Sunday, January 23, 2011

ish


i'm moving on friday and i'm (thinking about) packing, but it's hard to dismantle all of the lovely areas in my bedroom. le sigh. i'm going to miss this room. it has been one of my favorites that i've lived in. especially with the morning sunlight.

richard and beatrice helped me paint my new apartment tonight. a wall of peach in my bedroom and light gray in my living room. i am beyond excited to move in and decorate my new place. but i've only visited in the evening, so i'm not certain on the sunlight situation.

Friday, January 21, 2011

bette davis

a night of beautiful snowfall that we spent telling old stories to boys who may/not think they are (even half as) funny as we do.




moving a bathtub down the stairs

sharing the wealth of my sleeping-bag-coat


cash money and diamonds



Thursday, January 20, 2011

miss america

how did it feel to win the crown?

britt + teresa scanlan + me
sweet as pie and only seventeen

to be miss america must be one of the coolest feelings in the world.

moving

save for the packing, i love moving. i love redecorating, reorganizing and just the feeling of being in a new space. so lucky for me, i'm moving next week! to the east village, ten blocks away from where i am now in the lower east side. i absolutely can not wait. the east village is home to my favorite garden and pomme frites. i can't believe it has already been two years since emily and i moved to nyc! we've lived together since junior year of college and now we are both moving to places of our own.

excusez-moi for not writing as much. my lack of posting has been due to apartment hunting, signing my lease and dreaming of how i am going to decorate. but get ready for the tons of photos and writings to come!

Thursday, January 13, 2011

truth and beauty

i have said this over and over again. but, i am just wild over pale shades of carnations.



Sunday, January 09, 2011

gwendolyn

she asked if she could sit next to me. my mouth filled with beef jerky, i nodded and kept reading from my kindle. within the half hour, she told me she was nervous about traveling alone. even though her mother took her to the train station in connecticut and her father was picking her up in vermont. i said that i would make sure she was fine and to not worry about the trip.

she was delighted when i told her my name, saying we both had names of celebrities "sorta." she said she was going to wear a fancy dress and ask justin bieber's publicist if he would take her to her 8th grade dance in may. it doesn't hurt to ask. she normally shops at hot topic but she is wearing american eagle today. most girls wear abercrombie but she doesn't like the smell of the store. she went to her first concert last month with her friend. they saw ke$ha. she taught herself guitar and has her own youtube channel. she loves lip gloss. she got a cell phone for her 14th birthday, but her mother took it away after a few months after she used too many minutes. she doesn't really miss it. she described the problems she was having with her friends. her friends told her she was annoying and were constantly stabbing her in the back. she wanted to give them gifts and write letters to win them back. when i told her that her friends sounded annoying, she defended them. her older sister used to stand up for her, but she is now in high school. she also has a six-month old brother who is a little flirt. she told me that girls physically fight with each other all the time at her (middle) school. she dated a boy for two months and he broke up with her on her facebook wall. her general motto is that "things could always be worse." she is going to try out for the talent show this year and go out for cheerleading in grade 9. she tapped me on the shoulder to ask if i was okay when i was quietly listening to my ipod. she tapped me on the shoulder to show me pictures of her old haircut. she got her nose pierced this summer in burlington. she reads seventeen like it's the bible. she wants to go to cosmetology school or be a singer. she said to remember her because she will be famous one day, repeating and spelling out the letters of her last name.

i wasn't expecting a seat-mate like gwendolyn and i'm still not sure how i feel about her. i was planning to teach myself to crochet and i had great book for the 8-hour train ride up to burlington. at first i felt lucky to sit with her. she was 14 and it's been a while since i've had a conversation with someone that young. a different point of view. despite being tiger beat incarnate (which she preferred over the seventeen she was reading), she was very levelheaded. she was introspective and at many points, she reminded me of myself at that age. giving her advice felt especially rewarding, though i'm not sure how much she actually considered any of it. after a while, i was trying to keep my interactions with her as short as possible (like i said, i had a great book), but she didn't quite take the hint. un/relatable.

after our (many, many) hours together, she hugged me and said how great it was to meet me. and it was great to meet her. or interesting, rather. i realized that it has only been ten years since i was her age and my, how things change! even to think of the past five, four, three years.

i bought a new diary today. i hadn't completely filled up the last volume, but the timing for a new book felt right. i had the last one since june. wild amounts of life has happened since and it just seemed like i needed a fresh start. blank pages, life cycles.

Wednesday, January 05, 2011

shopping and boys

  • i wonder if every vintage-clothing shopper has the same duffle-bag-under-the-bed of ill-fitted blouses, sack dresses and billowy wonder-frocks from the 70s that we all promised ourselves we'd get tailored. annie and i went to one of the best vintage stores in burlington and i tried on the most fabulous yellow gown that was straight out of the brady bunch costume closet. when they were performing! or is that just in the 90s movie? anyway, marcia would have worn it. that's how stunning it was. and even though the zipper was broken and it was too large, it was perfection and i am so glad i didn't get it. i've been down that road too many times.
  • for my trip to vermont, i traded in my proper jacket for my mother's floor length coat/sleeping bag. and now, either looking slightly homeless or fabulous (depending on my mindset), i have been staying cozy all around the city. yesterday morning as i got on the bus, i decided to sit in between two other people when i realized that my coat takes up an insane amount of room. i apologized to the woman next to me and we talked about how wonderful it is to have a coat like mine. and then her friend got on the bus at the next stop and they talked the rest of the way about being kind and the importance of not getting too angry at others when they don't behave as they should/as you'd like. they were talking so sweetly and i really felt lucky to be able to listen to their conversation. a little guidance, perhaps? anyway, when the woman next to me left, she wished me a very happy new year and for a good day and she was just so pleasant that it is now my message to you to treat others the way you want to be treated! okay? yes.
  • on a whim, i picked up a scratch lottery ticket with my bottle of water from the bodega below beatrice's apartment on monday night. and then i won twenty dollars!
  • what would you do if you suddenly won a million-billion?
  • redistribute.
  • i can't remember when the last time i made a new year's resolution was. i (sort of) make resolutions on my birthday, but never for a new calendar year. but then! i was walking down the street last night and came across a workshop poster that read "RESOLUTION: START WRITING." and it's true, i really do need to. aside from this blog and my job at the magazine, i also keep a diary and work on a few other writing projects that i feel i've more/less neglected in the past few weeks. i partially blame this on the weather since most of my weekends in warmer temps are spent in frolicking in gardens and being incredibly inspired to create. but really, i just need to buck up.
  • here it is. january. our lease is up and i'm back apartment searching. and it's lovely and peculiar to read entries like this or this and especially this. i am very thankful that i've kept this blog for so long, tracking my life in manhattan. ever-evolving.
  • and i really think i will keep the promise to myself that i will START WRITING more than i have been. on charmly and otherwise. because it would be really nice to see in the future what i was like when i was a kid.

Monday, January 03, 2011

le cohen

annie moved back to burlington a few months ago and this week was the first time i was able to visit her.

annie has one of the truest-to-self decorating styles of anyone i know and i lovelovelove her for it. if i had never seen it before, and you took me through one hundred apartments to guess which one was annalise cohen's, (without a doubt) i'd guess correctly.



what a wildly crazy/lazy trip to my favorite place in the world! it felt good to get a little fresh air.

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