026.

Yesterday I stopped by the Paper Garden, an adorable shop that sells paper, cards, notebooks and those gorgeous paper cutout chandeliers. Well, used to sell. Apparently they're going out of business, because the top floor was completely empty and everything on the bottom floor was 60% off.

Sad as that may be, I used the opportunity to buy myself some notebooks (and a card for my mother's 50th birthday). One is a tall skinny 2009 planner, with a magnetic clasp and a cover that's patterned after vintage silk jacquard. I've never been one for planners, but this is one I would work on using, just because it's so pretty.

The other is my very first Moleskine. I am dorkily excited about it. Usually when I think about buying one the pricetag turns me away, but this was too good to pass up. I am now Molskine'd up and ready to do some serious writing.

025.

In honor of my 25th post...no, not really. I think it's rad that I made it to 25 without taking a major hiatus and getting bored. Perhaps that's because I refuse to nail down this blog to one topic; tried that once and it didn't work very well.

But without further ado, I've decided to start posting outfits. What I wore today. Because as I read my blogroll, bloggers like Queen Michelle and The Clothes Horse have common threads that run through their clothing. Style, I think it's called. I have yet to discover what mine is, and I think I'll have an easier time of it if I have material to analyze. Which means outfit photos. And I'll be presumptuous enough to put them on the intertubes.



Dress & Belt: stolen from my mom.
Shirt: Forever 21.
Necklace: Nordstrom.
Shoes: Star Ling via Nordstrom.

024.

You know it's a slow day at work when these kinds of thing are twice as funny than they need to be.

Coworker on the phone: I had a tickler in my system to call you...
Reply: Absolutely. I've been thinking about you too.

Other coworker and I: (explode into laughter.)

023.

When I first decided to try the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, I didn't think I could do it. And truly, the first week was really hard--I was hungry and cranky and was never really satisfied. But as time progressed, I got used to eating veggies instead of bread and nuts & honey instead of chocolate. It was easy avoiding pasta and rice--I never much liked them anyway--but the craving for cupcakes or a thick piece of crusty bread spread with butter, those consumed many an evening.

My allotted 30 days expired on Friday. My first swallow as a free eater was a McDonald's milkshake. Yes, it's true. Unfortunately. And the weekend was filled with cake and hamburgers and Grandma's cookies. My eating habits weren't the way I had planned my reintroduction to "normal food," but they worked. I was never so happy for a breakfast comprising mainly of cantaloupe in my life.

While I don't remember a point in the last month where I said to myself "Egads, self, you're feeling rather fit today!", after a weekend of ingesting crap, I could feel it. Today I ate back with the diet (and had cashews with lunch--I have discovered that I can eat nuts now, and it's a beautiful thing) and it's like the universe has realigned. Well, my universe, at least.

This weekend I'm going to make myself bread with whole grain flour and see how that goes. Bread is the one thing I really miss.

022.

Why leggings and I will never be BFF: cold ankles.

021.

I made myself go to church today, to the closest church I could think of that isn't the cool-kids Lutheran church down the hill, which is a church that is really heavy on the modern evangelism and love but light on the heavy theology and meaningful music. So it really isn't my style. The sermons are usually pretty relevant, though.

Anyway, I have a point. At one point in the sermon, the pastor made was talking about an Old Testament king, and said that we all need to be kings in our own lives. As in, we need to be like Josiah, and also take control over our environments to the extent we can. This immediately rubbed me the wrong way, because the pastor is the type of man that I would expect preaching a sermon about having to give over the kingship of our own lives to God because we should give all control over to Him*. And this, directly from the Stphenie Meyer school of world building**, is why I have a problem with so many modern churches. Because in their quest to dumb down messages for the masses, they reach for the easiest metaphor/analogy possible without thinking about how it fits into the grand scheme of things. If you're going to use a king metaphor for more than one concept, at least qualify it, so people don't get confused as to whether you're talking about selfishness or authority.

* The "You should let God drive the car and just sit in the passenger seat" school of Christianity is inane. As a Christian, you shouldn't be that passive. You are the one living your life, not God. God has set up reality, God gave you your journey, God will help you, but you have to live your own life. Therefore, God is the navigator, telling you where it would be helpful to turn, but it is your job to take the wheel and turn the car.

** See the ever-wonderful condensed version here at Fandom Wank if you're confused. Basically, Smeyer contradicts herself in the Twilightverse and obviously hasn't thought about it very much. I think it goes something like "Oh, I didn't plan for that did I? Well, I'll just slip it in anyway, no one's bound to notice. It's just a tiny detail, those don't matter."

020.

Sometimes I get like this, and I hate it. Work all day, come home excited but only watch tv. Don't cook, don't clean, don't create, just sit. It's repugnant.

019.

I caved and bought a fashion magazine today, Marie Claire, even though I told myself I would stop. It's another one with Maggie Gyllenhaal on the cover.

I've been trying to cut my consumption of fashion magazines ever since Elle pissed me off a couple months ago. It was the "body" issue, and the subtext throughout the entire issue was that of "of course you want to look like a model, and lament the fact that you never will". Which is pretty much modus operandi for fashion magazines. But. They ran an (actually pretty intelligent) article by a man who explained that he would rather date real, flawed women instead of perfect models. When I read it, I was really grateful that the magazine took the time to acknowledge that the majority of its readership does not, in fact, look perfect. But later, when I had time to think it over, I realized how pathetic it was for me to be lapping up the one article, just two pages, that the magazine provided. In a sea of thinspiration, the magazine threw out one bone of sanity, and I gobbled it up happily. That's bullshit. If a magazine is going to embrace women of all different shapes and sizes, they better spread it allll over the magazine.

I stopped buying Vogue a long time ago. There's too much of a whiff of the old lady who wears ostentatious furs and the attitude "I know you can't afford this, and will never be able to, but this is how you should be living, you plebe."

Marie Claire started off the entertainment section by giving me a "food pyramid" of my August tv shows. Not suggesting. Not promoting. Telling. I don't take well to being told. Especially by a magazine. (Also, given that the tv I'll watch this month runs more along the lines of Buffy, Firefly and the Olympics, I doubt I'll ever turn on Californication and The Wire.)

Nylon is okay sometimes, but gets a little too vapid and consumeristic for my tastes, not to mention thinking that it's way more indie than it really is. And I still really like Teen Vogue, because it really doesn't try to be more than just a "how to" guide for teens with no money.

I really should have just saved my pennies for an Elle UK. Dang.