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Between New York's brutal cold front and battling the flu, I've barely left my apartment this month. So I decided to get dressed up on Saturday even though we stayed in to make chili and play Scrabble. C gifted me a nice sweater (Oscar de la Renta!) for my 31st that I wanted to sport with some fancy pants I thrifted in Omaha a couple months back (I've been into dressy slacks lately and, overall, have been trying to class it up a couple notches).
I play dress up all the time with C, trying on new fits and unexpected combos from our overflowing dressers/closets. I own more pants than I've ever owned (maybe 15) so the permutations are truly endless.
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Tees, sweaters, turtlenecks
Jean jacket adorned with patches that I’ll probably die in
Wide legged jeans I cropped
Docs + above ankle heeled boots
Some new things I acquired tho and am excited to try:
Loafers
Flare jeans that make me feel cunty in the best way
Some looser fitting jeans that I normally wouldn’t go for because I’m short but these ones work!
I’m on a mission to thrift jeans of every color, so that’ll add some fun to my autumn wardrobe as well 💃 I seem to have no full body pictures of myself since like, 2020 to show how I style any of this, but you probably can picture it pretty easily
Sep 19, 2024
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I often have to dress myself while my husband is asleep because he keeps the sleep schedule of a teenager. Today this resulted in:
- A checkered gray cabana shirt?
- Accidentally inside out children's pajama bottoms with lace and blue ribbon trim at the bottom (they look like fancy Victorian underwear)??
- Tevas???
- The confidence to rock it 😎
Jul 5, 2024
Oversized brown houndstooth sweater coat I’ve had for like five years, funky vintage metallic gold sweater I’ve had for ten years, wool men’s fedora I stole from costumes when I played a male gangster in a middle school play, big scarves, sheer black pantyhose, black boots, black dresses, black blazers… maybe get back into some aggressive pattern clashing idk I’m feeling quirky
Sep 19, 2024
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Jan 24, 2024
Every Monday, me and a bunch of other Brooklyn degenerates congregate at The Gutter in Williamsburg to destroy some pins and drain some longnecks. I've been bowling at the Gutter for eight years now and most seasons we lost miserably, but now we're sort of good. Joining the league was a great way to meet people and I always look forward to league night, especially during tough or lonely periods. Plus, just about everyone is charmed when you tell them you're in a league.
I look like I work for IBM in the 90s in this pic but here I am with my high score (181).
Jan 22, 2024
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I felt like I was on trial watching Anatomy of a Fall -- for my failures as a writer and the ensuing resentments misdirected at my partner. Seeing my private torments litigated in a riveting courtroom drama, spoken in clinical French, was titillating. The writing was so sharp I could’ve just listened like the blind son Daniel and been engaged. But I loved watching Daniel practice piano, the baby blue glaze over his eyes and his surprise testimony in a redrum turtleneck.
The story wastes no time. Within five minutes, the husband is found dead, bleeding out in the snow. An autopsy cannot rule out foul play and his wife, a writer, becomes the sole suspect. What unravels in court is not only the events that precipitated the death of her husband, but an ultimate tea concoction of their strained relationship, competing literary ambitions and the blame and guilt surrounding the accident that blinded their son.
Entering a foreign court is a bit jarring. The rules, procedures and dress are notably different from America and seem silly when defamiliarized. The prosecutor, a bald little gremlin robed in red, was probably my favorite character. Arched, dry and eloquent, he bludgeoned the accused writer with an avalanche of incriminating evidence and was quick to undercut any counter/argument from the defense. Court rules in France appear to allow more cross-talk, making the arguments more conversational than U.S. court dramas, which glorify long-winded monologues.
Impressively, the writer/director thread the needle so well that one is never quite convinced one way or the other. I am easily persuaded and in this lawyerly tug of war, I felt myself suspended over a chasm with demons of jealousy, envy and pride snapping at my feet.
For all the talk of literary failure, this was a written masterpiece. I am drawn to such stories, like a moth to flame, for so many deep and cutting reasons. Like the husband, I deflect and blame others for my shortcomings: If only X, Y and Z were different, then I could write! The wife’s gaslighting voice lives within me too: Make the time and do it, coward! And I disdain my father for giving up sports journalism, and for withholding those ambitions from me (Had I known earlier, maybe then I’d be a staff writer!) and on himself in general.
Funny enough, when I was biking home after seeing Fallen Leaves last week, I had the high thought that my senior thesis anticipated my current condition with regards to writing. My argument was garbled -- something about the author subverting masculine forms/expectations of writing (adventure, heroism) using feminine forms (diary, domesticity) through an act of ventriloquy -- but the book I chose to write about was a book about a wannabe writer’s failure.
Called El Libro Vacio and written by Josefina Vicens, it was a novel about the shortcomings of a middle class man working in middle management and his literary shortcomings. He wanted to be a great writer, but he was tormented and uninspired by the banality of his day-to-day life as a family man. If only he didn’t have a kid and wife, he could hit the road and sail the high seas and finally have something to say! He studiously documents his failures and torments in a diary that amounts to the novel by Vicens.
In my early 20s, I was interested in what makes a good leader. I studied the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, the most winningest basketball coach Gregg Popovich and read more than a dozen presidential biographies. But now I find myself fixated on failure, my own and my fathers, and I want to learn the art of letting go.
Jan 22, 2024