sick. but not in a way that is slang for cool.

well, this is happening.

if you haven't been reading this blog for a while, let me fill you in--

bedraggled me + face in a pillow= I am sick.

So frustrating!  I was so close to making it to the end of the semester without it happening.

But now I have a lovely laryngitis/cold/fever thing.

Gosh darn it.

My mom was coincidentally visiting me this weekend, though, so she took care of me.  She's the best.

And as often happens when sick, I did some perusing of the interwebz.

And I found the HIGH-larious  Catfoodbreath, the blog of a 17-pound Siamese cat.

(I know it's written by a human.  I'm ignoring that fact.)

Oh, and I'm listening to this song pretty much constantly.  It's by The National, but it was written for the video game Portal 2, so I'd never heard it before it came up on Spotify.  Apparently it plays on a radio in the game.  It's really pretty.

Oh, and these necklaces are great.

I think this one is appropriate for this post.

Alright, back to snoozing, homework I can do in bed, and wishing the kids outside my building would quiet down or get off my proverbial lawn.

(sometimes when I'm sick I get just the tiiiiiniest bit cranky.)

hope you're all having a lovely start to the week!

♥

sensitive man

Heehee... I've mentioned before that I'm into the WTF podcast, hosted by Marc Maron.  So this music video for the song 'Sensitive Man,' by Nick Lowe and featuring Marc Maron, is one of my favorite things...pretty much ever.

I can't decide which line I love more-- "Come get me-- don't leave me here--" or "...Christ."

Haaaa.

Hope you're all having an excellent weekend.

the illusionist

Tonight I finally, finally bought my own copy of The Illusionist.

It is my absolute favorite movie of all time.

Every time I watch it I'm just blown away by how beautiful it is.

"What do you want?"
"Nothing."

"Then why are you doing this?"

"To be with her."

“From the moment we enter this life we are in the flow of it. We measure it and we mock it, but we cannot defy it. We cannot even speed it up or slow it down. Or can we? Have we not each experienced the sensation that a beautiful moment seemed to pass too quickly, and wished that we could make it linger? Or felt time slow on a dull day, and wished that we could speed things up a bit?”

The love scene from The Illusionist is by far the most beautiful one in any movie, anywhere, at any time.  
There's no explicit nudity (amazingly) but you probably shouldn't watch it at work.  
Your computer might explode from the perfection of it.








I almost didn't post this because this movie is so special to me and so close to my heart that I had a moment of wanting to keep it hidden.  But it's too perfect not to share.

If you've seen The Illusionist-- what did you think of it?

♥

fill-in-the-blank friday!

via the little things we do

1. When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is if I'm at home, I wander around in search of a hug.  But not a hug where I actually hug back, one where I just sort of curl into whoever is hugging me.  It makes the transition from asleep to awake easier.  When I'm at school, I mentally calculate whether I can re-set my alarm for another few minutes of sleep.  I'm a night showerer (because let's face it, my hair is long and curly, it's going to do whatever it wants.  And I don't like blowdrying my hair, it's too noisy.) so I can usually just run a brush through it, stick some bobby pins in, and go.  And my makeup routine consists of chapstick and mascara, so not much time needed there.  So yeah, I usually reset my alarm and go back to sleep.

2. I can hardly wait for my mom to visit this weekend!  YAAAAAAAY!!!  It's going to be the best!  I haven't seen her since Easter.  It doesn't seem like that long, but I'm really close with my mom and I miss her a lot when I don't see her for a while.

3. The quickest way to my heart is humor and sweetness (I know that's two things.  whatevah.) because I love to laugh, and because sweetness seems like such a genuine thing.  You can't fake sweetness without it being really obvious.

4. A little known fact about me is I have kind of a rude sense of humor sometimes.  I love when people are witty and sophisticated and subtle in their humor, but I also enjoy a good 'that's what she said' joke every now and again.

5. The best part about my job is the wonderful people I work with.  I was actually scheduled for RA duty this Saturday when my mom and I realized that this was the last weekend we would be able to have in the city before I graduate in a few weeks, and I sent an email asking if anyone could switch with me so she could visit, and within ten minutes three people had written back to me.  They are seriously the best.  I'm not generally one for lots of group social interaction, but I could spend days on end with the other RAs.  They are the sweetest, most supportive, funniest group of people I've ever had the pleasure of joining. Thank you for making the past three years phenomenal, my lovely colleagues!

6. Something I just couldn't live without is my floor lamp and twinkly lights.  I hate fluorescent lighting so, so, so much-- the buzzing sounds, the flickering, the way it's just incredibly unflattering... so I prefer the warm glow of my other lights.  And if you ever come into my room and turn on the light-switch and I flip right out and screech to turn it off, it's nothing personal.

7. Something useful that I wish I knew how to do is fix computers.  No idea how to do that.

Tonight is going to be awesome.  I have macarons, the latest issue of Artful Blogging, my newly purchased DVD of The Illusionist, craft supplies, and Etsy orders to wrap up to send out.  Ohhh, I am excited.  This is my kind of Friday night.

♥

woodland fairy dress

My dress for my leather class is finished!

please pardon the cheesy mirror-photos...

tooled leather bodice

I cut around the motifs to create a more organic feeling along the seams, and the straps are looped through gold grommets.

how did I get the skirt so fluffy?  crinoline!

...lots of crinoline.  usually I attach it directly to the waist of the dress, but between the pure volume of fluff and the unusual waist treatment, topstitching along the motif edges, I decided to make a separate crinoline skirt for this dress.
my friend Lauren immediately seized it when I got to class and pranced around in it for a while.

This was such a fun dress to make.  It makes me feel like I should be in a woodland fairy ballet.  

Or something.

♥

don't close your eyes

Oh my gosh, you guys.  I have the most talented cousin everrrrrr.

Kaleigh just put up her first music video and it is so, so pretty.  The music, the softness of the video, it's perfect.  So check it out!  I'm so proud of her. ♥

If you're in the NYC area, Kaleigh will be playing at The Delancey on May 5th at 7 p.m.  You can get tickets here.  Yay!  Support an up-and-coming artist and hear some beautiful music.

♥

man of a thousand faces

My go-to television show to watch every semester while I am hand-stitching my hems is The Office.
In fact, I have sort of an unofficial tradition of watching every single episode by the end of the semester.
Right now I'm on season seven.  So I'm on track.
However, after eight semesters of this, I think I may have actually watched it too much.
Whenever something exasperating or bemusing happens, I find myself turning to an imaginary camera and making a Jim-face.

...Wow.  This post has gotten out of control.  I was only going to include maybe five of my favorite Jim-faces, but they are all so good.

incidentally, most of the gifs in this post are via jimhalpertfaces on tumblr.  if you do one thing today, follow them.  because there's like thirty pages of Jim-face goodness.  

THIRTY.  PAGES.

Hope you're all having a good week.  Is it seriously only Tuesday?  This week is going on forEVER.

Ha.

Alright.

I'm done now.

♥

built to last

        “…and don’t forget to bring your juke-box money!”

          The stereo blasts as I make my way through the crowd of dancing legs and hips at my eye level, gathered in the small living room of my house.  Between the music and the shouting and laughing of my family, the volume of the room is almost overwhelming.  I manage to single out one voice, singing along raucously, and battle my way to a pair of cropped black pants and tall wedge high heels.  I tug on the sleeve—my Aunt Fern looks down at me, into my chubby little face with big brown eyes and rosy cheeks.  “Heeeeeeeeey!” she shouts, as though she hasn’t seen me in months, even though we sat together for dinner earlier.  She’s wearing big dark sunglasses, her long, long white-blonde hair in a bun on top of her head, and the sleeve I’m tugging is covered in gold sequins, glimmering in the light from the lone lamp in our living room.  It’s our annual Halloween party, and I’m dressed as a seven-year-old Wednesday Addams.  The gray wool dress is buttoned up to my neck making me itchy, and in my free hand I’m clutching a headless Barbie doll—homage to Wednesday’s decapitated companion.  Aunt Fern swings my free hand and pulls me into the thick of the dancing.  Though I can’t see their faces, I know everyone—my Aunt Annie’s infectious, raucous laugh, seeming to explode from her petite frame, and my dad’s friend Pete, who has a baby doll strapped to a big orange square of foam on his head and a wooden cross in his hand (“I’m the holy Baby Cheez-Its!”).  I hug Aunt Fern around her waist, then scoot back out of the crowd.  Too close for me.  I run out onto the front porch, where my dad and my brother and my Aunt Nan are laughing.  Aunt Nan brings a rubber mask for my dad every year—this Halloween, it’s a creepy King Kong mask, which my dad is wearing with a button-down shirt and a pair of the slacks he wears when he substitute-teaches.  “Daddy!”  I demand, hurling myself into him.  He picks me up and sits me on the porch railing, but first he takes off the scary mask.  He knows I don’t like them.

          “Having fun, Jules?” he asks me, grinning.  His hair is a little wild, the brown and silver strands mussed further by taking off the mask.  I beam back and nod and keep my hand in his, feeling safe in that little haven even as our house was full of singing and stomping and shouting.  “Daddy, will you sing the song later?”  I don’t have to specify which song—at family gatherings, he always sings me “My Girl” by The Temptations.

          “Of course, as soon as we start playing,” he replies, and I feel like the most special girl in the world.  Who else’s dad would get a bunch of loud and rowdy grown-ups to play a special song just for her?  Aunt Nan laughs at something my brother says—the Romano family laugh, the staccato ‘ha-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah!” that my dad shares with his three sisters and his brother, and presumably his late brother, too, although my only strong memory of him is his sing-song calling of “Juuuuuulie, Julie, Julie!”   The air is a little chilly, and I slide down off the railing.  “I’m gonna go find Mommy!”  I push through the living room full of adults, now singing along with The Grateful Dead’s ‘Built To Last.’  All these trials soon will soon be passed…Look for something built to last…

         My dad calls after me.

“Love you, Jules!”

♥

this is an excerpt from my term project for my memoir class, a series of vignettes from my childhood.
more info can be found here, as well as another excerpt.

rainy day woman

Yesterday I went for a walk in the rainy weather.

the texture of this tree bark is so cool.

As much as I love New York on beautiful sunny days, it's just as lovely in the rain.

see the world

There's a drawer in my grandmother's house full of old photos.  I spent a lot of time this winter break looking at them.  Aren't these beach photos beautiful?  My grandmother took them in Cape Cod, at Nauset Beach, in 1987.

When I'm feeling down or confused, my first instinct is to be near a body of water.  There's something so calming about listening to waves and feeling the little kisses of sea-spray on my cheeks.  It clears my mind and puts things in perspective.  The weather is moody today and so am I... I'm going to put on my rain boots and head down to the park by the river to clear my head.

'See the World,' by Gomez, is one of my favorite songs.  The lyrics are simple and honest and they make sense to me.

Ok.  Time to go for a walk.
The world is puddle-wonderful.

♥