Blogging : Honeymoon Diaries
O. Em. Gee, y'all. I've been blogging! Over at the Honeymoon Diaries you can find me obsessing over going to Morocco, and finally revealing our Italian honeymoon...
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Camp Mighty 2012
I’m going. Here is my life list. I’m sorry I don’t have more to say about this right now. I’ve got shit to do.
1. Learn to play drums.
2. Hike Macchu Picchu.
3. Get pink/purple ombre highlights.
4. Blog/photography project of NYC facades and eventually other cities.
5. Write, pitch and publish my first ever article for a “real” publication (print or online).
6. Hang out with lemurs in Madagascar.
7. Start up a stuffed animal swapping/adoption site. Because I still can’t just give them
away to anybody.
8. Have my own business.
9. Own a Fiat 500.
10. Eat at least 1 extravagant dinner a year.
11. Learn how to meal plan and grocery shop really effectively.
12. OR Make enough money to afford food delivery.
13. Act in a play.
14. Visit Iceland in the summer and also in the winter.
15. Drive around the SW in a vintage convertible.
16. Visit all the beachs in Croatia.
17. Visit the Trulli in Italy.
18. Go to Israel with Nicole.
19. Visit Marfa, Tx.
20. Return to Ozona, Tx.
21. Dance on pointe again.
22. Fly first class on one of those fold-down beds.
23. See the pyramids (for my mom).
24. See Petra.
25. Be photographed by Bill Cunningham.
26. Stay in the ice hotel.
27. Hole up on a cliffside in Greece.
28. Become a lawyer.
29. Own a pool.
30. Try living in South America.
31. Stay in that treehouse hotel in Dominica.
32. Go to Carnival in Trinidad.
33. Save, share and celebrate historic homes (like La Selva) in a lucrative way.
34. Sail down the Amazon.
35. Hole up in the English countryside – preferably where Doc Martin takes place.
36. Stay at that hotel in Kenya where the giraffes stick their heads in the window.
37. See orangutans in the wild.
38. Learn to sing one song that won’t embarrass me at karaoke.
39. Visit Komodo Island and see the dragons.
40. Stay in an overwater bungalow in French Polynesia or the Maldives.
41. Get my yoga certification in Bali.
42. Learn archery.
43. Buy a crumbling building in Italy.
44. Swim with whale sharks.
45. Learn massage.
46. Write a fantasy novel.
47. Publish a book.
48. Go on a spiritual pilgrimage.
49. See the gorillas in Uganda with my college anthro professor.
50. Go yachting in the Mediterranean.
51. See blue-footed boobies in the Galapagos.
52. Go glamping.
53. Open a bar.
54. Write a screenplay from one of my favorite books.
55. Appear in Vogue.
56. Visit Hagia Sofia.
57. See a capybara in the wild.
58. Run a marathon.
59. See one of the ideas on my very long list turned into a tv show. (J.J. Abrams, where
are you?)
60. Birdwatch on every continent.
61. Learn spanish web/silks.
62. Drive from LA to Seattle on PCH with Scott.
63. See the pigs in the Exumas.
64. See Great Whites breach in South Africa.
65. Teach personal finance to high school/college kids (and their parents).
66. Open a gourmet milkshake shop.
67. Join Mensa.
68. Visit Djibouti because well, have you seen it?
69. Somehow transform my love of hotels into a career.
70. Flip houses.
71. Live like a king in Patagonia
72. Live in London.
73. See the non-touristy part of the Great Wall of China.
74. Have a purpose that makes me excited to get out of bed every morning.
75. Get my teeth fixed.
76. Take a cooking class with Carla Hall.
77. Swim with dolphins.
78. Make a quilt.
79. Brave a small plane in Belize.
80. Live for a while in Merida, Mx.
81. Act in a movie. Act in a movie that people see.
82. Learn ballroom dancing.
83. See marmosets and tarsiers in the wild
84. Cage dive with sharks.
85. Learn to scuba dive.
86. Go to Martinique.
87. Show Scott Hawaii.
88. Learn fencing.
89. Find out who my grandfather’s birth parents were.
90. See the Northern Lights.
91. Go hiking in the Himalayas.
92. Volunteer with the sloths in Costa Rica.
93. Stay in every room at the Roxbury Motel.
94. Take my 10 best friends on vacation somewhere amazing for my 40th birthday.
95. Get a PhD in history or cultural studies.
96. Take a writing class from Erica Jong.
97. Learn Spanish.
98. Learn about Ayurveda.
99. Visit Easter Island and see the statues.
100. Help renovate a French chateau
101. Trace my roots in Ireland and Germany.
102. Visit Yves St Laurent’s house in Morocco.
103. Work on an HGTV show.
104. Visit Philip Johnson’s The Glass House.
105. Own a dog.
Thoughts : Blogging
“Today I thought about blogging about one-sentence synopses of what I thought about blogging about today.”
On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 4:05 PM, KA wrote:
exactly! i might just start doing this with my blog...
"Today I thought about blogging about one-sentence synopses of what I thought about blogging about today."
or is that too meta?
On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 4:03 PM, Aimee wrote:
perfect. I would read it, since it wouldnt take a ton of time to read, its a blog for the busy folks.
On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 4:02 PM, KA wrote:
Bwah. Let's just start a blog that says, "today i thought about blogging XX" and that's it.
On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 3:58 PM, Aimee wrote:
Its the thought that counts.
On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 3:54 PM, KA wrote:
Ugh. I *thought* abt blogging the other day, does that count?
Style : Work
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| Check out those demon eyes. Clearly I was born to be doing this, right? |
Yesterday was my first day working from home (and by working I mean supervising movers and figuring out how to squeeze all my crap into my 10' x11' office), and I figured I'd celebrate by documenting my last week of leaving-the-house clothes. (Ok, if you've been following the weather in NY you'll notice it was my technically my second to last week's wardrobe.) Obviously, I'm already getting SO much DONE.
It was actually oddly fun and relaxing taking these by myself with a tripod. Click 10 sec timer, try to look fierce, fail miserably, repeat. I might make this a regular thing to motivate myself to continue dressing thoughtfully. (Even if it's just in one of FOUR pairs of Uniqlo legging pants I just bought. They're seriously that awesome. Work from home pants, what what.)
I was pretty proud of this week's outfits, especially in light of the unseasonably cold temperatures (I don't know how to dress for 70's) and fact that I've been doing a lot of manual labor at work. There's a solid color scheme going on, and I think this would make for an excellent vacation wardrobe, as it all can be mixed and matched and repeated ad infinitum.
 |
| This is the face of someone who's not usually productive before 9am. Top: Target? Shorts: Express Shoes: Keds |
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| Outtake, ftw. Unless you enjoy my fiercely stressed out face. Pants: Target Hoodie: H&M Shoes: Toms Scarf: Target |
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| This one does not photograph well. I'd like a do over with some skinny white jeans. White shirt: Converse for Target Tank: for Target Pants: H&M |
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| What is this, FashionToast? Look at that pose. I clearly think I'm on ANTM. My first serious attempting at mixing prints. I think it's working. God I love purple and persimmon. Onesie: Express Scarf: Target Belt: NineWest via TJMaxx Shoes: Keds Bag: Prada   More intense modeling. Skirt: Vintage, my mom. Tube: I don't remember V-neck: Express. |
Birthday : Goals
photo of yours truly by the mr, scott eric johnson
For the past few years I’ve been doing a year in review .pdf thing courtesy of Marcus Buckingham after I read one of his books and signed up for his mailing list. (It’s the only thing I’ve ever gotten from his mailing list, and it has just now occurred to me that I hope tons of good stuff hasn’t been trapped in a spam filter or something.)
Essentially you write down the highs and lows of the past year, what you learned, what your goals are for the coming year and how you plan to achieve them.
Because I’m a procrastinator, doing this exercise gets later and later every year, and has now settled around my birthday, which I think is as good a time as any. My outlook on the prior year has gelled, and I have a decent stock of where I am and what I can get done in the next 8 months. Sometimes my goals are Mondo Beyondo level unrealistic and others have been downright manageable.
In an unprecedented move of transparency, this year I’ve decided to share some of them.
Here are the juicy ones:
1) Create business plan, packages, website and take on 1 new client.
Now that I’ll be working from home and the proud owner of an extra 10 hours of time a week, I’ve decided I want to officially brand myself as a business manager, and reach out to creative solopreneurs and tiny businesses who are finding they can no longer do it all themselves and need administrative and strategic help, but aren’t ready to commit to hiring “staff”.
2. Focus on Honeymoon Diaries as a blog people might actually read, and/or as a potential business or stepping stone to other career opportunities.
Here’s the thing. I’d like my work to entail looking at photos of hotels all day. Yes, this sounds like a ridiculous thing to do for a living, but there are lots of bloggers and others doing ridiculous things for money, so why shouldn’t I be one of them? And yes, asking the universe for this scares the crap out of me for several reasons. Mostly because I don’t do well with good things happening to me, and so I can't handle or imagine how GOOD it would be. How happy PLAYING in the world of pretty travel dreams makes me. Happy like a little kid happy. Summer mornings happy. Even though I’m now putting it out there for the world to see, I can’t imagine actually letting myself want this, this thing that I already do day in and day out, at least when I’m not actively avoiding the things that make me happy. (Which is a big issue for another post and possibly a therapist.) At the very least, if Jetsetter’s recent Pinterest contest showed Aimee and I anything, it’s that we’re not the only ones that want to look at travel photos all day.
3. Continue taking acting classes and find out what it is I’d have to do to do more with it:
Well this is a BIG and SCARY one. Perhaps the biggest and the scariest. The thing is, I like acting. A lot. I’d like to see what it’d be like to do more of it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, except the little voice that’s told me since childhood that the bananas-ness of “being an actor” is so, well, bananas, that I might as well not bother. Except that I have started bothering and all I want to do is see what it would be like to do a teensy bit more, so that stupid voice can shut the fuck up right now.
4. Write article about orphans and investing. Look into whether there are any personal finances blogs or components of personal finance blogs for high school and college kids out there. Get involved.
This is a good one, in two parts. See, I’ve been really into $$$ this year, and specifically I’ve been thinking about how us young adult orphans react to investing for retirement. When, you know, we saw our parents not make it to retirement. This feels like a real article, meant for somewhere bigger than this blog. And thusly, I’d like to make it so. And then keep that ball rolling.
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So that dear readers, are my big scary goals for 29. I should probably try to have some fun in there too.
Birthday Update
i was an ugly little monkey.
Boy, if this were a paper journal, it sure would be dusty right now.
In other words, it’s been a while.
A lot of things have been afoot since the wedding and I never quite got around to “announcing” them, possibly because it felt like they deserved announcing and not offhanded mentioning, which is more my style.
Yesterday being my birthday, it seemed as good a time as any to make a list, and then we’ll all be up to speed in a matter of minutes…
1) I never quite got my mind back the way it was, but I’m doing better.
Sometimes I miss the single-minded pursuit of things that academia and film—and the wedding—gives me, but I never miss the catatonic state the end of a project leaves me in. Especially when I don’t have a winter or summer or otherwise unemployed break to binge drink and get reacquainted with my inner monologue.
2) Starting in July, I’m going to be doing one of my jobs from home.
This was decided sometime last year, but it was so up in the air that I was in a perpetual state of “I’ll believe it when I see it” until there was a definite deadline. But now it’s happening, and I won’t have to commute 3 whole days a week, meaning I’ll have an extra 10 hours to do exciting things with, plus the new setup should make my time that much more efficient in general.
3) I’ve already allocated all my newfound time:
3a) I’m starting a business. It’s going to be me, doing what I do, providing administrative, logistical and all-around support to solopreneurs and tiny companies (ideally ladies with world domination in mind!), who don’t yet have the need or funds for steady staff, but who are no longer able to do it all on their own.
3b) I’m already starting to work with a company that markets the historic mansions and museums here on Long Island (an awesome intersection between history, architecture, interior design, and luxury that I’ve loved since childhood).
4) Scott lost his job.
We saw this one coming, and were wondering if it’d be before or after wedding. Turns out it was after, the week before Thanksgiving. Meh. It was a bit of a financial blow after paying for a wedding and a honeymoon, but we were lucky that we hadn’t gone into any debt from that, just didn’t have quite as much in the bank as I’d have liked. On the plus side, we spent most of December taking some super fun weekend trips. Ok, that didn’t help the budget, I know.
5) We took our third acting class.
More on this in a future post. I know, that’s the problem I’ve been having with not getting everything on here, but this one I’ve already started writing. And I’ll finish writing. Pinkie swear. Anyway, we did and it was maybe the best one yet, and I’m so happy that we have this extracurricular and the group of people that comes with it in our lives.
5) Scott found a job.
I should probably back up a bit, and this should probably get it’s own post, but we have this secret plan to be able to work from anywhere and spend a few months out of each year traveling/living abroad. Soo…I wasn’t took keen on him getting another full-time job, when he could take unemployment and spend the time beefing up his portfolio to begin doing freelance work for himself. But then a recruiter found him on LinkedIn. And the job sounded like a step up from his previous job. And he mentioned working from home and/or part-time. And they seemed amenable to that. And it was going to work. And then it wasn’t going to work. And it was a stressful couple of weeks, but in the end he got exactly what he wanted – 2 days in the office, 2 days from home, and Fridays off. HUGE, I tell you.
And that’s where we are.
Upcoming:
~ We’re going to Googa Mooga this weekend. Super excited. There will likely be lots of instagramming.
~ We visit Zan’s farm before she and the Cowboy head off on a new adventure!
~ I finally sort of mostly finish cleaning out the last room in the house (to become my office) , though we still have bins in the shed and it’s all going to drag on longer, that’s for sure.
~ We go to Mexico in July – a few days on a catamaran and several days at a resort that looks like we shouldn’t be able to afford it.
Commute :
Thursday, April 26
I’m mostly writing this because I feel like clicking keys are the only defense I have right now over obnoxiousness. Clacking keys drive Scott crazy on the train but I have a feeling they won’t drive the guy next to me crazy because he’s so drunk I can not only smell it on his breath, but he sat on an empty soda bottle that was on the seat next to me. I mean, sat on it. I don’t know how that’s possible. I don’t think anybody’s ass is large enough to flatten a plastic half liter soda bottle enough to mitigate sitting on it for an hour. This is what is breaking me.
That anonymous comment this morning on my half-joking, half-true LIRR rant only upset me momentarily, until I had formulated a fair but firm response to it. But it + my usual shitty commute got me thinking about the part that’s not in that post, the part I don’t like admitting to because who likes to admit their weaknesses?
I wish I had meant none of what I wrote there. I wish I had a smaller personal space bubble, I wish I wasn’t claustrophobic on places like trains and airplanes. I wish I could ignore or—even better—not notice people’s rudeness. I wish, like sooooo many New Yorkers, I was blissfully OBLIVIOUS.
But I’m not.
And my frustrations with all of those things can leak out as snark. I don’t think that’s such a harmful way to deal. At least it seems better than other options—like the excessive drinking of the seatmate mentioned at the beginning of this post, whose initial muttering to himself dissolved into unintelligible gurgling noises by the time he got off an hour later.
(And at least I’m not alone in my frustrations or snark, as the comments on this Gothamist post happily reminded me.)
For the past month Scott has been “trial working” for a company that was looking for a full-time designer, but seemed open to negotiating to work-from-home and/or part-time, and then the owner said “never mind” after Scott had already worked out an agreement with the guy who would’ve been his boss. When this all came down on Monday, there was a brief moment in time where he was considering agreeing to full-time.
And I almost lost it—on the train, appropriately enough. Because I thought we were getting out of this. I thought the commuting was almost over. I thought the living in NY would be over in the next few years. I thought we had a plan. And then for a scary moment I thought—like those horrible stories of people’s whose partners leave them with no warning—maybe I had been planning all of this alone.
And I realized, I am so far at the end of my rope, with commuting, with NY, with having the same life that has not changed in 5 years, that I would do it alone if it came down to it. Maybe this is taboo, but my sanity is more important than anything or anyone, and it’s slowly crumbling under the the mind-numbing monotony that is my day-to-day existence. I look at all these people on these trains everyday, and they all look as fucking miserable as me. Just older. Worse for the wear. Often drunk. I can’t wake up in another 5 years and be one of those people.
I know right now I’m talking about a lot of big changes and plans that I haven’t even mentioned on this blog, and I know I’m horribly out of the loop and wrapped up in my own shit. (Wasn’t the selfishness supposed to recede after the wedding?) But I had to get this off my chest, and out into the universe. Changes are coming, and I don’t care if none of it is “safe”, financially or otherwise. Y’all can just point me right back here, to this day and this post, when we’ve living in a van down by the river.
And now back to my blogging sabbatical.
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