A dizzying array of photos

While searching Pinterest for images to associate with my goals on the new Go Mighty site, I came across two fantastic Tumblr sites whose collection of images was just fantastic. I really just wanted to tack each photo to my wall and stare at it forever (or just add **every photo** to a Pinterest board, but that's getting extreme). Instead, I'll link them here so I can share the wealth.

Viva Amore

The Fullerview

Life Hacks

I love this list of 99 life hacks to make your life easier (via Good). I used to read the Ladies' Home Journals and Good Housekeeping magazines my mom had lying around the house when i was growing up. They were full of tips like this--genius ways to do the things you do every day more easily. Now wouldn't it be great if there were some sort of real-life pop-up video to remind you of one of these genius things in the moment you need it?

Talk like a pirate day

Dear CTA--

Your tweet:












made my day.

Happy National Talk Like a Pirate Day to you too, Matey.

Love,
C

Buying All The Things

Sometimes I read a blog post that just totally hits the nail on the head. A post I want to email to all of my friends and say “See! This is what I mean. This blogger just articulated what I was trying to say much better than I did. Now do you understand?”

Such was the case when I read “You Don’t Need All The Things (But Sometimes Things Help)” on A Practical Wedding. APW, if you’re one of the ten people who haven’t stumbled across it yet, is a community of sane people who craft beautiful essays musing on all sorts of valuable topics—marriage-related and otherwise.

The post suggested that yes, we live in a society where we are constantly told we need to buy this thing or that thing, and yes, it can be nice to consciously decide to live simply and avoid buying everything. But sometimes, buying a particular object helps relieve a relationship stressor and make the whole thing go much more smoothly. The author’s object was The Dishwasher, but mine was The Dresser.  

The apartment K and I share has three tiny bedrooms. We moved a garment rack and our dressers into the middle bedroom to turn it into a walk-in closet. I have an enormous six-foot long Ikea dresser that I absolutely love. Its long, wide wood top, becomes a magnet for all of our larger events where we dump all of the clothes after they come out of the dryer. K’s dresser has three drawers that are huge and deep and utterly inconvenient for storing clothes. Because his dresser is poorly designed and I hate folding clothes and just throw them on top of the mountain/avalanche on my dresser, the situation in that room has gotten out of control. Every morning, I end up searching for fifteen minutes in this massive pile of clothes because I can’t find anything. It was slowly (but certainly) chipping away at my sanity. I declared that we should buy a new dresser. One with lots of drawers for K to put his clothes away. We’d squeeze his old dresser into a corner of our bedroom and use it to hold sheets and towels. This dresser would make every morning more relaxed as I would finally be able to find the clothes I was looking for without causing the whole pile to topple over. It would make every evening better as all of the sheets were neatly folded and easier to find, and it would make our relationship better as I stopped cursing at K for not putting his clothes away.

Yes, getting all the way out to Ikea was a giant pain, and no, we still haven’t put together the 8-million piece dresser, but at least we’ve taken one step closer to implementing a solution. The APW article helped legitimate my decision to buy K a dresser, driving home the point that sometimes spending a little bit of money to address a problem can make an enormous and unquantifiable improvement in the situation.

What do you think of this idea? Have you ever bought something to address a nagging issue? What was the outcome?

Camp Mighty

I am pretty much the opposite of a spontaneous person. I tend to overplan and weigh my options in agonizing detail. It's not that I don't wish I were more spontaneous--one year I even made it my new year's resolution--it just doesn't come naturally.

There is a woman who works in the same building I do. She's my mother's age, but with no kids of her own she's pretty much the super-cool aunt I never had. We met in a creative writing class and grab lunch every few weeks now. Inevitably during our conversations, I find myself talking about something I would love to do, but have talked myself out of, deciding it's too expensive, or I don't have the time, or I should spend the money on something more practical. The last time we talked she stopped me and said, "Go. Life is too damn short." I've heard advice like that before, of course, but for some reason, this time it really resonated with me.

Either that, or I'm on a quest to spend all of my money as fast as I can. Possibly both.

After years of whining about how I wanted a car, I just went for it and bought one. It's used, yes, but it's also the same car I thought was the coolest around when I was sixteen. Coincidence? I think not.

K was leafing through a brochure of jazz concerts the CSO will be performing this upcoming year, but had decided not to subscribe because it was too expensive. Once I stopped thinking about what else I could do with that money, I realized how much he'd enjoy it and just bought the damn tickets. Bam.

And then there's Camp Mighty. I'd heard about Camp Mighty last year when it seemed like all of my favorite bloggers were off on vacation together and thought it looked fantastic. In 11th grade, my friend and I made our own wish lists, which I've been adding to ever since. I"m thrilled that there is a larger group of people who have done the same thing. I had somewhat forgotten about Camp Mighty until last week when I saw that tickets were on sale. I waffled about it a bit--I' not a real blogger; I'm not hip enough for a weekend lounging poolside or a space party; it's expensive and I should save the money. But then my friend's voice starting screaming in the back of my mind. Just do the damn thing. Life's too short.

So off to Camp Mighty I go!

The differences between French and English, or: Why the Bloggess should be bummed she isn't tweeting in French

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece called "I love France." Hokey? Totally, but it was for an assignment, so I went with it. I listed a whole bunch of reasons why I think France is the bee's knees, including, "Because the French language is beautiful in its nuances."

My writing teacher wasn't buying it. She handed the paper back with "Prove it" written on it. So I tried to revise the short piece, and when I came to that sentence, I thought, and then I pondered, and then I finally contemplated, and yet couldn't come up with anything. So I turned to the Internets to see if someone had ever addressed this issue before.

Ah, but they had! Goldmine!

Not so fast. It seems, that actually, the French language is rather unspecific, and not nuanced. Apparently, the English language has half a million words, and French only has 70,000. So, the English language is actually the one that's beautiful in it's nuances.

Take a look at all of the different ways you can translate fil: string, thread, wire, yarn. Think of how many characters The Bloggess could have saved if she'd been asking Nathan Fillion to hold "un fil" instead of "a piece of twine"!

In their defense, the same website has a roundup of all of the different English words that have several meanings in French (the word crue, for example, indicates a river has flooded because of a change in the seasons), but there is far more specificity in English.

Now I know.

**For the record, when I wrote that that completely unspecific (irony!) phrase, I was actually trying to allude to the fact that it's possible to insult people in French in ways that don't even exist in English--such as using the "tu" form when you really should be using the "vous" form, or conjugating your verbs inaccurately (I had one student who seriously offended her host family when she would conjugate "vouloir" as "veux" ("I want") instead of "voudrais" ("I would like").

Best Birthday Ever

What an awesome weekend. Tea at the Drake (delicious!), dinner with LOML, my brother, and his lovely girlfriend at Mindy's Hot Chocolate (really, really yummy), and delicious margaritas at Cesar's with some fantastic friends I hadn't seen for a long time. Oh, and lots, and lots of Downton Abbey.  It was a weekend full of great food and friendship that made me feel so loved.