Seriously can't get over the entire Lauren Moffatt Fall 12 collection...so geeky chic, classic with a twist, vintage inspired, and terrific attention to textures and all the charming little details! Basically everything I look for in a piece, and I'd like to think I'm beginning to transition my wardrobe this way and leaving behind the crazy, loud and incoherent style of my college days.
all photos from Lauren Moffatt
I come from my-coffee-is better-than-your-coffee land in San Francisco, but I do wish the city had, in similar abundance, Tea Houses, Salon de Thes, Tea Rooms, whatever...but if one had to come up for a colloquial name for these places using direct approximation, getting 'Tea at a The' doesn't have quite the same ring as getting 'Coffee at a Cafe' does..
If you thought I wasn't a qualified coffee critic because I don't even drink coffee, maybe this will redeem my psuedo Epicurean hat. When I'm feeling particularly tense, a cup of warm Mighty Leaf tea lets me know that everything is going to be alright. The flavors are fragant and have an addded freshness and depth than the Joe Smith tea. It's available at most grocery stores, and a little on the pricey side, so these are quite the treat for me. My favorite flavor is Chamomile Citrus.
I started a much less depressing post than my previous few gems, when I got back to Madison after winter break but I never finished it because of the usual lame culprit - school. Qualifiers and excuses aside, my life has been moving at a pace much faster than I can document. Sometimes I wonder if this is a good thing, because it makes the doldrums of the basic science years here go by more swiftly, but sometimes I think maybe I should stop and smell the roses. I certainly did slow down during winter break when I had three glorious weeks in Los Angeles, of which 56% involved eating. Thankfully, I was able to capture some moments in photos, something I don't do often enough!
It turns out that I'll be in Madison for part of the summer because I got a research position here doing work at a community clinic on the 'Patient-Centered Medidcal Home', which is the hot topic in primary care right now about how to organize care around the individual patient, and coordinating and tracking care over time. Remember when you had to get a duplicate test of something because you couldn't remember the last time you had it, or where that record went? It's a slow moving machine but I think our health care system is moving in the right direction...if Obama gets reelected....oh hey, has anyone seen my soapbox? Oh, here it is!
While I'm not entirely elated about spending my summer here, it's only for eight weeks, I'll be getting paid, and it's work I actually care about. I'm finally getting a car over here in April, so I can explore Wisconsin a bit more over break, and getting around this city won't be such an ordeal. And this is where I talk about how much I miss the effciency of public transportation in San Francisco..and the sounds of the city, and the way the sun gleams on buildings in the FiDi, and the olfactory factory that is the local taqueria, and and...
If I thought I loved Grizzly Bear and CANT before, I love them even more after this video! CANT is the solo project of Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor and this is pure sensual baby making musicccc!!!
“things wong kar wai taught me about love”
1. you will fall in love only once. obstacles will prevail. the rest of your life is spent recovering. 2. anything that distracts you from the pain of your loss is good. some people are more successful in this regard than others. 3. eroticising their objects will be the pinnacle of your sexual fulfillment. 4. desire is kept eternally alive by the impossibility of contact. 5. the most potent way to exist is to occupy someone else’s imagination. 6. technology will only heighten your sense of desolation making you more keenly aware that no one is trying to call. 7. hook up with someone. live with them. sleep with them. tag along. don’t be fooled. you are only a transitory distraction. ask for commitment. declare your love. watch the set up evaporate. 8. some coincidences are deliberate.
There are many things to love about my family, but in this post, I am not going to talk about them. Every time I visit home for the holidays, it becomes increasingly apparent how my mother’s heavy hand, harsh criticism and neurotic tendencies have instilled in me a deep self-consciousness. Not the kind where I feel like I need to change what I look like or what I wear, but the idea of “not enough”…both a ‘we don’t have enough’ and ‘you are not enough’. I remember being asked to take on more classes while I was in college, or to take a second job, when I was already working a full time job. Somehow there must be enough working hours in the day to compromise any second of self-preservation.
Yet there was always a catch. While there were phone conversations coaxing me to take on more activities, every other conversation, in a disparaging tone, would be about whether I could handle the workload, the possibility of failure, whether I was behind my other classmates. I was always either not doing enough, or becoming crushed by the amount I took on. With my mother, there is no comfortable middle ground. For me, this translates into anger, resentment, and a consistent feeling of guilt. Small wonder that I didn’t turn out more fucked up.
Living away from home has allowed me to separate what I thought were her unrealistic expectations for me, from my mother’s self generated neurosis. She grew up very poor and lives forever with the idea of scarcity - that nothing will ever enough. It was how she was raised, and I do not blame her for her reaction. It’s as if any semblance of happiness is quickly eclipsed by cynicism, as a means of self preservation. While I can only offer my empathy, part of me wants to change her, to let her know that everything is ok, and can’t we all be happy now? It’s more than impossible to change the behavior that took a lifetime of conditioning. I know she isn’t truly happy, but I guess for some, happiness is truly a luxury.
wow posterous has changed since I last posted. I will try to salvage it from neglect tonight, though whether this post will go half written and unpublished like a handful of others I have filed away, remains TBD. Here I am at home on a rainy Saturday night studying for my final exams. It feels so good to say 'final exams' because it means winter break is a mere two weeks away, which means California is a mere two weeks away, which means refuge from the simultaneously expansive and oppressive midwest is. a mere. two. weeks. away.
Have I changed since I first moved here? It is baffling how much I have learned in the past five months. It feels like I've integrated as much information as one year of undergrad. I've also learned that I'm not as adaptable as I once thought..there ARE places in the world where I don't feel compelled to completely throw myself into and fully relish, if only for the sake of novelty, change, variety. In yoga this week, we meditated on freedom...the idea that through breath and self awareness, challenging and upsetting situations do not need to be fled, because in those challenges lies personal growth...and beyond these challenges lies true freedom. I haven't found true freedom in Madison, though I have found, tolerance, inspiration, independence, and vague optimism. I've also started wearing mittens.
I've made some good friends here..and interestingly, they share my same sentiments about Madison. Social groups have definitely formed in the class. How do people recognize similar interests? Is it something we just exude? I don't wear my "I'm not from Wisconsin shirt" every day of the week, so how do people know? It's weird to think that in our third year when we rotate through different clinics outside of Madison, students and friends will be scattered like the wind. I wonder if I'll maintain my friendships beyond the second year. The interactions are so different from familiar friends in that an underlying level of professionalism still persists. I never gave the 'professional' part of professional school enough credit. I thought it would just be like undergrad, just more facial hair and husband shoppers.
Most importantly, I've learned to not look too far ahead in time. It's just too overwhelming. This perspective has helped me cope with the present. As Rilke would say, "love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then, gradually, without noticking it, live along some distant day into the answer."
His prose IS poetry. Even against the sterile interface of a slate gray kindle.
I started Jonathan Franzen's Freedom after exams last month and got about 12% (according to Kindle..haha...are page numbers obsolete?) into it until an avalanche of classwork limited my free time. Franzen is most notable for Freedom's predecessor, The Corrections, which is now being adapted as a film with an all star cast - Naomi Watts, Brad Pitt and others. So far, Freedom is not as good as The Corrections in that there is a lot more....shock value. It doesn't have the subtle audacity of The Corrections to engage its characters in situations that are at once unbeleivable and completely relatable. I don't see myself in Patty like I saw myself in Denise or Chip or Alfred. But then again..I'm only 12% invested. More reactions to come.
I like Beyonce more than Lady Gaga.
....there i said it!
