Chiming in here just to remind myself what a pleasant, rejuvenating weekend this was—a much needed change from the pace of life lately.

Sat in the shade at the park this morning, reading a magazine and eating breakfast tacos while Riggins was (somewhat miraculously) very calm, despite loose dogs and bike bells and big trucks passing not so far away.

Went out to dinner and to a play with a friend on Saturday, enjoying the slightly-cooler-than-normal weather as we strolled through campus, me noticing changes both good (public art) and weird (an Amazon store in the gym and a soon-to-open on-campus Target).

Celebrated my recent promotion at my favorite restaurant in Austin.

Spent a fair amount of time playing with my Pantone swatches and looking at fonts, two things that bring me joy.

Found gas at one station in my neighborhood despite the idiotic run on gas in Texas this week. At least I know I’ll be able to get to work for the next four days.

Fixed a few small things around the house that have been driving me crazy for a while. Felt very pleased with myself.

Hooked up my new (humongous) monitor which I got free from work. Caught up on a bit of work, which was unsurprisingly made much easier due to this new monitor currently occupying my entire coffee table.

Had a dance party to an Ed Sheeran song, which was just…weird, on many levels. But also fun and silly.

Prepped for my upcoming trip to London and Amsterdam, the first time I’ll be back in Europe in over five years.

Baked brownies and am now about to watch Julieta, Pedro Almodóvar’s most recent film.

What a difference an extra day makes!

I had thought about getting a dog for years, but in a “one day” sort of way, along the lines of owning a house with built-in bookcases and a KitchenAid mixer. As much as I love dogs, and love going home to see my parents’ crazy, beautiful pup and my sister’s doting doggo, I just never really felt ready to be the person who always had to go home to let the dog out. I worried about the responsibility and the cost and traveling and finding dog-friendly rentals.

And none of those things has changed.

But last summer, sitting on a park bench in Chicago with my mom, I finally just decided that life is too short to keep waiting for the perfect scenario. A few days later, I was back in Austin and at the animal shelter, where I almost had a breakdown. I had gone a little over an hour before closing with the intent of surveying the dogs myself before my sister and my brother’s girlfriend Rachel arrived the next day. I had mentioned the possibility of getting a dog during the weekend of their trip—a risky proposition since their dual excitement levels officially put the pressure on, turning an idea into a more tangible reality. Wandering all of the kennels there, I was just overwhelmed by all of the dogs in need of homes, each with his or her own hidden history and sometimes not-so-hidden behavioral issues. It struck me that a dog might need more care and attention than I was able to give, and it all just felt like such a crap shoot. I left there, in the rain, doubting my decision.

Mostly recovered two days later, we had set a tentative plan to go and look at one of the other shelters in town. I reiterated that I wasn’t so sure this was going to happen in the next few days and made clear that I didn’t want them to be disappointed if it wasn’t the right timing or fit. I was also reassuring myself that I didn’t need to move forward if I didn’t find the right dog, trying to reduce my anxiety levels. After grabbing lunch, I saw a reference in my Instagram feed to a pet expo taking place at a convention center downtown. It wasn’t clear exactly what it was about, but there seemed to be the promise of dogs in weird outfits, so we went with that in mind and our expectations low.

Mostly, that’s what it was—tons and tons of pet product booths and some breed-specific rescues looking for volunteers. So many dogs, from Great Danes to Chihuahuas, wandering around with their owners, but only a couple of groups with dogs available for adoption. My sister and Rachel walked over to a kennel with two dogs inside—a 3 year old and a 1.5 year old, one a beautiful yellow Collie mix and the other a cow-looking big black and white dog. We weren’t sure which age was which. They started petting the black and white one through the gates, and urged me to come over, but my first reaction was not positive. “No, no. Absolutely not. He’s way too big. No. Can you imagine the shedding? You’re nuts,” pretty much sums it up. But they pushed on, commenting on how sweet he was, how calm he seemed. I was more interested in the other one, honestly—until we overheard that she had massive separation anxiety and had been adopted out and returned three times. They wouldn’t adopt her out to a family without another dog in the house.

The foster family for the black and white dog was there and told us they had been taking care of him on their farm for over a year, since he was a puppy. A Border Collie/Great Pyrenees mix. “Would you like to take him out for a walk?” she asked me. Pressed by the vigorously nodding heads of my compatriots, I said yes.

We wandered through the maze of dogs without drama and took him outside, me peppering the foster mom with questions the whole time. How was he with other dogs? Cats? Was he fully housetrained? What other training? Had he ever bit anyone? Any health issues? Could he be alone all day while I was at work? We walked him around the back grass for a few minutes, me contemplating life with this 70 pound addition.

And then we stopped for a minute, and he sat down on top of my feet and looked up at me, and I was toast.

Inside, I filled out an application which was immediately approved (something about being in foster for over a year will do that). I bought a leash from one of the vendors and went home with a dog who would soon be named Riggins, after Tim Riggins of Friday Night Lights fame. Don’t you see the resemblance?

He is a mellow dude who spends most of his time sleeping, often with half of his body squeezed under the furniture.

While I’ve had a lot to learn this year, he is generally very well behaved, not getting up on anything, not getting into anything he’s not supposed to, generally good on the leash. On the rare occasions he gets about 10 seconds of the zoomies, he slows his pace between the coffee table and the couch so as to avoid getting in trouble for knocking anything over, which is a truly hilarious sight.

He doesn’t appreciate loud noises and has developed his Pyrenees barking ability in the last few months to make that point clear, a development I’m not super pleased about. He hates UPS trucks and trains and when I whip open a new trash bag. He spends a decent amount of time hiding in the shower. His shedding is truly epic, despite my best brushing attempts and growing collection of industrial-grade grooming tools. I now own two vacuums. I should buy stock in lint rollers.

He is thoroughly confused by violins.

It hasn’t been stress-free and it has been more expensive than I anticipated, but I am SO GLAD I rolled the dice and took home this very fluffy, friendly dude. He makes me laugh every day and adds so much joy to my life. I feel lucky to have found such a calm, cuddly companion. Being outside more while walking him and having someone to take care of have both been hugely beneficial to me.

So today I’m celebrating one year with Riggins.

Texas Forever.

I spent Thanksgiving in Mexico City (one of my three travel goal destinations for 2016). The trip was excellent and the city was as surprising, often beautiful, sometimes gritty, and generally exciting as I had heard. After pulling together a quick travel guide from memory for a colleague recently, I decided it was time to finally write something about my time in one of the world’s biggest cities.

Day 1

After a short ~2 hour flight from San Antonio, I arrived in Mexico in the mid-afternoon. Checked into my (wonderful, well-located) Airbnb, chatted for a bit with the host, and struck out in search of a nice walk while the sun was still high in the sky. Two of the neighborhoods mentioned in all of the guidebooks are Roma Norte and Condesa, and I stayed right in the middle of the two.

I wandered over to Avda. Amsterdam, a circular road with a shaded, tropical-feeling path in the middle, popular for running and dog walking. I was shocked at how many dogs there were here, of all sizes, most off leash but closely following their owners.

On my little loop, I passed a lot of fun, bright houses, public art, and adorable shops, but with light fading and more to explore, I didn’t stop at any of them that first day. Instead, I wound my way through a number of parks, watched groups of all ages playing soccer, and peeked into the windows of the first of the many (many!) neighborhood libraries I saw in the city, this one nestled right in the park.

After checking out the neighborhood, I stopped for a casual dinner—with a side of hot sauces and salsas—at La Cervecería del Barrio, around the corner from Contramar (which, as it turns out, is only open for lunch). I enjoyed the people watching but was mostly pleased to be just a short walk from my bed after a day of travel.

Day 2

Mexico City sits at an altitude over 7,000 feet, and is smoggy as all hell, so I did notice that my eyes watered quite a bit and I felt more lethargic than expected, especially on day 2. Nothing that some earlier-than-normal bedtimes and eye drops didn’t basically fix, but worthy of note.

So the next morning, I wandered bleary-eyed to Lalo!, a hipster neighborhood coffee shop, where I had bomb chilaquiles, coffee (with almond milk!) and a pistachio pastry.

Fortified with caffeine and carbs, I made my way to the Museo Frida Kahlo, where I was greeted with a long line but (hot tip!) I was able to book timed-entry tickets about 10 minutes later on their mobile website and jump the queue.

You can see how it’s also known as Casa Azul. It was a charming museum, a number of exhibitions (one straight art gallery showcasing Frida’s work, another the living quarters Frida and Diego shared, plus Frida’s art studio, and finally a fascinating display of her clothes and myriad braces and medical instruments) all focused around a lush, internal courtyard.

After the museum, since I was in the neighborhood, I decided to swing by and see the absolutely monstrous four-sided mosaic at the Central Library at Ciudad Universitaria Campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (better known as UNAM). It was fun to soak up the energy of the university campus at lunch time and the murals were really pretty astounding—I had to walk way back just to be able to capture the whole building in my frame.

After a quick wander through the stacks, I caught an Uber back to the center of the city with a few hours left for a late lunch at Eno and time to check out the famous Museo Nacional de Antropología before it closed at 7.

The museum is both enormous and overflowing with incredible artifacts. The central courtyard, with this massive monolith/fountain, is a memorable start to a world class museum experience (which, in Mexico City fashion, costs about 4 USD).

I loved how dramatically the scale differed—from tiny carved sculptures to the 12 foot high, 25 ton Aztec Sun Stone.

Possibly one of the highlights, the ancient ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

After a long day of wandering, I had a tasty dinner with mediocre service at Fonda Fina, which bloggers seem to love but I found a bit oversold in a city full of places to have fabulous food (without the side of attitude).

Day 3

The next morning, I got up early to head to the pre-Columbian city of Teotihuacan, a UNESCO world heritage site. There are buses that head from the city 30 miles north to the ancient pyramids, but my Airbnb host recommended a local driver who would take me before the first bus arrived, which ended up being the right choice for me. Being all alone in this place that used to be the spiritual and cultural center for an entire civilization (archaeologists think the city reached up to 100,000 inhabitants at its height between 100 BC and 600 AD) was really something to remember. The early morning mist added to the eeriness.

Archaeologists think all of the layers of the buildings were once very colorful, with painted panels covering the intricate rock work beneath. I liked seeing the combination of inside structure and little bits of lingering color here and there. Overall, components of the site seemed incredibly well preserved (or maybe carefully restored?) from my clueless layman’s point of view. Also fun to climb.

After a few hours of climbing pyramids, it was back to the city, once again passing through some of the roughest areas in the metropolis as seen from the highway. Miles and miles of hillside shanty towns (and glimpsing more than one policeman with a machine gun) gave a small picture into life outside the up-and-coming city center.

Speaking of CDMX being the new place to be, I spotted two of my friends from Austin, on Instagram, posting from the pyramids at Teotihuacan. A strange but wonderful coincidence, so we decided to meet up for a drink and a wander through Roma Norte once I was back in town. We met up for ice cream on Avda. Amsterdam, stopped for appetizers and drinks at some spot with shark on the menu, returned to a new, high end liquor store they had passed the day before (tellingly called El Liquor Store, highly recommended for mezcal and Mexican rum tastings and souvenir bottles to bring home), and made one more quick stop at La Clandestina before they were off to a concert and I was on my way to Lucha Libre, which was just as ridiculous and funny as one might expect.

Day 4

With only one day left in the city, it was time to wander a bit more around Condesa, Roma Norte’s upscale sister. Breakfast is always the right place to begin, so after a walk through Parque España, I enjoyed a spread on the patio at La Buena Tierra.

I wish I could have spent more time in Condesa, but I enjoyed the stately mansions and chic cafes I did pass by. Since I didn’t make it to the more famous Polanco location, I did stop by El Péndulo bookstore in Condesa and browsed a bit.

One of the greatest features of the street cafes of Mexico City: personal coat and purse racks.

I spent a good portion of the afternoon trying to get into the city center, where it turns out traffic was totally stopped, the metro trains were completely jammed, and the streets were filled with police and military-looking types toting semi-automatic rifles, all in the name of a parade. I went into the main cathedral at the Zócalo, fought the crowds for a bit, had a memorable lunch at El Cardenal as recommended by a friend from the city, and then made my way to La Ciudadela Centro Artesanal, a large market filled with Mexican handicrafts of every variety perfect for souvenirs.

A few tips: bring cash, including small bills, because almost no one accepted cards. Do a loop before committing to anything, because quite a few of the booths sell the same types of items (or one version that’s much higher quality than another), and don’t be afraid to barter a bit. I ended up buying a small punched-tin mirror, sterling silver earrings and bracelets for presents, a hand embroidered top for myself, some embroidered linens, and a collection of adorable, insanely cheap blown glass swizzle sticks/cocktail stabbers. I figure they’ll make great hostess gifts but mostly I just couldn’t resist the cute.

Day 5

I mentioned that I passed a bunch of cool shops on Avda. Amsterdam on my first evening, but I didn’t specify that there was one I couldn’t get out of my head. I didn’t really remember the name of it, didn’t recall exactly where it was, but I knew it was on Avda. Amsterdam, which went in a circle, and that I’d spotted some great shoes in the window. So on my last morning, I set off in search of shoes, and ended up finding the recently opened Toco Madera.

The shopkeeper was busy unpacking tons of boxes of new merchandise, apologizing profusely for the mess, but I was too busy checking out the beautiful shoes and leather goods to care too much. Almost all of the shoes and bags were either leather or canvas with touches of one of a kind, handmade textiles to add color and pattern. Like so many handmade shoes, they were also extremely comfortable and, unlike a lot of handmade shoes, they were less than $65 per pair.

After waffling for a few minutes trying to decide between a pair of brown ankle booties a bit like these (but with different colored tapestries) and some unique black shoes with red backs a bit like these, I did the only sane thing and bought both pairs.

Boxes in hand, it was time to head to the airport and say “hasta luego” to Ciudad de México.

General thoughts

I have to say—it was wonderful to speak Spanish. While I definitely think you could navigate the city just fine without it, being able to speak it and getting the chance to practice for the first time in a long time added to the relaxation and sense that I was really “getting away” from my normal day-to-day.

I’ve been asked a lot about safety in the city, which is one of those questions that’s somewhat personal and hard to answer. In general, I would say that I was on my toes more than I would be traveling domestically, but that I generally felt safe traveling alone. I took the advice of a number of blogs and sites and avoided taxis (which have a reputation for taxi crime), choosing Uber instead. Uber was both extremely easy to use and dirt cheap there—most of my rides cost only a few USD. I have since deleted the app in the U.S. but might consider re-adding it for travel in CDMX. After about 9 pm, I called a car instead of walking unless I was going to be traveling a short distance on very well-lit, busy streets. The security business is flourishing in Mexico and many nicer houses and restaurants have full-time security guards standing outside, but it’s hard to know whether that’s in direct response to high crime, for appearances, a vestige of a more tumultuous time, or some combination of the above. What I can say is that Mexico City felt a LOT like Spain to me—not just for the language, and in many of the best ways, and with pretty similar levels of safety within the most popular/tourist-friendly neighborhoods.

Flights to Mexico City’s Benito Juárez airport are both frequent and cheap. My round trip cost about $200 from San Antonio. An Uber from the airport ran about $7-8.

The value of the peso fluctuates quite a bit against the dollar, so you’ll want to check exchange rates, but I found Mexico City to range from very reasonable to dirt cheap. I saw decent looking Airbnbs in the center of the city for less than $30 a night, but ended up “splurging” for one that was more like $80/night with fees, in a converted mansion with a rooftop patio, within walking distance to Roma and Condesa.

A few Mexico City travel write-ups I found helpful in my planning:
New York Times (which named Mexico City its #1 travel destination for 2016)

Heart of Light

Peeking Duck

Hither & Thither

Of course, there’s a TON I didn’t see, including some of the places at the top of my list. Because I’ll most certainly be back, I’m listing some of those spots for the next time:

Palacio Postal · Churrería El Moro · Pastelería Ideal · Diego Rivera murals at Palacio Nacional · Nico’s · Azul Histórico · Zinco · Fce Bella Época · MUAC · Museo Rufino Tamayo · Museo Franz Meyer · Luis Barragán’s house · Museo Soumaya · Dog school at Parque México · Parque+Castillo Chapultapec · Mercado de la Merced (maybe with a tour from Eat Mexico) · Biblioteca Vasconcelos · El Péndulo Polanco · Tortas Been (Républica del Salvador 152, Centro) · BO Pastelería (Fernando Montes de Oca 114-B, Colonia Condesa) · Boutiques on Colima · Romita Comedor · Museo Dolores Olmedo · Centro de Abastos · get a reservation at Pujol (this time I just ate at Eno, the casual restaurant by the same Michelin-starred chef, which was good but nowhere near the same)

Questions? Recommendations? Is Mexico City on your travel list? I’d love to hear others’ experiences.

(all photos by me)

Yep, this blog where I so rarely write anything anymore, where the design has basically been broken for years, the blog that appears on my weekend to-do lists as “write a post. any post. no, seriously.”

And yet the idea of letting it go makes me feel really sad.

So I’m renewing. Again. And trying to get back in the groove, for another year. Blogging is dead? Whatever. Here I am, happy to be in this space.

The other thing I do very little anymore: take pictures, other than on my phone. But sometimes I do, and I finally actually edited some photos from a trip to Chicago last August, so I figured I’d at least end this boring blogger apology post with a little bit of color and light (to say nothing of razzle or dazzle).

The requisite Chicago sign photo

My mom and I toured the Frank Lloyd Wright house museum in Oak Park. I liked this cozy little room.

The neighborhood was so lovely and leafy. A nice break from brown Texas in August.

Detail from the studio, adjacent to the house

Final Frank Lloyd Wright detail: the greatest window placement

Water on water at the Shedd Aquarium

I loved this fish-hugging man (and Shedd Aquarium, in general)

Clique but whatever, the Marina Towers are pretty fab

Finally, a rhino. Because sometimes you just want to wander through a free zoo on your way from here to there.

I’m still trying to write down some 2017 goals, narrowing down my focus. Trying Susannah Conway’s 5 day email series to help choose a word of the year—I had great luck one year but haven’t been feeling it in recent years. But I have been feeling overwhelmed by day-to-day stuff lately while simultaneously kicking myself a bit for shifting my focus away from higher level goals and spending time the way I *really* want to. (less mindless phone time, more reading and writing, among other things)

So tonight, with Bonnie Raitt in the background, I bit the bullet (yeah, I said it) and jumped on the bullet journal craze.

bullet journal + pseudo-selfie

I’m only a little bit sheepish about the whole thing. Let’s see, an organizational system using a well made German notebook with grid or dotted pages, which comes in tons of colors (Amazon, JB Welly), made by a company with the motto “Details make all the difference”? This is like crack to me.

I went with Royal Blue this year for two reasons: I knew I wanted dotted pages, and my local bookstore carried only three colors in A5 dotted: Black (boring), Orange (too close to my Moleskine planners of past years), and Royal Blue. Wanting to start the new year with a notebook in hand, Royal Blue it was! But I was tempted online by the purple. And the red. And especially the army green. Thinking of excuses to buy it already.

There’s a lot of dogma around how a bullet journal *should* be formatted at the same time that it’s supposed to be all about the individual. Hmm. I have some ideas of how I might structure mine but am also listening in a bit on the Pinterest #bujo groupies and their (often way too elaborate) systems. If it’s something I can stick with and I find useful, cool. If it’s a way to use up some of my ever-growing art supply/paper product stash, even better. I’m trying to keep my expectations low at this point—but who knows, maybe I’ll be Instagramming my layouts in a few months.

(this seems unlikely)

One goal I know I have for this year: spend more time with a pen in my hand, whether that’s making lists and notes in my bullet journal, writing letters to friends, or writing more personal stuff in my painfully neglected journal. Jotting down quotes. Words I like. Making plans for the year to come. Remembering those little details (they make all the difference).

There were some highs and some lows, but mostly it was just unsettled and, truth be told, it’s left me a bit wrung out.

I had three (count ’em, three!) jobs this year: I left my job at a medium-sized company in March, spent six months at a tiny startup, and then got recruited to join a bigger company—a place where I can see myself for some time, thankfully.

I traveled to two of my 2016 goal locales: New Orleans in February and Mexico City over Thanksgiving (with Marfa still on the 2017 list). I also swung through Las Vegas, New York City, Minneapolis (twice!), Chicago, Montana (twice!), Memphis, Oxford, Mississippi and Chicago (plus Dallas, Houston, Waco, and San Antonio).

I bought a car and sold my older one.

I struggled a lot with the election—leading up to it, the night of, the time since then. Still.

I saw some truly excellent photography exhibits—though barely took any photos of my own.

I started going to Piloxing classes—and then totally stopped in the last few months when life got (even more) chaotic.

I watched a lot of good TV but only read 10 books (!).

I paid off my undergrad student loans, finally.

I went through a pretty brutal breakup.

I adopted a dog.

I’m very ready for this year to be over.

Honestly, I’m a little scared for the new year and the changes we’re seeing, one headline at a time, both in our country and abroad. I’m spending tonight thinking, as I have been lately, about how I can be brave and outspoken when necessary, supportive when possible, and kind always. I think we’ll all need it.

But a new year still brings hope and the chance to reexamine your priorities, your goals, where you want to be a year from now. I’ll be back tomorrow with a few of my ideas and plans a-brewing.

In the meantime, Happy New Year! Wishing you and yours a wonderful year ahead.

For the rest of you: Boxes? Albums? iCloud? Evernote? Ever-growing piles slowly taking over your house? (ding ding ding!)

Are you tied to the analog, wanting something to hold in your hands? Or addicted to your document scanner and going paperless?

Have you figured out some sort of system for keeping those memories?

And if so, do you actually go back and look through those things? Does that act bring you joy? Does it feel worthwhile?

I have about a million thoughts on the relative importance of our photographs these days—how casually snapping so many iPhone photos all of the time is beautiful, in some ways (and SUCH an improvement over Camera Phones v1.0), but also makes each individual photo so much less precious. At the same time, I seem to have lost my interest in photography over the last few years, at least partially to do with the fact that all of my images just go onto an SD card, to be transferred to a laptop, to be transferred again to a hard drive and somewhere in the cloud. Rarely do I even look at them, and when I do, they don’t stack up to the Instagram perfection I see every single day. It’s like the old adage of letting the postcards cover the most obvious shot, while you focus on the details. Except that Instagram does those picture-perfect postcard shots (+ drones!) as well as the detail shots. The space feels claustrophobic to me.

At the same time, my physical space is feeling too cluttered, too overwhelming, too much. I’ve contemplated getting a doc scanner, maybe DoxieGo, to slow the inflow a bit. I know a lot of people love Evernote, though I’ve never been able to make it stick. But I wonder if the digital will feel like enough for me or if I’ll miss the tangibility (and be just one not-quite-backed-up hard drive away from data loss). Plus, I’m really good at solving problems with “organizing solutions” but less great at using those solutions consistently.

I’m charmed by Project Life in some ways but know I would never keep it up. Plus, let’s be honest, most of my weeks at this point look like work-happy hour-work x3-dinner out-work-Netflix-one or two memorable things. Not exactly scrapbook fodder.

There has to be some kind of curation involved, some space that feels special enough that some things (most things) just don’t make the cut. But I haven’t been able to figure that out quite yet.

What about you? Have you been able to find any options that safeguard the special stuff while weeding out the rest? Or are you starting to approach the question from another angle entirely?

(I suppose I should rat myself out and say that this is the second post I’ve written with this title. The first one, five years ago, makes clear two things: this is an ongoing preoccupation of mine and I’ve made zero progress {negative progress?} in the past decade or so. Le sigh.)

Cheryl Strayed gave one of the keynotes. I’ve read Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things. I listen to the Dear Sugar podcast. She has told aspects of her life—deeply personal, painful, intimate memories—in so many spaces. But there was something different to me about standing in front of 600 people in a room versus writing a book or an advice column in private, even though those works were read by millions of people. Same thing for speaking with just one other person into a microphone each week, even if your words get piped into my home as I catch up on the dishes. Of course, the numbers don’t support my impression, but there was something raw about the immediacy of hearing her speak in person. Sitting there, I was struck by the boldness of being so open and so flawed and so unapologetic in telling who you are.

In the Q&A session afterward, there were some questions that tied Cheryl’s talk into the conference theme, a few questions about her process, how one gets a book published and then optioned as a movie. But one woman stood up and talked about how her life shared some of the terrible abuse Cheryl Strayed has written about from her own history. In asking her question, the woman from the audience professed “I’m getting all shaky,” and I was immediately hit by just how brave she, too, was. To speak up and be vulnerable in front of your professional peers is not easy. When we talk about what we limit about ourselves online, our professional prospects are so often top-of-mind.

It’s so hard to be yourself at work, to emphasize your strengths and desire to do well while also being open to what you don’t know. (or just suck at!) Exposing any weakness leaves you vulnerable, we’re told. Sadly, I think that’s generally pretty true in our weird contemporary reality, where we so often justify the intensity and importance of our work by the number of hours over 40 we put in each week. And, honestly, a lot of people prefer that separation of work and not-work for its clarity, delineation—you have a work-self and an outside-of-work-self, and they aren’t really distinct but some components just don’t cross over. (yes, I, unlike Hillary’s graphic designers, understand how a Venn diagram works) It’s a way to manage expectations. You give up some of yourself, even willingly, as a way of aligning with “culture fit” or maybe just to make work culture, already political, already complex, a little easier to manage.

You spend a huge portion of your life at work. For me, divorcing my work-self from the person I want to be the rest of the time just doesn’t make sense. It leaves me feeling diluted, like in both cases I am not quite as good or as honest or as complete as I’d like to be.

This week, I finally found some people like me professionally, people with whom I could honestly express my interests, people working in jobs that I not only would love to have but also that I could see myself doing—really well! And so even though we had all kinds of other interests, some overlapping and not others, I felt like we could relate to each other. Less explanation of “who we are” was necessary. It was just so pleasant.

A few months ago, I quit my job and joined an early-stage startup. It wasn’t something I was actively seeking, and the decision was a difficult one. Friends with startup experience warned me that I needed to prepare myself for a different pace, that I needed to make sure I had my finances in order before taking the leap. Even as they cautioned me about how exhausting it was, how their past companies mostly weren’t successful, I sensed in them at least a little bit of longing. How much needs to get done is overwhelming—but you can also directly influence and accomplish so much.

Even with their warnings, I don’t think I fully got it, if I’m being honest with myself. The past few months have been a rollercoaster, leaving me feeling wrung out from all of the highs and lows. There’s a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty and it’s hard to go along for the ride without occasionally throwing your hands in the air and sometimes screaming, loudly. The “life” part of my work/life balance hasn’t been so hot.

Still, this is an opportunity. To shape my role. To test out skills I’ve been wanting to acquire for a while. To figure out what I don’t want to keep doing. To be honest about the fact that most startups fail and this one might, too. To practice being myself at work and outside of it and to see how it goes.

At this point, all I can really say is “Wish me luck!” As much as I’m striving for greater cohesiveness, I still don’t know how much I want to talk about work here. Like an email-free vacation (if those even still exist), there’s something freeing about having a space devoted to the “life” side of things. But it’s nice to feel like I’m not hiding anything. Like I can be brave enough to talk about what I need to here. And, hopefully, where I can buoy up those other interests, where I don’t have to worry too much about explaining who I am or what it is I care about. Nine years in (!), quite a bit of it is written right here.

Most people would start a post about budgeting with a comment about spreadsheets or maybe making your own coffee at home. There might be a Suze Orman reference.

But I already make my own coffee at home (or work) most of the time, don’t have cable, paid off my car last year, etc. And my spreadsheet skills are only so-so.

Instead, my post on budgeting is going to start with a conversation about shoes.

I don’t get why finding comfortable basics that aren’t obscenely expensive is such a challenge, but I can happily report that, after years of searching, I found a couple I’m happy to share:

The Lucky Emmie flat – a simple leather flat without a *&^#& ballet-style bow

I boldly wore the Emmie flats for the first time on a day I walked about 9 miles in Las Vegas, with nary a blister. I get blisters in everything, even tennis shoes, so this is a true feat.

Fair warning: these run small. The 9 fit me very snugly but the 9.5 felt better and left room for a cheap-o Dr. Scholl’s insole from Target. I noticed that the bottom said “9/39” which is weird since I always wear a 9 in US sizes but a 39.5 or 40 in Euro sizes…I’d say follow your Euro size on these if you know it.

They’re $59 full price but tons of stores seem to carry them, so your chance of being able to use a coupon code is good if you’re patient. They come in a bunch of colors and patterns, but I was happy to go with versatile black.

My other semi-recent purchase, also black, are these Cole Haan Outlet Landsman Chelsea booties. They’re nice leather and a good height for rolled up jeans or skirts. They can be pretty casual but are refined enough to work dressed up as well. I got them on sale for around $100 in November, and they’ve been my top shoe pick for months. If you’ve seen my shoe closet, you know that’s saying something.

Cole Haan Landsman booties – no clue why the lighting is so atrocious

So, about the budget part. I’ve been spending more money than I’d like on clothes and shoes, at the same time that I’ve run out of room in my closets for clothes and shoes. While I accomplished some big financial goals last year (I paid off my car, my credit card, and 2 of my 4 undergrad student loans), I still have 2 undergrad student loans left – and they’ll hit their 10 year anniversary this August. There’s also grad school loans but let’s not talk about those…I’m a little scarred lately in that department. I’m going to need to buy a new car soon-ish, but that moment hasn’t quite come yet (thank goodness).

Point is, I want to spend more money this year on paying off my loans and on travel, and less on shopping. I suck at budgeting – some months I’ll buy nothing, others I’ll hit sales and go comparatively nuts – but I thought it might be useful to try keeping a running list of “wants.” Some of them – classic black cowboy boots with black stitching – have been on my lookout list for years. (I’m sensing a simple black shoe theme here) Others – an olive green hip-length jacket, something along the lines of this military jacket that has been all over the web lately – have emerged more recently, but I know would go into heavy rotation.

So, I’m wondering: do you actively stick to a budget? Do you keep a running list of things to buy, especially clothes? How do you prioritize travel (or your splurge of choice) while keeping things relatively balanced?

Perhaps more exciting – do you have big plans for your tax refund this year?

Vegas, baby! It was surprisingly relaxing, with nowhere in particular to be (lots of wandering), nowhere near as crowded as I expected (though lots of sequins), and let’s not forget endlessly circling cocktail waitresses. It was the right place to be when the clock struck—even if the timing at the Bellagio and at Planet Hollywood across the street differed by almost a minute…

Instead, I’m taking the MLK long weekend to do some planning, set some goals, figure out what I want the new year to hold. I’ve tackled resolution-y things over the whole month of January before, and you know—it works just the same (maybe even better!) as planning it all the day after the ball drops.

But one goal I do have in mind. Scrolling through Instagram a few days ago, this quote really struck me:

“This is why we need to travel. If we don’t offer ourselves to the unknown, our senses dull. Our world becomes small and we lose our sense of wonder. Our eyes don’t lift to the horizon; our ears don’t hear the sounds around us. The edge is off our experience, and we pass our days in a routine that is both comfortable and limiting. We wake up one day and find that we have lost our dreams in order to protect our days.”—Kent Nerburn

Whoa. This so closely resembles the little nagging sense of lack I’ve been feeling for a while. Yes, I traveled a lot last year, all over the U.S. But I don’t know that any of it really challenged me. I was almost never in that vulnerable mode of being a tourist somewhere totally unknown. And so, while I continue to search for a far away international location and the time and money to get there, I have a baseline of three places, all new to me, I want to be sure and see in 2016:

New Orleans

Marfa, TX

Mexico City

Yay! I’m excited just thinking about it. At this point, I have my eye set on either President’s Day weekend or my birthday weekend in March to kick things off, so pretty soon I’ll need to pull the trigger. All of these are within a day’s travel, either flying or driving, and suitable for a 4-5 day weekend. A good baseline, and places I’ve been wanting to see for some time.

So, what about you? Do your resolutions focus on travel? Health? Creativity? Any tips for me for NOLA, DF, or Marfa?

(quote from Anna Zajac Photo, presented here in slightly longer form than on Instagram {as you do}, photo by me)

Just last week, I roadtripped through eight states, four of them new to me. It was a quick, whirlwind trip, but I had fun dinners in Memphis and Jackson, Mississippi. Attended a wedding in the Indiana Statehouse. Wandered the cute, hipster-fied NuLu neighborhood in Louisville. And listened to live music (and let’s not forget the blissful consumption of those biscuits and fried chicken) in Nashville (for the second time this year!)

Last month, I was in Chicago for the first time. I really loved that city.

A month before that, L.A., which pleasantly surprised me with its incredible museums and flowers in bloom everywhere.

Moving to a city with a larger airport has its perks, as does a job with “unlimited vacation” (a misnomer, of course, but you get the general idea). And a bit more money to travel. It’s the positive side of having friends spread out all over the country.

I also finally broke down and replaced my almost-six-year-old laptop, so at long last, I think I have a machine that doesn’t require me to wait…..in order…..to do…..almost anything. So I can download some photos! And edit them! And share them here!

And also start doing some travel planning, using that renewed but still-empty passport in 2016.

Go anywhere fun in 2015? Somewhere you’re dying to see next year?

In between beach time and museums x3 (I’ve been on such an amazing museum roll lately), the topic of hobbies came up. More than once. My high school friend’s house is basically a shrine of musical instruments aligned one after the other on raised stands. He cooks. Is into photography. Is generally kind of tech-y—in order to present me with a list of tourist options for the trip, he sent along an elaborate, multi-layer Google Maps mashup.

A year or so ago, my camp counselor from when I was 14, with whom I’ve kept in touch all of these years, was cleaning out her stuff at her parents’ house and unearthed a number of gems, among them the “Letter to My Counselor” form I filled out half a life ago. It was hilarious and kind of charming in its naiveté (I was trying SO HARD to be cool), but one thing stuck out to me: I listed so many hobbies. Basketball. Volleyball. Golf (wait, what?). Tennis. Listening to music. Writing letters to friends. Reading.

Oh, and I said I was good at “volleyball, basketball, writing, school stuff, knee boarding, and Name That Tune” but just OK at “golf, tennis, ping pong, and making friends.”

Ha. I’m dying over here.

If you’d asked me a few years ago, I would have told you about my projects. DIY stuff around the house (lots of spray painting). Taking and editing photos. Tennis. Listening to music and going to concerts. Reading – online articles, blogs, magazines, fiction, non-fiction. Plus this blog: writing, tweaking the code.

And then I went to grad school.

Being around my former intern friend last weekend, now a PhD student in Public History, I remembered that constant “should be” grad school feeling. If they aren’t actually writing, researching, prepping for the next thing, to say nothing of the doctoral “oh yeah, I also need to write a book,” grad students are basically feeling guilty. And sleep deprived. With some low-level anxiety thrown in.

In school, I handled that by going to the other extreme: if I wasn’t doing something school-related, I was likely watching every single episode of Gossip Girl. Or just lying on the couch, or in bed, staring at the wall. Or out with friends, when I could convince them to step away from their reading lists.

Two years of that, and I kind of forgot how to have hobbies.

So now, a year after graduation, I’m throwing a mixture of time (weekly tennis, on the calendar) and money (contemplating replacing my slooowwww computer with something that won’t waste so much of my time just to boot up, only to produce about a 50/50 ratio of functional vs “not responding”) at the problem. I’m trying to do a bit of web work, and am finding that being so behind on html5 and css3 updates makes me feel like I’m starting from scratch. Damn, it’s a steep learning curve!

But it’s good. On the occasion that I actually get something to work, there’s a rush I haven’t felt in a while. And even in the interim, just getting in a bit of practice—it’s fun. It makes me want to meet new people with whom I can talk about this stuff. It makes me happy to be spending a quiet Saturday at home, the light streaming in through the windows. The windows that could use a good cleaning…but I’m pushing aside the “should be doing” feeling, at least for today.

After just shy of NINE inches of rain in June (not to mention the Memorial Day floods at the end of May), I’m ready for a little sunshine. And swimming. And summertime sandal shopping.

A few weeks ago, Fran posted a link to these Mtng sandals at Nordstrom. I was smitten. (What happens when you start following more fashion blogs? You start buying more clothes.)

But $70 felt a bit steep for an impulse buy.

Then I got tipped off from a friend that Target was selling blatantly obvious knockoffs, which were touted as extremely comfortable and cost $17 a pair. I ordered two!

But when the Target pairs arrived, I found them less-than-comfortable. Insert an overly dramatic sigh here. (Apparently I’m a weirdo because I keep seeing them everywhere and everyone raves about them.) I felt pretty ‘meh’ — and I already own way too many shoes to add two more to my closet that I don’t love. So I decided to test out the originals…but the cognac leather/black elastic combo I had been eyeing were sold out. Damn!

Undeterred but unable to decide between the nude leather/copper elastic and black leather/pewter elastic combo, I took advantage of Nordstrom’s free returns and ordered both.

(So, for those keeping count, I was now about $180 into this game, plus tax. Whoops.)

The visual similarities were…striking, shall we say? To the left, the Mossimo sandals from Target. To the right, the Mtng sandals from Nordstrom.

But here’s the thing…the Mtng sandals were love at first try-on. Like, hello, my name is Cinderella.

Actual leather, comfortable cork footbed, thick elastic that holds your foot in place without squeezing your foot flesh out at weird angles, made in Spain where they kinda specialize in walkable sandals. Zero break-in time—I actually ran through the grocery store in them a few days ago (because I am a space cadet and forgot the main ingredient for the dish I was making, which I realized once I was already in line…doh) and felt nothing but comfort. This is not something I say often, but in my book, they are worth the extra $53. I am in love.

I decided to go with the nude/copper combo and return the rest. But with the Anniversary Sale starting up at Nordstrom this week, inventory is being added in stores and online (and seems to be fluctuating every day)…so…ummm…I may end up springing for the tan/black combo after all.

How about you? Any fun summer shopping outings lately?

I’ve been taking a closer look at my blog lately, ever since I received the message that my comments were no longer working. (that’s fixed, by the way!) And this isn’t going to be yet another “what does it all mean?” post on blogging—although I can’t promise that there aren’t more of those to come. I bring up the blog mostly because I think often of this lovely post by Frank Chimero called “Homesteading 2014” in which he compares creating your own space online to visiting an architect’s house. Crafting your space, perhaps in more specific detail than most people might. The post opens

Have you ever visited an architect’s house, one they designed themselves? It’s fun to walk through it with them. They have so many things, arranged so thoughtfully, and share the space with such pride because of the personal reflection the house required to design (not to mention the effort it took to build). It’s really quite special. I think there’s a pleasure to having everything under one roof. You feel together, all of you at once.

Probably five or more years ago, I spent a Sunday afternoon going to open houses back in Missoula. I saw three houses that day, and I still recall them clearly, each for their own reason.

One was an architect’s house, I knew as soon as I entered. Something about the use of steel tension cables helped to give it away, a certain modern spin on Frank Lloyd Wright, but also because the whole house was built for its occupants. I could tell that they must have been tall, the kitchen counters higher than normal. The dishwasher was mounted close to a foot off the ground, requiring less bending over. The alcoves in the walls were designed around the cherished objects they would display. Even the layout of the master bedroom and bathroom, with a walk-in closet adjoining the two, was so clever. You could get ready in the morning without waking up your partner; you could close the door on a messy closet and still have one more bathroom available for parties. It just made sense. And yet I heard other people in the kitchen, saying it wasn’t sized for them, commenting to the realtor on how some of these details likely hurt the house’s resale value.

After this house, I went just a few blocks away to another. This one was far less grand, a pretty standard 1940s house, modest in almost every way. The house itself blends in with so many houses I’ve seen, awkwardly renovated over the years. But in the back, up a set of stairs above the garage, there was a studio apartment. Soaring ceilings, amazing light, a little landing before the main space that would have served as a wonderful little library for curling up with a good book. There was something about that place—probably the light streaming in and the blank slate feeling—that made me consider whether or not I could ever live in a studio, whether I could adopt some kind of loft lifestyle (whatever it is that really means…)

Truthfully, I am not well-suited to a loft, not at all. I am far too messy, I have too much stuff. But the biggest issue with that scenario is the lack of storage, that there’s really no place to hide things away. That place had one wall of low cabinets and nothing else, no other built-ins, hardly a perch for your shower necessities.

Yesterday, I accompanied a realtor friend to check out a house available for rent. It was outside of my budget, too big at three bedrooms, on a busy street, not in my ideal neighborhood—it was not for me. But I’m anxiously awaiting my lease renewal from my landlord, scared he’s going to jack up rent more than I’m willing or able to comfortably pay, so I was curious to see what else is out there. I’m weighing in my head what my limits are, what it would take to make me move out of this (already kind of pricey) place where I’ve lived for the last year. Because I really love this place. Perhaps loving a place too much as a renter is risky behavior. After all, it is not really yours.

It was good that this place yesterday wasn’t for me, because honestly, I was seduced by the cabinetry. Cabinets and built-ins everywhere. In the kitchen, the laundry room, the living room, the bathroom especially. A narrow cabinet between the two vanity mirrors for everyday items. Shelves (actually nice-looking, custom wooden shelves) behind the toilet. Two cabinets mounted below the sinks. And then an upper AND lower cabinet behind the door, perfect for sheets and towels.

What I wouldn’t give for a linen closet.

To some extent, I realize that storage is a little like purses—whatever size you have, you’re likely to fill it. I have a huge purse right now and the marks on my shoulder to prove it.

At this point, I live in a pretty big house, one that I sometimes think might be a little too big for me. I have a hard time keeping up with the cleaning, yes. But mostly, I ask myself, how can I have so much space and still not have room for everything? Why does it always seem like such a mess?

Well, partially it’s because I’m messy. And of course there’s no denying I need to get rid of some things. She who lives in an uncluttered house can be the first to cast stones on that front.

But also, this house has almost no storage. I’ve brought in my own to some extent, lugged from one rental space to the next over the years: cabinets and bookshelves and dressers and now an IKEA wardrobe. Still, the bathroom storage consists of those open wire shelves, covered in white coating, perpetually grimy. No matter what I try, all of the bottles look like a jumble. Downstairs, there are really just three normal-sized kitchen cabinets and only one decent closet in the whole place.

Wandering that house yesterday, opening and closing all of those drawers and doors (soft-close hinges! be still my heart!), I’ll admit that I got some ideas about my own place, things I might change if all goes as I pray it does and I renew my lease this month. A hammock and a BBQ and some better bathroom storage, dealing with my exploding bedroom closet.

But also, I couldn’t help but yearn for built-ins. Not for more storage, per se, but for feeling invested in a place, knowing you’re going to live there for long enough to make changes seem worthwhile. Maybe even knowing that it’s yours and then working to make it seem that way by adjusting it or even overhauling it to suit your needs. Building in those purposeful nooks and crannies. Asking what height the kitchen counters should really be, without worrying too much about the effect on resale value.

To be honest, I’m not even entirely sure who lives like that anymore. There’s a sense of nomadism (nomadery?) among most of the people I know. I find it simultaneously exciting and exhausting. Everyone seems to be mentally withdrawn a bit, anticipating the next move, starting over all over again. I’m not sure that it’s how I want to continue to live in the next 3, 5, 10 years. At some point, I’d like the pleasure of having everything under one roof, of “feel[ing] together, all of you at once.”

Right now, that’s just not in the cards for me, and no amount of cabinetry will help that.

So in the meantime, I’ll keep my fingers crossed that things will work out and I’ll be spending another year, at least, settling into this place—the place I’ve come to call home.

As I’ve mentioned, my grad school apartment was compact, shall we say – there just wasn’t room for all of the art I brought with me from Montana and my last (large, two story) house. A few things spent two years in the gaps on the side of the washer and dryer. I had framed art slid under the couch and my bed, awaiting the next transition. So, when I moved into my new place almost a year ago (!), I was excited to get things back up on the walls.

Well…it turns out this place has a lot more wall space. And I’m not sharing it with anyone, so this is the first place I’ve really lived where every space is mine…and I have a decent amount of it. With friends coming to visit, I put together the guest room over the last few months – new bed from IKEA, platform base, Overstock sheets, a Target nightstand and clearance lamp – nothing too fancy but trying to make visitors feel comfortable. And it looks OK, serves its purpose as occasional guest room and as my daily closet / space for my obscene number of shoes.

But something is missing.

I already hung all of my art elsewhere in the house, and this room is looking a little…blah.

Right now, I don’t have a big art budget. Not knowing where the next move might take me, I don’t want to invest in anything too large, but I also want to spice up this neglected space. I’m also a little tired of dealing with framing lately – more on that soon – so I would prefer to find something already framed – but don’t want to mortgage the home I don’t own to pay for custom framing!

Based on those many criteria, I have decided to order something from Minted. I’m a paper snob, and I spend too much of my time at work looking at wedding invitations, so I generally have extreme champagne taste when it comes to wedding paper goods. But I was impressed with the sample wedding invitation from Minted inserted in one of the magazines. Thick, velvety paper, crisp printing, impeccable edges. (also, aren’t these agate invites fun?) Their wedding invitations, which I currently have no obvious use for, were sort of the gateway drug to their “art marketplace.”

Things I dig: the option of higher end archival papers. Reading about the artists behind the work. Tons of selection, including framing choices. Pretty decent taxonomies to help with browsing. And the availability of squares as well as rectangles.

After much deliberation, these are my current top contenders:

Mid-summertime by Emily Jeffords

(actually, there are a bunch of options from Emily Jeffords that I really like)

Hexagon with Dots in Blue by Yao Cheng

I can’t quite decide on the framing option for this one – white? black? birch?

Float by Betty Hatchett

Lights on the Lake by Lindsay Megahed

Or maybe bring a bit more of a winter feel to Texas?

Which would you choose? Do you hang art not long after moving in, or do you struggle to put nails in the walls? Important follow up question: when are you coming to visit me in Austin? The guest room awaits!

(This post is in collaboration with Minted. All choices and opinions are totally my own.)

Yep, we can once again blame El Niño (that’s Spanish for…”the niño”). 

Over the Memorial Day weekend, people lost their lives and their homes and their pets and their heirlooms and, despite my lame Chris Farley joke, I don’t mean to make light of that. My graduate program is offering free workshops for people looking to conserve damaged scrapbooks and documents, and people were lining up to temporarily foster animals in shelters under water. There’s something really amazing about how people come out of the woodwork when they’re scared and nature takes control and we are jolted a bit out of our routines.

Last night just before sunset, when the rain finally stopped, I wandered out in my rain boots to survey the damage. I met my neighbors for the first time, a couple drinking Topo Chicos (Austin’s patron beverage) and laughing, wondering about how they were going to get across town to see the movie they had bought tickets to in advance. They said water started coming in the back of their house, so they moved everything to another room, only to find that that room had water bubbling up from the foundation. To a third room it all went. They told their friends to get some floaties and come hang out in the backyard.

Those incredibly loud iPhone weather warnings are pretty commonplace here, to the point where a tornado warning running through a party’s worth of phones on Saturday night elicited no real response. Party on, Garth. There are nine (9!) Emergency Alerts in my phone’s Notification Center just from the past three days. But, home alone, and with the wind whipping and the sky turning funky colors, I’ll admit I found my way to my interior bathroom yesterday to sit on the floor with a book and wait out another tornado warning. After that alert had expired, and more flash flood warnings came, I went back downstairs and started gathering up all of the things that were important to me and easy to move. My art journal. My various computers and hard drives and gadgets. Some art I recently had framed that I keep meaning to write about here. A new pair of shoes I had removed just inside the door the day before.

As I stood in the middle of the living room, trying to decide what to move next, in came the water from some unknown place under the stairs. It was clear and silent, moving quickly but not rushing, a bit like the way water moves across a table when a drinking glass is accidentally toppled. I had imagined that water, if it were to come in, would come in from under the doors. It didn’t occur to me, really, that it would come in below the baseboards, from no single source. Even though it wasn’t much, really, I felt this anxiety flow up into my throat, thinking this was just the start of things to come. I ran upstairs and gathered all of my towels – beach, hand, new, old, whatever – and tried to stop the flow. I was thankful for my bar cart on wheels, the IKEA kitchen cart a few feet from that, easily shifted away from the spreading puddle. A metal coat rack near the door, holding coats and bags far above ground.

Once the towels were doing their work, I stopped to consider that more water could come from anywhere, not just the doorways I had cleared. So up came the rugs, everything got unplugged from the walls, furniture to the middle of the room, my couch piled high with inverted side tables and lamps. Inching an eight foot bookcase away from the walls, little by little.

I went outside to see a river through my carport, my washer and dryer in a few inches of standing water, a neighbor’s cat accidentally stranded in my laundry bay and meowing loudly. A dead tree branch that had been looming over my driveway had fallen, mostly blocking in my car, one end resting against the second floor of my place, confusing the hell out of the motion sensor light.

In the back of the house, the water was above the foundation, coursing against the siding. Moving some things on the patio so they wouldn’t get swept away, there wasn’t much more to be done. I raked away the debris gathering near my front door. I took a few pictures of the branch, glad no one was parked there. And then I came back inside and turned off the air conditioning, as the outside unit was under water. I sat at the top of the stairs and waited and watched for more water to come.

Somewhere in there I checked the weather forecast, saw that more rain is predicted this week, and panic-ordered a Shop-Vac from Amazon.

Really, this isn’t about the flooding, not for me. A stack of soaked towels and a bunch of rearranged furniture does not a tragedy make.

Instead, it got me thinking about all of the stuff I had to deal with. I’m not going to go all Kondo here, not right now, but the panic I felt freaked me out a little bit. I haven’t been sleeping well through all of these storms this month, partially because my room is lit by lightning and the thunder shakes my windows, the rain pelts against the windows and the roof over my head. It’s hardly the ideal sleeping scenario. But partially because I’ve had this looming dread that I’m going to wake up and stand at the top of the stairs one morning and see brown, murky water everywhere. I’m worried about this possibility at the same time as I haven’t spent any time on my patio in the past few months, I haven’t had people over, I haven’t even really given this place a scrub down in forever. I finally set up the new guest room bed in time for visitors a few months ago, but the office landing is full of junk, half-emptied boxes, laundry that’s been hanging to dry for weeks. Looking around last night, I thought, “This is what you’re so worried about?”

To make matters worse, I called my mom and managed to scare the hell out of her, too.

I’ve lived here now for about nine months and it’s time to deal with some shit already.

So. I’ve decided to hold off on putting everything back together until the epic rains seem a bit less Biblical. I’m hoping the weekend facilitates some vacuuming and mopping and rearranging. Hey, if nothing else, it ought to be easy to clean the wide open floors, right?

But also…stuff. And value. And moving. And what I want home to feel like. All thoughts swirling in my head on this hot, humid, but rain-free night in Texas.

[actual autocorrect I got today] 

Happy Easter, all! Happy Passover!

Or, in my case, Happy Sunday!

Growing up, holidays were a big thing around my house. My mom decorates for seven holidays a year, I believe, and we had family traditions affiliated with so many of those days. Cards and chocolate and little presents after dinner on Valentine’s Day, barbecues and fireworks on the 4th of July. Thanksgiving, of course, and Christmas.

But also the downtown parade and wearing green and corned beef and cabbage on St. Patty’s Day. Even after we left home, my mom would call on that day to say “Top ‘o the morning to you!” — and the correct response: “And the rest of the day to you” — was something we had ready to go when we heard the phone ring.

Easter was at my grandparents’ house for so many years. We’d dye dozens of eggs with my grandpa to prep for the big Easter hunt, where I would marvel at just how terrible my cousins were at hunting for eggs. (I have a long and illustrious Easter egg hunt winning history) Waking up to jam-packed Easter baskets. New spring dresses and shoes — even though Montana springs included blustery days on the edge of snow more often than not — and morning church and a brunch buffet somewhere with my aunts and uncles and cousins. 

I think one of the most exciting things about Easter was that it typically signaled the end of a very long winter. Spring was springing — or trying to, at least — and there was a sense of newness that you don’t so much get in a place without seasons. I miss that.

So today is just another Sunday. I’m eating some Cadbury Mini Eggs and watching The Americans and gearing up to get some work done. But I took myself out to breakfast. I’m doing some spring cleaning around the house. And I’m looking toward having some people over one of these days, supplementing those holiday get togethers, drawing people together just because.

But blogger apologies are boring.

I’ll try to make this one slightly less so. (Maybe?)

Logging into WordPress when you’ve been away for a while is a bit like coming back to any hobby after a break: things have shifted a bit, you feel a little clunky and uncoordinated, some housekeeping is in order to get back on track. So I come in and I back up my database, I install the latest version of WP, I update my plug-ins. I try to avoid my real fear, something I experienced over a year ago (!) and have yet to really deal with, that your site has gone down (or, even worse, has been hacked), that some update has caused some breaking changes. At this point, I barely seem to find time to write anything, let alone troubleshoot (boring) or redesign this space (less boring, but hard, at least for me). When all of the minute design tweaks I had made, slowly, one trip to the WordPress forums at a time, all vanished some time around Christmas 2013, I was mostly relieved to get the site back up, even if the vaguely burlap-y background had been replaced by stark white, even if my fonts were missing, and the colors were gone, and I had a certain Miss Clavel feeling about it all.

After the initial panic of seeing a white screen at this web address, I bounced back, I got excited about a redesign, I quoted a blog post that really hit me then and has stuck with me since then about blogging being a kind of homesteading.

And then 2014 came. And 2014 was a very strange year.

So much happened, and in some ways, it was a great year. But also, I found myself feeling exhausted.

This was likely due to a number of factors, job-related, moving-related, hormone-related, generally transition-related. In 2014, I wrote in my journal twice. TWICE. I wrote a handful of blog posts, none of them the kind that make me feel really proud. Outside of phone snapshots, I took hundreds of pictures, not the typical thousands.

I haven’t been feeling very creative, and I have been racking my brain to try to figure out why.

Some part of it is the firehose and just being overwhelmed by emails and tweets and articles and videos and status updates all day long. So much to read and see, so much of it good, but so consuming, either way. I can blame my phone and phantom ring syndrome. (I’ve become kind of obsessed with our phones as evocative objects, as Sherry Turkle has written pretty extensively about in the past few years, but perhaps that’s really fodder for another post or ten.) Some of it has to do with not quite measuring up, with bloggers and Instagrammers and all the rest getting that much better at showing their perfectly twee, curated lives.

(no one seems to have vertical blinds. no house has carpet. no one eats fast food except maybe In-N-Out because somehow that’s cute and not shameful.)

But really, it’s not about them. It’s about me. I need to turn inside. To examine how I spend my time, where, with whom. How many hours of my day, my week, get sucked into the ether.

And what I’ve realized differentiates this little space, which generally feels good but also sometimes hard (a bit like exercise or reading a challenging book) from social media (candy rush!!) is the concept of time. This feels less ephemeral. Everything else feels pretty fleeting.

And so I develop a million means of procrastination. In the time it’s taken me to sit down and write this silly little post, at a coffee shop and not at home (fewer distractions, right?), I’ve checked my email. Three times. Work and personal. I’ve texted two people and have checked my phone, just to be sure I didn’t miss anything, a couple more times. I’ve done some aimless Googling. Twitter. Insta, of course.

I’ve done everything possible to not sit my ass down and write. write. write. But none of those are things I’m likely to remember an hour from now. One hour!

2015 will mark this blog’s eighth year. Honestly, I’ve written a lot of crap. And some OK stuff. And a couple of handfuls of posts I still think about, reference, go back and reread to remember, to reconsider, to indulge in a little linguistic reverie.

I want to write more of those.

One of the changes to the latest version of WordPress is that they’ve replaced the Zen writing mode (a white screen with nothing but a space for a title and a borderless box for the post’s text) with “distraction-free writing mode,” which basically removes the non-post-specific menus but still allows for adding images and all kinds of formatting. You write within a bounded box. I’m sure I’ll get used to it, and I’m sure people complained about zen mode being too limited. But I’ll miss that great white expanse, feeling unbound by word counts and character lengths, ignoring the most approachable (appropriate, even?) way to write in the web world: easily digestible chunks on not-too-intimidating topics, all composed with web literacy in mind.

I’m no good at those things, not online, not in person.

Well, check that: I can write with those metrics in mind, but it’s not much fun.

Knowing my spotty history, I know better than to make promises about the next post, maintaining some kind of scheduling. Habits have never been my strong suit. But I can guarantee this: I understand the tedium of blogger apologies. And I know I’ve likely hit my limit in that department.

The long, meandering posts in which I unwittingly use GRE vocabulary words are unlikely to retreat. But I’d like to do a little less navel-gazing.

I think of this space often. It means a lot to me.

And, though I know it’s a lot to ask, I hope it also continues to mean something to you.

I’ll try to do a better job of honoring that confidence.

xxoo,

E.

“I’ve always been impressed by the fact that upon entering a room full of people, you find them saying one thing, doing another and wishing they were doing a third,” he said in a 1965 interview with the weekly newspaper The National Observer, now defunct. “The words are secondary and the secrets are primary. That’s what interests me most.”

Since moving in to this apartment in August (yes, this as yet really unshared on the blog apartment, despite my sad attempts at floorplan creation in Google SketchUp), there’s been a lot going on, good and bad. New job, going to NYC, insurance fights with my new employer, an astronomical (please, please be a misread!) utility bill, car problems, on and on. Truth be told, I lost a bit of steam (and kinda ran out of money) after the first few weeks and things basically stayed as they were for a while. “As they were” is code for “in huge piles all over the place.”

My mom came to town last weekend. We went to the Austin City Limits music festival to see Sam Smith (plus Belle and Sebastian, Outkast, Beck) and we saw The Drop in the theater (I really love Dennis Lehane) and went to a backyard fire with some old friends of mine, but mostly we spent a fair amount of time making some sense of things around my house. Well, she did most of it and I…I don’t know, directed. And put together IKEA furniture.

It’s always both really nice and more than a little stressful to unpack and have to make so many decisions, to see what all has yet to be finished, all the things I still need to buy. Moving, the entire process, makes me really moody. I do not understand, not even a little, the people who say that they love the “fresh start” of moving. Maybe when I finally buy a house? Probably not.

I am a house person, a nester, someone who owns multiple kinds of spoons for specific tasks. (I’ve been watching a lot of Gilmore Girls this week and there’s a bit where Lorelai is harassing her mother about some ice tea spoons and their relative uselessness. I had to smile—no ice tea spoons for me, but ice cream spoons, yep!) And that is unlikely to change. I do not see minimalism in my future.

And honestly, what’s wrong with that? But moving makes me feel guilty for the things I own, that I end up needing to ask friends for help, that I have more stuff than almost anyone I know. I hired movers, and it’s money well spent. I have plenty of space in this new, comparatively huge apartment. There’s nothing inherently wrong with owning, using, loving ice cream spoons. And yet I find myself having these existential periods of brooding that I just can’t kick, partially brought on by the time of year and partially about moving and transitions and…it just doesn’t make things quite as straightforward as they could be.

So today I unwrapped all of my art, piece by piece. Two big boxes’ worth. It was so fun to be reacquainted with all of it, to see what was hiding behind each blank newsprint wrapper. Watercolors I bought way back in high school, or that someone gave me to remember a trip we took together. Photographs by me and from friends and from old boyfriends and of people I care about. A print that used to hang in my parents’ house. A Christmas present, opened on the same morning that my parents gave me the ring my dad gave my mom when I was born. So many things I love, so many gifts from people who matter to me.

None of them are hung yet, I haven’t decided what goes where. I need to make a trip to Home Depot once I finally get my car back from the shop. The glass broke on one, I need to get some things matted and a few things framed.

But seeing that art laid out, plus the fact that this is starting to feel like a place where I might live and that I might share with other people, got me thinking about what I’ve loved about some past places, especially my last place in Montana.

Which leads me to last night’s dream. I should preface this by saying that I sometimes have really wacky, very detailed dreams, and that in creative writing classes, we were always warned that dreams are boring. Oh well. Here goes.

There’s a lot of weird prefacing that could happen – I was attending a wedding of someone I didn’t know well, there was a courtyard that kind of looked like Chilton because, whoops, too much Gilmore Girls, there were windows on pulleys, they served the cake in huge slices and ran out after one table full of people. That’s a very high level overview. But then somehow it transitioned, with some of the same people, to a wake. At my house, which was very little like my actual house and was instead much more…warren-y. But was a place I hadn’t been for too long, but had settled into. And a bunch of my family members were there, and it was crowded, and there were friends there to support me. (nope, no idea who died. not the point?) My dad was moving things around to more reasonable locations, as he is wont to do, and my aunt was asking my opinion on throw pillows, and people were gathered around the kitchen in that warm cozy way that people do at good parties. I was looking all over for my brother, couldn’t seem to find him, and then he pulled up to the front of the house with a car full of Kokanee in bottles, what we often drink at my family reunion, and it all just felt really familiar. And cozy. In my house, a place where people come and congregate and drink and laugh and tell stories and stay until late. Ignoring the weird death addition there (no idea!), it’s something that was sort of missing, or at least really tough to have, in my last apartment because of its size and location. It was another reminder that making space—for visitors, friends, love—was a motivator for me moving.

So things aren’t done yet. They’re not going to be “complete” any time soon. But I’m excited to kick things off with a little get together this month. To try to get into the habit of having people over, for actual parties and casual dinners, for drinks on the patio and laughs and stories and living room dance parties and movie nights and crowded kitchen gatherings. To not wait until things are perfect and to be OK knowing that things aren’t perfect, or only rarely are. I’ll chip away at things in the next few weeks and it will be a relief to put moving behind me for a while. I’ll hang some art. But mostly, it’s the season for hostessing, for welcoming people to come on over, grab a beer, stay a while.

Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t make big decisions lightly. Really, I don’t make too many decisions lightly, and have a knack for (over)thinking all sorts of things. Online shopping makes this much worse. Reviews! Blog posts! So many places to research every.little.thing. I doubled checked the prices for sink strainers* yesterday from the Target aisle before committing to all 8 dollars of the thing.

But because I enjoy weighing in on decisions made by strangers, and I like hearing feedback from others (shopping with the right partner is my idea of bliss), I thought I’d start a little mini-series called Decisions, Decisions. I hope you’ll consider weighing in—either with your expert opinion on my uncertainties or with decisions you’re considering in your own world, shopping, decorating, or otherwise. It’ll be fun.

So, the leather tote debate. I’ve wanted a basic leather bag—big enough to carry a laptop, small enough to still be considered a purse when getting on a plane—for many years now. I ogle them at airports. A few chic classmates carried bags closely resembling what I want, though not quite the same. I go back to this specific Olivia Palermo street style shot (carrying a discontinued Zara bag) with some regularity and fantasize about my fashionable life if only I had that bag. And possibly a metrosexual man wearing purple socks.

Requirements: basic, not too embellished, with at least one interior zip pocket. Not too preppy. As much as I like Olivia’s forearm sling look, I need one with straps long enough to slip over a shoulder. Although I am tempted by colors because I always am, and I wear a lot of black, I think a basic luggage brown is probably the best bet in terms of versatility, as Ms. P shows in the image above.

I’m headed to New York for work soon and realizing that a) I’ll need to bring my laptop to and from the office each day/into and out of meetings and b) my laptop-sized bag options include a massive Radiant Orchid Patagonia messenger bag, a Lowe Alpine backpack I’ve had since my senior year of high school, and…I think that’s it. The New York office seems a little Devil Wears Prada-lite and I am a touch intimidated.

So, it’s time. I need to up my professional game.

I’ve basically narrowed down my options to two extremely similar bags: The Madewell Transport Tote in English Saddle and the Cuyana Leather Tote in Caramel (which comes in two sizes).

The Madewell Transport Tote

Cuyana Leather Tote – Short

Cuyana Leather Tote – Tall

Quite a few bloggers are singing the praises of the Cuyana bags, but I get the impression they might have been gifted free ones in exchange for their posts—the extent to which that is happening on almost every blog I read is kind of a bummer. Some people say the Cuyana straps don’t look as good for as long, some people say the Madewell bag ages better, others say the Cuyana leather is higher quality. For sure, they all have the option of gold monogramming—I’m thinking MLE since my initials (EEB) and monogram (EBE) are both pretty lame.

So I’m leaning toward the Madewell bag since I can more easily see it in person (there’s a Madewell store in Austin, while Cuyana’s only brick and mortar is in SF), I can buy it and then take it back later to get it monogrammed if I decide I love the bag, and it appears to be a bit more structured and thus stand up on its own, hopefully reducing the number of times it falls over and spills things everywhere.

But…it’s so hard to choose! Decisions, decisions, I tell ya.

So, which would you choose? Do you have your eye on a “timeless” splurge? Do you have tricks for making up your mind in a less dramatic fashion? Inquiring minds want to know.

*I actually think the funniest David Letterman skit I ever saw was a series of Halloween costumes that are terrifying to adults. One of them was a dude dressed up as a sink strainer basket looped with spaghetti and full of unidentifiable chunks. Yep! Adulthood!

I guess most importantly: I got a job!

The Monday after graduation, back in May, I started interning four days a week at a large tech company with an office in Austin, while continuing to work another ten hours a week or so at the local museum and sculpture garden where I did my master’s capstone project. And then in July, the tech company offered me a full time salaried position! So happy to only be working one job for the first time in…a while. My first day was on Monday.

As for why I started almost a month after the offer, first I spent almost two weeks in Montana!

I had already booked the flight before anything came down the job pipeline (and had bought tickets to see Paul McCartney in Missoula), so I decided to push back my start date and take a little vacay – and escape the Texas heat. It was awesome to see family and friends and my dog and also to have almost nothing to do, save a little preliminary Craigslist stalking. I was exhausted and spent more time sleeping than ideal, perhaps, but I needed it. I did read three books and started another, plus a ton of magazines, so…productive? Sure.

And then the morning after I got back from Montana, I moved! To some weird degree, this is the most exciting aspect of everything for me. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m excited about the job for lots of reasons and I’m relieved to be employed and all of that, but c’mon, decorating is basically the greatest.

The lease on my old apartment ended the first week in June, so I hired movers and put about 95% of my stuff into storage. Not knowing where the next few months would lead, I took a friend up on her offer to let me stay in the studio apartment behind her house – all 150 sq ft or so. It had a shower that required me to take a deep breath to enter, a futon I slept on/ate on/watched TV on/lived on all summer, and perhaps most frustratingly, a defective dorm fridge. One particular night when I pulled out a carton of ice cream (melty and funky) and then thought “OK, this is a sign. Find something healthy instead” only to bite into a strawberry (mushy on the outside, frozen in the center) was kind of a low point. Don’t get me wrong – my friend’s generosity enabled so much of this to happen, and I am really grateful for a rent-free summer. But I was also reminded just how much my living situation affects my happiness and how cranky I get when I feel unsettled. So I was ready for my situation to become less temporary/nomadic (so much house/cat sitting this summer!) and more permanent.

Guys, my new apartment is going to be awesome. I can feel it.

After lots and lots of Craigslist stalking, and one place that fell through in the process of signing the lease (I had the pen in hand!), this place actually took my breath away. It’s a two story garage apartment with a loft feel and a big open first floor. The second floor houses the bedrooms (yes, I said bedrooms plural!) and bathrooms (!) and an open office-type space. The previous tenants let the place get pretty rundown, so there’s been quite a few fixes by the landlord since I signed the lease and more surprises all of the time (um, what the heck is the deal with the wire hanging outside from…somewhere, stopping abruptly a few feet off the ground…?) but I see potential. Plus light! Nice, soft light streaming in the many windows and casting cool shadows on the walls.

So now is kind of the Crazytown USA moment where I have boxes everywhere and am just wrapping up moving out of the studio and I haven’t really found a place for anything but I have, against all reasonable advice to the contrary, managed to unpack a large number of boxes, thus exploding things all over the place. Things that do not yet have homes. Whoops.

But this, too, shall pass. I have lots of ideas and thoughts and feelingz about it all, and I’m hoping to get back in the swing of posting. Want to follow along with me? I hope so! I think it’s gonna be a real good time.

But Sam Smith’s voice, in “Money on My Mind,” “Latch,” and this awesome cover of Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know?” seems to be taking up residence in my head with no sign of departure. This video has two and a half million more views than when I first watched it last week, so I know it’s all over the internet. But just in case you haven’t seen it:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwHACITShSI

I love his modern, vaguely Boy George-ish look and his incredible voice. I’m looking forward to listening to his recently released first album…and will admit I’ll be on the lookout for the Shonda Rhimes-organized 80s covers compilation that includes this song. RIP Whitney.

Reading: Like a good creative writing major, I recently went back and reread Raymond Carver’s Cathedral collection, which I enjoyed but not quite as much as the first time around. I breezed through Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park in a night, just as the best YA intends. It was charming and a nice change of pace from your normal coming of age teenage romance. (Not that I’m really against those, either…) And now I’m getting back to Zadie Smith’s NW. I got about ten pages in some time last year and then it was recalled at the library. I love White Teeth and On Beauty but struggle a bit with some of her essays, so the jury’s still out on this one. No one is going to describe it as a light summer read, but I’m ready for something a little meatier.

Thinking: Differently. I don’t quite know how to explain it, but not quite two months out of school, I’m finding that I have a curiosity and energy for learning that I had kind of lost for a while. I guess it has something to do with having a more regular schedule. Or maybe it has to do with watching some TV and letting my brain reset.

Watching: The Newsroom. I had been told for a long time that I’d like it, and I did. I am even in full support of the saccharine wrapping-almost-everything-up-at-the-end ending. I guess that’s Sorkin’s prerogative when a smart, witty show like that gets cancelled after only two (short!) seasons. Oh, and Orange is the New Black, obviously. And the moving process basically reignited my love/hate relationship with Grey’s Anatomy, because it turns out you can understand the entire show just by listening to it. It was nice have-it-on-in-the-background-or-even-in-the-other-room packing noise. Except when Jackson Avery is on. Then I’d watch. (didn’t that super scary “hot felon” look a lot like Jesse Williams, the actor who plays Avery? Only one of them is a repeat offender with a tear tat and the other is a fictional, near-perfect doctor prone to taking off his shirt when it makes very little sense in context…)

Oh! And Obvious Child! I saw it (twice!) in the theater and thought it was the most realistic, charming, funny romcom I’ve seen in a long time.

(Still) unpacking from: a long weekend in Dallas with a dear friend. We hit the Dallas Museum of Art, which was fabulous, ate good food, hit the sales at the Galleria mall pretty hard, drank Shiner Ruby Redbird, and watched more World Cup than I had all tournament. The downtown Thanks-Giving Chapel was a pleasant surprise:

Enjoying: Austin’s slower summer pace. Patio beers. Trivia nights. Free music and movies on the lawn.

Looking forward to: Heading to Montana in a few weeks! August is the perfect time of year, and being on the lake—with no schoolwork to do!—is going to be total bliss.

So…what has this summer held for you? Tell me in the comments!

(thanks for Danielle at Sometimes Sweet for the original inspiration for these posts)

I can’t say that I’m a real student of her works, but snippets from one of her best-known poems, Phenomenal Woman, play in my head with some frequency. When I was in middle school, my cooler (high school!) cousin Annie gave me a notebook full of quotes and song lyrics and magazine clippings, and over time I added to it. It still remains one of my most prized possessions, something I go back to from time to time, remembering my growing confidence and feminist leanings from a time when nature and society both tell you that you should feel badly about yourself. Honestly, I avoided a lot of that uncertainty, and I think that this poem had a little something to do with it.

Phenomenal Woman
by Maya Angelou

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
It’s in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It’s the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them,
They say they still can’t see.
I say,
It’s in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Now you understand
Just why my head’s not bowed.
I don’t shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing,
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It’s in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need for my care.
’Cause I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

——

Do you have a favorite Maya Angelou poem, too?

Seven years ago, I decided to start a blog.

Some years it’s been a more prominent part of my life than others, but it’s still one of the best decisions I’ve made.

Here’s to another year! Thanks for sticking around, y’all.

(photo by me, taken at the Alhambra. Yep, wanderlusting as ever.)

I had one of those dreams last night that seemed really vivid at the time, although now I can’t really remember much about it. I woke up around 6:30, when the world was still half-dark but the birds were starting to chirp. In the dream, I had decided to go to Amsterdam. I was trying to decide the perfect time to go, when the tourist season might have slowed some but the weather was still nice enough for all day wandering. I knew I wanted to go to the Van Gogh museum but couldn’t quite bring out the artist’s name in the dream—though I’m sure that’s the one I was thinking about. For whatever reason, in my dream, Amsterdam seemed like the exact right place to revive my recently lagging interest in photography.

I finished my master’s degree last week. My last class was on Tuesday morning and thought I would feel a sense of relief walking out of there, but I didn’t, not really. I woke up in the middle of the night on Tuesday night convinced I had forgotten to do something important.

I hadn’t.

On Wednesday, I told myself that I was going to do as close to nothing as possible before I had to work that night. I tried to sleep in but couldn’t really go back to sleep, so it was like self-imposed bedrest. I watched Glengarry Glen Ross, which has been coming up in the weirdest places lately, listed more than once as someone’s favorite movie. I thought it was kind of boring. Then I laid on the couch for a while but couldn’t really sleep since I had just gotten out of bed a few hours ago. It was sort of pathetic, honestly.

One of the requirements of my graduate program is that you complete a semester-long capstone experience, design a poster explaining it, and then stand next to the poster for three hours on the last day of the semester so people can come by and ask you about it. It’s some family members, some first-year students, faculty, most of the project supervisors. Allegedly, some people are there looking for new graduates to hire. I guess some people got business cards but I wasn’t one of them, which didn’t really surprise me. My interests are kind of niche and not the core skills most people expect from graduates of my program. My supervisor came by and was really happy though, so that was nice. And I enjoyed my capstone and learned quite a bit, so it felt like a success. It was a relief to be finished with that final hurdle and to not have to stand there any longer with a smile plastered on my face, trying to look welcoming and I don’t know, available, but also not too needy. It reminded me of craft shows—to each his own, one man’s crocheted potholder is another man’s nightmare, and the last thing you want to do is actively engage with a vendor selling things that don’t interest you. It takes a certain kind of steeliness to put yourself out there though, to present what you’ve made for people passing by to peruse.

I’m thinking the wanderlust dream probably had to do with my new passport arriving. My old one had been expired since September and something about that was making me feel anxious, actually cementing in my mind the fact that I haven’t been anywhere in quite some time and have no future travel plans. There’s a certain irony in the fact that when you have time, you rarely have money, and vice versa. I’m wondering when I’ll next get to take off for a week or two.

For now, I’m taking it easy. It’s looking like I’ll be exploring Austin this summer, maybe other parts of Texas.  I’m moving (again) in about a month, this time into a tiny studio for a while, putting almost all of my stuff in storage. I have more to write about that soon.

I have lots more to write, actually. Time and, soon enough, energy to write again, write more, write more often. I’m reading a book for fun. This morning, I went back to sleep and actually had a whole new set of dreams, this time that I was planning for my parents to come and visit me in Córdoba and not in Austin.

Enough space to have travel on the brain again.

Sharing is caring, right? When I read something that reminds me of someone, I love sending it their way. It’s the modern version of your grandparents cutting out interesting articles in the newspaper, folding them gingerly, and putting them in an envelope to land in your mailbox. Are the snippings ever received with the enthusiasm expected from the sender? Is that even the point?

Any more, when I read an article, I find myself thinking whether it meets the bar of sharing—on Twitter, Facebook, or the loftiest standard of all, via email. So much of my interesting reading comes pre-curated by a contact out there, or according to some New York Times algorithm, or maybe because a company paid for that top spot in my search ranking. And, to be honest, I am grateful for those providers of great content (ok, maybe not so much the ads). I seek them out. Even not-so-great content makes me happy when it’s targeted to me personally.

Still, I wonder about the public/private thing. The old Google Reader sharing is a feature I find myself missing even a year after Reader was shut down. I had a small, “curated” list of friends there who were interested in many of the same things that interest me. Those Google Reader friends and I are friends, online and in real life, largely based on our specific shared interests—more so than my family, my Facebook contacts, the people who I spend my days with—and so it was the perfect circle, pre-G+, where I found interesting content in line with my existing interests and, more than occasionally, was pleasantly surprised by other recommendations. Because the sharing was private, we were able to be genuinely curious, or critical, or even snarky without worrying that those comments would be viewed by everyone on the internet (well, at least until Google unexpectedly made those comments public. There was a frantic race to change my privacy settings on THAT day!)

So many bloggers love to publish a weekly list of links—some version of “What I read this week.” And it’s extremely tempting, because those posts are relatively easy to put together, but also because I WANT TO SHARE ALL OF THIS GOOD STUFF!

And yet, when going through my RSS reader (Feedly, these days), those are the posts I’m most likely to ignore. It’s just too overwhelming to me in digest form like that. Do other people do this too?

So, is your reading a little like your Instagram, in that your enjoyment of something is actually increased by knowing how “shareable” it is? Or are you exhausted by the urge to make every personal moment public? Would you respond differently if a contact recommended the same article on Twitter? Do you read articles people send your way, or does that seem old school like email chain letters?

If you don’t comment and share this article with ten people, you will have bad luck forever and will probably also get scurvy.

One way or another, this is going to be an important year. Finishing grad school, most likely moving, starting fresh all over again. And today I turned 30. It took all of those things to finally convince me to do something I’ve been considering for many years: a 365 project.

One photo a day for a year.

No rules beyond that. Some I’ll post to Instagram. Some I’ll take with my actual camera, I hope. And I can only assume that, from time to time, I’ll post some here.

Some, like today’s, will be a little grainy, a little too dark. But that’s OK. I want to remember tonight. And I expect I’ll get better. It’s not about trying to do things perfectly, only showing perfectly lovely moments. And sometimes the boring stuff, too. It’s about what I saw that day. (and today I saw a birthday cocktail with an old friend…)

I am terrible at habits and doing the same thing consistently every day, so I think this is going to be a challenge. But there are changes afoot and I want to start noticing little beauties again while keeping track of the ways in which things change—and stay the same—this year. Wish me luck!

photo by me, day 1. A shout out to Erika Ray, who I follow on Flickr and who just finished her third 365 project. While I am neither bored nor discontent right now, I loved this quote from her blog:

“If you’re growing bored or are discontent with your life, start a 365.  It isn’t about talent.  It’s about showing up every day.  Be gentle with yourself, but use it to push you.  Use the 365 as an excuse to do random beautiful things: we should camp more.  Use it to be selfish: a glass of wine would make a nice photo.  Use it to break you down: I guess a hamster might be fun to photograph. Use it to see what you’ve been ignoring.  Use it because life isn’t overtly glorious and it’s really easy to wallow in shit.  Use it to love what you’ve got.  Or use it to give you the courage and power to change it.”

This semester has been the most hectic, by far. I’m trying to apply to jobs but so far have done a lot of searching (for months…) and not much in the way of actual applying. This needs to change—I have a Saturday job application date with a friend tomorrow, in the hopes that we can both get back into the submission groove. I could go on with my extremely boring laundry list of duties and tasks and stressors, but instead of another blogger apology, I thought I’d just issue a little statement: I’m thinking of this space all of the time, but I’m probably going to be laying low here for a bit.

Maybe not—maybe I’ll squeeze in some time over spring break, or here and there as stress relief—but I’ve been trying to take some things off my plate, just for a while. This site has been looking wonky now for months and, as much as I’d like nothing more to dive in and redesign it, it’s just not in the cards at the moment. My posts have been sporadic at best for some time. Sitting down and writing coherent thoughts, sharing what I’m reading on blogs, passing along some poetry that made my day, taking the time to explore my world through photos—all of those things only happen when I don’t have this pit in my stomach, the back-of-the-mind taunts of “you should be doing x/y/z instead.” At least for now, x/y/z need to be the priorities.

Don’t give up on me, though! I’ll have at least one big post headed your way in the next few weeks, and 2014 promises to be a year of growth, change, transition, and (hopefully) quite a bit of excitement and adventure. I can’t wait to fill you all in on things to come.

(in the meantime, did you see that Domino released almost 3,000 images on their site? Go forth and go Pinterest happy for me; it could basically keep you occupied until graduation in May, which is why I need to figure out how to block that site…)

I think out loud, preferably talking through things with someone. Sometimes I talk out loud to myself, because even hearing things in my own voice often helps me to figure out what hits the right note. As I talk, things start to make more sense.

In some ways, this might not be expected, especially since writing is such an outlet for me. Maybe it has something to do with my ENFP-ness? I’m not quite sure. But writing is generally for contemplating and rehashing emotions, picking them apart and analyzing them, while sometimes talking about things can lead to spontaneous understandings and developments.

Honestly, one of the biggest challenges of the last year and a half has been being surrounded by introverts, by people who carefully prepare for class, do all of the reading, even take notes, and then don’t feel compelled to say a single thing in class. Their silence gets me riled up and all of a sudden I am talking all of the time. I’m saying purposefully silly things just to see if I can elicit a response. Bring a little life to the room. Learn something new from the people with whom I spend almost all of my time. Occasionally, it works. But often, it doesn’t or it doesn’t really feel like me.

I oscillate between feeling kind of embarrassed by how much I talk and feeling defensive. This is who I am. If we’re going to sit in this room for three hours and no one has anything interesting to add, no further insights about these often thought provoking readings, no guilt and discomfort at the silence, sure, I’ll be the one to pipe up.

I’m a talker, yes, but I have never been the most out there person in the room or the center of attention. I like being once removed from that, heard and seen but out of the spotlight enough to be able to share my own (sometimes snarky) responses with a chosen few. That’s just not the way it goes here.

This weekend, I had a couple of great conversations with friends. The stage has been set in a lot of ways for introspection—including starting my last semester of school, thinking about the job search, putting myself out there more professionally and personally—and I’m sort of taking the time and allowing myself to look ahead, to think about what I want this year and years to come to bring my way.

I’m not tied to a specific place. I am not in a field with well-defined job titles. I’ve traveled very little in America (I only just increased my count of states visited above countries visited by taking a ten minute, otherwise pointless trip into Arkansas two weeks ago…) There are a lot of unknown variables.

Over Christmas break, people asked me how I like Texas, almost always saying Texas with an exaggerated drawl. My stock answer had something to do with Austin not being quite like that drawled out version of Texas, but warm and sometimes weirdly Texan and other times, really not. A place I mostly like, enjoying school, good food, lots more to explore, etc. Talking to a friend of my mom’s who I don’t know that well but who is clearly an adept listener, her response to all of this was “Hmm…it sounds like something’s missing.” I was kind of taken aback but thought she might be right.

Last week, I saw a woman with a Spanish flag painted on her Toms and struck up a conversation. She’s from Madrid but has been in Austin for six years. She likes it here. It’s a lot like Spain. And as we talked about that, her experiences here and mine there, I realized she was right in a lot of ways. I was reminded of those airport doors sliding open on my first visit here, that intense rush of emotion and nostalgia and excitement when I realized that this city smells like Córdoba. I’m guessing it was probably the bougainvillea, though I’m not quite sure. It made me feel happy and at home in a way I hadn’t felt at all in other cities I had visited.

And so on Friday, I was out with some friends, one of whom had friends here visiting from California. It was already a weird day because it was my first snow day ever, caused by what could barely be described as a skiff of snow. We started talking about online dating, as her friends had met on OKCupid. We laughed about the two kinds of male profiles—what I’ll charitably call Über Geek and Testosterone Cross Fit Paleo Guy—and about how hard and demoralizing it can be to wade through all of the weirdos creepers losers noise. I said that I thought it didn’t help that women messaging men appears to be some strange taboo.

Later that night, we were at a bar that I love in theory but sometimes loathe in practice. Good atmosphere, great music, could be a lot of fun but it only sometimes is. And I think part of that, for me, is that women don’t ask men to dance here and not too many men ask me. Maybe it’s my resting bitch face, or the fact that I’m taller than about a third of them. Hard to say. But I was feeling vaguely annoyed at another night of standing around and not feeling any agency here. My friend’s California friend asked whether the men here seemed Southern, whether women ever ask men to dance. We joked a bit about Southern chivalry, said that, no, it wasn’t common practice, and I heard the words “That’s why I’m moving” tumble out of my mouth. Hearing them, I couldn’t help but be surprised. Was that true? Almost immediately, I knew it was. I knew it wasn’t that simple, blah blah, but at the base of everything was this understanding that these are not my people. This is not my place.

Almost right away, I said my goodbyes. I got in my car and listened to Ani DiFranco for the first time in a long time, singing along, loudly, knowing the weird pauses in the live Living in Clip versions of songs even though I hadn’t listened to that album in years. Thinking about some of the people who know me well, some of them people I haven’t talked to in a long time. Missing that easy companionship, what I thought was a question of time but I realize now is also a question of compatibility.

I went on vacation to Phoenix in December and loved the museum there. I tried to go in with an open mind, wondering if I could live and work there, but as much as I loved the museum, the city just wasn’t for me. Too many bedazzled jeans and sun seekers and signs about guns everywhere (outside coffee shops, bars, grocery stores). Too many cops and ugly strip malls and smokers filling every patio so you can’t even enjoy the fact that it’s sunny and 70 degrees outside. I keep trying to convince myself that maybe I could find a weird little niche in Atlanta or Houston or that maybe a so-so city with a good job wouldn’t be so bad.

All of a sudden on Friday night, I didn’t think that way. I realized that, to some extent, I’m recruiting a city and my living space and my people as much as I’m recruiting job prospects. I’m not so sure exactly what shape that will take, and I’m still trying to be open minded to all that I don’t know and haven’t seen and haven’t tried, knowing that moving is always an option and that each place teaches me all kinds of things I maybe couldn’t have learned someplace else. That sometimes even places you like, places where you are frequently shocked by how happy and lucky you feel, aren’t really your places. Maybe, with the right people, that’s OK.

For me, it’s almost certainly going to be a clean slate. And yes, I am developing a bit of a complex about turning 30. I have found a number of gray hairs and have plucked them, not quite ready to deal with losing my most defining feature. Despite having basically lost my ability to hold my liquor, I find that I’m sometimes really tempted to go out and let loose and shake my ass on some sweaty dance floor somewhere. I’m engaging in a fair amount of internal debate, mostly when stuck in traffic and feeling invisible in this mass of humanity, about pushing what I expose here, trying to be more personal and more open. You know, 32 flavors and then some.

I’m not sure where this is all headed. I have Atmosphere bouncing around in my head: “You see me move back and forth between both/I’m trying to find a balance/I’m trying to build a balance.” Maybe, as I navigate decisions and spaces and what feels right to me, coming home to this space I’ve cultivated over the years will feel right. I’m honestly not sure yet. But here I am today, internet, one member of this mass of humanity, trying to find her little corner of this world.

After three weeks of mostly relaxing and bumming around in Montana, I was all hyped up to power through my (absurdly long) to do list this week…but then I was greeted upon my arrival (at one a.m.) with a notice on my door that my building will be without hot water all day today. Hmm. Turns out laundry, mopping the kitchen and bathroom floors, cleaning out the fridge—those things all require hot water. So I guess I bought myself a little down time today, a good excuse to pick up my mail at the post office, go in a fruitless search for post-11 am breakfast tacos (waa!), and take a closer look at my ever-growing to do list.

Inspired by Anna at Door Sixteen’s seemingly superhuman productivity whenever she posts a to do list, I thought I might make mine public this week and see if it inspires any above-average follow through.

This Week’s To Do

Running around town
– drop bags off at cobbler (two leather bags in need of some love)
– get new car key made
– take (ahem, Thanksgiving) tablecloth to the dry cleaners
– pick up mail/file Priority Mail complaint (USPS is on my shit list at the moment)/buy stamps
– pick up books on hold at the library
– grocery shopping (Trader Joe’s? nope. this can wait)
– buy lightbulbs – some of the ones I need are nowhere to be found!

At home
– unpack suitcases (no seriously, must unpack suitcases)
– laundry
– make bed with new sheets (yay!)
– clean out fridge
– make at least one crock pot meal
– sweep and mop kitchen and bathroom floors
– clean windows and mirrors (halfway there)
– (finally!) hang map over bed
– finish messing around with IKEA spotlights (one down, one or two more to go)
– vacuum
– take down the few holiday decorations I managed this year (took them down, need to put them away)
– filing and shredding catch-up
– write thank you notes
– update resume again
– mark upcoming job deadlines in planner
– spend a little more time with Susannah Conway’s 2014 workbook and see if anything comes

Computer/internet/phone
– get portfolio to OK spot pre-conference
– updates to Dad’s website
– try calling Lacie again about hard drive nonsense
– download iPhone photos to computer/clear more space
– email Craigslist person again (fingers crossed on this one) (ugh. another one bites the dust)
– continue uploading photos to Flickr backup (turns out Flickr is the source of all of my recent internet woes. Grr.)
– email with info about Blurb book order
– update student group website I manage
– order textbooks
– figure out hotel situation for April conference in Baltimore

Well, yes, that does seem a little daunting spelled out like that…but let’s see how far I can get.

What items are on your to do list this week? Did you make any resolutions? Any 2014 plans? In the spirit of New Year community, let me know in the comments!

It seems like December 31 is the year’s most contemplative day, don’t you think?

The bug hits me, I’ll admit. I’ve spent the past few days thinking about the year, the pace of which felt a little like this. Even as the light dims this late afternoon (snow is falling!), I’m still hoping to have time for Susannah Conway’s year-end notebook. It’s pretty involved and I don’t seem to ever finish it, but I have decided on a word of the year for the last couple of years (2012: fresh, 2013: bold) and going through the notebook has helped add some clarity and direction to the upcoming months. My chosen words of the year have been a little bit prophetic. 2014, in particular, feels full of possibility and challenges and changes to come.

WordPress informed me this morning that I posted 41 times in 2013 (ha! 42 now, suckas!). Another aspect of my year-end musings is always thinking about this blog. As usual, there were a few announcements this week by big-time bloggers that they have decided to stop posting. And I get that impulse. For me, I start to feel sheepish after a while. I realize I haven’t written much I’ve been really proud of for quite some time. But still, this space is my space, even if it’s not looking quite like me in the past few weeks.

I really identified with this Frank Chimero blog post. Having your own digital space is a certain kind of homesteading. He writes, “In a way, building your own house is the ultimate project for a creative person: you’re making a home for what you think is important, done in the way you think is best.”

I love that, even when I’m not doing much writing, my blog is so often in the back of my mind. I couldn’t agree more with Anne Lamott, who writes in Bird by Bird, “One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.”

So here’s to looking closely at life this year. Here’s to building your own house. To choosing just the right word. To things to come.

Happy New Year’s, y’all!

(Anne Lamott quote from here, Frank Chimero blog post found via one of my favorite Twitter feeds, @austinkleon. Montana photo by me a few years ago.)

Please excuse the mess, which might include duplicate posts in your RSS reader, while I get things all warm and rosy again.

This morning, my Facebook feed blew up with talk of “the big game,” the annual Montana-Montana State football game (which is, somewhat foolishly to my way of thinking, called “The Brawl of the Wild”). While alums of both schools taunted one another, I was doing my own kind of game planning: the kind that involves grocery lists and oven temperatures. Yes, I was game planning hosting my first Thanksgiving.

Why is it that buying one particular kind of poultry feels so monumental, while poor chicken is hardly ever cause for celebration? I’m not sure, but I know that my head has been spinning this week with turkey talk: to baste or not to baste, to brine or not to brine, the stuffing debate, butter or canola oil or deep frying the thing. I even learned the meaning of the word “spatchcock.”

Thanksgiving falls so late this year that the semester is almost over. School-related stress is peaking right about now, and so taking most of the afternoon to wander around store after store buying food for eight or ten when my first Thanksgiving will include all of three people (myself included) does seem a little silly. But I’m trying to make a day of it, make Thanksgiving all about cooking and hanging out and trying to pull off something exciting (only because multi-course meals are still sort of a challenge). I think my rarely felt homesickness was in full force last Thanksgiving, so I thought this might be a year to just dive in and do things my own way. I’ve rented four Thanksgiving movies (however loosely themed: Pieces of April, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, The Ice Storm, Scent of a Woman). I made a Friendsgiving Spotify playlist. Today I bought a $10 turkey platter on sale at Target. Plain white. Simple. Something I’ll likely have forever.

And for whatever reason, perhaps partially fueled by all of the blogger Thanksgiving cooking pressure, buying a turkey and then this platter, one of those things that only adults have, made this afternoon kind of contemplative. Maybe it’s the cold weather and the low light—winter is always my best thinking time—but, I don’t know, I can’t help but project about things to come. This time next year, if all goes as planned, I’ll be working somewhere. I will have likely moved again (and will have moved this huge turkey platter!). I might be back home for Thanksgiving, or I might be hosting a Thanksgiving for one in some new place. Once again, I’ll be trying to make new friends. I’ll probably be getting to know another city all over again. School will be behind me. I’m both hesitant about things to come and impatient for those same things to start.

But Thursday will be a break from all of that. It will be a one-day production of cooking and cleaning and baking and dishwashing and setting a nice table and lighting lots of candles. The farthest ahead I’ll be thinking is about the leftovers. Thanksgiving leftovers alone are reason to celebrate.

When girls were really starting to figure out the makeup thing in middle school and college, I pretty much stuck with the first makeup I ever owned—brown Wet & Wild one dollar mascara and Clinique Black Honey Almost Lipstick, which was a huge splurge at the time (and still kind of is – see below). Thankfully, I ditched the matte white eyeshadow that was a thing in middle school when you wanted to wear makeup but didn’t want it to look like you were wearing makeup at the same time. I guess that’s supposed to be the goal of makeup in general? Except now I kind of don’t want to wear makeup but want it to look like I am—if eyelash tinting was cheaper, I would be all over that.

In case you can’t tell, I seem to have a certain hesitancy to spend much money on makeup and beauty products in general, which has been reinforced by fairly poor makeup choices over the years. I decide I should buy (blush/concealer/foundation, eyeshadow, fill in the blank), go to Target, wander around for a while, get kind of stressed out, and eventually choose something…which very often looks surprisingly like my skin tone. I recently bought some lipstick a friend recommended, only to find that it is THE EXACT same color as my lips. Like Chapstick only less moisturizing and a little…filmy. I also own flesh-toned blush (invisible?) and eyelid-colored eyeshadow (this is an eyeshadow palette, so how the darkest can basically look like my eyelids is beyond me). I thought maybe I just wasn’t putting this stuff on right, or putting on enough, so I bought a set of brushes from Ulta. They don’t seem to have any effect on the makeup application/visibility but do feel nice on my face.

But now I live in Texas, where makeup is an artform. And I’m trying to look more “adult” for job interviews and whatever. I am far from mastering the smokey eye (I always wind up looking bruised) but I have accumulated almost 100 points this year at Sephora (!) and in the process have discovered some makeup I don’t hate! Since I’ve clearly established my authority on the subject, here are my reviews:

Moisturizer:

I basically don’t wear the stuff except for sunscreen, which I like to be as lightweight and gel-like as possible. But sometimes I get weird little patches of dry skin on my face, or like flaky but kind of oily between my eyebrows? Turns out sunscreen isn’t so good as a spot treatment, so when that’s the case, I like a tiny dab of Clinique Moisture Surge. The one I have probably came from one of those gift sets since I’m pretty sure my mom gave it to me. It’s light and smells good but not fruity. Doesn’t leave a greasy film like most lotion but does make my skin feel smoother.

Mascara:

My eyelashes are blond on the tips—I wish I could say they are ombré—so mascara is the easiest way to make myself look considerably better with the least amount of effort. For a while I was pretty into Hard Candy Lash Ink because it lasted four days (score) and was only $7 and basically just dyed my eyelashes darker, but I started having problems when I would wear contacts (again, a rarity) and I didn’t love how crispy my eyelashes looked. That stuff dries hard. So I asked my sister, who knows about these things and has extremely enviable eyelashes which she coats in mascara daily, thus making them actual conversation starters, and she told me to try Clinique Lash Doubling mascara. And my cup ranneth over (can you say that, past tense?) because my mom had another sample in her massive bathroom drawer, which she sent my way. The cone-shaped brush works well for getting all the way to the roots and also for getting the shorter inside lashes and bottom lashes. It’s lengthening but also adds a little bit of oomph without being too chunky/volumizing. It looks natural enough that I have it in black and not brown. (I know, gettin’ cray cray!) It doesn’t bother my eyes. It washes off easily in the shower. I didn’t realize how much I actually like the stuff until I lost my weird little mini-tube for a couple of days and used another kind I had lying around which I thought I liked and it seemed so…lame. So I actually took a bus to Georgetown this summer specifically to buy this mascara at Sephora. But don’t just take my word for it—the dude working there with the impeccable skin said it was also his favorite, and he knew what he was talking about.

Eyeshadow:

As I mentioned above, this is not my first rodeo when it comes to eyeshadow palettes, but the only neutral-looking ones without stupid prices at Target have basically been a bust. Rather than continuing to buy various versions of eyelid-colored shadows, strangely purpley-browns, or stark too dark browns, I finally bit the bullet and bought the Urban Decay Naked 2 palette, the godmother of all eyeshadows. There are cheaper alternatives out there, certainly, and I am sure those are great, but I’ve been happy with my purchase. I really only have tried about three of these but they seem to look decent and non-bruisy and that’s asking a lot. The lip gloss that comes with it tingles nicely, despite basically being the color of my lips.

Eyebrows:

My eyebrows are also blond and kind of non-existent in photos, which sometimes makes me look a little like Powder. But darkened eyebrows make me feel like this (or this or this or this or this or this). I’ve tried pencils and powder but even fairly light brown looks silly and make me look like I’m constantly concerned. So I was pretty happy to discover Benefit Gimme Brow in Light/Medium, which makes me eyebrows a tiny bit darker so you can see them in photos, but otherwise isn’t that noticeable. It’s stupidly named, overpriced, etc but the tiny brush makes it easy to put on and it looks natural and I’m a fan.

Lipstick:

The tried and true: Clinque Almost Lipstick in Black Honey, and its shinier cousin: Superbalm Moisturizing Gloss, also in Black Honey. Lately, Sephora is selling a number of combos containing these two items (and also Black Honey nail polish, apparently…) but, as I mentioned, I’ve been using the original for about 15 years. Every time, I buy it, it pains me a little—fifteen dollars for a lipstick. Arg. But it’s actually worth it. I bought the gloss on a trip to Canada when the original American run had been discontinued, tracked it down in a multicountry epic trek. They look like my lips but better, and I get the impression that is the case for most people who try this particular color. It looks like Elvira or something in the tube but it’s not flaky, it goes on smoothly, it doesn’t taste weird, and it looks good. The balm is not too sticky or goopy. They both get my five star rating.

OK, so let’s take this next level: do you have a lightweight foundation/tinted moisturizer/BB cream recommendation for very pale me? An eye makeup remover that doesn’t feel greasy or leave a weird residue? A flattering red lipstick for when I’m feeling fancy? A YouTube person who can help me achieve the elusive smokey eye? A makeup item you want to gush about and share with the world? Tell me your tales, makeup experts and klutzes alike!

(all images from Sephora)

It makes me so jealous.

Here in Texas, it’s supposed to be 90 all week (or, as the radio announcers like to say, “we’re looking at highs as low as 90”). The past few days have been beautiful, to be fair. Sunny but not scorching. Slightly cooler evenings. I had my screen door open yesterday morning for hours, something I haven’t been able to do since about March.

There’s something about the change of seasons that makes us sit up and take notice. They provide quarterly deadlines, sure. But they also alter our surroundings just enough to force thoughts of upcoming change, and mortality, and birth, and an examination of where we are now as compared to this time last year. Where we want to be this time next year.

I’ve been struggling lately to really live here in Austin, to try not to think so much about where I might be at this time next year. Maybe next year, I’ll be pulling on jeans without sweating. Maybe I’ll be drinking hot, spiced, possibly even pumpkin beverages. But this year, I live in Texas. Where highs in the 90s count as a chill in the air.

So I will not be wearing wooly tights and knee high boots. The coat I’m expecting to arrive today will hang in my closet until November, at least. But I do have plans to finally make some progress on my patio. I’ll pot some outdoor plants. When everyone else is harvesting the last of the summer’s bounty, I’ll hang paper lanterns in anticipation of many patio evenings to come. And hey, maybe someday, sitting outside will even require a sweater.

(Photo by me, a few falls ago)

It has been a busy month of travel.

DC->Austin for 36 hours->Montana for 10 days->Austin for less than two weeks->Portland for a long weekend->Austin for less than two weeks->Montana tomorrow for another long wedding weekend

I have been unpacking (kind of) and repacking so much that I haven’t ever really caught up. My apartment is like, whoa.

But I like airports. I’m looking forward to the cool air (5500 feet is a-ok by me). The pace should be considerably slower than the last wedding, so I’m hoping to do a little reading (even if it will mostly be for school) and to take some pictures.

It’s been a long while since I’ve been in the mood to take pictures, something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately. I think I might be getting closer to a few conclusions, but “inspiration” is a slippery thing.

(photo by me, on a recent plane ride)

+ Also, whoops, I’m back in Austin.

+ Also, double whoops, I obviously won’t be uploading an entire month of August Break photos, though I do have some more ready to be posted when I have a spare minute (and stop binge watching random TV shows—lately, New Girl, Girls, and The West Wing).

+ School starts tomorrow, and it’s so different from last year. I know the drill. I know the tricks of the bus and the freeways. I have a job. I am (more or less) settled in my apartment. And unlike last year, I think I even have some sense of what I might want to do with myself, and three classes that go along with that idea. Kind of a novel concept.

+ After one whole day of classes—I am flying to Portland on Thursday to be a bridesmaid in my cousin’s wedding! So excited. I’ve never been a bridesmaid before so I have no idea if I’m doing it right (whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing) but luckily Megan is a total wedding badass and has been super clear throughout the whole process, in addition to being more mellow than most/all. We needed navy, short dresses—I found one I really liked at a BCBG outlet for $29 and just had to get the straps shortened. Colorful shoes—I bought two green pairs and haven’t decided yet which one to keep (they’re both kind of fab but in really different ways). If you have any thoughts on good bridesmaid etiquette, please let me know in comments. I don’t want to be That Girl.

+ Did you see that Jhumpa Lahiri has a new book coming out in September? I really love her writing, and it seems like it’s been forever, so I’m looking forward to it. Also, Zadie Smith’s NW just became available as a paperback, so maybe I’ll dive in again. I checked it out from the library last semester but it got recalled before I had the chance to read more than about 20 pages. White Teeth is one of my favorite books, and I loved On Beauty, but I thought The Autograph Man was just pretty good and I haven’t been able to get through her book of essays. The Amazon reviews on NW are divisive—people either love it or they hate it. Have you read it? Are you reading anything interesting lately?

+ I can’t remember if I told you that I bit the bullet and bought a Black Rapid strap for my camera before I left Austin in May. I went with the basic, non-gender specific one because the women’s one looks almost identical but is more expensive and that kind of marketing drives me batty. Basically, it allows you to do two main things: carry your camera across your body without having to invert the strap so the lens doesn’t stick out (with the Black Rapid, the lens hugs your body like it’s supposed to) and be able to take pictures without moving your camera off your neck at all—the camera body just slides up the strap and stays connected when you shoot. Here’s a video if my explanation isn’t making any sense. At any rate, it made carrying my camera really comfortable and pulling it up to shoot really quick and easy. I can’t think of any drawbacks versus the traditional camera strap, other than price. And $40 in cameraland is basically dirt cheap anyway.

+ Have you noticed that Feedly has integrated Pocket AND Pinterest lately? I am loving it but am going to be UBER annoyed if they convert these to premium-only in the near future. Also, I still miss Google Reader sharing—the old school version, not the later G+ version.

That’s all for today, folks. Tell me what’s new in your lives!

An afternoon in the water. Finally.

Play. Day Eleven of The August Break.

(photo by me, wrapped in a beach towel)

Signs of summer.

Red. Day Ten of The August Break.

(photos by me, at the Huckleberry Festival and later on the dock with a vodka tonic in hand)

One missed silk. Oops.

Taste. Day Nine of The August Break.

(photo by me, on the deck before dinner was served)

There are a number of legitimate excuses for why I basically abandoned posting August Break photos a week in. One was that I was supposedly on vacation, at a cabin without internet. Another was that I was freaking out about finishing a school project and feeling resentful that I wasn’t able to just sleep in and read magazines like I had been wanting. An actual break, without a to do list. But it’s also not a coincidence that I dropped off the face when the day eight prompt was to post a selfie.

I don’t love getting my picture taken, as much as I want to feel differently. Lately I’ve been taking some selfies on my phone, but I always feel like kind of an idiot, a little more narcissistic than I’d like. Picking apart every little thing in a way that I almost never do when looking in the mirror. And, I have to say, trying to have access to the one mirror in the one bathroom in the cabin you’re sharing with many other people is more than a little awkward.

But here it is. A (highly edited) selfie. Quite possibly the most random of the bunch, but the one that seemed the most real, too. Lake hair and kinda sunburned nose.

A selfie. Day Eight of The August Break.

(photo by me, before I got kicked out of the bathroom)

From the upper patio of the Iron Horse, at dinner with a friend on my one night back in town. Missoula, Montana.

Skyline. Day Seven of The August Break.

(photo by me, waiting for my salmon BLT, enjoying my company and the huckleberry vodka and lemonade)

From the lovely deck at Brookie’s Cookies. (the cookies aren’t too bad either…) Bigfork, Montana.

Diagonals. Day Six of The August Break.

(photo by me, appreciating the free wireless)

A rainbow of mixers. Swan Lake, Montana.

Close up. Day Five of The August Break.

(photo by me, contemplating my options)

First sunset at the lake, one of my favorite places. Swan Lake, Montana.

Love. Day Four of The August Break.

(photo by me, taken from the dock)

Clipped from the garden. Great Falls, Montana.

Yellow. Day Three of The August Break.

(photo by me, just before dinner)

Reflections on a trash can. Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport.

Circles. Day Two of The August Break.

(photo by me, waiting for my connection)

Torchy’s Tacos. Austin, Texas.

Breakfast. Day One of The August Break.

(photo by me this morning)

I’m at the airport, an hour away from commencing my westward migration. Today: to Austin. Two days later: to Montana for almost two weeks. Somehow, tomorrow is August.

Despite my best tourist efforts in the last two weeks, much remains that I did not see or do in D.C. Eleven years will not pass between this trip and my next, as was the case the last time around. Living in a truly international city with (free!) world-class museums is something I haven’t done since I spent a month in London in college, and it was incredible to be able to see both cutting edge exhibit design and super traditional, but expertly curated, museum displays. As a student with a focus in museum studies, my wheels were turning in the best way. Professionally, I’d call this summer a success.

I think I viewed D.C. through a different lens than London – this summer I was constantly wondering what it would be like to move to the nation’s capital, trying to understand and separate the differences in the experience of a long-term tourist and an actual resident. Could I see myself commuting like this every day? Could I see myself living without a car? Would I want to live in this neighborhood, or that one? A (somewhat) nicer place further out, or back to roommates and roaches in or near the metro center, with the city’s offerings just a walk or short metro ride away?

I must admit, I’m looking so forward to being back in my own place, knowing that wherever something may be, I put it there, being in charge of my own schedule and bills and surrounded by the things I love. I had a hard time deciding whether or not to stay in my current apartment in Austin. It is a good size, gets great light, nice enough neutrals, killer closet, patio, pool…but is not in the most convenient of locations, exactly. If I could transplant it about six or seven miles closer to campus and downtown (and still be able to afford it – ha!), I would be one happy tenant. But that’s not quite how life works, and in the end staying put was the right decision. Hopefully. Sometimes just making a decision, whatever it may be, is better than all of the wondering. And now I know that, for at least another year or so, I’ll live in the same place. I won’t go too crazy, but I want to improve the functionality, look, and comfort of my patio, and try to get into the habit of spending more time reading and eating outside (at least once temps drop back into double digits). In a last minute packing frenzy this morning, my softest sheets went into the garbage, so I’m also on the lookout for a replacement set. I have two IKEA duvets I use, and trying to find linens that don’t clash with one or other is a challenge. I wish I could find gray sheets that were luxurious but not too dark but also not so light they look like dingy white. Speaking of totally different sheets, I have some antique sheet music I bought in Paris, oh, five years ago that I’d like to get framed. Maybe I’ll ask for that for Christmas or something. There’s never a shortage of projects. This is how my mind works – thanks for tagging along. Ha!

And then, as soon as I arrive and cool down my apartment and eat my share of breakfast tacos, it will be time to get on a plane again. If I’m being honest, I’m more than a little resentful that my Montana “vacation” will be spent frantically attempting to finish an independent study project I’ve been working on very independently (read: no professors ever return my increasingly pleading emails). It’s actually a project that interests me, thank goodness, and a dock on a beautiful lake, one of my favorite places in the world, is not the worst place to be cramming, I suppose. Still, I’m reminded again of how your time isn’t really yours in grad school, that the work is never done, and it makes me giddy with anticipation for May.

Whenever there’s a new marking of time – the end of the semester, moving, anticipated vacation which may or may not actually occur – I become hopeful that I’ll have more time to write here. And yet, that time never seems to manifest. I’m considering taking part in the August Break, if only as a means of staying creative and using my camera when I’m knee deep in scholarly journal articles. I guess I’ll decide tomorrow, when I’ve had a little more sleep. And some breakfast tacos.

Do you have any August plans? Tell me that someone is actually vacationing without a suitcase of academic texts so that I may live vicariously through you.

This week, I saw two things I’ve never seen before: fireflies and a rat.

I’ve been told that the fact I haven’t seen any rats yet in D.C. is sort of a wonder. As one person said, “Let’s put it this way…that rustling in the bushes ain’t squirrels.” This particular specimen of vermin was lying dead in Dupont Circle, a block away from a row of foreign embassies, with hundreds of people in the general vicinity, reading in the grass and taking pictures around the fountain. A friend and I sidestepped the dead rat and carried along our merry way. I bring it up, as gross as it is, only because it speaks to this aspect of D.C. I have been thinking a lot about lately – less about what I am experiencing as what people have warned me about. So far, my place hasn’t had any rats (although apparently there’s a mouse lurking somewhere…another thing I have been told about but have yet to see). I’m somewhat shocked that, other than small ants that seem to be everywhere, this place has been pest-free. And yet I must admit that I hold my breath a bit when I turn on the kitchen light at night, fearing some yet-to-be-seen scurry.

There is a lot of talk of crime in D.C., of interns taking the shuttle at some of the museums because so many people were getting jumped in the two blocks from the metro to the museum’s front doors. One intern said her small museum has had so many problems that a security guard walks her from the site to the bus stop every day. The area around my work is swarmed with tourists and security guards; I mostly just try to watch my bag. I feel perfectly safe.  But in my neighborhood, a swarm of late-night sirens in front of my house prompted me to check the D.C. crime map – which was a mistake. I’ve gotten much faster at unlocking the two locks on my front door. I walk with purpose. (and I feel dumb writing it like that, but am not sure how else to say it…) I don’t look at my phone. Late at night, I sometimes take cabs distances I would normally walk.

Friends remind me that much of the crime on that map is targeted, that a small percentage of people are involved in a large percentage of the crimes. They say that they mostly feel safe. And yet they all have stories, freak occurrences that they or their friends have experienced recently. It’s hard to tell how cautious to be – I do not want to be some over-paranoid small town girl, or even worse, a privileged white girl, but I also realize that, living here short term, I guess I need to err on the side of overly careful. I’ve lived in urban areas but never places where conversations about violent crimes seem to come up quite so easily or so often. I wish I could be here longer and get a better sense of the city, but somehow my time here is almost halfway up already.

So, the fireflies. We don’t have them in Montana. They were starting to come out in Austin near the river in the few weeks before I left, but I never found myself near the river at sundown. A few evenings ago, I was walking along the street, admiring the rowhouses, when my eye caught a little flash. I didn’t actually know what it was. But then I saw another and actually gasped. A huge smile spread across my face. I walked a little more slowly, trying to catch a few more out of the corner of my eye. Last night, I was in Virginia at a poolside party, complete with Hawaiian band and a hula dancer, and the fireflies were lighting up all over the backyard, in among the ivy-covered trees, even reflecting off the pool’s water. It was magical to me. Which was funny for another guy at the table, who grew up in the area, said his parents’ backyard is swarming with them, and that, in the end, they are just bugs.

It’s so interesting how our personal, limited perspectives shape everything, don’t you think? Urban annoyances to some are causes for real concern for others. Moments of magic for me are typical experiences, even mildly disgusting, for someone else.

Luckily, my days here are a lot more fireflies than rats. I’m seeing a lot, I’m learning a lot. This place has me thinking. And that’s a nice feeling, being challenged. This week it really started to feel like summer, and I’m excited to see what more D.C. has to offer in the coming weeks. Keep your fingers crossed that I continue to have those firefly moments, that I continue to see and appreciate little glimpses of magic.

(photo by me, taken outside the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden)

Somehow, I’ve already been in D.C. for two weeks. It feels like the clock’s hands have been spinning double time, and I expect that the rest of my time here will continue to feel the same. It’s both energizing and overwhelming, being so conscious of time, trying to make the most of every day. Limits sometimes play a pretty incredible role in appreciation, no?

Considering the push to go, see, do, I think I’ve done a decent job so far of balancing the settling in and the getting out. Anyone who follows me on Instagram has been seeing a series of “epic ______ (Trader Joe’s, Target, IKEA) trek via metro” photos. My apartment now has both food and plates from which to eat it. I took a tip from dorm rooms everywhere and hung some Christmas lights above my bed, which have been doing quite a lot to up the coziness factor in my room. Things are good.

I’ve been working Monday through Thursday all day and Fridays until noon, taking off in the afternoon to wander a different Smithsonian. I know it’s such a cliché, but there is so much to see. I am awed and overwhelmed, in a truly awesome way. The National Gallery was incredible. I happened upon, and loved, the National Postal Museum. I’m still thinking about the Ann Hamilton exhibit I saw at the Hirshhorn on Friday. She was the artist behind The Event of a Thread – I posted a video a while ago of that incredible installation. This installation, called palimpsest, also utilized air and movement, but was comprised of hundreds of pieces of paper, each with a short snippet or quote or thought or memory, each in different handwriting. They were even installed in the floor, partially obscured under the beeswax. A fan would oscillate and blow them slightly, creating a wave-like effect, different every time. It was incredibly transfixing.

Now I’m spending Sunday in a busy neighborhood coffee shop, having found it feeling like a new kind of achievement, and am looking forward to editing some photos, maybe watching an episode of The West Wing, relaxing before meeting a friend for an early dinner. Here, in these couple of months, I get to be both a tourist and a local (or attempt to be, anyway… :)) Normally, there’s nothing worse than being in-between. But so far, here, this summer, being in-between has been good. The best of both in many ways.

How are your summers unfolding? Do you have adventures on the horizon?

I can’t say I’ve taken adequate advantage of my pool this month, or of UT’s truly spectacular on campus pool, either.

But I did get a cute swimsuit for $26, and I’m making a pretty killer summer jams playlist, so I’m calling this summer a win.

(image links to all sources on Polyvore. The shoes: let’s just call this a summer fantasy sequence.)

Watching:  I’m only mildly embarrassed to admit that I breezed through two seasons of Scandal over the past few weeks, and then, finding that my not-all-that-believable-D.C.-political-drama quotient wasn’t fully met, moved on to The West Wing. They’re different but both fun, with complicated characters and strong female leads.* I’m going to be, like, an expert on D.C. when I get there on Saturday, right?

Working on: Mostly, I’m spending my time right now saying various goodbyes, drinking the accompanying beers, and prepping to leave town, but I’m excited to have made some serious progress on an archiving project of my grandparents’ scrapbook. One book covers their college graduations and wedding in the 40s through seven children (!) I’m hoping to post some photos from it soon – there are some truly charming images.

Oh yeah – I’m also processing the almost 900 images from my Europe trip last year – Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Sweden. I’ll almost inevitably do a poor job of selecting a small group and will bombard you with way too many at some point.

Recovering from: eating so much over the long weekend! In between barbecues and lobster boils (my first lobster!), I think I am still stuffed. Time to clean out the fridge this week and stick with salads and leftovers. I will miss Austin’s truly incredible avocados, for sure. Oh yeah, and Shiner’s summer seasonal, Ruby Redbird. That’s grapefruit beer folks, and it’s delicious.

Reading: Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, after breezing through the three Lois Lowry books I will just refer to as “the post-Giver books.” I saw her speak at BookPeople in Austin in the fall and bought the final installment, Son. I was concerned about any kind of Giver follow-ups, seeing as how it’s my favorite book ever, but I liked these quite a bit and didn’t feel they took anything away from the magic of the original. Have you read them?

Anticipating: being in D.C. in a few short days. Eek! At least it’s making me really, really productive.

What’s up in your life, currently?

*Am I the only person for whom Netflix consistently recommends Emotional Dramas with Strong Female Leads? Ahem…well then.

(Thanks to Danielle at Sometimes Sweet for the original inspiration for these posts [and the reminder that it’s probably time for another one!])

Yesterday, I was uploading and tagging some photos on Flickr when all of a sudden the site reloaded, and POOF!

There was a message on the top telling me to smile, which I always find a little creepy, and the site looked so unfamiliar that I thought it was a virus of some kind. Cue general sense of confusion over the next number of hours.

I guess I should have seen it coming. I’ve been using (and really liking!) the new Flickr mobile app for a while, and the look of the site redesign mimics the app. I attended a Flickr session at SXSW, where they hinted at changes to come. And I’m actually OK with change, as a concept. Flickr has looked almost the same for the almost seven years I’ve been a member. It was probably time for a refresh.

For most people, a free terabyte of space is plenty, and Flickr’s commitment to full-res images should be commended. I thought it was a little disingenuous, though, that they kept throwing around stats about being able to take a photo an hour every day for 61 years – without consistently making clear that they were talking about 6.5 megapixel photos. Real cameras haven’t shot at resolutions that low in years. Soon, most smartphones will shoot photos larger than that, too. One terabyte is a lot, but it’s not the unlimited, ad-free experience current Pros enjoy.

So, the question becomes: is Flickr supposed to become another dumping ground for your crappy camera phone photos, but without the Instagram filters?

Is Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer right that there’s “really no such thing as professional photographers anymore”?

Are people willing to pay 50 bucks a year for an ad-free experience?

I know, I know. Yahoo! killed Flickr and lost the Internet, years ago. But there were still many of us there, paying $24.95 a year for a Pro membership, using Flickr as amazing off site storage, adding metadata way beyond what other sites allow, using Flickr as an archiving platform. But also publicly liking, commenting, being social in a way companies kill for. The thousands of angry comments posted yesterday on the Flickr message board were perhaps expected – people generally dislike and distrust change – but they also identify a core of very committed, very loyal users. Flickr is by far my favorite social media. And I would love it if others felt the same way, if this redesign can be successful in recruiting a new group of loyal users.

Facebook is about faces, people, building on already-established relationships. Tumblr’s reputation as a micro-blogging platform makes perfect sense to me. Instagram is a personal diary, the filters awash with nostalgia for bygone days and their expired film. And Twitter…well, I don’t really get Twitter. But then what is Flickr about?

If, like Yahoo! claims, the new Flickr is all about the photo…is it also about the photographer? Rather than dumbing down the amazing API and the incredible metadata options (tagging, geotagging, EXIF data, sets, collections, and still the easiest and clearest privacy settings in social media), why not make those as accessible as possible for photographers – in addition to highlighting the photos themselves? I know, metadata isn’t sexy – but it forms a framework for Flickr as a viable, long-term photo storage space.

In the future, we’ll look back at the photos of so many childhoods – all uploaded to Facebook and Instagram (and compressed to a totally unacceptable level of quality for reproduction) – and we’ll shake our heads. We had all of the advanced technology in the world, but we just didn’t know how to make any sense of it.

Flickr has long offered an alternative for people who know enough to care about quality. And yes, yesterday’s redesign sacrificed the quality of the user experience for those of us who have remained loyal, but all is not lost. With some tweaks, Flickr could regain its reputation as the world’s best photo sharing site. It’s not just about recruiting new members, it’s about making them use Flickr consistently, for years to come.

Quantity, even a terabyte of it, just isn’t enough.

(photo by Sarah Korf on Flickr)

Six years later, that blog has become this space.

This blog has taken me from Montana to Spain, back to Montana and then to Texas.

From teaching to being unemployed to working to being back in school (while teaching and working).

It has been here through two new cameras, and actually starting to learn photography. Discovering that I really love it, too.

Through births and deaths. Birthdays and breakups. Travel and quiet evenings at home. The ends of things and the starts of things and that weird in-between.

Over the past six years, I’ve posted, on average, about once a week. That’s nothing compared to many bloggers, but much more than others. But if there’s anything I’m slowly learning, it’s that it doesn’t matter. So please humor me while I lay on the cheese for a moment. I’m happy to have this space. I’m happy to get the chance to write here, or post some pictures, to have the chance to share with some old friends and to make some new ones, too. It’s been a small thing, this blog, but I have approached it with a lot of love.

So I thought it would be fun to highlight some of my favorite posts, the ones that have stuck with me. Maybe you’ll remember one, too?

2013

+ Reminiscing, Holiday in Spain (parts 1, 2, 3)

2012

+ Lifelist check: Counting Crows live

+ Writers are people who write

+ The up and onward and not the over and out

+ Thoughts on writing (and finding the time)

+ Backtracking for beauty

+ Making my move

+ On super clean showers and having beautiful days

+ Fairfield (not far from Freezeout Lake)

2011

+ Keep in touch

+ Whatever happened to romantic comedies?

+ On being brave

+ The road home

+ 30 Days of Creativity: Day 17 (Friday morning ritual)

+ 30 Days of Creativity: Day 3

+ Memory keeping

+ Waking up

+ Mimi, and writing about grief

2010

+ The year (of food) in photos

+ Seattle Public Library

+ Working and happiness and other Sunday night thoughts

+ View from my kitchen window

+ Last farmers market

+ Feels like fall

+ My handwriting is a font!

+ Update: cleaning things up

+ Bye bye winter

2009

+ Inspiration

+ Demolition

+ No more Bull

2008

+ An autumn weekend in Glacier

+ Noah

+ Whatever happened to Thanksgiving?

+ Home coming

+ (O)Porto!

+ Lovely Lisbon

+ Lots of cheers (ok, and a fair amount of tears, too)

+ Wanderlust

+ Eurovision!

+ Semana Santa/Holy Week

+ Paris in the (almost) springtime

+ An unthemed update

+ On being extranjera (foreign)

2007

+ Puttin’ me in my place

+ Colegio/elementary school

I expect no one to read them all, or to come close, but it was fun to go back. Perhaps there are some discoveries here for someone.

Who knows how long I’ll keep doing this. But I just renewed my domain for another year. I’m approaching this summer with excitement on many fronts, one of them related to posting here more often. This little space has become my little space, and I’m happy to continue to call it home.

You are welcome here, my blog friends, and I am thankful to share this space with you. Six years! Pretty hard to believe.

(image from Parker Fitzgerald, via flickr. The phrase always reminds me of my grandma, Mimi.)

This week, I finally got my fingerprints taken, filled out the rest of (start of?) the paperwork required for any work with the federal government, and signed a lease on a shared apartment in D.C., just a fifteen minute metro ride to my summer gig.

I’m really, really excited.

I’m excited for the opportunity to work at one of America’s foremost cultural institutions. I’m excited to get more hands-on experience in my field. I’m excited for a change of scenery. I’m excited to be a tourist in D.C., especially all of the amazing museums. I’m excited not to have a car for a while and to be in a transport-friendly city. I’m excited to take more pictures and post more in this space. I’m excited!

Have you spent much time in D.C.? Other than Scandal, which I’ve been binge watching this week, and a free high school trip for being one of Montana’s top high school journalists (ha!), I know next to nothing. Any places that aren’t to be missed? Favorite bars? Restaurants? Walks? Tips, in general?

Do you have a favorite Smithsonian?

(photo from my Instagram feed)

First on that list: heading to Houston for the night! A friend and I are celebrating the end of grad school year one, with plans to visit some of Houston’s world class museums (ah, oil money…), maybe hit a baseball game, and wander around the city. Oh, and eat. And drink. Should be fun.

Checking out all of the amazing art options got me thinking again about this video, shot during Ann Hamilton’s Event of a Thread installation at the Park Avenue Armory this winter. I’ve been a fan of Paul Octavious’ photography work on Flickr for a long time, but didn’t realize he also shot videos as beautiful as this one.

I’ll be back this week with more to say and hopefully some Houston stories to share. Hope it’s sunny where you are!

(**for some reason, embedded videos don’t seem to be showing up in some RSS readers. If you’re reading this in a reader or via email subscription, you might have to click through to see the video. It’s lovely and worth it!)

It was a big decision for me, a huge step up from the rest of my lens arsenal. But I love the little things. I’m a detail person. I am well suited to macro photography in a lot of ways.

If I’m being honest, I’m still learning how to use it. That amazingly shallow depth of field that I’ve so wanted also presents some challenges (only intensified by my hesitancy to carry around a tripod, even when I *know* that I should). But I’ve been having some fun experimenting with it. So I thought I’d show the first few months of macro attempts, looking forward to coming back to this in a year or so and laughing at how little I knew.

Around the house

Outside on a sunny day at Home Depot.

Hook ’em. Haha.

Macro self-portraiture (see, I told you my glasses were “marbled lilac”)

A morning at the Zilker Botanical Garden

And, because my photography posts are rarely complete without food, lemon poppyseed muffins with a lemon glaze. Last Sunday morning.

I have one week of class left and then my first year of grad school will be over. I’m excited to get back to this space. I have so many posts I’ve been wanting to write!

How are things, friends? How do your gardens grow? Anything new in the oven or around the house?

+ Pete Goldlust’s Carved Crayons series.

+ My Brita water bottle. I own about twenty water bottles. This one is not especially attractive. I sort of wish it wasn’t a squeeze bottle. But I’m drinking way more water than normal (why is that the hardest resolution?) and it’s because water from every tap tastes great. Two thumbs up.

+ The Fault in Our Stars. Recently requested it through Interlibrary Loan. Picked it up as I left my shift at 10 pm…and read it straight through. There were lots of tears, but good ones. Fair warning: it’s about kids with cancer.

+ The new Craigslist gridview. Finally, a more efficient way to waste my time looking at things I don’t need.

+ There are so many Buzzfeed lists, but this My So-Called Life one made me pretty happy. Many, many great animated gifs.

+ Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi’s TED talk on flow. I’ve read a little about this concept before – where high skill levels and high challenge levels move people into a state of being when external needs (hunger, pain, mindless wandering) fall away. Flow is being in the zone, and Czikszentmihalyi claims it’s one of the ways life stays exciting.

When was the last time you had a flow experience?

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

—e.e. cummings

Detective Sarah Linden is a total (redheaded) badass.

If you haven’t seen it, do.

(photo from here. warning: Season 1 spoilers.)

But in the meantime, it got me thinking about music…and red hair. For a pretty legit list of the top 5 songs about redheads, check out this Hairpin article. Jolene, yes!

And to contribute my little addition: I can’t tell you how many times this little Garth Brooks ditty has come on and people have gone out of their way to point at me during the line “Pick him up at seven and they’re headin’ to the rodeo/Momma’s on the front porch screamin’ out her warning/Girl you better get your red head/Back in bed before the morning.”

So, an ode to the last few days of spring break. And wild redheads.

Ain’t Goin’ Down (‘Til the Sun Comes Up)
Garth Brooks – Ain’t Goin’ Down (‘Til the Sun Comes Up)

(if you’re reading this in an RSS reader or on mobile, it’s possible you need to click through to hear Garth. He’s worth it.)

“The reason we studied redheads in the beginning, it was essentially an urban legend in the anesthesia community saying redheads were difficult to anesthetize,” Dr. Sessler said. “This was so intriguing we went ahead and studied it. Redheads really do require more anesthesia, and by a clinically important amount.”

Yeah, like 20% more! And there’s an understanding that the same thing goes for pain medication. Beam me up, Scotty.

—from this New York Times article

I so want to rock this look.

(Photo from here)

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gMq3hRLDD0

Cosmic Love (live on KEXP)

Such a beautiful video, such a beautiful voice. And I can’t help but notice her super intense red hair, either…

I try not to post videos alone, but this one is worth your time.

For those who believe the question “do you prefer blondes or brunettes?” is sorely lacking.

For those of us who require more anesthesia.

For those of us who think sunscreen is a human right (and should be cheaper!)

For those of us who have been asked by strangers if the carpet matches the drapes.

For those of us who loved Angela Chase’s “Crimson Glow” dye job, even if it was fake.

For those of us with higher than normal pain tolerances.

For those of us who looked up to Anne of Green Gables. (the real one. not this one.)

For us, and those who appreciate us, a week of devotion ending on the most redheaded of all holidays, St. Patrick’s Day.

Let’s do this.

If you live in Austin, you hear a whole lot about “South by,” even though most people don’t actually attend the conference(s) themselves. Plenty of free parties and concerts and beer, I’m told?

If you listen to NPR, you hear a lot about SXSW. NPR is obsessed with SXSW.

If you’re into obscure indie rock, SXSW is your jam.

If you work for a startup, this is Mecca.

Me? Yep, yep, nope, nope. I only sorta fit.

The ten days of SXSW coincide with UT’s spring break (possibly so students and faculty can attend events, and possibly because, judging by my trek to work today, getting around ANYWHERE in this town appears to be a nightmare) and so I’m trying to make the most of it. I’ve RSVPed to probably 200 free events. (not an exaggeration, for once in my life!) I’m headed to a happy hour this afternoon, with tentative plans for further wandering.

I’m a little overwhelmed. But also excited. Trying to just keep an open mind and maybe get a little dose of energy from all of the goings on.

I’ll be carting around my camera a bit and also posting photos to Instagram. If you’re here in Austin, give me a shout out! If you’ve navigated SXSW, I want to know your insider tips. And if you’re still trying to figure out what exactly this whole ess ex ess dubya thing is all about, I’ll keep you posted.

But for now….SPRING BREAK, BAYBAY!

(photo by flickr user Michael Brown)

I was lucky enough to have a couple of friends offer to let me stay with them and ended up deciding to stay with my friend Rosa, both for the opportunity to spend time with her and to finally get to meet her partner and their daughter, María. On my first morning in town, we drove to a pueblo blanco outside of town where some friends were performing circus tricks (yep) and had rented a huge house for the weekend. It was a beautiful sunny day in a town straight out of an Almodóvar movie.

The good thing about hanging with hippies with communist leanings is that they don’t jack up the drink prices. Take what you want, mark a line on the fridge, pay before you leave. I like this system.

And one of the most exciting aspects of going to Córdoba — meeting María!

One of the best and worst parts of visiting a place frozen in your memory is seeing how it’s changed. Going on an epic trek to get the best sandwich in town, only to find El Torpedo closed? Tragic. But seeing the always too busy streets around Plaza de las Tendillas converted to a bustling, cosmopolitan pedestrian zone made me pretty happy. Even at night, it’s so much more pleasant without the sound of traffic.

And the new sunshields at the mercadillo are such a charming (and essential!) addition to Europe’s hottest city.

I almost lived in this plaza with the statue of Manolete, Córdoba’s most famous bullfighter. Like so many famous bullfighters, he died in the ring. The square faces a 13th century church, and sometimes I still dream about living here, listening to the church bells, feeling the breeze through the bamboo blinds. In my fantasy, I get a lot of writing done here, in this place where I never lived. Some places stick with us like that.

My friend and I took a trip out to Medina Azahara, a fascinating site just outside of the city. It’s an active archaeological site, and the updates over the last four years were really impressive. I have been to a lot of the Moorish palaces and important sites in Andalucía over the years — the Mezquita of course, the Alhambra,  the Giralda, and the Alcázar — but the sense of history is different at each of them. Seeing the colors that remain on the interior walls of the Alcázar helps to envision an Alhambra where the colors survived. And being at Medina Azahara, where so little remains but is slowly being uncovered, opens up a new view to the expansiveness of this period in Spanish history.

My favorite breakfast: pan con tomate, café con leche. They have these special toasters that allow for toasting thicker pieces of bread, and then you get this tomato pulp stuff and olive oil…add a little salt, and you have this simple, filling, but super tasty meal. I haven’t been able to replicate it.

Córdoba’s old town is a neighborhood of narrow passageways, confusing streets with changing names that reflect the thousands of years of history. The streets are often so narrow that the sidewalks are less than a foot wide, and only small cars, mirrors folded in, can even pass — people have to step into doorways and hold their breath so as not to get swiped by passing traffic. Plenty of streets are closed to cars in general — one learns to listen very closely for the sound of a motorcycle’s approach. There was a certain smugness in remembering the shortcuts, in not quite yet feeling like a stranger in this city.

An evening wandering the Judería, with the promise of returning in the morning to see the Mezquita.

No matter how many times I’ve visited the Mezquita, and I’ve gone back again and again, something new catches my eye. There is a complexity inherent in a mosque-cathedral, yes. But there’s also this endless grace to those famous arches.

And I really love the outer doors.

The middle, where the mosque recedes and the cathedral begins.

And yet the mosque is always present, and the cathedral, impressive in its own right, feels so generic as compared to this massive, detailed, beautiful wonder.

Most people think the best view of the tower can be found through this tiny passageway, Calleja de las Flores. This is the quintessential Córdoba postcard shot.

And then it was over. One final favorite breakfast at the train station, sad to be leaving once again, but also ready to be home.

I still write Christmas cards to my colleagues in Córdoba, though I wonder how long I can keep that up. I was too busy this year to send more than a couple of cards, but I have saved a few that aren’t too seasonal, hoping to get them in the mail over spring break next week. I assume I’ll be back, one of these days, the pull too strong to resist. And yet I do wonder when I’ll no longer remember the tricks to navigating those narrow streets. When will Barajas airport in Madrid get a full renovation, no longer filling me with a sense of deja vu when I land there? As my Spanish trickles out of my brain, month by month, I recognize that it presents an insurmountable challenge to communicating with some of my monolingual friends. Somehow, almost five years have passed since I last lived there. And yet so many things remind me of Spain, so many parts of myself are informed by my time there. Always, it will shape my memories.

Always, it will feel at least a little like home.

I headed to Barcelona to meet up with two of my dearest friends: one who works for a tech company in Barça, and the other who flew in from Berlin. I was excited but also sort of nervous about the meeting of these two people, people who I love but who are also pretty different from one another, in some ways reflecting poles of my own personality. But we all three share a love of wandering, H&M, food, and making fun of me, so I think it was a good couple of days. As I’ve mentioned before, my time in Barcelona was a mix of highs and lows — seeing friends, wandering, shopping, touring Casa Gaudí, going out and remembering the awesome intensity of the Spanish nightlife scene, but also feeling a lot of my uncertainties at that time bubble to the surface. Not knowing where I was headed next, feeling at times out of place in situations that used to be my jam, wanting something more but not knowing how to get there…recognizing that I was in-between, and being scared and overwhelmed by that feeling. It’s calming to look back and realize the importance of some of those discoveries, a few of them made in late night Barcelona bars, to see that many of those uncertainties have momentarily subsided. It’s also something I come back to often, feeling on the edge of something and figuring out how to leap. It’s a cliché but it’s the best metaphor I’ve been able to figure out for that particular feeling.

Very importantly: jamón and I were reunited.

On my first day, I spent the day alone and decided to wander Montjuïc, site of the 1992 Olympics, one of Franco’s most infamous prisons (if you haven’t read The Shadow of the Wind, I would recommend it), and a series of parks linked by escalators. The day was humid and the greenery was surprisingly lush.

Olympic Stadium (isn’t it amazing how much Beijing reshaped our ideas about what an Olympic stadium should look like?)

At the Jardí Botànic de Barcelona:

Spaniards love escalators, even in their outdoor gardens. But I was also glad to see some of the original staircases survived:

Important pan catalan lesson:

At the Pre-Columbian Art Museum:

My friend and I decided to pony up the eighteen euros to tour Casa Battló, possibly the most famous Gaudí-designed house. Although I totally can’t imagine living there, I did really love all of the strange and wonderful attention to detail.

The whole house was so undulating, even the woodwork:

The tiles in the central patio (stairwell) are a gradient, really dark blue towards the top floor, lighter as you get closer to the ground floor – five colors in all. It really does give the impression that the ground floor gets more light than it really does.

The tiles also cast cool, aquatic reflections:

The top floor is its own alien land.

And the rooftop looks like a lizard and a bunch of uniformed soldiers.

Later that night, we went all went out to this fun Mexican place called La Rosa Negra (which, coincidentally, will always remind me of Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights). The food was good, but mostly it was a good night because it reminded me what it was like to be in a place crawling with young (but not 18 year old) people. It was another night when I got to thinking about what direction my life was heading…margaritas have that effect on me. (also, Happy National Margarita Day today! February 22, of all of the days of the year!)

My friend lives not far from La Sagrada Familia. After Casa Battló, we decided we had had our fill of waiting in line and paying high entrance prices for Gaudí, and since I have been before, we just wandered the perimeter for a bit. Still pretty awe-inspiring.

La Boquería really is one of the world’s great markets:

And finally, it was time for a little break from Spanish saltiness. Perfect antidote? Noodles and Fun.

(is this fun for anyone but me? No, not noodles and fun, these travel/photography write-ups. I’m honestly not sure…let me know in the comments, will you?)

One of the really fun parts about going through old photos is reminiscing about fun times, creative moments, a certain kind of light, a really amazing meal. I thought I’d share a few more photos from my trip to Spain…in October/November 2011. Because it’s Friday and I’m feeling nostalgic.

Since I flew into and out of Madrid, those are the bookends on my trip. I took so many photos in 10 days (which is a big reason why I got so behind on Flickr) that I thought I’d split this into three posts: Madrid coming and going, Barcelona, and Córdoba, my old stomping grounds. Thank you for humoring me.

A few from Madrid’s newly renovated Mercado de San Antón:

Chueca, the shoe district (or the gay district, with shoe stores. see it as you will):

The one that got away:

Street used booksellers. I love coming across them.

I love how Madrid can be at once so modern and so traditional:

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Atocha train station, but I still really love sitting in this space.

(also, the little old man with his hands behind his back is SO SPANISH.)

More soon. Fun weekend plans? I think I might be taking a trek out of town to find…barbecue.

(all photos by me)

+ This bloopers video from The Office:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDNYLhr4o7w

+ Harry & David Moose Munch. Also brunch with friends. Outside in January. With complementary mimosas.

+ The new(ish) Flickr mobile app, and people remembering lately that Flickr is actually great.

+ This kid’s all over Facebook, and for good reason. “The world needs you to stop being boring!”

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-gQLqv9f4o

+ My first Austin visitors! Friends here three weekends out of four!

After all of the drama and exhaustion of my move in August, I hit a wall about three days after move-in. Too much stuff, too little space for it, one couch too many…and I was just really, really tired of making decisions. What had been accomplished up to that point, housewise, lay mostly untouched for the rest of 2012, as school, work, settling in in other areas, and generally getting on with living took over.

I hung a couple of shelves. A few evenings I was in the mood and put up some art or tinkered in some capacity. I ditched a couch. But there have been large boxes in my living room for months. I have all kinds of framed art stacked under the windowsill, waiting to be hung.

And perhaps most importantly, I haven’t had anyone over because I’m too embarrassed by the general disarray. And that’s a shame, since I love making dinner for friends, and my space could totally work for get togethers. And I like having a house of which I can be proud, all of the little pieces of me on display, all of the magazine and design blog reading put to good use.

So, I’m back in Austin. It’s a new year. I have a week until classes start and another week until I welcome my first visitor. (hooray!) I’m excited to start Nesting 2.0.

Because I’m always inspired by Anna Dorfman’s weekend lists (it’s amazing how much she accomplishes in a weekend!), I thought I would post my to do list here and try to be held accountable. I’ll update it as I complete tasks, and I’ll plan to upload some photos once I’m all done (or school starts, whichever comes first).

Nesting 2.0 list

+ Unpack entirely from Christmas and put suitcases away
+ Vacuum, sweep and mop floors
+ Dust, clean windows, clean kitchen and bathroom counters
+ General bathroom clean
+ Hang black floating shelf in bedroom
+ Hang green mirror
+ Hang whiteboard in kitchen (find store to buy hardware to hang vertically)
+ Hang art wall behind couch
+ Hang map above bed?
+ Clear off desk so it’s actually useful again
+ Unroll and flatten rug that’s been rolled for too long
+ Figure out IKEA spotlights and mount them
+ Buy down insert for new pillow cover
+ Make mantel look presentable (I refuse to use the term “mantelscaping”)
+ Water plants
+ Laundry (load #1, load #2)
+ Make bed, including down comforter
+ Groceries
+ Make toasted quinoa salad with snow peas and shrimp (two thumbs up)
+ Update filing system so I have a place to put paid bills
+ Set up incoming mail drop spot
+ Buy candles that don’t smell like baked goods or diapers (might want another…)
+ Figure out a plan for one stupidly tall shelf on bedroom bookshelf

Kind of a daunting list. And that’s just the house-specific one. But a lot can be accomplished in a week, and I’m excited to get started.

Do you have plans for your abode for the new year? Do you get overly ambitious in January and make extremely long to do lists, as I am prone to do?

So I’m just here for a day and a half – arrived yesterday and squeezed in a visit with my cousin and her fiance before they caught a plane, catching a bus back home tomorrow morning. Went out with friends last night, met up with some others.

It’s weird to be here.

My hometown changes very little, has always been basically the same, and a couple of times a year I come home, and it feels pretty much like the last time. It’s not a place about which I feel too conflicted.

I’ve only been gone from this city for five months, not long, and so of course most things look the same. As I wandered up and down the main street today in my coat, gloves, boots, snow falling softly, a few storefronts had changed, the Mexican restaurant on the corner has a new happy hour special, but otherwise, it is what I remember. I know this place. I’ve turned down that road, have waited at that crosswalk hundreds, maybe thousands of times.

But for some reason, I feel different here. It’s a strange mix of nostalgia and familiarity and anxiety I can’t quite figure out. There are so many things I miss, and yet I also have memories of being here during some of my saddest moments. I remember feeling a little trapped for a while. Too comfortable. It’s kind of nice being an outsider, but it makes me think a lot more about how things are going for me where I live now, a place where I still rely on GPS to get me around about half the time, where I miss exits and take wrong turns all of the time. I have a few friends, but I don’t run into people on the street unexpectedly. Granted, Austin is not a small town. But in some ways, I’m still an outsider there.

And I’m kind of an outsider here.

And it’s all part of this transition that’s been happening this year, leaving behind the sense of sleepwalking that comes from getting too comfortable in exchange for frequently making mistakes, feeling a little unrooted.

I’m so curious to see how Austin feels upon my return. Will I feel a sense of relief walking into my apartment, that “ok, now I’m home and I can breathe again in my space” feeling? I’m not sure. Will I look out the window of the plane, see the Frost tower and the Capitol and the UT Tower lit up and feel like I’m landing at my home airport? I’m not sure. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t get that sense of returning home when we pulled into town last night. It felt like a memory, rather than my reality. I’m not sure why, I’m not sure about it all.

Everything looked mostly the same, but I felt different.

I’ve still got the lingering smoker’s cough. I have so much I’ve been wanting to write about, so I’m hoping to take advantage of this break, the longest I’ve had in years, to do some writing here. And I’m catching up on my Flickr uploads, after getting a full year behind. (wha?) In the interim, a quote that didn’t make it into one of my papers, but that I liked anyway:

“When ‘conversation’ as a curatorial and creative process seeks to transform the distance between art and its audience, it does so by changing our sense of the ‘space’ of the artwork itself, by making us rethink fundamental questions concerned with the category of the aesthetic. These questions are somehow prior to the critic’s concern with genres and periods as the historical measure of art’s social vision. The conversational approach poses these questions: What kind of ‘knowledge’ do we expect from the practice and the presentation of art? How does conversation change our relation, as artists and audiences, to cultural experience and the social transformation of our times?”
—Homi K. Bhabha, “Conversational Art”

I’ve also been watching a lot of Gossip Girl, so…yeah. It’s kind of a high/low mix.

I have never compiled a bucket list, or a 30 before 30 list (though I’m thinking about it, with thirty a little more than a year away!) But, even without formal list making, our little life lists start to develop. I want to see Machu Picchu before I die. And the Taj Mahal. And the Grand Canyon at sunset.

Some items on this not-quite-list are more likely to happen than others, sure. But, over time, you can slowly cross things off.

And so it is that, at some point over the last 15 or so years since my very first concert (Ben Harper at a greyhound racetrack), I’ve seen almost all of the artists I’ve always loved, ever since I got that CD player for Christmas in about the sixth or seventh grade.

I quickly figured out that attempts to record songs off the radio weren’t especially successful. Once I started babysitting, I could afford more than tape singles from Musicland.

And so I bought CDs.

A lot of these CDs I actually acquired via one of those Buy 1, Get 13 free BMG promotions in every Sunday’s newspaper supplement. A handful came from Target or were presents. Many I saved for and bought in the mall on long afternoons consisting of wandering with friends while wearing our coolest clothes, eating bobby cheese bread at Bob’s Pizza, and buying knock off perfume and nickel jewelery at Claire’s. We had to make sure to save a quarter so we could call one of our moms from the payphone to arrange a ride. Those were the (late 90s) days.

For a long time, my silver CD case was my most prized possession, by far the most valuable thing I owned. Over time, it sprawled to five or six cases, many of them binder-sized, almost exclusively filled with actual purchased CDs.

When about 60% of your (paltry) money goes to buying music, discovering those artists live is the next logical step. I’ve seen most of the bands represented on those early CDs: Dave Matthews Band (eight times?), Ben Folds, Ani DiFranco, John Mayer. Also quite a few from my parents’ generation, music I grew up listening to: James Taylor. Crosby, Stills and Nash. Bonnie Raitt.

But always absent from that list? Counting Crows.

Until they came to Austin.

I haven’t bought their last handful of records, I must admit. This item was almost removed from the life list by virtue of an expiration date.  But I love August and Everything After. I like Recovering the Satellites. Hard Candy is underrated. I like Adam Duritz’s elaborate metaphors – all birds and kings and blankets of stars keeping you warm. The lyrics really meant something to me when I first heard them, and I remember that when I listen to them now.

I still think that the line “Every time she sneezes, I believe it’s love” is one of my very favorites, ever.

It was a pretty wonderful concert. They played for almost three hours. Opened with “Round Here” and played “Holiday in Spain” as an encore. Adam Duritz was strange and mesmerizing, the songs wandering and leaving and coming back again just as I expected they might. And there was something so comforting about hearing those lines, in that voice, in a place that is not yet familiar but that I’d like, eventually, to feel like home.

Counting Crows, Round Here
Counting Crows, Holiday in Spain
Counting Crows, Anna Begins
Counting Crows, Colorblind

(all photos by me, posted to Instagram)
(oh, and did I mention the elaborate music video friends made in high school to the CC song “Goodnight Elisabeth”? I so wish I could show it here…there’s a particular scene when a dress, found in a laundry basket, is held up and swirled around and morphs into a flashback of a girl wearing it and dancing on a roof in the snow….epic)

Hard to believe I’ve been in Austin over three months. Things have been pretty quiet around here, largely because being back in school turns out to be pretty time consuming. I’m so busy printing (and, ahem, reading) endless PDFs, teaching classes, writing papers, and generally doing the student thing that I haven’t been much of a tourist yet in my own town. Which is kind of silly, since I’ve been experiencing a lot of the downs of big(ger) city living – discovering the real meaning of traffic at the top of the list – without really enjoying the perks. Living in Montana, I was always so envious of the cities with things actually going on – book tours and daily concerts and Hairpin meetups and, yes, Flickr groups. And so I was pretty excited when I got the message that Flickr would be hosting a photowalk in downtown Austin.

A few photos from the morning:

We wandered through a farmer’s market for a while – the first one I’ve visited this year, sadly.

Still getting used to the many versions of cacti (always makes me think of that bad 90s Nickelodeon show, Hey Dude…yippie kay yay what?)

And finally, did I mention that Ryan Gosling is reportedly in town filming?

Two of my dear friends, going back to high school and beyond, had a baby girl a few weeks ago. They named her Matilda Mary, and she joined her adorable big brother Parker. Even though my friends have moved a lot in recent years, to Australia and back, and now to New York, I’ve followed their little family through their blog and feel like I’ve gotten to kind of know the silliness of their son through photos and Kelly’s frequent updates. I read her pregnancy posts with anticipation, looking forward to another cute kid being added to the clan.

And there’s no doubt that Matilda is beautiful. But she’s also sick, suffering from acute liver failure and the doctors aren’t sure what else, and she needs all the love she can get.

She’s lucky in that she’s the daughter of two fiercely loving, bright parents, and they’ve been battling for her over the last few weeks at Mt. Sinai in New York City. She’s at the top of the transplant list, if it comes to that. She’s had a double exchange blood transfusion, and they’re waiting to see if that might cure her symptoms. They’ve been worried about sugar levels, and ammonia levels, brain damage and a world of other concerns, day in and day out.

But they’ve also been so thoughtful, my friends, in caring for her. Upset they couldn’t always hold her when she’d cry, they took the nurse Gina’s advice and got her something to hold: Gina the Giraffe.

After one particularly harrowing night, Kelly wrote on her facebook wall, “Tyler and I have rallied our spirits and have come up with a plan to hold Matilda more, snuggle more, sing more, read more, and enjoy every moment with Matilda more. She is a gift and we plan on keeping her forever.”

It’s been an emotional couple of weeks, and I find myself thinking of them all day and checking in over and over again. I tear up a lot on the bus. I know people go through terrible things, but I don’t feel old enough to have friends going through this with their kid.

But luckily, Kelly and Tyler are handling all of this with a grace beyond their years.

So, what can you do? Well, there’s a website to donate to Matilda’s cause. And I won’t try to pretend that money doesn’t matter.

There’s also an option to have a meal delivered to them in the hospital, which is pretty easy to do, and feels like something tangible.

But also important, really really important, is knowing that more people are thinking about her and praying for her. Being so far from family right now, Kelly and Tyler have said that the thoughts and prayers bring them comfort. And I believe in the power of collective thought, or prayer, or however it is you might see it.

So in those quiet in-between moments, please keep my friends and their baby in your thoughts. It would mean a lot to me, and to them.

There’s something so special for a kid about seeing his or her name in writing. This invitation to participate in a new world of narratives. For a long time, my parents told me that the neighborhood park was named Emily’s Park. You can imagine my disappointment when I learned how to read and saw the small sign in the far corner – Memorial Park. What a stupid name. Some might say this is exactly what’s wrong with America: making our children feel like the world revolves around them. But I think it’s OK to feel special (as long as you’re not a brat). And even when I knew the “real” name, I continued to call it by the childhood moniker, warming my heart a little to the (honestly somewhat bleak) block of land.

And so, getting back to the big red dog, I was so pleased to hear the author of the Clifford series and his wife on NPR this morning. It’s a short but really charming interview, in which he clarifies that Clifford was not born big. He was the runt, and Emily Elizabeth was encouraged not to adopt him. He grew bigger than a house because that’s how much she loved him.

Listen to it here: http://www.npr.org/2012/09/22/161541838/clifford-the-big-red-dog-turns-50-in-human-years.

(image from npr.org)

oh yeah, finally trying to jump on the Instagram wagon. Find me @emily05mle.

There were futuristic cocktails, complete with gelatinous spheres. There were appetizers and homemade ice cream sandwiches. Complimentary valet parking! And the things he designed were incredible. His stuff from the 20s looked Eames-esque. The predictions he made about everything from GPS to the dishwasher were eerily accurate. There was one article in particular, predicting all sorts of changes to come in the future – things he couldn’t have known, and yet so many have happened. I might stop by again just to take a picture. A creative, fascinating man.

I also got the added bonus of feeling educated since the only way I knew anything about Bel Geddes prior to a few weeks ago was through the USPS industrial design stamps (which, for the record, I really love). He’s the radio designer:

Anyway, later in the evening, while my event buddy and I were trying to surreptitiously position ourselves in the sight line of waiters leaving the kitchen with full trays of appetizers, a dude walked up to us and gave us both high fives. Maybe that should have been a tipoff that this was about to get weird.

He’s studying to be a writer, he says. Well, first he tells us we should talk about something fascinating, or something daft like that. Then he said he was studying writing, “but not to get a degree.” I asked him what he wrote, and he said “I’m not a writer. I don’t write.” Which, perhaps not so surprisingly, struck me as odd for someone studying to be a writer.

My response, something I’ve been told more than once myself, was, “Writers are people who write.”

It became pretty apparent that he was drunk, kind of stinky, and purposefully obstinate. Go with God, dude.

But that exchange has kind of stuck in my head in the past week. Writers are people who write. It seems so straightforward.

And yet so many people who have studied writing, myself included, don’t do much writing. Writers are not people who read. Or people who grade others’ attempts at writing. Or people who talk about writing.

Writers are people who write.

It’s so simple, and yet so daunting.

But thinking about it encouraged me to sit down here tonight and bang out some thoughts on the screen…so maybe there’s hope for me yet.

(stamp image from usps.com)

I’ve been sick for the last week, a weird mix of symptoms that seems to change everyday. Every morning there’s a new surprise – mostly fairly unpleasant, really. Is it an ear infection? Strep? Common, lingering cold? I don’t know.

And I’m getting a little behind on the school stuff. The reading. The oncoming assignments. Grading. Lots and lots of grading.

I’m still not really settled into my house, but because I’ve made some progress, it looks worse than it has since moving day. This is normal, I know that. But it’s still a little overwhelming when I walk in the door at the end of the day.

And so there’s only two answers: laundry and the crockpot.

I figured out that I love using these two appliances because they make me feel extremely productive. Look, here I am just lying out the couch watching Parenthood….and yet, I’m also making dinner! I might be slogging through more pseudo-Foucauldian reading on the gaze, but…..ta da! I’m also making my stinky clothes smell good again! And then I’m going to fold them, when they’re still kinda warm and, most importantly, good smelling, and restore a little order to this small corner of my life. Or, in the case of the crockpot, I can smell this real meal, not just pasta or a salad or whatever, awaiting me at the end of this current article. (is there an end? I can’t help but wonder.)

This week, I went with an old standby. I’ve made this Slow Cooker Chicken Tortilla soup quite a few times, and it’s always a crowd pleaser. (or, in this case, a me pleaser…) But since I make some tweaks to the original recipe, and I always forget what they are when I am wandering the grocery aisles, I thought I’d list my little spin here.

Word to the wise: don’t let the long list of ingredients freak you out. They are cheap (especially at Target for the canned goods) and readily available. If you have a can opener and a 4+ quart slow cooker, you can make this.

Slow Cooker Chicken Tortilla soup (slightly adapted from this recipe)
Supposedly makes 8 servings, but I think it’s more like 4-6.

Same old, same old: too many thoughts, too little time (or maybe just focus?) so I thought I’d take a tip from Dani at Sometimes Sweet and attempt a Currently post. Reply in comments and tell me what you’re currently up to!

Reading: It’s been a somewhat bookish couple of weeks. In addition to reading all kinds of pamphlets/booklets/flyers/whatever about my new school and city, I’ve gotten through a handful of books: Riding with Rilke, I Feel Bad About My Neck, Bossypants as audiobook read by Tina Fey, and The Believers.  They were all good for their own reasons: much of the narrative in Riding with Rilke takes place in Austin, and specifically at the Harry Ransom Center on campus, so it was fun to get acquainted with this amazing resource through non-fiction. I also learned a lot about Ducatis, which was, admittedly, extremely random and not really in my normal purview. I’m still mourning Nora Ephron, somewhat belatedly. Tina Fey was the perfect narrator for her own memoir (not always true!) and I appreciated the feminist aspects of Bossypants. And I read The Believers in about 4 days, almost entirely on the bus. The mother character was over-the-top abrasive, and most of the other characters weren’t especially likeable either, but somehow it mostly worked for me, and that was a study in fiction all by itself. I’m going to try, really try, to carve out that time on the bus everyday for pleasure reading, at least one way each day. I started Lisa See’s On Gold Mountain this morning on my way to class.

Watching: I finally got the internet hooked up at my house, so I’ve been watching light TV on my laptop (Parenthood, the hippy Berkeley counterpart to Pasadena’s Brothers and Sisters, without the one really hot character or Sally Field but with Craig T. Nelson so it’s all kinda even), and some heavy movies (Incendies, El secreto de sus ojos). All worth a watch.

I’m also going to list the Tumblr The Thinking Tank here, as I’ve been watching (and loving) the curated images there. When I don’t have time to really read anything, this is where I turn for a little escape from the banal.

Thinking about:

Finding a coffee shop to make my own. After only one class last week, I had over a hundred pages of reading to plow through. I need a non-home, non-Starbucks where I can linger and get some reading done.

Surprised by: Many things, but we’ll go with the fact that the cold faucet water runs warm here. Like warmer than lukewarm. I have yet to use the H knob in my shower.

Making me happy: I got a teaching assistantship! This is a huge weight off my shoulders, financially, and I’m looking forward to some of the work I’ll be doing. I’m no longer unemployed!

Listening to: Lots of really bad hip hop. Too embarrassing(ly awesome) to really go through step by step. Let’s just say I’ve had Titanium in my head for about a week.  Also, Mike from Charlotte who danced like (and kinda looked like) JT – we had a whole lot of fun getting down with you to all the Top 40 hits last weekend. What a blast.

Working on: Getting back into school mode AND getting my apartment in shape. Did a little late-night painting last night, so I’m looking forward to showing off my creations soon.

Anticipating: Going to Idaho tomorrow! Our closest family friends will be celebrating the wedding of their oldest son. It’s going to be a blast. And I bought a new dress. And it’s going to get below 80 degrees at night. All of these things are making me happy.

What’s up in your life, currently?

(image one and two both from The Thinking Tank)

Moving is a bitch. There’s very little way around that. But I couldn’t help but be surprised, again and again, by how bumpy the road was, nonetheless. Here’s a little semi-chronological smattering of events:

• + Change my address to the apartment I had pre-leased in May or early June.
• + While I am at the UHaul place picking up the truck, I get a call that the apartment I had reserved and put a deposit down for months ago was “no longer available.” A new apartment in the complex will be available, but not immediately. Move-in date changed from Aug. 3 to 10.
• + Woman at UHaul feels badly for me as I stand there hyperventilating and gives me 7 extra days and 200 extra miles for free. Also takes $100 off as an added bonus. Then card won’t run again so have to leave checkbook as collateral and drive the UHaul to the bank to take out the cost of the truck and trailer in cash.
• + Cancel all hotels. Make plans for new places to stay. Book new hotels.
• + Mom changes her flight from the 8th to the 15th. Will now miss a class, an Alison Krauss concert, and a week in her garden before school starts again. And has to pay a change fee.
• + Cancel change of address. Fill out new change of address form.
• + Pack the truck. Barbecue a lot. Float the river a handful of times, cold beers in hand. Clean and Rug Doctor and all the rest. Say a little goodbye to the house.
• + Time to start up the truck and pull away. Truck won’t start.
• + Call UHaul service number and a tow company comes to jump the truck. A light in the cargo area turned on automatically but surprise! didn’t turn itself off after 30 minutes like it’s supposed to.
• + Take the loaded truck and my car to UHaul to get the car trailer loaded.
• + Once on the trailer, the driver’s door won’t open all of the way.
• + Mom, driving the car onto the ramp, climbs out of window.
• + Now we realize that we can’t get the keys out of the ignition unless we keep the window rolled down. Door won’t open wide enough to do both. And not just rolled down a little. Rolled down most of the way.
• + End up pushing the car back a foot or so to put blocks under the tires, thus raising level of the door.
• + Push the car onto the blocks.
• + Can successfully open car door!
• + Now car won’t start. No idea why. Luckily window is up and we can close the door and lock the damn car and get out of town.
• + First day drive to Billings: smooth. Stay in Billings for four or five days. Get to hang out with my 91-year-old grandpa. I finally get around to painting this mirror. Pictures to come.
• + Day 2: driving into Casper, Wyoming. Receive call from apartment complex. Apartment will no longer be available on the 10th. It will be available on the 15th.
• + A few minutes later, the truck starts rumbling. Flat tire? Trailer loose?
• + Mom and I sit and stare at one another at an Arby’s for a while.
• + Drive the truck around town. It appears that the rumbling was just from the rougher-than-normal highway. Back on the road.
• + Decide moving into this place isn’t an option. What if they changed the date yet again? Not to mention their total lack of empathy, that they offered me absolutely nothing for my troubles, having to pay for more UHaul days, the question of where to stay in the interim, etc.
• + Call an apartment locator. Hardly anything available. Most places have been pre-leased for months. If only I could raise my (already decent?) monthly budget $200. On and on. Get an appointment to view an apartment the morning after we arrive. There are 3 to choose from in the (new) complex.
• + Denver: we had some good burgers here.
• + Wichita: bad Chinese. Also most of the corn on the side of the highway is scorched and dead-looking.
• + At a truck stop in Oklahoma, everyone around me is drinking sweet tea and there’s Nascar on the TVs. I think the guy at the next table says “peon” and try to figure out the context. Oh. Pen.
• + These are not my people.
• + View apartment. Locator guy is sleazy. Now there’s apparently one apartment left in complex, not three. Have a feeling they may tell this to everyone.
• + Apartment, though, is nice. Patio. Washer and dryer. Humongous closet. Dishwasher. Further from school than I’d like but on a bus line and close to lots of other things. And available immediately. Decide I’ll take it.
• + Disconnect car from UHaul. Drive them both the 30 minutes back to where we’re staying. Grab my checkbook to pay the deposit by 5 pm and head out to the car, relieved to be driving a normal-sized vehicle for the first time in a while.
• + Car won’t start.
• + Have a breakdown. Not the car, me.
• + Borrow another car to get deposit paid by 5 pm. Get car towed.
• + Mom hires a couple of college students to help us move. Thank goodness. It’s hot. Really damn hot. Get everything unloaded in just about 2 hours. I lie on the floor for a while, where the A/C bounces off the sliding glass doors. Feel lightheaded and nauseous. Google “heat exhaustion symptoms” on my phone.
• + Change my address. Again.
• + Car battery had a bad cell, hence working on and off. Heat killed it for good. New battery=pretty good news.
• + Return the UHaul. So very glad to see it go. And I was hardly ever the one driving it.
• + Spend the next few days unpacking, organizing, sorting, drinking lots of Arnold Palmers with my mom.
• + Take inaugural trip to nearby IKEA.
• + Take inaugural trip to nearby SuperTarget.
• + Sad to see the Olympics end.
• + More unpacking. The feeling of being unsettled and in between starts to get to me. I’m cranky and worn out.
• + Mom comes out of the shower and says, “There’s a very large bug on the wall in there.” Cockroach.
• + Goodbye, cockroach.
• + They’re coming to spray the next day.
• + The next morning, Mom lifts something up and a lizard runs across the living room floor. Seriously? A LIZARD? We deal with that issue and start plugging up every hole in the house, including that rear bathroom sink hole that prevents overflow.
• + They come and spray. Some of my sanity returns.
• + Mom flies home. Looking forward to sleeping in and doing very little for a few days, but sad to see her go.
• + The next night, talking on the phone and sitting on the floor near the charger, I feel something on my leg that I think is a loose hair. Cockroach.
• + Proceed to drop the phone and screech for a while, causing person on the other end of the line to wonder whether I am being attacked. I was, just not by what he might have expected.
• + Spray the hell out of that thing. Second guess my move.
• + Wander around the house with Raid spray in hand. Have some nightmares. They’re going to come and set traps.
• + Go to campus. It’s beautiful. Get an ID card so I can ride the bus for free. Get an appointment to set up internet at my house. Drive somewhere and don’t get lost and don’t have to check directions.
• + Make plans for queso and margaritas tonight.
• + Get my first mail in the mailbox.

That pretty much brings you up to date on the move.

The rain has stopped for a little while.

Time to venture out again.

—Meghan Daum, from Life Would Be Perfect if I Lived in That House

But when I look around my house, at the total catastrophe of stuff everywhere, and the piles of papers I still haven’t sorted, and just how many things still need to go into boxes, I am overcome with what must be despair.

Maybe it’s just the day after garage sale blues (successful garage sale, even) or the fact that Sundays are often a little melancholic. Or maybe I’m finally a little closer to facing reality about things, the reality that I won’t finish if I keep doing what I have been doing at the rate I’ve been doing it for two weeks.

I guess the other way to look at this is that in one week and one day, I’ll be on the road and finally starting with the next adventure. Austin, Texas here I come.

Now please just let me get through this week.

Ironic that my last post, about finding the time to prioritize writing, was written six weeks ago. It’s quite possibly been the busiest six weeks of my life.

Handed over board president reins after a hectic, but I think fairly successful, year.

Three weeks in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Sweden.

One last week of working. Unemployed for the next month or so.

Successfully ran a half marathon.

Packing up to move across the country.

Garage sale tomorrow.

Leaving in another week, driving a UHaul and pulling my car on a trailer. 1,950 miles.

In all of this, there are loads of specific posts. I think about this space every day, and yet I can’t seem to pull a single memory from the Pensieve. Too much swirling around in there.

But every day I’m getting closer. One of these days the memories and thoughts will be extracted, one by one, and I have a feeling quite a few will make it here.

In the meantime, sorry for the silence. Bear with me.

(photo by Lorcan O’Brien on Flickr)

But if we’re talking about writing, about coming up with characters and a scene, many scenes, or crafting and drafting and revising something with a little heft, changing this word for that and do-si-doing syntax for a better rhythm, well, I haven’t done much of that in a long time. And that kind of writing, for me, is more conflicted and best done at a computer, white expanse shining back at you while the cursor blinks.

In college, I majored in literature and creative writing. I wrote fiction, almost exclusively, forty or fifty pages per semester. Every time a story was due, I would walk around preoccupied for weeks, trying to come up with scenes as dynamic as the characters I had started to concoct. I loved writing characters, envisioning their morning routines, whether they would leave time on the microwave screen, whether they could carry a tune or not. The quirks. That part of the process appealed to my extreme attention to detail, allowed me to harness that trait that is otherwise a little exhausting. The problem was always making the characters do things. I wanted to place them on the stage, clap my hands and say, “OK, it’s up to you now!” Plot was not my strong suit. I wrote a lot of bathtub stories.

So to meet those classroom deadlines and turn in an actual story – beginning, middle, end – I would hole up in my apartment for the weekend. I would grocery shop in advance. I would buy beer. If at all possible, I would also clean beforehand, because even the most dreaded task becomes tempting when you’re sitting and staring and trying to make characters come alive and failing. And then I would play around and see what happened.

It was hard work, in some ways, but also really gratifying when I could make it go right. I assume this is how a mathematician must feel when a complicated problem is completed correctly, when the checks and balances lead you to believe you’re temporarily in control. Your effort justified.

I would rarely talk to anyone else over the weekend, especially about what I was writing, not wanting their input, not wanting to break the spell. I never knew how the story would end, figuring a solution would emerge at some point. The right moment to dim the lights. And honestly, sometimes that moment never came and I just ended it, sappily, when I had reached my page limit and couldn’t think of anything better. Before bed late, late on Sunday night (or more accurately Monday morning, if you look at it like that, which I never have), I would email my draft off to a couple of people. A friend or two, maybe my mom, maybe a creative writer who wasn’t in class with me. I would do one final draft read-through in the morning if I had time but wouldn’t check my email. And then I would make copies and distribute them to my classmates, feeling slightly nauseous while awaiting their critique two days later. It wasn’t finished, but it was done. For then. Ideas and people and places were on paper, things I had dreamed up, a few little risks I had taken. And as much as I had to force myself to do it, to be sequestered and anti-social for a while, I came back into the world feeling a sense of relief, of accomplishment, a turn of phrase ringing in my ears, a smirk on my face.

I miss that feeling.

I’m not sure how, but it’s a feeling I’d like to get back. It’s not so much “now or never” as “now or not now,” and in a way, that’s scarier. The obvious follow-up is “If not now, when?” A question without a clear answer. A mathematical problem without an obvious solution. A blinking cursor broadcasting the same message every second: write. write. write.

As someone who dreaded running The Mile in gym class every year, who was lapped on the track by the fast kids while limping along with a sideache most of the time, I must admit that even I am surprised by the following statement:

I ran seven miles the other day.

And I didn’t even feel like dying.

Something I didn’t talk about in this space last year was my decision to run a half marathon. The local marathon has gotten great reviews, on a national level, in the last couple of years and so many people in this town have started running it. On Sunday mornings from March to July, the streets and trails are teeming with people in various Lycra/DriFIT/whatever ensembles, huffing and puffing or flying by, either with iPods in place or Galloway run/walk timers clipped to their belts.  There are slow and fast, fit and fat, experienced runners and newbies out there, pushing themselves when it would be easy to be doing something else. Anything else.

Last year I got about six weeks into a training class when my lingering shin pain became worrisome. I saw a doc, who directed me to a physical therapist, who told me the pain wasn’t going to get any better without a fair amount of work (and, though he didn’t say this at the time, seemingly endless exercise printouts with photos of people in weird 90s exercise clothes and awkward positions). My half marathon goal wasn’t going to be reached, not last year. And that sucked, since it seemed like everyone in this town was running, training, talking about it all of the time. I don’t like announcing goals I can’t meet.

So I moved on. And I did a lot of PT, for months and months. Some strange realignment techniques involving my grip and my teeth, among other things. Lots of walking backward up stairs and trying not to fall on my ass. Various contortions involving stretchy bands and Kegels while blowing up balloons. No, really.

And I ran seven miles on Sunday with my running buddy with pretty minimal discomfort. Finally.

I leave on Monday for Europe, and I’m not too sure how the running plan is going to work there. I’ll run eight miles before heading out of town on Saturday. And ten the weekend I get back.

Only one week later, July 8, boom. 13.1.

Wish me luck.

(image source)

(thanks for that, R. Kelly)

It’s raining and chilly here. Go figure. I’ve spent the day thus far under the covers, finishing the third Hunger Games book, and then Skype-ing with some friends in Portugal. Always nice to see their smiling faces.

Last night, a friend and I made dinner and watched The Cutting Edge (which is apparently called “Pasión por el triunfo” in Spanish, thus cementing in my brain that whoever translates movie titles should look for a new job. Like accounting.)

But damn, I forgot how much I like that movie.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mrnd-rO456Q

There’s still a day and a half of this long weekend left, so I’m going to try to make the most of it. Take some pictures of my house before we start dismantling it in time for more transition: moving out, moving in. Post some things on Craigslist and start the slow exodus of about two-thirds of my furniture. Cross a few things off my list.

But also try to have me some fun. TBD.

Are you having any Memorial Day weekend fun? What’s on the weekend agenda?

My short walk to work over the past two years has changed very little. It’s not just that I could do it in my sleep – I often actually feel half-asleep when I wend my way across streets and between buildings on my five minute morning “commute.”

A month or so ago, a freak windstorm knocked down a huge pine tree, taking down the fence with it but somehow not crushing the car directly beneath it. I skirted that part of the block for a few days, but then the tree was removed. The fence restored. The car in the same spot, looking untouched.

There are these two trees right outside the Law School that turn the most beautiful red early in the fall, before any other leaves have turned colors. They are my signal that fall is officially here. And those leaves fall sooner than other leaves, too. Every morning for a few weeks in the past two falls, I was taken by their intensity and beauty, both on the tree and on the ground.

And just across the street is the spring counterpart, a tree that bursts with white blossoms and hums with bees right around the time of graduation. I walk under it and tilt my head back to take in the sweet scent. And every day, I wish I had my camera with me and I know that the flowers, the smell, the lovely little surprise, won’t last. Soon the flowers will grow brown around the edges. The petals will drop. And I’ll have no record of this annual ritual, one so insignificant in some ways that I doubt I’ll be reminded of it once I live in Austin.

Maybe it’s my trepidation about moving somewhere with less distinct seasons, maybe I’m feeling nostalgic, or maybe we all just need a deadline, but today I finally backtracked. I went home, grabbed my camera, and went back to snap a few quick pics of this tree, white, fragrant, beautiful. An exclamation point in an otherwise monotone conversation.

Because it is an interaction, the way we do or do not notice our surroundings. The way certain corners come with memories – of kisses, of near accidents, of slipping at icy crosswalks. Of beautiful leaves and crisp autumn air, of blossoms and sunshine.

(all photos by me)

+ The Moveable Type Truck made a stop in town two Fridays ago for just a couple of hours. My sister and I hustled down there to meet Kyle on the tail end of her ten month tour of the U.S. We were lucky to catch her on one of her last few stops before heading back to Portland, home of her letterpress studio. I was happy to pull this print to add to my collection:

She had lots of cool cards for sale in the truck (this one was my favorite, of course) but I was short on cash, too set on trying to get down there while she still had the truck doors open. Will have to do a little letterpress damage in her Etsy shop one of these days.

+ Have you seen The Killing? What an addictive show. My sister told me about it on Friday and I’ve used it as an excuse to barely leave the couch today.

+ Tulips really are my favorites. I love them in all of their stages: their shape when they’re closed tight. Their colors when they’re opening, the contrast of the centers and the petals. When the petals start to curl and become frilly on the edges. And even when they’re falling apart, when the striated colors become even more obvious, the petals increasingly translucent. Having not one but two bouquets at my house this week, both with beautiful tulips (and lilies, and bells of Ireland, and those cool coral berries) has been a real gift.

+ Still haven’t gotten around to reading The Hunger Games – was hoping to see the movie in the theaters, but it might not be in the cards – but I have read some interesting books lately. Susan Orleans’ Rin Tin Tin was interesting but a bit too…dragged out. Should have been about 75 pages shorter. Room, on the other hand, kept my attention from start to finish. So many instances in which authorial intrusion was a risk, and yet it never felt heavy handed. I was impressed, as both a reader and a writer. Now I’m reading and liking The Hare with Amber Eyes, thus far a surprising and interesting familial tale across borders and generations. More non-fiction. Aaaand… I should probably admit that I’ve been powering through the Sookie Stackhouse books over the past few months. I squeeze one in between “real” reading, finishing most of them in a day or two. Such a guilty pleasure, everything Sookie.

+ One more exciting announcement: I’m going to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Sweden in June! A school trip needed a chaperone so I’m getting hooked up in a serious way. Now that some of the other big questions in my life are getting answered, I’m finally thinking about this trip, prepping and getting excited to hop on a plane again. I have a feeling that it will be the fun, more relaxing trip I’ve been needing for a while.

What’s going on with you recently? Reading anything good? Any travel on the horizon?

I’m moving to Austin, Texas in August to start grad school!

For the last few years, I’ve been making ends meet – relieved to have a job with excellent health insurance, really to have a job at all, but still kind of going through the motions. I think that one of the reasons I haven’t written much here about my trip to Spain in October was because it was a lot more complicated than I had imagined – as two of my best friends met me in Barcelona (and met each other for the first time), both urged me to make my move – literally and figuratively – and open myself up for a new start, the one I had anticipated in 2008 when I moved back from Córdoba, oblivious to the impending economic crash (I refuse to call it a “downturn”) that started just a few weeks after I arrived home. And, even though I totally agreed with them and had been initiating upcoming changes (taking the GRE, researching and deciding on a program of study, applying), it was still hard to hear – like I hadn’t been doing enough, like the boundaries I perceived only existed if I allowed them to be. There were some tears shed on a couple of occasions in Barcelona bars. When, a few months later, another friend gave me practically the same pep talk, I found myself in tears once again, tired of feeling so limited – not helpless, but extremely limited – for so long. I’m aware that these “youth frustrated by the economy” stories are ubiquitous, and so often are viewed with a certain disdain, echoing the sense of entitlement my generation is known for. Every “adult” has some story of a recession they got through – a tough time, sure, but the narrative always concludes with the final unscathed emergence. Back to normal.

I’m not quite there, and the loans I’m looking at taking on are daunting, to be sure, but I also realize a few of the other costs. As my friend, that most recent cheerleader, said to me, “I think we’re all telling you this, unbeknownst to one another, because those who know you see that you’ve been functioning at half speed for a while. Maybe you need a little push.”

I guess I did – a little push, some time, feeling bored enough for long enough to think that most alternatives were pretty good options.

But in the end, I’m lucky. Austin isn’t just a pretty good option. My program is ranked #1 in the nation. During my visit this week, people were universally friendly and down to earth and approachable. Austin is a haven for arts and music and libraries and nightlife. It’s relatively affordable and more diverse than anywhere I’ve ever lived. But it’s also strangely familiar – walking out of the Austin airport on Wednesday, leaving the air-conditioned sameness of every airport for the warmth and humidity of an April evening in Texas, the very first thought that came into my head was “Whoa, it smells like Spain.” As much as the Montanan in me liked seeing all of the cowboy boots and microbrews, and the Missoulian recognized the strange cross-section of generally laid-back hippy/hipster culture and big-time college football, another part of me connected to the Spanish influences in a way I wouldn’t have imagined. Walking down a wide boulevard under dappled light, looking at the tiled roofs and hearing Spanish spoken, it seemed as much like the south of Spain as the American South. It will take some getting used to the heat of Austin, yes (it was 90 degrees there on Thursday. in early April!), but I also lived in a 5th floor apartment with no air conditioning in Córdoba, when the nightly lows were in the 80s and the highs soared well into the triple digits. I’ll learn to make do, and the sunscreen I stocked up on and thought might expire will be put to good use!

Remember how I chose “fresh” as my word of 2012? Well, I’m practically giddy to see some of my wishes and plans coming through – a fresh start in a new city, back to thinking critically and feeling challenged, a new space to settle into and city to explore. And I’m relieved to be getting back into a place in my life where I have lots to write about – where I’m experiencing things with open eyes and a fresh perspective, wanting to capture little bits of it all and post it here.

(photos by me)

The first day of spring, I heard on the radio this morning, my head still nestled into my flannel-sheeted pillow, my body enveloped in a down comforter. A quilt. Sweatpants.

I used two fingers to separate the mini blinds. “Please, don’t let there be snow on the ground.”

No snow. But gray. Yet another day of gray. Another day of going through the motions. Dishes piled up in the sink, on the counters. Meetings. Emails. Feeling shrouded by some unnamed lethargy I’ve been feeling for a while.

I get to work and there’s a bundle of daffodils on my seat, wrapped three times with a thin rubber band. A benefit for cancer. I think they might have arrived yesterday, and I’m a little annoyed that no one put them in water. I’m not sure I’ll be able to appreciate them before I leave tomorrow. They’re closed tight, the stems all ending in a thin, pointed tan sheath. I find a vase on my desk (a cup, really), add water, and plop them in. Nothing thereafter could really constitute “arranging.”

Two hours later, most have burst from their shells. Yellow is emerging. I hear a “crack” and watch the light brown membrane separate from the stem. Within minutes, the brown falls away, color is exposed.

The brown falls away, color is exposed.

My springtime wish.

Afterwards, a few local women were on a panel talking about body image and the media. They were insightful and funny and said some interesting things. A girl down the row from me, maybe 12 years old or so, asked the panelists how they get over looking in the mirror and feeling badly about themselves. And they gave some legitimate answers, the kind I could see myself giving. I wake up late so I barely have time to look in the mirror. I look in the mirror, notice a zit, notice this and that, and then move on. I don’t comb my hair. I try to avoid full-length mirrors.

All of those answers are fine. They’re real. They’re honest. But they’re not very inspiring. And, at least for me, they’re not the whole picture.

You know how you shower all the time and they’re all basically the same, but then suddenly, often for inexplicable reasons, you take what I like to call the super clean shower? You get out feeling awesome. Fresh. Ready to take on the world. And so, so clean.

There’s nothing wrong with the other showers. They’re pretty good. Fine.

I feel the same way about looking in the mirror. I’m happy with the way I look. Sure. I don’t think a ton about it.

But every once in a while, out of nowhere, I look in the mirror and do a little double take. Damn, I look good, I say to myself. I smile. I might even wink.

And that’s OK, too. Women have a way of cutting down the competition, of keeping each other in our rightful places. Keeping us feeling like confidence is something you’re supposed to have but not show, never flaunt.

I read a post today by Susannah Conway about always wearing an invisible crown. She’s been writing really interesting things lately, and this was one of them. And I totally agreed with her premise, that it’s OK to like ourselves. That we’re better than “not too bad.”

But I would take it a step further. I don’t think our crowns have to be invisible. I don’t think our strength needs to be something we keep inside, save just for ourselves.

When I spoke up on Thursday night, a room full of women turned to me, some of them smiling, nodding. I don’t think I’m alone in occasionally smiling in the mirror. Grinning. Not just being “not too bad” looking, but pretty damn good. And being not afraid to feel that way, too.

» Sunday was my birthday. Great sushi, friends and family in town, and lots of fun presents. I’m finally the owner of a pair of TOMS (the Carpe Diem style), a present from my mom. Just in time for spring! As my sister said, inspirational. footwear. Just my style. There was also a snarky comment in there about them probably being vegan – and they totally are! (though I’m not…but I guess I seem to flock toward touchy-feely footwear. I also have vegan Danskos…)
» Today is International Women’s Day, as you’ve probably seen around the web somewhere. I don’t pay too much attention to National Ice Cream Day and International Wear Your Heart on Your Sleeve Day or whatever, but the treatment of women still gets my heart pumping and in a world where Rush Limbaugh still exists, it’s worth taking time out to envision a society in which women are valued and treated accordingly. I think it’s still possible to make a $25 Kiva donation to a low-income woman and her business without putting any of your own money down. A five minute, zero-risk investment in an entrepreneurial woman in need of a hand – a great way to celebrate today.
» I also plan to attend a showing of Miss Representation tonight. Have you seen it? There are 3 and 8 minute trailers on Vimeo.
» I loved this NPR story on the 50th anniversary of A Wrinkle in Time. I devoured A Wrinkle in Time and all the rest of the Madeleine L’Engle books. Totally connected with Meg! From the story:
“Even if a young reader doesn’t know all of the words, or know who all of the quotations are from, or if they can’t grasp exactly what a tesseract is … it sort of gives room for the reader and shows possibility and a place where you want to go and understand,” Voiklis says. “[L’Engle] didn’t think condescending to children was the right thing to do.”
» When I’m stressed, I buy pens. My newest purchase: Pentech Hybrid Technica in the Extra Fine 0.3 mm size, black. Super smooth for such a fine tip. Makes me delusional enough to think I might eventually get around to some photographic journaling.
» Excited to see Cataldo and Blind Pilot tomorrow. You can listen to all of the Cataldo albums streaming online. Worth checking out.
» I’m going to Toronto in two weeks! Have you been there? Any recommendations for me?

Fairfield

“A guy I used to know — he taught me all about the sky.”
Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra

I wanted it depressed, one dusty road
and two cafés both with ‘help wanted’ signs.
Where I ate, the waitress was too in love
with the cook for the things I wanted to say.
The canal passed through town ripe green
and grain, I had to admit, grew assured.
A dog slept fat on warm gravel. No trouble foreseen
raising funds to build the new gym.

I’d expected hurt, the small town kind everyone
knows and ignores, a boy who tried and tried
to leave home, sobbing his failure alone
at the mirror back of the bar, still wearing
his ’39 letter sweater, still claiming
the girl who moved to Great Falls will return.
I wanted to honor him in this poem,
to have the sky turn dark as I drove off
the town in my rear view mirror
huddled with fear white in black air.

The drunk I saw seemed happy. I drove empty away.
What if Fairfield sent signals to Mars
and signals came back saying all weather is yours
no matter how vulgar? I imagined cruel sky
left every bird orphan. When I passed
Freeze Out Lake I saw herons accepted that refuge
as home, and I knew the water was green with sky,
not poisoned green with resolve.

—Richard Hugo, from White Center

(Freezeout Lake photos taken by me last March)

But, in fact, the opposite happened. I made valentines with my sister over the weekend. I dressed up, wearing some of my favorite red shoes and a cardigan of my grandma’s. I got a fun box in the mail and a heart cookie from a friend (and one, um, anatomical cookie that made me laugh). And lots of nice little things happened.

gettin' crafty

ready to mail

one of my favorites

We used the Printable Tattoos from Fifth and Hazel, but since they were reversed for tattoos, and we didn’t have the paper, we flipped them to print. And then we hauled out my somewhat absurd collection of stamps, pens, tapes, vintage Letraset, and all the rest and I carved us a little heart stamp. 90s rom-coms seemed required (Hope Floats, Sliding Doors).

Yesterday at work, I was pleasantly surprised by all of these little signs posted around the building in random spots.

(excuse the crappy camera phone quality)

The signs’ pro-love messages, and not specifically of the commercial, heteronormative V-Day variety, were such a nice surprise.

Love, Love, Love. Love is all you need.

(all photos by me)

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKVcQnyEIT8

And what did I buy?

Photoshop! InDesign! Illustrator! Acrobat Pro!

Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!

Turns out I had a fair amount of gift card credit, plus a University staff discount, which meant that the balance was $84.90. Seemed fated.

I’ve spent the majority of the day playing around in Photoshop, using some of the Pugly Pixel templates I bought forever ago, and generally setting up preferences and nesting. Exciting!

The timing was just about right, since I’ve finally gotten past some big deadlines and have spent the last few months thinking about photography, why I’m feeling less creative, why my Flickr is 5 months behind and I’m rarely posting images here anymore. I think I have a few answers.

In the meantime, my first little project: the many faces of Lucas. Remember that baby shower I threw a little over a year ago? Well, meet Lucas:

I was greeted by this cutie on the morning I landed in Madrid. (oh yeah, remember how I went to Spain and then never really talked about it? that’s upcoming too, I think.)

Having been there for the baby shower and on the day he was born, both of these things back here in Montana, it was so hard saying goodbye to him (and his parents, who had become dear friends) just four months after he was born so they could start anew in Portugal. But it did make the reunion a few months later pretty sweet.

So now it’s time to pull myself away from my new toy for a little while and re-enter the Land of the Living. But expect the occasional pimped out blog post, now that I’ve got a few more tools. Hooray!

(Any favorite Photoshop references or sources to share?)

But I don’t care. Nothing even close has come around since. And because I just saw this and I AM PSYCHED.

Magazine hoarding be damned, this will join my old stashed away issues!

So, Domino fan? Do you also hoard magazines? Which are your favorites, or the hardest to get rid of?