-There's a woman in the coffee shop I'm sitting in wearing the nicest dress I've ever seen, ever. Can't quite describe it (a pattern is involved), but it's perfect. There's also a 98% chance it's from Japan (I can hear the language the women are speaking, among other clues), and an 198% chance it wouldn't look nearly as good on me. That said, on my or their way out, whichever comes first, if I summon the courage, I'm going to ask where it's from. Fingers crossed that the answer will be "the Old Navy down the street."
Mid-post update: I asked! And yes, from Japan. (In blue, but that's definitely the style, confirmed by the woman wearing it.) The quest beings...
UPDATE: This is the dress, in the right color and everything. Not made for my body type, I now see, but gorgeous.
-If you imagined Cupcakes and Cashmere was all Emily Schuman, you... were making a reasonable assumption. Personal blogs that expand take different approaches to acknowledging said expansion The one I worked for, as the careful reader may recall, used a masthead. It wasn't spelled out who did what, but it was clear that a group of people were involved, and who they were. Some go with bylines. Others with some mix. Still others just morph into publications.
I was of course interested to see Schuman introducing her staff, but couldn't quite say what to make of what I can only assume was her choice to mention them only by first name. It's like a quasi-credit. It feels sort of breezy and feminine and on-brand and... odd. A little less so for the recent college grad whose first real job this is than for the woman who's "been an L.A.-based editor for the entirety of [her] career."
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Californian fashion commentary UPDATED
Monday, February 09, 2015
Extraordinary descriptions of ordinary occurrences
-Yesterday I - I! - drove to Los Angeles and, crucially, back from Los Angeles as well. Around it, too, even, a little bit. My husband (and former driving instructor) was with me, which was particularly helpful when I was driving on whichever part of the freeway has like 20 different lanes on either side of you. Given the driving involved, L.A. itself was a bit of a blur. We had some (all excellent) ice cream at Carmela, coffee at Dinosaur, Thai food at Wat Dong Moon Lek, Korean BBQ at Eight. I think I ate (and spent) enough for this entire month in California in one day.
There was also a halfhearted attempt at clothes-shopping. Which is to say, I tried to go where the five minutes of where-do-my-favorite-bloggers-most-of-whom-seem-to-live-in-L.A.-now-that-I-think-of-it shop? research directed me (this trip was, as you might gather, spontaneous), but this one boutique that sounded very promising turned out to be... exactly how I now see the Yelp reviewers found it, which is to say, ridiculously expensive and hipster-parody-ish.
-After reading so much about it (the "cool girl" speech especially), I decided the time had come to read Gone Girl. It was a complete page-turner, as in, it was difficult to put it down as I was reading it. It had a lot that held my attention apart from, you know, the suspense. Specifically the parental-overshare angle. The book does suggest that writing fiction about your kid can be as damaging as non-fiction, at least if it's more fictionalization than fiction-fiction. Much of the story ends up hinging on this. Well, that and the "cool girl" thing - Amy Elliott is so chill that she cheerily moves from New York to rural Missouri, where she can't find work, so that she can care for the aging parents of her cheating husband. (There may be thoughts on the intersection of "cool girl" and "monogamish" forthcoming.)
The only thing that bothered me was that Amy makes no sense as coming from New York. She's from a demographic of native New Yorkers that exists in entertainment - I'm thinking especially of "Gossip Girl" - in which Manhattan-ness means being the too-cool-for-school popular girl from an all-American high school. I couldn't figure out where she fit into any actual part of the New York population of the years when she's supposed to have grown up. She's this posh woman with family money, but the money was made from bestselling children's books. Yet that somehow lands Amy into something like a WASP upper-crust ice-queen status, and not, like, Zabars-and-Fairway country.
OK, and one other thing... I wouldn't say bothered me, exactly, but it's something I wondered about. I kind of get why literary fiction is so often about writers. I wish it weren't, but it sort of is what it is. But a mainstream suspense-type novel, does that also have to be about Brooklyn writers' parties, even if it quickly moves elsewhere?
Tuesday, February 03, 2015
Reverse "Annie Hall"
For some reason, this morning I was feeling especially, hopelessly, perhaps even a bit euphemistically New York. A brilliant plan to combine getting a croissant with going to a supermarket in the croissant-having strip mall didn't take into account rush-hour traffic, plus I wasn't entirely sure which freeway exit I wanted - not such an odd situation, perhaps, but in the moment it felt overwhelming. But I got there fine, parked in one of those slanted parking spots that are made for people who got higher than a C in physics but you get used to them, and went to sit outside amongst the fluffy dogs and coughing blond children while enjoying said croissant and a cappuccino.
While I'm not joking about the coughing, the overall vibe was very blond and wholesome. At one point I glanced over and saw the blondest and most wholesome scene I ever had (and I've spent a lot of time in Germany!), involving three generations of blonds and their Golden Retriever.
And then came the part this post's title comes from: Rather than imagining that I was being seen as a Hasid, I looked up and saw two more wholesome Californians heading into the supermarket I was about to go to, dressed like so. Which - as per the link - isn't out of the ordinary, given that there are Franciscan monks about. But for a moment I really did wonder if I was somehow Grammy Hall-ing a couple surfer dudes.
Sunday, February 01, 2015
Green beverages
Yes, I did it. I tried green juice. While the one I tried was probably as good as green juice gets - it's the one the woman at the green-juice place said is the most popular green juice, and has apple juice and ginger mitigating the kale - it's not for me. According to my husband, who'd tried a different green juice before, this was one of the better ones. It's possible we'd have both enjoyed it more (no way I was going to attempt the entire thing on my own; as it stands, half of a no doubt now-gone-off green juice remains in our fridge, as a souvenir of sorts) had we not gotten it immediately after tacos, which were, in turn, immediately after pastries. A juice cleanse this was not; perhaps if you're really hungry, it's more appetizing? Something about the aftertaste - celery? romaine? - set off my gag reflex.
That said, it was less weird than I was expecting. More... snake-oil-ish. I mean, it's some liquid in the general family of gazpacho or V8. It's not a new, exciting product, but vegetable juice or, with the addition of ginger, vegetable soup.
That said, sometimes it pays to be suggestible. Inspired by someone I follow on Instagram, I got a matcha latte, which was quite good. I went with soy milk, thinking that would somehow go together, and I think it did. Different from, but not necessarily worse than, regular (that is, milk-free) matcha. Vastly, vastly better than green juice, but with that same "health, health, health, darling" aesthetic appeal.
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Why drive when you can write about it?
-I was just alerted to Adam Gopnik's learning-to-drive-as-an-adult essay: "There’s a rich literature about learning to drive written by women, for whom it represents a larger emancipation from the feminine roles of enforced passivity, of sitting in place and accepting helplessness," writes Gopnik, surprising those of us who'd thought that literature consisted of Katha Pollitt's essay and various failed attempts at reinventing that power-steering wheel. Gopnik has instead produced some learning-to-drive literature for men, which involves unfurling a long New Yorker essay (sample observation: "Writing a book seemed as mysterious a process to him, one as much in need of elaborate advance and afterthought, as driving a car was to me.") about wanting to drive to Cape Cod (not the Hamptons), and feeling (but not actually being) privilege-checked by a road-test examiner of the black and female persuasion.
Now, my learning-to-drive essay, which I will sell to the highest bidder, will be quite different. It won't be a tale of feminist triumph, at least not in the usual sense - I had to learn because I'd relocated for my husband's work, and he's the one who taught me. (That means no folksy story about connecting with the Common Man via driving lessons.) Nor will it end, as Gopnik's discreetly does, with an announcement that, the license now secured, the time has come to muse about it over however many thousand words, but not to actually, like, use it to drive somewhere. Getting the license is not quite the same as learning to drive. That's the main takeaway from the last two years of my life, and most especially of the last few days.
-Speaking of driving (are there other topics?), this evening was my first time ever pumping gas. While my husband helped me figure it out, I'd already been prepping, which is to say I Googled it and watched a couple YouTube videos. I also read the comments to those videos from incredulous and vaguely irritated people who can't fathom how anyone (who'd be in a position to need to know) wouldn't already know how. I also read the other comments that offered the very reasonable explanation: New Jersey law. It's not about having a butler who does this for you or whatever it is these commenters might imagine.
-Also on the agenda: trying this green juice they speak of. It sort of must be done, for when-in-Rome purposes. I'm working my way to it slowly - I got a soy espresso drink one day, which was actually quite tasty in a yuba sort of way, and am making my way through tremendous amounts of non-pulverized fruits and vegetables (and chocolate croissants). I want the full aesthetic experience, which involves leggings and green juice. I want to announce - on the basis of pseudoscience - that I glow.
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
The deep end
Before I'd started the process, I'd imagined that learning to drive would be a binary sort of thing. Either you know how to do so - in which case the entire world of driving-related possibilities opens up (all of that "take Exit 3 and bear right") - or you don't, in which case you either live in New York City or sit around waiting for a ride from one of those people who has this magical skill. How wrong I was. There is, in fact, such a thing as semi-knowing how to drive.
Monday, January 26, 2015
Ranch to mouth
Apologies in advance, East Coast, for what I'm about to say:
I just ate a citrus fruit directly from the tree. I say "a citrus fruit" because I don't know what kind, only that I had permission to take one. It felt very biblical; upon eating it, I came to the sudden realization that I was wearing leggings as pants.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Alvy Singer 2.0
Today was most unusual in WWPD history. It included:
-Driving on the freeway. In California. With me driving. Uneventful (thus far, knocks on wood, prays to all the world's deities) but challenging because this was my first real experience driving a car other than my own. (Driving lessons don't count.)
-Impulse-purchasing a giant (Zutano?) avocado at a farmers market, basically because it seemed amazing that avocado could be a local food. The giant avocado represented not being in New Jersey even a little bit. Bought some limes as well, in part for that reason, and also, of course, to go with that and the regular-sized less-impulsively-selected avocados.
-Having fried-fish tacos for lunch at a Sundays-only pop-up taco place.
-Walking by the Pacific Ocean. (!!!!!!)
-Walking around in leggings and a sweatshirt and finding myself vastly overdressed.
There was some usual as well. I have yet to switch from coffee to green juice, and I've already been to a Japanese supermarket.
Friday, January 23, 2015
Off to Greenjuiceland
I'm going to be spending the next month spousally trailing to Santa Barbara, California. I've never been there before, so if you have and have suggestions, comment away! Thus far my plans include eating fresh local produce and cluelessly asking the rest of America why it isn't spending its winter doing the same.
My main sense about this trip is that having learned how to drive will come in handy. A quirk of learning as an adult, though, is that you can kind of forget that you did. I still have this thing where I automatically ignore whichever suggested directions involve driving - not around here in NJ, where of course that's how I'd do so, but when contemplating being anywhere else. I just immediately go to how one would get from Point A to Point B on foot, maybe by bike - assuming public transportation's not an option. While there are advantages (ecological, toned-ness-ological, cheapnessological) of that approach, my sense of where we're staying is that it's one of those places where you really need to drive. Granted, I've walked across many such places in my day (Tempe, AZ and Los Angeles come to mind), but not absolutely needing to do so seems like it'll be a plus.
