Tabs I always keep open, a list of bad internet management.
It's true, I browse the intertubes by opening a million different tabs and taking a week to get to them if at all. These are the ones I'm always looking at:
travel? design? office supplies? I'm in love. Not only is this an awesome concept but the name, it's perfect. I'm jealous, and I want it. RAD AND HUNGRY's Something Mighty Collection. Limited edition, locally sourced office supply kits that aim to infuse lo-fi design with travel.
An innovative vacation home in Kawakami Village, Japan:
Designed by Shin Ohori of General Design Co., the structure—Setsumasa bristles at the word “house,” since his desire was for something that “was not a residence”—and its wooded surroundings serve as a testing ground for the Kobayashis, who design outdoor clothing and gear (as well as many other products) for their company, .......Research. The shelter is constructed from locally harvested larch wood and removable fiberplastic walls and is crowned with two yellow dome tents used as year-round bedrooms.
Still, this is no primitive lean-to. There’s electricity, hot water, and a kitchen—not to mention iPads, Internet, and a clawfoot tub. By day, the couple trims trees and chops firewood. At night, they sit around a campfire and eat Japanese curry, listen to Phish, and balance their laptops on their knees. This is what a modern back-to-the-land effort looks like.
Roasted asparagus with miso butter and a poached egg from the genius that is the Momofuku cookbook. I was lucky enough to find this lovely book on sale at one of the Borders that is closing. It's beautifully put together, different from a traditional cookbook. There's plenty of amusing narrative, great photos and the recipes are more of a challenge, which I love, until they call for molds and space I don't have. Note to self, get a commercial kitchen and lots of money...
A lovely new find: They Draw & Cook, a collection of artist-submitted illustrated recipes. All so different and beautiful and not to mention delicious sounding!
I love these videos, they're ads for a language immersion program and they have them for other cities too. Fantastic. It makes me want to go back to France so badly. Reading Julia Child's books and shopping at Anthropologie will have to suffice for now. Paris, tu me manques.
Reasons why I just want to go to culinary school...
Potage parmentier avec artichauts à la sauce hollandaise
just kidding...
or not.
I have been slowly making my way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking but with considerably less drama than Julie Powell. I don't know if it's because I'm having some kind of quarter life crisis too but I think I'm doing it more as just a fun cooking project and because I love all things French. Contrary to the book's ample criticisms, I've enjoyed cooking from it quite a bit so far. What makes this book so not-user-friendly is why I like it. I like the precision and detail that makes a recipe 4 pages long. I relish in the process of making a meal and have never much been drawn to the ready-made age of Rachel Ray. Granted, I don't really intend to cook kidneys, and I have witheld a tablespoon or so of butter here and there, but I'd rather spend hours with Julia Child than 30 minutes with Rachel Ray any day.
Sanctuary T, a New York City (of course) based tea-restaurant, is showcasing a gallery of tea-times from around the world. Contribute your own image of what Your Tea Time looks like. There are some gorgeous submissions. What a great wintertime idea, doesn't it just make you want to sit at a favorite cafe with a book and a delicious cup of tea?
My mom regularly sends me a box of old magazines that have piled up around her house. I guess it's her way of recycling? One of the magazines I get too many copies of to keep up with is O. One of this issues is all about "finding your true calling". In it, frequent contributor and life coach Martha Beck provides a 4-Step Plan to Get Your Life on Track and figure out what it is you're meant to do with yourself.
Steps to figuring your life out. A list. (This counts right?)
Step 1. Stop making excuses.I'm too busy, there's too many choices, what if I miss something? Man up.
Step 2. Stop thinking logically. What? Go do what you love and keep track of what those instincts mean to you but don't let your rational mind guide what you're naturally drawn to. Beck quotes Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis in explaining that "it is only because our emotional brains work so well that our reasoning can work at all."
Step 3. Discover your bliss. Beck equates your instincts to your "inner animal" and she advises following its tracks to get a lead on something. "Make a list of every time you remember being utterly, happily absorbed in an activity, no matter how odd."
Step 4. Develop it. Experiment. With respect to tracking your instincts, try and predict them. Try an activity that may be a little different from what you're used to, but you think will still foster the same bliss. This will help you determine what it is about those activities specifically that you're drawn to like a lion to a herd of antelope. Or something like that.
Step 5. Rinse, Repeat until ou find a track that leads you somewhere. Just keep returning to your list and following new paths until you get somewhere where the track stays hot! Beck suggests finding a common theme and gives examples of clients who followed the obvious paths but it turned out that it wasn't that they wanted to be in politics, but rather that they were drawn more to teamwork and facilitating groups which lead them to event planning. Voilà.
Step 6. Answer the call of your bliss and follow your instincts through the wildness of your fear wherever they lead.
Bear with me here as most of my childhood had been blocked out due to traumatic photos like this one. No, I did not used to be a boy, I just thought I was apparently.
Plastic dollar store alligator. 1990. This was probably my favorite of anything I've ever owned, and the cheapest. I carried it around EVERYWHERE until our dog got a hold of it and it met its sad fate.
Lite-Brite.1992. I could sit in front of that thing for hours. That fact is probably still true.
Girl Talk: a Game of Truth or Dare. 1997? The video is just as exciting as when I tried to make my older boy cousins play with me. Reason #24 why being an only child is awkward.
A box of inside jokes. 2001. I've known my BFF since we were 2. You can imagine the amount of weird inside jokes that rack up in that amount of time. She filled a box with orange soda, boat flags, trash, you know, standard stuff. It was the most original, hilarious, and personal gift ever.
One of Justin's first poetry notebooks. 2006. Filled with scratched out versions and first drafts. Fabulous.
Watercolored sign/decoration thing. 2007. My friend took a painting class, the result, a crazy awesome sign with my nickname and tree bits. I know it sounds weird, but it was sweet, he spent the whole time working on this to surprise me with it.
Giant OCR3w road bike. 2008. A gift to myself for saving money from crappy college jobs. That counts right? I love this beast.
Chanel pearls. 2010. A dream come true. Shallow, I'm aware.
Any gift from my mister. The wrapping is so exciting most of the time it doesn't even matter what's inside.
What ever happened to that voice that seems to be in every 90s commercial? Seriously.
You know those people that can get up every day at the same time, somehow squeeze in a run and a full breakfast before heading off to work and then have some down time to macramé or what have you before making dinner? Well I'm not one of those people.
But for some reason I'd like to be. The idea of a routine is attractive to me. I don't know if it's the efficiency of it or what, but I'd like to be able to have something consistent and stable. The problem I think is that I'd also like to still feel awake after 8 and have time for spontaneity too, I am still in the young and irresponsible age bracket right?
My resolutions and goals often revolve around some kind of attempt at a routine, which would explain why they're so short lived. When I was in school I tried to meditate every morning for 30 minutes. That all went smoothly until about a week in when I woke up late for class after a late night. And unless you've been doing something for long enough to make it automatic, it's hard to get back into a rhythm once you've messed it up.
In another attempt at this, maybe to make myself focus and calm for at least 15 minutes every day, I stared Yoga Journal's 21-Day Challenge. It's 21 days of different sequences to help you create a daily home practice. Each video has a recipe and daily challenge to go with it. I'm also reading the book Meditations from the Mat by Rolf Gates as I go along, and hopefully that will keep me going past the 21 videos. Today is day 9 and everything - the practice, the passage in the book, and the challenge tip - all seemed to fit so perfectly with this goal of mine to use this as a small step toward some kind of routine.
The practice was a gentle morning practice meant to energize you (Which, on a side note, is something else I like about this, it makes me do things I don't normally do often, like a gentle practice). It was introduced with respect to Ayurveda, the sister science of yoga, which is something else I'm always trying to learn more about. The description offered that developing morning self-care rituals is one of the best things to do to ensure good health:
"In fact, the actions you take upon rising will set the tone for the rest of your day. Try adopting one or more of the following Ayurvedic exercises into your waking routine:
Wake an hour before sunrise to benefit from the special vata energy that permeates the atmosphere.
Upon waking, drink a tall glass of lukewarm water with fresh lemon, to gently rouse your digestion.
Splash your face and eyes with cool water to disperse heat, or pitta energy, that builds at night.
Use a tongue scraper to remove toxins and to awaken the digestive fire.
Give yourself a gentle ear massage to awaken meridian points all along the ear."
The challenge also suggested that once you got moving, it was much more difficult to skip out on your daily practice, which I've found to be very true. And finally, day 9 in Gates' book is about Abhyasa, practice. The author says it "refers not only to yogic practice but also to the attitude with which a practice is approached...It is the dedicated, unswerving application of what you believe in..It is an energy that builds in our lives as we use it. And it will be there for us in hard times if we cultivate it in good times." For that reason I hope to be able to keep finding time for either a daily morning or evening practice no matter what is happening, to take advantage of the in-between times to cultivate my practice and my awareness, and maybe someday I'll be able to fit a run in.
I'm going to leave it at that. Another exercise. I have a tendency to create over-ambitious goals and to-do lists that never get met. So here's a stab at learning to have a concept of time, and at actually feeling like I'm getting something done!
Watching this creative process is so incredible. The scale and precision of everything. Inspiring. Of course they're French. Oh and then the music is pretty great too.
After the holiday rush I feel like my creativity just disappeared. With so much to do and figure out, I have handfuls of lame excuses. I feel like I'm always trying to "figure out" my life. There's too much to do. I need to clear my space and my head and get to crafting! What do you do when you feel overwhelmed with things that aren't what you want to be doing?
2. Physical therapist. How fun would it be to stretch out Nenê pre-grame?
3. Archeologist, more discovering, less statistics please.
4. Tree-Climbing Scientist, ever since I saw a picture of someone doing something like this in a National Geographic when I was 8.
5. Designer/Stylist/Image Consultant. Ah, picking out outfits and dressing people all day, yes!
6. Owner of a cafe/shop. Maple bacon peanut butter pancakes and homemade goodies anyone? Time to be creative and do things I love all day? Wait, that's a mom isn't it?
7. Forensic Psychologist/Examiner ish? The mystery, the intrigue! oh and the law! I might be romanticizing this...
I'm not one for resolutions. Mostly because I can't keep a routine. But I like projects. So, this 2011 I am attempting 52 lists. One list per week for a year. I see it as a good way to actually make me sit still for even if just 5 minutes and write. Regularly. And I'm kind of interested to see what happens when I run out of ideas.
I've always wanted to do 52projects but it seems a bit much for this already busy year. Something like seemed much more fitting. So with inspiration from other list-lovers and listography, here I go!
