outfit: walking on sunshine

occasion: Las Vegas recovery brunch with mah boo / dress: Strut (last worn) / shoes: Steve Madden (last worn) / purse: Louis Vuitton thrifted via Goodwill (last worn) / watch: Michael Kors (last worn) / sunnies: Karen Walker knockoffs from Amazon (last worn)

Is anyone else having a serious case of the deja vu? I've definitely posted almost this exact outfit before. Wearing it feels different now, though. Which begs the question: do our clothes wear us, or do we wear our clothes? Does the dress make me look different, or do I make the dress look different?

Or, does it all just look the same.

Either way, in this dress on this day, I'm walking on sunshine.

suck and rock report

And now for commentary on the ups and downs of life!


(unrelated picture of geese taken in  Pittsbursh is currently making me smile)

SUCK

- I haven't been to yoga in over a week. My mind is much less clear, and I think my arms are actually atrophying.


ROCK

- Kyla Roma's tips on eating for energy give me another reason to turn that frown upside down when I remind myself to Just Say No to potatoes.

- My celebrity boyfriend carried the Olympic torch?! Patrick Stewart, I will live in sin with you.

- Elsie Larson's etsy window shopping makes me want a house of my very own.

- Laura Veirs' music is getting me through this post-vacation week (Oh, I didn't tell you I went to Vegas? Oops. More on that later). In my ears right now.


What about you guys? Any Suck or Rock to report?

job envy, or, hobbies as hobbies

My dear little blueberries, do you ever have a hard time accepting your hobbies as hobbies? Do you ever start taking  silks lessons and think, "This is my calling! Circus performer, how did I not see it!?" Or buy a DSLR and fancy yourself a photographer?

Am I asking rhetorical questions because I still don't know how to start a blog post?

...

...Yes.



It's the enticing call of the creative life. Taking pictures as a hobby seems so lame in comparison to being able to sip your wine nonchalantly say, "Oh. I'm a photographer," when you meet all those interesting, worldly people at all those interesting, worldly parties you go to. Professors of microbiology and Victorian literature would stare at you, mouths agape in wonder at your amazing awesomeness. Then you get to comment in tra-la-la tones about trotting home early because you've been hired to shoot a wedding in Bora Bora tomorrow.

Then you remember that the thought of running a business is terrifying the way that a shark attack is terrifying. Just like gettin' nibbled on a little bit.

I'm focusing on photography in this post because I do enjoy it and I know several people who have built successful photography businesses. One of them particularly, Shaina Sheaff, has made amazing professional and creative strides just in the past two years. I see her work and feel absolutely unaccomplished in comparison. She also happens to be my cousin, so it's like, we share the same genes. But she's flying to Virginia to create beautiful photographs and I'm wondering if I should get Mediterranean or Italian for lunch.

So, how do we accept that our hobbies are way more interesting than our actual jobs?

I think that it helps to remember that we have hobbies because we need them to keep us sane. After all, even photographers and circus performers have hobbies. Because no matter how creative or interesting a job is, it's still your way of supporting yourself, which comes with all sorts of pressure and stress. I guess there's a reason that people spend so much time engaging in such objectively useless activities as model ship building, uni-cycling, and bird watching.

Dear god, people, there is reason that ComicCons exist!

It's because with all of our higher brain functions and up-right-walking-ness, we absolutely need to do things JUST FOR THE HELL OF IT. Because our brains are big and we have thumbs, and we CAN, damn it!

So build that model train and don the ewok costume.

Go on with your bad self.

sunrise mint

One day a week, my work requires me to be up with the sun. It's a good excuse to get in some quality time with my mint. I sit on the couch in a fog and eat my granola. The mint tries its hardest to not to die. I'll let you know how it goes.

color me ungrateful

You know that thing about wanting what we don't have? Grass is always greener, etc. I have a twinge of that right now.



Don't get me wrong, I love my life. Everything has fallen serendipitously into place lately. I got the dream job, I've acclimated to said job quicker than anticipated, I have athletic pursuits that make me feel alive and accomplished.  I've been working really hard, and I am nothing but proud and satisfied with what I'm doing right now. In this moment.



And yet.





Color me ungrateful, but I can't help missing daily walks with my love and crape myrtles at sunset.

new designs for new times

If you follow me on twitter, you may have noticed me trolling around for blog designers the past few weeks (and a great big Thank You to all the kind souls that responded). Perhaps it is my complete and total lack of commitment to anything ever (except for, you know, the whole marriage thing), but I got a random hair up my ass and decided it was time for an online makeover.



As much as I love good design and believe in supporting independent artists, I also like to hold on to my hard-earned dollars, squirreling them away like an actual squirrel might do his acorns.

On a side note, I once tried to have a potted garden on an apartment balcony. The squirrels - fat, ballsy little effers - buried their nuts in my Begonias and made nests in my Wandering Jew. I followed the internet's advice and retaliatorily sprinkled my garden with chili powder, euthanizing my plants and probably blinding some random mammals in the process (we also got a lot of opossums). You always hurt the ones you love.

So, I came up with a design myself.

I don't like to get all meta with my blog. While I absolutely understand the internal confusion and turmoil that can ensue when personal creative satisfaction conflicts with the need for validation and anonymous approval, I didn't create this blog to vent about how hard it is to be a blogger. Maybe it's just because I walk around with skin about as thick as an over-ripe peach, but I don't want to make anyone who may read this blog feel responsible for my personal dissatisfaction and ennui.

More importantly, though, despite my general air of self-disapproval and -deprecation, I do not want to disrespect former me by discounting all of the things I used to hold in high esteem. If I were to write, "OMG, you guys, I am sooooo over outfit photos, they're so, like, stupid and frivolous," I would eventually adopt that attitude preemptively towards everything I attempted. There's really no reason to sabotage my future happiness with creative new retroactive self-disrespect.

The redesign, simple though it may be, is not a dismissal of the past, it's an acknowledgement of my changing sentiments and ideals as I look towards the future.

Or maybe it's just a pretty new website. Let your eyes be the judge. Either way, I hope you like it. I know I sure do.

more than fireworks

//4th of July 2011//

Last night, the hubs and I sat on our bedroom floor, sipping champagne and watching fireworks dance around the edges of apartments and trees. Children with flashing glow sticks pranced by with parents in tow (not the other way around). A patriot rode by on a bicycle, his American-flag-turned-cape waving cheerfully. Cars trying to "beat the rush" were backed up for blocks.

The scene was everything that the Fourth of July should be: fireworks, music, mirth, love, community. But it wasn't right. Something was missing.

To me, the Fourth is about more than fireworks. It's cicadas in the dark. Screen doors and melting ice. Wicker. Charred hot dogs on Mrs Baird's buns, topped with ketchup and mustard. Blankets and trucks parked in a field of maize. Simplicity.

As we grow up, it's difficult to hold on to a sense of wonder at the world around us. Now we're the ones driving the cars in backed up traffic, lugging the coolers up sandy roads, and picking the burrs out of picnic blankets. We know how fireworks work and can never forget how early we have to get up tomorrow.

But, the Fourth. Every year on the Fourth, I am a kid again, joyful and alive and awed. Barefoot on a country road in north Texas, headed toward that field of maize.

goals and the creation thereof

//image//

I love it when people say they are Goal Oriented. I feel that it's almost like saying "I need food to live" or "Puppies are cute." Duh. Aren't we all goal oriented? Aren't we all driven by the results and rewards that signify the end of a task? Maybe it's not so simple.

As much as I hate to admit that I'm wrong, it is possible in this instance that I have been the opposite of right. That is to say, lately I've been singing a different tune. Because it turns out that I, in fact, am selectively goal oriented. Let's just say that the super amazing tattoo I planned in the spring, told everyone and their freaking grandmother I was getting, and have been, airquote, saving money for, end airquote, ever since is no closer to happening now than it was in March. I started out with $350 and as of right now I have about $23.75 in the old piggy bank. So, clearly that goal has not motivated me. On the other hand, I climbed for the first time in silks this week. Up and down once on both sides, which, side note, makes me a Warrior Princess. But more on my Warrior Princessdom another time. The point is that I had a specific goal: Climb That Damn Silk. And I accomplished it simply through the motivation of the effect of the effort. My lizard brain told me, "Try hard, climb silk. Do not try hard, do not climb silk. Me want to climb silk." So I went to classes, revived my yoga membership, tried as hard as my jiggly white ass could try, and Climbed That Damn Silk.

What was my point again?

Goals - they're tricky. Last year, I started a little blog thing that I called "A Year of 25." The point was to make twenty-five super cute and/or trendy goals and update my breath-baited readers as I checked them off one by one. I'm pretty sure that I was trying to be Elsie Larson at the time. But I'm not Elise Larson and I crossed nothing off that list that I wouldn't have anyway without an official "goal." Yet, I tried again this year, thinking, "All the cool bloggers have goal lists! I'll be a looooooser if I don't!" How many of those have I accomplished? Two, and one only through purposeless inaction ("Resist cutting hair," I like to aim high.)

In all of this, I think my real failure was inorganically creating goals in order to fit into some construction of a productive, happy person that I so easily formed from reading blogs and looking at pictures of people with apparently productive, happy lives. People like Elise seem so passionate and driven, and I, well, work at a library and eat a lot of pizza.

The takeaway?

If there's anything that I have learned in my past three years of blogging/26 years of life, it's that passion can't be manufactured. We've got to just throw ourselves in the way of things that inspire us and maybe, just maybe, something will stick. When I started reading Austin Eavesdropper, I was bored with my life and silks seemed like a blast.

And now I'm climbing.