Use More Words

More words!  Rules about judging continue to apply.


fauxgress (n): portmanteau of “faux” and “progress” - the mainstreaming or appropriating of a progressive goal through suspect logic and/or execution
example Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way”
from Social Justice League

ensorcell (v): to bewitch, enchant - basically the verb for sorceror
usage As you can tell, I could not have been more ensorcelled by the movie star/makeup artist/entrepreneur [Salma Hayek].
from Lucky Magazine (yes, there are occasionally words in that magazine)

regret ceiling (n): the maximum amount of guilt or remorse one can feel before forgetting/moving on from a regrettable event or situation.  I mostly like this phrase because it could be a good way to explain certain aspects of my personality/behavior to other people: I am prone to high regret ceilings.

chichi: "showily or affectedly elegant or trendy; pretentious" (dictionary.com)  Onamatopoetic, no?
pronunciation: shishi

loaded for bear: mentally and/or physically prepared (or perhaps overprepared) for a strenous task.
etymology: Originated with hunters, who would need to carry different equipment (& different expectations) for hunting bear than for any other type of game in north america.
from Brian Cranston's interview with Marc Maron on the WTF podcast (Sidebar: Brian Cranston is AWESOME.  He was once wanted for murder.  And then he was the dad on Malcolm in the Middle.)

geech: I saw this word in a blog post that I apparently did not bookmark.  It was used as a verb and I think it was shorthand for gchatting, but can't find evidence of that usage in five minutes of Googling and apparently that's my research limit today. It has a number of colorful definitions on Urban Dictionary but other evidence (The Simpsons, as well as a namesake comic strip and beer) suggests connections to small-town/rural America.  Any insights would be appreciated!

farting at a fan: pointlessly doing (presumably minor) damage to one's self.  Gross, funny and accurate.
from Urban Dictionary Word of the Day

opuscule: A small or minor work.  (How deliciously dismissive does that term sound?  Probably because "puscule" sounds like "pustule." I don't think it's supposed to be derogatory but it's hard to escape the connection.)
from Dictionary.com Word of the Day

postprandial: after eating.  Like postcoital, but . . . also good. "Prandium" is Latin for "late breakfast" (or second breakfast). related: jentacular - pertaining to Latin "jentaculum," or first breakfast.
from I forget.

bellwether: this one is pretty well-known but the word's modern meaning of vanguard/trendsetter comes from the word for a ram (wether) who wore a bell to lead his flock of sheep. Both cynical and accurate as an analogy for cultural and political trends.

hangry: angry as a result of hunger
from Ceejus, maybe?  Not sure.

Keep On Eatin' On

I'm now three weeks into my no-meat-no-dairy experiment.  The novelty is has mostly worn off, which is on the one hand kind of nice, since it means I'm coming to terms with the limitations of the diet, but on the other hand can signal a certain complacency which is not in keeping with my goal of learning more about veganism.  Fortunately, Kenji Lopez-Alt at Serious Eats just started a similar experiment.  His (decidedly more thorough) discussion, along with some vegan recipes, can be found here.

Ongoing observations:

- Navigating restaurants with these diet restrictions remains difficult and tests my flexibility.  I try not to be a spoilsport when going out with friends, but it's obvious that I need to be proactive about pushing vegan-friendly restaurants, and/or flexible about eating ahead of time, when making plans with friends.

- Even when I do find vegan options at restaurants, I often still leave less than satisfied with the value I'm getting.  At restaurants I generally try to order dishes that are difficult to make at home, or that involve specialized ingredients (often meat, which I cook relatively rarely myself).  Certainly there are vegan dishes which fit those requirements, but there are also plenty that don't.  $8.50 for a peanut butter sandwich seems a bit exorbitant  (Iota, in Arlington - which is curiously thin in veg options given its cultural niche).  On top of that, at many mid-level restaurants, the vegan option is just a regular option with certain elements removed (like the Federalist, where I requested my admittedly-delicious potato and leek tart sans goat cheese).  In both cases I ended up feeling like I'm paying the same amount for less.

- At-home cooking takes more thought/time while I have fewer protein sources at my disposal.  My go-to couscous/pasta/rice + poached/fried egg + whatever veggies we have in the fridge + parmesan/hot sauce is a no-go until February.  Avocado, hummus and beans fill the egg/cheese void, but not perfectly.  More seasoning helps too (I'm enamored of the combo of garlic powder & pimenton right now), and I've even found some actually vegan shredded cheese that doesn't make me barf.  But when I'm really hungry RIGHT NOW, I'm still resorting to PB&J (or, on a bad day, Tofutti Cuties) to tide me over after work while the beets roast or the beans soak. Not exactly top-notch nutrition.

Tonight I made a tasty casserole while grazing through my quick-pick vegan options (grapes, prunes, pb on a spoon).  It doesn't look like much but it turned out well and I'll likely revisit the recipe in the post-vegan future.  On the other hand, I've also picked out the first two recipes I'll be making in February: yum and double yum.

Vegan Bake**

Leftover rice
Fava beans, cooked until they're barely recognizable (ideally the day before. GEEZ beans require planning)
3 cloves garlic, minced
head of chard, sliced & lightly sauteed
pureed tomato (from this summer, by way of the freezer)
chopped dill
garlic, pimenton, salt, pepper
bread crumbs
Daiya vegan cheese (to sprinkle on top)

Layer to your liking, bake for 40 mins on 350, eat with your face.



*An exception: the menu at Zaytinya had a number of really, truly delicious, totally vegan small plates.  Although their pita inexplicably include dairy, they brought me cucumbers to dip in the rich hummus.

**Thanks to Bill Bryson, I now know who to thank/blame for precision measurements in recipes, a practice not popularized until 1845 by Eliza Acton and Isabella Beeton.  I am also much better acquainted with how to properly berate my servants.

Favorite Things Friday: Saturday Edition

I got to enjoy snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes last night on the walk home from a delicious vegan dinner with friends.  Here's hoping there's more silver-white winter coming before it melts into spring, because I'm really excited about my new raccoon hat . . .

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I already posted about it last week but, just to reiterate, Ellen Willis is a badass.  (An excellent review from the awesome Rachael Maddux can be found here.)









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My new favorite blog, which is teaching me lots of new words, is Social Justice League.  It engages with the sociological problems of pop culture while generally remaining a fan of pop culture, which is SUPER HARD.  I really enjoyed the discussion of the unreliable narrator in 500 Days of Summer, and also the problem with Pepper Potts.

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Upon discovery, I immediately scrolled through all 100-something pages of the Old Love tumblr (via Miss Moss).


















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Oh hey I joined  over the holidays . . . mostly to spite Google Reader for dropping the "Note in Reader" feature.  Watch me turn the whole thing into a perverse competition!  Or forget about it completely, immediately.  In other news, some of the people I kind of know have excellent taste.

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Champagne-cage chair craft - easy to do, cute, fun and a sweet memory of drinking bubbly.  Also a god thing to do with your hands at a dinner party.  via Nag on the Lake














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Finally, a long one:

A while ago, I posted this video of Kermit from Sam & Friends lip syncing to “A Horse Named Bill."  I had tried to add that song to my December 2011 playlist but couldn’t find exactly that version, which I prefer for its weird lyrics about a whale named Lena breaking the ten commandments. The closest version I could find on iTunes was one by some guy named Brian Dewan - not exactly the same, but he included the verse I wanted (that jerk Jerry Garcia left it out, probably because he is racist against whales).

Later, I was poking around on the Neutral Milk Hotel website because I remembered that Jeff Mangum just released a box set, and, why don’t I have that yet? There, I noticed that the set comes with a poster version of the flying gramophone from the CD liner to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea . . . by artist Brian Dewan.

In college, I taped this exact CD liner next to my bed in my dorm room, right next to, if memory serves, some art made for me by children I babysat, and a ketchup packet.














Anyway, probably not the same guy, right? That would be a weird coincidence.  But it IS!  He also did album art for David Byrne and They Might Be Giants, plays lots of weird experimental instruments and is clearly a big fat hipster-nerd. So I guess it’s not shocking that he was floating around two different musical things that I lurve, because I am nothing if not predictable in my lurve for hipster-nerds. Still, neat, right?

Well, THEN I scrolled down and saw that Dewan also contributed to the Where in the World is Carmen San Diego soundtrack, which was basically the soundtrack to my life for the whole of my tenth year on earth. For anyone else out there who also had a cassette player, a minor children’s game show fetish and a major Rockapella crush (god help me I loved the white guy with the cornrows), Dewan cowrote and presumably performed this weird and depressing song (whose choice for the soundtrack, I now realize, makes no sense):

 
This song was at the end of the tape and so includes an inside-joke secret track at the very end.  Remember secret tracks?

MAN I need to dig up that cassette tape.

According to his website, Dewan currently records experimental electronic music with his cousin under the name “Dewanatron,” and designs and builds “synthesizers in custom cabinetry, often reminiscent of either New England churches or 1940's school house architecture” (!!!) He also makes (or made) modern art film strips/installations that sound kind of amazing.  And he may have written music for Sesame Street?

I guess that’s all. Just wanted to let you know that I am super glad this person exists in the world.

Read More Words: Out of the Vinyl Deeps

Books to read (or re-read) in 2012

In pursuit of my 2012 resolution to "read more in general," I'm plowing through Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music and it is giving me a pretty bad lady-crush.  Also some hand-cramps from excessive underlining. A few samples . . .


On pop culture:

Conservative and utopian idealogues agree that man must understand and control his environment; the questions are how, and for whose benefit.  But pop culture defines man as a receiver of stimuli, his environment as sensory patterns to be enjoyed, not interpreted (literature and philosophy are irrelevant) or acted upon (politics is irrelevant). . . . The bureaucrat defends standardization because it makes a complex society manageable.  Yet he thinks of himself as an individualist and finds the idea of mass-produced, mechanized art incomprehensible, threatening--or a put-on.  The pop artist looks at mass culture naively and sees beauty in its regular patterns; like an anthropologist exhibiting Indian basket-weaving, Warhol shows us our folk art--soup cans.  His message--the Emperor has no clothes, but that's all right, in fact it's beautiful--takes acceptance of image for essence to its logical extreme.


On Dylan (next to which I just wrote "YES"):

Dylan has a lavish verbal imagination and a brilliant sense of irony, and many of his images--especially on the two Blonde on Blonde records--are memorable.  But poetry also requires economy, coherence, and discrimination, and Dylan has perpetrated prolix verses, horrendous grammar, tangles phrases, silly metaphors, embarrassing cliches, muddled though; at times he seems to believe one good image deserves five others, and he relies too much on rhyme.  His chief literary virtue--sensitivity to psychological nuance--belongs to fiction more than poetry.


Even the footnotes she wrote later are memorable.  Poetic crimes aside, she clearly loves Dylan (as do I) but notes in reference to her 1967 discussion of "Another Side of Bob Dylan":

Here as elsewhere in this prefeminist essay I refer with aplomb if not outright endorsement to Dylan's characteristic bohemian contempt for women (which he combined with an equally obnoxious idealization of female goddess figures).  At the time I did not question the idea that women were guardians of oppressive conventional values; I only thought of myself as an exception.  I was not possessive; I understood men's need to go on the road because I was, spiritually speaking, on the road myself.  That, at least, was my fantasy; the realities of my life were somewhat more ambiguous.


Rock on.

Just Eat It

You'll be happy to know that I've made it all the way to day two of my minimal-animal-foods diet.  I'm shying away from calling it a vegan diet, because veganism is really more of a philosophy and I imagine true vegans would resent my using the term for a temporary project born largely out of curiosity.  Also I don't intend to stop eating honey, so, there's that.  I will refer to foods as vegan, since that's a more fact-based designation.

What I've learned so far:

- It's hard to eat out as a vegan, even in very hipster-friendly venues.  I had dinner with a vegetarian friend last night and had basically two menu options, one of which (the black bean soup) was basically just a can of beans put into a bowl with some seasoned salt in it.  Not that I'm complaining, black beans and seasoned salt are delicious - but it wasn't exactly worth the $5 hipster-bar-on-H-street premium I paid.  Fortunately my vegetarian friend was able to provide some guidance and sympathy, having had a decade and a half's worth of experience navigating not-so-veggie-friendly menus.  

- Apparently not all beer is vegan, owing to the use of animal byproducts like isinglass and gelatin during the brewing process, as well as lactose (e.g. milk stouts) and honey for flavor.  The beer I had last night, Summer Solstice Cerveza Crema by Anderson Valley Brewing Company, might even have had some lactose in it - which, to be fair, I probably should have figured out from its name.  Either way it was delicious, but dangerously like drinking alcoholic cream soda.  Will have to revisit later in the year.

- Most faux meats are not vegan, as they rely heavily on eggs as the first or second ingredient.  Some have cheese as well, as I learned on my Safeway visit today.  As a carnivore I actually enjoy Morningstar Farm's facon (faux bacon) but Smart Bacon is my only vegan "bacon-style strip" option this month.  I found some vegan faux chick nuggets, as well faux mayo and soy cheese, with a little bit of searching.  The rest of my purchases were produce.

When I got home from Safeway I made myself a modified vegan FLT with my spoils. 

The verdict(s):

- Nayonnaise is quite tasty and nearly identical to light mayonnaise nutrition-wise.

- Smart Bacon looks gross, smells gross, and doesn't bring much to the table flavor-wise

Doesn't exactly scream "EAT ME"

- The soy cheese I got actually isn't vegan, apparently: its second ingredient is casein, which is a milk protein used as a binder. It does taste suspiciously like "real" American cheese, which is to say not at all like cheese but still occasionally delicious.  I didn't realize this until I'd unwrapped one slice so we'll call that slip #2 of likely many.

- The best part of the sandwich, by far, was the avocado.  

Lesson learned: mother nature makes better vegan food than people do.  Shocking, I know.

NOT WRITE NOTES

Johnny Cash, putting your life goals in perspective since 1955. Via Gingerhaze.

Welp, it's nearly 2012.  Not sure where the time went, but happy to have had it.  While end-of-year introspection generally leaves me mulling over negatives (an unfortunate but inescapable habit), I have to admit that 2011 was a pretty good year.  If I had made resolutions, the list probably would have looked like this:

1. Get married.
2. Advance professionally.

Done and done.  We had a fun wedding, an amazing honeymoon, and an intimate courthouse ceremony.  I start on Tuesday in a new position at the same nonprofit where I've been working for a few years, and am crossing my fingers that I do a good job and serve the organization well.  Whatever fitness goals I had at the beginning of the year were more or less not met, so that will be a project for a new year. But on the other hand, I ate (and cooked) a lot of amazing food.  2011 was also the year of not one but TWO totally genuine surprise parties (birthday and wedding shower), and of a pretty lovely bachelorette party.  I did a bit of yoga, I read, I watched movies, I spent time with friends.  I acquired a few nice new possessions, and kept an impressive quantity of indoor plants alive.  I survived being a bride and a bridesmaid. I got drunk at a zoo.  I got drunk at a butterfly garden.  I saw family.  I saw  Carhenge.  I drove across the country.  I touched a dolphin, and saw a shark in the wild.  I snuggled my brother's dog.  I gave (and received) a fair number of high-fives.

2012 has me feeling similarly ambitious.  On the slate:

- Read Ulysses
- Read more in general
- Meditate more/take a meditation class
- Record my dreams more frequently
- Write in private journal more
- Blog more regularly, if not more frequently
- Move to a bigger place, preferably one we own, preferably with a yard
- Get a dog?
- Improve aerobic fitness
- Find & go to a new dentist
- Floss
- Drink more water
- Beat Portal 1 and 2

I'm also toying with a year-long project, or series of projects, to keep me engaged and/or trying new things.  The basic idea is to have a theme for each month and to pursue that theme, in whatever way is most appropriate, as consistently as possible, throughout the month.  My early ideas for this were based on different types of deprivation, which has its place for sure, but I'm trying to keep it flexible and also productive.  So far, possibilities include:

- Minimize and when possible eliminate animal-based foods for a month
- Forgo TV for a month
- Avoid online social networking for a month
- Crafting month
- Meditation month (perhaps my own 28-day meditation challenge)
- Journaling (or dream-journaling) every day for a month
- Running month?  (w/ help from the Couch to 5K app)
- Guitar month (note: this would require obtaining a guitar, as the bro has reclaimed his)
- Writing (of the non-journal variety) month

I'm going to start with no-animal-foods for January and see how that goes.  I think it will be really, really hard and involve a lot of peanut butter, hummus, and rice with beans.  Hopefully enough veggies to keep things moving as well.

The worry, of course, is that I am generally much better at making lists and devising projects than I am at following through on them.  E will hopefully help me with motivation, although he's been a pretty hard sell on the whole no-cheese thing so I'll be going that bit alone.  Other than that, I guess all I can do is keep moving and take it day by day.

Happy new year, all!


Annnnd GO.

Favorite Things Friday: YouTube Edition

Happy Friday! Here are some weird and/or amazing things on the internet.  Mostly stolen from friends in real life/Facebook/both.  Thank you friends!

 
 God bless, He-Man. Via Gingerhaze

 
 Amy Sedaris knows what's up.

 
So pretty.



This nonsense song lip-sung by Kermit from Sam & Friends is apparently a traditional (and disturbing) children's song called "A Horse Named Bill." Via io9's collection of lesser-known Henson videos.  (Fun fact: the song was also recorded by Jerry Garcia).

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
"The Nutcracker" Ballet Performance
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

Continuing the theme of men without pants (which should be a band name, btw).

If you're already in Community withdrawal.



Rick Perry: douchebag.



And finally: Teddy Bear the talking Porcupine is pro-pumpkin.

Long Time No . . . Whatever (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Holidays)

(TL;DR? Just scroll down and click on the Spotify link!  The xmas music title is not false advertising, promise.)

Christmas and I have not always had an easy relationship. As an atheist Unitarian with one Jewish parent, I have never really been on board for the specific mythology of the holiday, and as a snotty, depressed teenager I wasn’t a big fan of the artificiality and consumerism. (Or so I told myself - in reality I think I was as much trying to manage the weirdly high expectations I still somehow had for the season of cheer.)

In fact, when I was a kid, Hannukah was kind of our big winter family get-together, because my mother’s side of the family had a bunch of cousins with whom to play dreidel and get into mischief. I have very fond memories of the New Jersey Hannukah parties, though looking back at the photos and videos I can see that they were basically just pure chaos with latkes.

Christmas, by comparison, was a quiet holiday celebrated with my father’s parents. It was beautiful and bounteous, to be certain - we got our share of awesome toys, snow and caroling. But I guess the relatively subdued nature of the holiday, combined with the waning of the Hannukah party tradition as we grew older, rendered Christmas susceptible to the charming negativity that I brought to most things I did between ages 13 and 19. Anyone who's known me a while can verify that I could be quite a pill during those years, and at no time was it worse than December (with the possible exception of my birthday, yet another vaguely-defined wintertime celebration filled with unmet and un-meet-able expectations).

In any case, here’s what it took for me to come around on Christmas. 1. Don’t celebrate Christmas one year, and 2. Go to Hawaii. At the same time, if you can swing it. My family spent the last week of December in Hawaii with Jewish relatives about a decade ago now, and it was THE BEST time. We didn’t really do much to celebrate Christmas OR Hannukah that year, because the cousins were all old enough that we didn’t really need to do gifts, and after all Hannukah is a relatively minor holiday in the Jewish religion. I did insist that we eat out Chinese (well, Thai, as it turned out) on Christmas night because, deliciousness, but other than that we were decidedly non-traditional. We spent Christmas morning body-surfing at Makapu’u beach. Listen: it doesn’t get much better than that.

Since then, the whole holiday season has been a different ball game. Once I could embrace the winter holidays as an adult with all the emphasis on what you do and who you’re with - not what you get, or whose religion means what - things started turning around. And once the holidays really felt like a choice instead of an annual obligation, suddenly they were a choice I wanted to make. It didn’t hurt that my parents followed the Jersey snowbird tradition and invested in some Florida real estate a few years ago in preparation for retirement. Ever since, the holidays have been beach-infused, present-free and pretty darn nice.

Because nothing I do is really important unless it has a soundtrack, my holidays now are also pretty music-filled. And because no soundtrack of mine would be complete without some really beautiful, silly, and f-ing weird stuff on it, my christmas music is AWESOME.

Crank it up.



P.S. I recognize that this whole post just REEKS of privilege: “I used to hate the holidays, but now we go to the beach every year and I love them!” For the record, the only way we could visit Hawaii was because we stayed with our relatives there and used airline miles to fly - and it was still a really expensive trip for the family. My parents are actually underwater on the real estate they purchased in FL just before the real estate bubble burst, and on top of that they spend a good chunk of their free time wrangling a variety of totally insane, occasionally non-paying renters. Everyone’s doing okay, and we’re all incredibly lucky. I truly recognize and appreciate the opportunities I have and how they’ve shaped my thoughts, and I also recognize that nothing is as simple as it may seem.

Road Rules

So, a week later I'm feeling a bit better and am ready to tackle the world again.  Kind of.  Well, the world as seen whizzing past a car window at the very least.  Today my brother and I set off for adventure (i.e. Pittsburgh), on the first leg of our cross-country road trip.  (Background: the bro is moving to Hawaii, with his car, which is shipping out of San Diego - so that's our destination.)  On this leg we gave a friend a lift to the 'burgh, in return for some pretty posh overnight accomodations upon arrival.  Seriously - I'm writing this from one of their two guest rooms, in an antique-y brass bed on the third floor of an undeniably gorgeous house.  A cat is balled up and sleeping on the bench next to me.  AND I have Wifi.  Life could be worse.

Preliminary thoughts on road-tripping:

- So far, popular conversation topics include: things that our parents do that we don't like, sci-fi television shows, what we are listening to (or what we are listening to next)

- The Pennsylvania turnpike is always just as scary as I remember it being.  And I didn't make up that they force trucks to drive in the left lane in certain sections. Because having zero shoulder on dark windy roads the mountains of Pennsylvania wasn't scary enough on its own, apparently.

- The tuna sub at Wawa is superior to the tuna sub at Sheetz.

- Combos has a special limited edition Buffalo wings flavor

- I am just as bad at reading in the car as I ever used to be. 

- Coconut water: available

Daylight Savings Mind

Day three of rain here in DC, and it’s getting darker every morning. Just as it did during the deluge in mid-September, this kind of weather spurs a particularly powerful impulse to contemplate every mistake I’ve ever made and catalog every failure in my life. Sometimes I literally make lists. SUPER healthy, I know.

Things aren’t even that bad. I’m keeping busy, spending time with friends and family, seeing shows, planning a big trip at the end of the month, taking small steps professionally . . . opening my mail, watering the plants, reading the news . . . all sorts of semi-adult and reasonably functional stuff going on around here. But I gotta admit, brain-wise, the ol’ belfry seems to be filling up with bat guano. And while I KNOW that (to torture the metaphor) said guano may be valuable for its properties as a fertilizer, that doesn’t make it superfun to have in my brain where normal, happy thoughts should be. PLUS as it turns out mining bat guano is really bad for bat populations, so there’s that.

In conclusion, shut up brain, shut up your face.

Right now I’m pinning a lot of brain-clearing hopes on the end of daylight savings time. Anything that makes my first hour of consciousness each day a little more sun-filled is a pretty good plan in my book, and who doesn’t like an extra hour of sleep now and then? It’s like a mini-snow day, a reminder of forces beyond my own little life. Natural phenomena really have a pretty profound impact on my mood. I'm pretty sure my brain chemistry changes substantially every time I take a walk at lunchtime or stop to smell a flower on my way home from work.*

Probably this means that I should be outside more or something CRAZY like that. Maybe if the f-ing rain ever stops. Tonight I’m going to see 50/50 because I really enjoy snotting all over myself in public apparently, and if all goes as planned tomorrow will find me gnawing on a turkey leg while watching some jousting in bumfuck Maryland. That’s outdoors, right?

And the sun just came out, for a moment anyway. Schizo weather. I’ll take what I can get.

See you on the other side! Hopefully at a post-5-pm-sundown happy hour, because that extra light in the morning always comes at a price. Weather jerks.



*If you’re in the Dupont area, there’s still one dumbass magnolia flowering over by the Brookings Institute. You have to climb up on a wall in heels and will probably spill pollen all over yourself, but it’s worth it.

*And in other news, I have officially become my grandmother.