thought

This is just a quick little post, I'm working on another one for later and I have another class soon.  But I thought this quote from Plato was too good not to share.  There's no way to know what's going on in someone else's life.  Be careful with each other.

p.s., if you could vote for Julianne and Jude to win a honeymoon, that would be wonderful!  Read about them in this post, or just go vote for them here!  Thank you so much to everyone who's already voted for them, they're closing in on the lead!  Yay!

1.

☼ here comes the sun ☼

Happy slightly belated birthday, George Harrison.

The weather today was beautiful-- mild and breezy and warm enough to forgo a scarf, even for a long walk, and to open the window in my room.  For the past few days, I've been really happy.  Not just happy as in 'not very sad,' which is what I'm usually more than willing to settle for this time of year, but really, genuinely happy.  There was even some giggling involved.  I went for a long walk in the West Village this morning, I'm freshly showered, and my room is clean and  full of that lovely yellow-pink light of late afternoon.  And tonight, I'm going to revel in the joy of being bookish by listening to audiobooks and doing homework at my newly cleared-off desk.

Today has been an excellent, excellent day.

1.

fill-in-the-blank friday ♥

via the little things we do

1.   I am currently obsessed with: this globe, from Uncommon Goods.

It's so lovely, and combines two of my favorite things-- antique academic ephemera, and butterflies.  Unfortunately, it's also four hundred dollars.  So I'm going to keep an eye out for vintage globes, because I bet I could make this.

2.  Today I am ecstatic because: I thought a project I've been working on was due next week, but it's not due until the week after!  I'm going to continue on schedule as though it was due next week, to leave room for any little changes, but it's going really well and I'm thrilled with how it's looking.  It's probably the biggest project of this semester, so the fact that I'm not going to have to pull a single all-nighter is kind of incredible.

3.  The age I am is 20 and the age I feel is usually 20.  I think I'm in a growing-up phase, and it feels really good.  This is a hard question to answer, actually, because I've never experienced being 20 from the perspective of anyone else.  I feel better than I did this time last year, because I'm in a much more even mental state.  Not nearly so many ups and downs.  But I don't know if that necessarily means I feel older.

4.  My favorite place is: .....oh wow.  So many possibilities.  I love being anywhere near the water, and I start to feel restless if I don't at least go walk by the river every few weeks, but I love being in the forest, too.  Then again, I could spend days and days at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  And my weekends wouldn't be the same without trips to the West Village.  Cape May, New Jersey, is one of my favorite places, too, because it's lovely and Victorian and it's where I started feeling independent, going for walks by myself and waking up early in the morning to bring my sketchbook to the beach.

5.  Something I have been procrastinating is: ....okay, I know this sounds unbelievable, but I'm not actually procrastinating about anything at the moment.  I've come to terms with the fact that I absolutely can't function on less than six hours of sleep, so procrastinating is kind of out of the question.

6.  The last thing I purchased was: a presentation board, marker paper, and a .08mm Micron pen, from Fashion Design Books.

7. The thing I love most about my home is: different depending on whether I'm at school or not.  When I'm at school, my favorite thing about my room is how cozy it feels when I'm reading in bed with only my Christmas lights on, and the next morning, when the sun is streaming in, and my duvet looks all fluffy and soft.  When I'm actually at home, my favorite thing is getting to be with my family, especially when we watch movies at night.  The house always smells good because my parents cook a lot of delicious things, and in the summer it feels all fresh and breezy.  ...Okay, and I love getting to cuddle my cat, now that she's decided she's the sort of cat who cuddles.

♥♥♥

In case you missed it earlier today, I posted about my friend Julianne and her fiancè, Jude, who are in a contest to win a honeymoon trip!  Read about them here or just go vote for them!  They're only 20 votes out of first place!

♥♥♥

♥in the name of love♥

Hi everyone!  So, how excited are you that it's the weekend?  Even though it was a four-day week for a lot of us, with the day off for Presidents' Day here in the U.S., those four days seemed to drag on forever.

Remember how I mentioned my worn-but-never-giving-it-up t-shirt, from the girls in my fife and drum corps growing up?  Well, one of those lovely ladies is getting married.  (Married!   How is that even possible, weren't we fifteen, like, five minutes ago?) Julianne is one of the sweetest, smartest, funniest people I've ever met, and I'm so happy for her, and for her fiancé, Jude.

Two of their gorgeous engagement photos

Julianne and Jude are in a contest to win a honeymoon, and they need as many votes as possible to win!  It's a contest for the best engagement story, and theirs is really spectacular.  It would be really fantastic if you could vote for them!  Seriously, it's the cutest video ever, ever, ever.  Hint:  It includes choreography, silly string, and newspapers.  Watch their video and vote here! All you have to do is click 'Vote For This Entry,' then log into Facebook (and watch the video, of course, because it is just too good to miss!  And don't worry, you won't get any Facebook spam from logging in to vote.).

I can't think of two more deserving people, and your votes would mean so much.

♥VOTE HERE!♥

and check out Julianne's blog, where she's sharing her journey to having a handmade wedding!

 

madam librarian

I love, love, love to read.  Unfortunately, when I'm at school, I don't have much time to do it.  I've listened to audiobooks for years, but a lot of them are on cassette tapes, and I don't have any way to play them in my dorm room.  Enter the New York Public Library website.  With just a library card, you can download audiobooks for three weeks at a time from their collection of thousands of titles.  It's a fantastic service.  You can even transfer the audiobooks to your ipod and listen to them while you're away from your computer.  The only downside is that not all of the audiobooks can be played on Macs.  There's a pretty big selection of MP3 books, and those work perfectly on Mac or PC, but the bulk of the collection is in WMA format, which plays on PCs.  This isn't a problem if you have a lovely and helpful friend with a PC, but public computers generally won't download the required software. I'm about to start re-listening to one of my favorite books.

Very adult choice, I know.

The NYPL website has lots of other services, too, like downloadable eBooks and music.  They also have a service called Freegal Music, which lets anyone with an NYPL library card download three songs per week from the Sony catalog for free.  It's definitely a site worth visiting, especially if you're short on time and can't make it to a physical branch of the library.

♥happy listening!♥

treehouse

 

essential summer song

under pressure

So we have a massive project coming due in about two weeks, everyone in my semester.  And I'm pretty sure we're all going crazy working on it.  More so than usual, I mean.  This is the first, last, and only time I'll be posting something by Queen (no offense, just not my taste generally, though I do love myself some David Bowie), but nothing could be more fitting at the moment.

lait blanc

Sara Naim took these beautiful photos of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata vibrating through milk.  How absolutely lovely.

♥

 

close

It’s good to feel you are close to me in the night, love,
invisible in your sleep, intently nocturnal,
while I untangle my worries
as if they were twisted nets.

Withdrawn, your heart sails through dream,
but your body, relinquished so, breathes
seeking me without seeing me perfecting my dream
like a plant that seeds itself in the dark.

Rising, you will be that other, alive in the dawn,
but from the frontiers lost in the night,
from the presence and the absence where we meet ourselves,

something remains, drawing us into the light of life
as if the sign of the shadows had sealed
its secret creatures with flame.

--Pablo Neruda

photo

respite

The weather yesterday was beyond lovely.  It was warm and sunny, and as soon as I got out of classes for the day, I went over to the High Line.  The sun was setting by the time I got there.

Today, it's back to being cold and gray.  But the past two days were a much-needed reminder that winter is always followed by spring.

♥

fill-in-the-blank friday ♥

via the little things we do

1.   I am: so very excited for this four-day weekend!  Saturday and Sunday, of course, and then we have Monday off for Presidents' Day, and I have Tuesdays off every week.  Yay!

2.  The bravest thing I've ever done was: crying on every haunted hayride I've ever been on.  Ha, just kidding.  I mean, not kidding about the hayrides, but kidding about that being brave.  Obviously.  I'm not that brave, actually.  Nothing comes to mind.  I would not be a Gryffindor.

3.  I feel prettiest when : I wake up on a sunny Saturday morning, preferably in an oversized button-down shirt and wooly socks, in fresh sheets and having showered the night before so my hair is in slightly wild, bouncy curls.  Mmmm!  Such a good start to a weekend.

4.  Something that keeps me awake at night is: my own thoughts... my days are generally really, really busy, so when I'm trying to go to sleep, it's hard to turn off my brain.  (Is it just me, or does the word 'brain' look particularly gross in print?  Eww...)  I actually have a ticking clock in my room just to have something to focus on while I'm trying to fall asleep.    ...Also, WordMole.  It's a game I recently discovered on my phone and it's a little addictive.  But only on non-school nights, I promise.

5.  My favorite meal in the entire world is: Oh my gosh.  That is a tough question.  Maybe the fantastic sea-food and pasta dinner my dad makes for New Years, it's calamari and scallops and fish and it is incredibly delicious.

6.  The way to my heart is: through an impressive vocabulary, optimism, a sense of humor,  sincerity, and open-mindedness.

7. I would like to: get the majority of a massive school project finished this weekend.  It's one that I'm really excited about, but with all my other classes, I haven't had as much time to devote to it this week as I would have liked.

 

♥yay, it's the weekend!♥

 

perpetuum mobile

This is a very strange time of year... days drag on and on, but then suddenly whole weeks have disappeared while I was looking away.

perpetuum mobile, penguin cafè orchestra

irresistibly sweet!

I just received my first blog award!  I'm so excited!

The Irresistibly Sweet Blog Award was given to me by Denise from A Room To Write.  I couldn't be more flattered, thank you so much, Denise!  The instructions for this award are to write four of your guilty pleasures, then pick six irresistibly sweet blogs to send this award to.  So...

1.  Tea-time.  When I'm having tea, I don't do any schoolwork at all.  Instead, I catch up on blogs and magazines, peruse Etsy and Pinterest, or read.  It's so calming and then I'm more productive when I get back to my schoolwork.

2.  America's Next Top Model.  Oh, reality television... so ridiculous, but sometimes I'm just in the mood for mindless entertainment.

3.  House Hunters International.  I find it really inspiring, seeing all the different styles of houses and what different people are looking for in a future home.  It's also lovely to look at the scenery, especially now, when it's so chilly here in New York.

4.  Yoga videos on Netflix.  This isn't something I really have time to do, but I do it anyway.  I've finally come to terms with the fact that I will never have an evening where there is absolutely nothing I should be doing, and while 45 minutes probably won't make that much of a difference in how much I get done, taking 45 minutes to do yoga in my room makes a major difference in my mood.

And now, here are the six blogs I'm passing this award along to!

1.  The Meaning of Bryce

2. Lindsay at Little Garden

3. Mallory Makes Things

4. Betsey at Una Bella Vita

5. The Pastry Affair

6. First Milk

♥hope you all enjoy these blogs as much as I do ♥

14th february

"When you make love to a woman, you get revenge for all the things that defeated you in life."

--Elegy

 

That quote is one of my favorites.  Something about the mix of fearlessness and vulnerability.

heeheehee...

You know how sometimes you start giggling about something at an incredibly inopportune moment, but you can't help it?  I was in my Architecture of New York class (how cool is it that my school offers that as a class?  Way cool.) and my professor showed us this photograph of the Wedgewood Pottery factory (Not in New York.  Not the point.).  He pointed to the river next to the factory and asked, "And what is this?"  And everyone answered, "A river."  He answered, "Yes, but it's also....?"  There was a pause while we all tried to figure out what crucial component we were missing.

And then someone suggested, "A...moat?"

Cue inopportune giggling by me.  Oops.

just like in the movies

Since it's almost Valentine's Day, here are five of my favorite movies about love.

Almost Famous.  Incidentally, that's my aunt's shirt that Russell's wearing.  One less degree of separation from   Billy Crudup.

Love Songs (Les Chansons D'amour)

Elegy.  This movie is phenomenal, I can't recommend it highly enough.

Say Anything. Oh, John Cusack.  Whatababe.

Amelie (Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain). Of course.

♥

just plain cute

I have a weakness for photos of cute animals.  I also have a weakness for reading blogs.  So, blogs that actually deliver photos of cute animals right to my screen?  Love. Here are two of my favorites.

The Daily Otter, which posts exactly what you would expect it to:  pictures of otters, every day.  lookatthatcutelittlefaceiwantit!!!!!!!

Dreamcats, which posts lots of pretty photos of adorable cats like this little guy.

♥

 

fill-in-the-blank friday ♥

via The Little Things We Do

1.   The TV show/website that I watch/read that I would be embarrassed to tell anyone about is: the Style Rookie Blog, by now-famous blogger Tavi Gevinson.  I know a lot of people at my college think that she's obnoxious and/or a joke, but I think she's pretty cool.  As someone who was interested in fashion when I was 14 (which was almost 7 years ago?!  How did that happen?), if she's found a way to express her opinions and creativity, good for her.  And one can hardly fault the girl for becoming well-known, very few people write a blog with the hope that nobody reads it.  I'm not saying that anyone should be accepting her opinions as fact, of course, but I don't think there's anything wrong with her, or any number of other fashion bloggers, expressing their thoughts.  It seems that a lot of people take issue with bloggers for taking part in losing the 'exclusivity of fashion,' which comes off as unnecessarily elitist to me.  But that's for another post.

2.  An item of clothing that is worn and torn but that I love far to much to throw away is: my Onicamay tie-dyed t-shirt with my name on it, from at least five years ago, made by some of the girls in the fife and drum corps I was in growing up.  It was an incredibly close-knit group, and even though we've all gone our separate ways into the worlds of school and life, I know those memories are ones that I'll always keep close.

3.  My grocery store impulse buy is: yummy-looking fruit.  Particular moods require particular apples, and woe is me if I'm in a Braeburn mood but I only have Granny Smiths.  Berries, too, especially strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries.

4.  Something I do at work to pass time that I wouldn't want my co-workers to know about is: I don't have much of an answer for this one, because I work as an RA at my school, so there's not a lot of time-wasting opportunities.  But let's face it, I'd probably cruise around on Pinterest and Etsy and Flickr.

5.  One thing in my life that I could give up, but never will is: having routines.  They're so grounding and comforting.  Tea and journaling in the morning and before bed, grocery shopping on Saturday mornings, checking Google Reader at lunch... I love being able to look forward to the pleasing familiarity of these things.

6.  A little indulgence that I have is: occasionally bopping around my room to songs by Katy Perry and the songs from Glee.

7. The junk drawer/area in my house is: a little red and white matryoshka-doll-printed box that ties with a red bow.  It's full of little stickers and charms and indecipherable notes to myself that I'm convinced I'll understand someday.

♥

sugar-pop

I can't stop listening to this song!  It's fantastic.  The Pipettes have been one of my favorite bands for years (I listened to them non-stop when I was working on my college admissions portfolio, and now I'm in my third year), and this song is from their most recent album, Earth vs. The Pipettes.

I do so love a song with choreography.

I'll be doing a Fill-In-The-Blank Friday post later this evening, but first up is a nap.  It's been a fantastic week, but an exhausting one.

Happy weekend, lovelies!  ♥

spring please?

I really, really like snow.  But by February, I'm ready for some sunshine, especially here in the city, where the buildings block watery winter sunlight.  Springtime, please come back to Manhattan soon!

1.2.3.4

 

my idea of a super bowl post

I don't know the first thing about sports, especially football.  But if, for some strange reason, I ever have a super bowl party, I will absolutely make these adorable little sandwiches for it.  Which will thrill everyone who is trying to watch football while I keep distracting them with cute little sandwiches, I'm sure.

sandwich cutters and stamps from here

edit:  These are now on their way to me.  I swear, I don't know how it happened.  I'll just think of them as my reward for not buying anything at Anthropologie yesterday despite lots of post-holiday sales (hidden talent:  purchase rationalization and justification!).

starry night

as per usual, some mood music before we get any further...



I learned of a few years ago, and then forgot about until yesterday, the part of the NASA website that posts astronomy photos every day.  Here are a few of my favorites.

There are hundreds more of these beautiful photos here.

happy birthday dad!

It's my Dad's birthday today!  He's the best best best Dad ever.

Love you Dad!

photo credits will be added later in the week

fill-in-the-blank friday

via the little things we do

some music to go with this week's questions:

(I know, I'm a little obsessed.  But it goes with the theme, how could I resist?)

1.   If I could only read one magazine publication for the rest of eternity, I would choose: Somerset Life.  It's the closest magazine to what I imagine my brain looking like.

2.   If I were to run my own magazine it would be about making crafty things, with some dreamy photography and some fashion articles and poetry.  And lots of flowers.  And yarn.  And music, and movies.

3.  I buy my magazines (at the grocery check stand or via subscription) mostly at Borders or one of the magazine stores on 23rd street.  I subscribe to Lucky, but everything else, I like to be able to choose which issues I buy.

4.  I prefer my magazines (in print or online) in print!  I like to read magazines in bed with only my Christmas lights on, and having my laptop there would mess up the ambiance.  And I get too distracted online, clicking around to links and stuff.  And online magazines don't make the same satisfying page-turning sound as printed ones.

5.  The number of magazines I buy each month is less than it used to be, but it varies by the month.  Probably three or four, unless a lot of magazines happen to run things that I like at the same time.

6. My favorite magazine genre is (lifestyle, gossip, home, etc...) art and photography magazines.  They're so inspiring.  I like fashion magazines, too, but since so much of my time is already full of fashion-related things for school, I like to have a break from it sometimes.

7. The magazines I read regularly are Lucky, Elle, Vogue, Artful Blogging, Somerset Life, Martha Stewart Living, Interweave Crochet, and Threads.

♥Yay, first weekend of the new semester! ♥

belle lune

This song is from Fraggle Rock, but I still think it's so pretty.

 

♥

 

mantra

I'm going to try really hard this semester not to do so much irrational worrying.  Instead, I am going to do my best on everything I do, and then put some trust in this thought: