Tunes Tuesday, "I'm Writing a Novel," Father John Misty

Big news last week: I'm headed to Coachella! After refreshing web pages and nearly giving up, my good friend Emily was able to score tickets for us for the second weekend.  I'll head to Arizona to visit her, then we will road trip to the festival. Hard to believe this is really going to happen, but I can't wait! 

Before they released the lineup, Emily mentioned that she heard Father John Misty would be there and that she really liked his album. I've had it on repeat for the past week ever since the first listen. To celebrate our upcoming trip, I'm bringing you my favorite track by far off the stellar "Fear Fun." It's a song that opens with the funniest lyrics I've heard in some time.

Father John Misty on Sub Pop http://www.subpop.com/artists/father_john_misty

"I ran down the road, pants down to my knees/ Screaming, "Please come help me, that Canadian shaman gave a little too much to me!'"

And the lyrics just go on like that... It's a hallucinatory episode you can tap your toe to.

Too Many Magazines

I've always loved magazines, to the extent that I used to look forward to going the dentist so I could read the magazines in the waiting room. Now I'm grown up and I subscribe to a bazillion magazines and counting. I love magazines so much that I have a hard time throwing them away. Look at this stack in my room.

I'm going to read these all. Some day. I swear.

They keep stacking up, and I'm not even getting rid of the ones I have read. It is a burden. Joe got me an iPad Mini for Christmas, which I love, and now I'm thinking about Next Issue. You pay a monthly subscription for an app that you lets read unlimited magazines on your iPad. Just reading the list of magazines involved made me realize this may be a dream come true. Bon Appetit, Marie Claire, EW, People, Lucky, The New Yorker, and more. I could hold onto them forever — for whatever reason I feel compelled to do so — without taking up shelf space. It's gonna put the airport bookshop out of business and keep magazines from folding.

Maybe. But I should I commit to another monthly fee? Yikes. If I subscribe to one app, then I wouldn't have an ungainly stack of magazines. But does the physical presence of a magazines compel one to read them? What do you think? My heart says yes to the app, but my head says no. For now. I might switch over and try it out when I have to renew my People magazine.

I was clearing through the pile a bit, or at least trying to keep it from collapsing on itself. When I saw Angelina's mug the second time, I thought it looked familiar. Check this out. It's the British Marie Claire I got on vacation in France on the right and my normal U.S. subscription on the left.

Now Marie Claire is my absolute favorite women's print magazine, but this makes me think we are getting the short end of the stick in the U.S. Only 238 hot new looks to 419 for the Brits? The British magazine is bigger and has about 100 more pages. Angie looks a little tanner in the UK photo. And the headlines are saucier too. I may or may not have bought this solely because I needed to know more about the "I hid a crack pipe in the Ugg boots" tagline. C'mon, you know you're curious about that too. I've never seen a crack pipe referenced on American mags besides Whitney's tabloid exploits. Too soon?

I told Joe about the magazine discrepancy, including the difference in headlines and my preference for the British version. "When you saw the crack pipe headline, did you just throw a 100 euro note down on the counter and walk out with it?" he said. Haha, no, but you don't want to know how many dollars I paid for this particular magazine with the exchange rate. Add it to the pile!

Book Report, "Happier at Home"

This series is my attempt to reconnect with my English major roots by writing mini-essays about books I think are worth adding to your reading list. First up, Happier at Home, a non-cheesy self improvement tome.

Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life

By Gretchen Rubin

Buy on Amazon

I'd like to just start out by saying that I don't have a ton in common with "Happier at Home" author Gretchen Rubin in terms of taste and hobbies. She is perfectly happy wearing yoga pants and a North Face computer backpack as a purse every day. Besides not being interested in fashion, travel isn't big on her list at all either. Or desserts. She decides that she will feel better about life if she doesn't eat a single sweet during the Christmas season and manages to accomplish that easily.

On the other hand, my tastes unfortunately lean toward ultimate consumption. I dream of wearing a cute new outfit while eating ice cream on vacation. 

So while we are opposites, and despite the fact that Rubin says at one point in the book that she's not very good at telling jokes — I may have nodded my head while reading that — I really enjoyed reading Happier at Home, the sequel to The Happiness Project. As a reader, you feel like you're part of Rubin's family and they seem like a loving, content bunch. And Rubin writes thoughtfully on parenting, marriage, and the physical realities of her home, incorporating arresting quotes from philosophers and writers about life and happiness. I like the idea of living an examined life, and following through on steps to make your life better.

Personally, I was intrigued by the first chapter about possessions and organization. I like that she doesn't equate possessions and consuming as shallow or detrimental to happiness. Rubin writes: "For better or worse, buying things (or photographing them, cataloging them, or writing reviews about them) is a way to engage with the world. When we're interested in something, we often express this interest by researching, shopping, buying, and collecting." 

I love fashion and home decor. I'm drawn to design, and I spend a ton of time reading fashion blogs and magazines for fun. But at the same time I know it's just stuff. If I bought everything I ever wanted, I would always want more. I suppose I feel conflicted about loving and wanting things. While I love shopping, I hate having too much stuff. Having to store it, and look at it, and get sick of it. Rubin understands the ties of ownership that can weigh us down. And her answer is engagement: to only own things that you use regularly or have meaning to you, and for those things to be organized.

I think this is a book I'll come back to as a way to simplify and improve my every day life, and I need to check out her first book too. What are your thoughts about possessions? What would make you happier in 2013?

Tunes Tuesday, "The House That Heaven Built," Japandroids

This song made plenty of 2012 "Best of" lists. Of course it did. It rocks that hard. This is the kind of chorus you'd hear in your head when crossing the finish line of whatever marathon you are running. I love the quiet part too. Love it all!  PS: Spin picked Japandroids as 2012's Band of the Year.

From the album Celebration Rock. Purchase CD / LP / MP3 here: http://www.polyvinylrecords.com/celebrationrock

Roy Lichtenstein Nail Art

When I went to visit my friend Lani in Chicago this past fall, she asked me if I wanted to get a CND Shellac manicure from her favorite nail artist, AstroWifey. I'd seen Lani's amazing AstroWifey-designed nails in photos before, so I jumped at the chance to try it out for myself. We made a day of our manicure sessions (literally, it took four hours for both of us to get our nails did). AstroWifey had an iPad with hundreds of designs to choose from, but I already knew what I wanted before I set foot in the door. In honor of this fall's National Gallery of Art's Roy Lichtenstein retrospective, I wanted to get a Lichtenstein-esque pop art manicure.

That's all I told AstroWifey, and this is what she came up with:

Isn't this mind blowing? She painted all of by hand! Talk about painstaking work, and some serious talent. Look at the thumbs! That face!  My middle fingers said "Whaam" and "Boom," in case you can't tell.

This manicure is downright amazing. I will admit I was nervous when she started by painting every nail a different color. But the result was cooler than I could ever imagine. She used regular craft paint on top of the nail polish for the designs, using a teeny tiny brush. 

So when I got home to Washington, I had to take my Lichtenstein nails to the exhibit for a comparison.

Pretty spot on, huh? Did you get to visit the exhibit? I've always loved Roy Lichtenstein's work for its boldness and humor, but I didn't realize how many genres of art he tackled with his trademark style — everything from sculpture to landscapes in Chinese style.

As you could've guessed I spent about two weeks staring at my nails. And everyone around me noticed too. Maybe because I couldn't shut up about them. This was my first time getting a Shellac manicure. It held up really well, except for some reason after about a week and a half, one entire nail peeled off without me realizing it. Nooo! Perhaps because there were so many layers of paint. I liked Shellac a lot, overall. While I had the manicure, I used CND Solar Cuticle oil everyday and my nails felt so healthy by the end of two weeks.

Anyway, I can't wait to visit AstroWifey again next time I'm in Chicago with two spare hours. Is there anyone in D.C. who can paint nails like this? If so, drop me a line in the comments, I'm dying to know! And PS: Who What Wear Beauty linked to some gorgeous Vogue pop-art inspired manicures here.

State of the Blog

Sorry for the radio silence, but there was an excuse — I redid my blog!  I switched over to Squarespace because I love their templates, and also I am just not very good at blog design, and they make it easy. Easy for a normal person, I imagine. It took me months to just do what you see here. Which is fairly basic. I still have some things I might change, and please let me know if you have any suggestions. But I decided to just throw it up as is and tinker as necessary. I recently attended Online News Association meetup at the Washington Post, and one of their designers said if you change one thing about your blog you don't like every day, that's progress. Obviously the Washington Post is on a much higher plane than ol' Gosh Gee Golly, but the advice still stands.

Let me catch you up on what's been going on here this month. I wanted to tell you that it's been more than two months since I donated bone marrow, and I feel totally, 100% back to normal. Honestly, I felt fine within a week. The only thing is that I didn't exercise at all that month, so I had to get up in the gym working on my fitness (TM Fergie). But that's been it so far. And last week I got a call from NIH and heard that the person I donated to accepted the transplant and has left the hospital. Exhilarating is the best word I can think of to describe that news.

What else did I want to tell you? Over Christmas, I visited Joe's family in Indiana and our flight got delayed in that Midwest snowstorm. It ended up getting pushed back for an 11 p.m. takeoff, and we were the only people in the security area at that point. When we were getting ready to go through the checkpoint, the security guard stopped me and said, "How old are you, little miss?" (or something to that effect).

"I'm 28," I said. "Oh, I thought you were 17," he replied. 

Remember last time at the airport when I was mistaken for an unaccompanied minor?  It's all happening again! In fairness to the security guard, I was wearing no makeup, a hoodie, and ponytail, and wandering around with a confused,  vacant "duh" look on my face. Shortly after that exchange, I dropped my plane ticket and it slowly fluttered out of the security area where I couldn't reach it and someone had to help me. How does that even happen?

One more story for this post: I did get sick with a cold in early January, like everyone else it seems. It was not fun. I lost my voice completely, and after several nights of coughing fits, I knew I needed stronger meds. Joe was so sweet to me during my brief illness. He brought me a Homemade Pizza Co. pizza after I had gone 24 hours without eating, and offered to drive me to the CVS Minute Clinic, even though it was 30 minutes out of his way to pick me up. There was a long line when we got to the Minute Clinic, so he sat with me in a little waiting room with a bunch of sick people. Unfortunately, you could hear everything that was going on in the exam room. This is a major design flaw for the Minute Clinic. Two Russian ladies got in a screaming fight with the doctor. We also heard someone say, and I quote, "Now, those may look like track marks, but it's actually where my cat scratched me." 

We'd been there for awhile, and in between pathetic coughing fits, I started to think, "What an amazing boyfriend I have, to take care of me when I'm sick and wait with me at the Minute Clinic." Just as soon as that thought crossed my mind, Joe turned to me, looked into my eyes and said, "You can take a cab home, right? The football game is starting in half an hour, so I'm going to leave now."

Now I don't know exactly what my expression was upon hearing this statement, but I imagine it was like one of those memes where a saucy Persian cat stares into the camera with disdain while giant letters spelling "WUT" hover over its head.

Yeah, kind of like this. That's exactly how I felt.

Joe got the message and stuck around long enough to drive me home. Phew! 

Thanks so much for reading, thanks for sticking with me, and let me know if there's any design features you want to see in the blog!

PS: The amaryllis flowers pictured above are a Christmas present from my mom. I can't believe how beautiful they are, especially after they barely survived being gift wrapped under the tree!