Last year, I went on date to see the movie Kedi at The Music Box here in Chicago. Kedi, in Turkish, simply means "cat," and the film documents the cats in Istanbul who rule the streets and seem, all at once, to belong to everyone...

I took a quick weekend detour from Chiang Mai back to Bangkok to meet up with Jodie — an Australian girl I had met four years ago in Amsterdam and hadn't seen since. I had been looking forward to catching up with her in Australia,...