days on

Day seven wrote me an exam and I wrote it one back.  An exam is certainly not a love letter, that's about the only thing I learned.

Day eight is today.  I went for a walk to the dog park and the ocean and found clippings from evergreens on people's curbs and brought them home and put them in a giant jar.  I almost stole someone's perfectly round poofball of a pomeranian and I accepted a chewed on stick as a gift from a very small girl.

day six

Day six is all about west coast blonds.

advent-ure

two-feather just challenged me to a blog advent calendar with facts about my life.  Yikes I'm not sure I can promise to keep up with the dailys (that only goes for the roger's chocolate advent calendar my delightful roommate bought me) but I can give you some news about all the small right things in my life.

So what is it, day five?

Well, after having almost everything go wrong for a few days it turns out nearly everything is going right.

1. My nails are the perfect shade of grey-lavender.  I've decided that nail polish is absolutely worth a study break.

2. After spending nearly $2500 on an apartment I don't live in (oops...) turns out I'm getting it all back!  Great.

3. Gluten-free pretzels from boys.

4. I made up and made a perfect southwestern chicken soup that I'm still happy to pull out of the freezer a week or two on.  Somehow, somewhere along the line, I learned to cook.  I am not sure when this happened but I am pleased with it.


5. I'm just surrounded with really positive relationships right now.  I like everyone around me and I'm pretty sure that every one likes me.  The best sorts of ships are relationships, jah?  Haha ew, sorry.

activities

1. I still take eggs from the carton at random to annoy a boyfriend I broke up with two years ago and have barely seen since.

2. I step on all the cracks and always have.  In case the world falls apart at the seams, maybe my footsteps will somehow hold it together at the cracks.

3. Coffee tastes better when you put the cream in the cup before you pour the coffee.  Mixing cream in after you pour isn't the same.

4. Money comes and money goes.  It's not even a real thing.  Sometimes all you can do is laugh about your life.

5. I see a practitioner of traditional chinese medicine mostly so that I can refer to 'my herbalist.'  She keeps me in tinctures that come in small glass bottles, I take them morning and night.

at your request

Once we said that everything lands perfectly and I'm asking every god I've ever met for that to be true.

I'm dreaming these days of losing everything I know and selling cable knit sweaters in a well-decorated store for the rest of time.  Read books in the afternoons, scrounge money for yoga, burn candles and time, travel for six months a year.

Meanwhile I'm skidding along a gravel road, dragging and bumping through real problems that I've never really had before.  I'm closing my eyes and forgetting and dreaming of alternate reality that doesn't speak to who I actually might be at all.  

I just want to turn off time and reality for a second and turn off feelings, too.  I never want to grow up.

careful of the vast landscape

There's some sort of certain completeness that we're all not sure we're looking for almost all of the time.  It's a half-way all-the-time type of feeling, rightfully right like slotting your puzzle self into its place.  Click your shoulders back, straighten your spine, smooth your hair, cock your head to the side.  We're ambiguous at best and probably lost if it gets any worse, marching into place and in place.

I guess what I'm saying (I never know what I'm saying) is that there's a sense that everything might make sense.  Somehow we're looking for something to be sure about and meanwhile we're just not sure what that might be.  You might say it's a beautiful wonder and a beautiful wander, too, but I think sometimes I'd prefer illumination to beauty.  Turn on the floodlights, universe.  I can't complain about the wait (it hasn't been long) but I'm getting tired of searching and getting tired of feeling like I should be searching, too.

height five

It can be shitty being a tall girl in a short girl's world.  Height isn't feminine, you can't be tiny and adorable if you're tall.  Height is associated with masculinity, something most of us feminine-identifiers shy away from, something that the boys we're into shy away from too.

Someone on the internet said once that tall girls don't get to do cute, and I think that's true.  Sure, we can be striking, imposing, ferociously beautiful, but cute?  Incongruous and impossible.

We have a lot presence, us tall girls.  It's about handling physical might with grace and strength rather than slouched shoulders and a desperate attempt to be more like our friends around us.

The creative director of J.Crew, Jenna Lyons, is an absolutely legendary figure for the rest of us fashion-y tall girls.  She's 6'5 in heels and wears what the fuck she wants.  Her dark framed glasses match mine, but her impeccable sense of style outpaces my own by far.  She's been at J.Crew for 22 years, and in many ways has made the brand what it is today.  Nymag.com sums up the J.Crew look as "nothing too tight, too short, too synthetic."  Dream of dreams.

Lyons wears striped t-shirts with gold sequined trousers and perfect fuchsia lipstick.  She pairs mens shirts - unbuttoned to the sternum - with khaki pants and manolos.  She never shies away from heels, despite being taller than many NBA players while wearing them.  She ties her hair back and wears almost no make-up.  She twists femininity into severity, twists severity into laid-back, twists laid-back into high-fashion.  I adore her.

More than just a fashion icon, though, Lyons (pronounced lions, awesome) makes it okay to be tall.  She struts instead of shrinking and doesn't overfeminize in an attempt to compensate.  She makes me feel okay about my 5'11-ness, and that is something I'm incredibly grateful for.