1. Get stuck in the Bar Harbor space time continuum.
When I graduated from the University of Maine, I had no idea what I was going to do after May. “Come to Bar Harbor,” everyone was saying. So I went. Within a week after graduation I was sharing a room with my friend Daniela in a men’s halfway house. Through the wall, we could hear our 58-year-old roommate Chuck Skyping with a Filipino woman he had never met. Every day at 1:45 he ate a raw hamburger on plain wonder bread. One day I went downstairs to do laundry, and there was a Chinese family living in our basement under two tarps. There was a kid from Jacksonville living in a VW bus with two flat tires in our driveway. I was working for a woman who required me to grocery shop for her before coming into the restaurant every day.