Summer aesthetics
Loose tanks, braids, high top sneaks
May 2013
4 posts
yesterday marked two years since he told me he found someone new. it would have slipped by me, but there are things about this time of year (the gradual humidity increase, lilacs, summer travel plans, dc greek fest), that deliver the reminder.
more importantly, i realized a short time ago that it isn’t a thing that bothers me anymore. the friends i’ve made and incredible things that have happened since then make me feel like a giant idiot to have allowed myself to hurt that much.
Monday
you make a playful and rhetorical suggestion via text message that he buy you a plane ticket, and an hour later a flight confirmation is in your inbox.
Play
April 2013
2 posts
What 4 Decades of Marriage Taught a Grateful Husband →
theatlantic.com
Champion your spouse’s evolution. Sometimes that involves patience and sacrifice, two parts of the partnership muscle group.
Beautiful.
March 2013
3 posts
“g’mornin’, pretty”
tonight on the bus, a dad and his three kids (ages (appx) 4, 6 and 8) hopped on, dad holding a big pizza box. the youngest boy was wearing blue superga sneakers and the 8-year-old girl was using her calculator like a phone. couldn’t stop smiling at their goofy sayings.
kids require so much damn attention and energy, it’s unreal. i just can’t even imagine having any of my own. weird. i’m sure that’ll pass, though.
“I just don’t think I need to take the time to eat fish twice a week… when I can just take Lipitor.”
—my 34-year-old boss
February 2013
8 posts
- me: percival. what an odd name.
- dino: also herbert. and roderick. and woodrowe.
Aquarius: This week will be full of thaws, full of soft things, full of an almost unbearable sweetness, full of moments so bright and so quiet that you can’t even move from all the happiness you feel. Try not to hold onto it inside you or predict when it’ll all fly away—just let this sweet hang in the air, let it roll over you, let it live in your body. Do the chores and make the phone calls you’ve been avoiding, then eat ice cream with your lunch. Take the long way home from work. Call your mom, just to see how she’s doing.
Love it.
“Creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.
Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities… ”
my procrastination has reached the point where i’m making a list of awesome things i can do once i’m done writing this essay.
You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.
-Dear Sugar #64. Forgiveness.
January 2013
3 posts
Funnest trip I’ve taken in years. Will spend the next 24 hours in and out of the sky and airports daydreaming and reflecting.
“Overcoming fear is about practice—trying something repetitively until I can see how to anticipate and adjust to a situation.
Strong people are the ones who often venture beyond their comfort zones, so they can expand it by overcoming fear in many different areas.” —
Strong people are the ones who often venture beyond their comfort zones, so they can expand it by overcoming fear in many different areas.” —
December 2012
5 posts
2013
Mindfulness, productivity, honesty
break highlights
Driving a vehicle + Spotify, wine, snow, text messages.
“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
—Joan Didion
-“do you get stressed a lot?”
-“no, actually. but i’m not sure how i feel about that. because i think struggle is good.”
-“well - i’ll stress you out”
November 2012
3 posts
I ran to the end of the beach and took my headphones out, feet killing me, and the people were gone — I left them all behind at the busy pier. What a weird feeling.
“[It was] the kind of shot which was impossible to take before this camera was there.”
-Iwan Baan, on his incredible capture for New York Magazine. “It was more difficult to rent a car than a helicopter in New York the day after Sandy.”
October 2012
3 posts
“…the artist has become the exemplary worker in conditions of late capitalism. The artist has become the exemplary worker and the worker is meant to be an artist, so to be a worker it’s not enough to just turn up at work and do your job: you have to be creative, you have to be innovative, you have to be flexible, you have to be constantly available. So, if you like, the new model of the worker is a model drawn from the artist, and that means that you can turn up at work wearing your Ramones t-shirt or listening to Radiohead on your iPod and you don’t have to shave or anything and you can be completely bohemian and say that you hate capitalism or whatever, but you’re still a good worker, and in fact you’re the best worker. There’s a sense in which the artist has become the paradigm of work and I want to think about that a little bit to try and recover some discourses around work. There’s a rich history of discourse around work, which we need to go back to.”
—miguel a hernández-navarro interviews simon critchley, manifesta journal 12
“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”
—A. Bartlett Giamatti, on baseball.
September 2012
3 posts
Dogfish Dash Weekend. Saw the ocean during the harvest moon, ran 3.1 miles, was rewarded with Dogfish Head Shelter Ale + friends, swam in the ocean (under the sun this time), napped in the car, and came back to start the workweek…
Unimpressed with my time, but everything that actually mattered was so awesome.
Able Parris: Focus Means Ignoring →
blog.ableparris.com
From crazy to sad to laugh-out-loud hilarious, Twitter is available for non-stop distraction. And as a maker, it really is that: a distraction.
I’ve been thinking lately about attention and how much of it I have to offer, and as it turns out, it’s not much. And the more things I try to give attention to the less attention I have to give.
…
True character comes when you give focus to the things that are difficult but must be done. This means you have to ignore everything else, and know that you will be better because of it.
I love this, but I also disagree. Work & play // focus & distraction should be in moderation.
Giving in to distractions can lead to serendipitous discovery, like a job posting or a poem I read earlier today that someone shared or the link to this very blog.
August 2012
4 posts
- Brian: i am not sure if i am experiencing reality about 75% of the time
- Brian: in case you were wondering
Step 238: Be good to your friends when they are heartbroken
This post makes me realize a) the anguish I felt about Ian that just wouldn’t go away no matter how hard I tried, is now so much less poignant (15 months later). It wasn’t any one specific thing. Mostly it’s just due to time.
And b) i have wonderful friends who did a lot of these kinds of things for me.
I don’t know if it has anything to do with moving season or not, but now it seems to be breakup season. The worst season.
When I went through my own Seminal Mid-20s Breakup With the Person That You Thought You Were Going To Marry But Then Didn’t (SM20sBWTPTYTYWGTMBTD), there were only two things that made me feel … not better, exactly, but not quite as much the ‘I can feel the sadness everywhere, even in my lungs, even in my wrists, even in my armpits’ feeling:
1. Frozen raspberries
2. My friendsYou can’t take the boundless, multifaceted sorrow of a breakup away from someone. That is like mopping up a flood with paper towels. But you can be there, to remind them that you love the shit out of them and that things will not always be like this and maybe sometimes distract them. Some effective techniques, after the jump.
Seeing three of my favorite bands in the span of six days: wonderful.
#1 Dismemberment Plan IN TWO DAYS. Remember how they broke up years ago?!
July 2012
6 posts
Searching for beautiful photos of Belize on the internet shouldn’t even qualify as a search. It’s like you just type in the name and they appear. So many of them.
It’s the type of place where the water is literally that color, like Grenada. No filters.
November? Thinkin’ so…
I did not actually make peace with the experience until I realized that I would never totally move past it. It is a part of me and it always will be. It has changed me.
All metro stations have mobile reception now, allowing me to read these kinds of Quora threads without thinking too hard about why. This one made me tear up on the train.
- Dino: i'd write a book if i wasn't so lazy. instead, i just add a notch to my desk for every person i made cry.
Today's Rush Hour Green Line
I’m slightly amazed I even made it home tonight, as this whole debacle broke out while I was on a green line train, northbound for Columbia Heights.
Metro makes me chuckle the same way the perpetual incompetence at my office makes me chuckle. Incredulity. When can I move to a place where things are normal?
A piece of paper falls off the subwoofer due to bass from Frozen Planet and at once, the entire crowd of 11 debate hausers erupts into applause.
June 2012
7 posts
“Some people are just so beautiful, and it’s natural. You’re like that.”
- Dino: i suddenly imagined a fake conversation between us
- Dino: me: alison, you know what's my favorite part about you? you: what? me: everything! you: you know what's my most annoying part about you? me: what? you: everything!
I love weekend.
back to listening to real estate, making my goals less fuzzy, recovering from sunday morning difficulty, and not sleeping when i should be. i will never go to bed before 1am.
Why can’t 24 hours go by without me thinking about him? As though I’m seeking my daily dose of sadness. An addiction.
