How To Shop at Marshall’s/Any place that requires excavation

A few of my friends were interested in how to get a new look without spending tons of money, so I wrote up a little guide on how to successfully Marshalls dive. I don’t remember where I got all the initial ideas from, but the washing the pillowcase frequently was, I remember, from galadarling.com.

So here we go:

Wendy’s Guide on Thrift-Store/Marshall’s/TJMaxx etc Diving

First, some general guidelines:

1)      Don’t get discouraged if you don’t find something right away. The stock in these stores is always changing, so one day you might find three great pieces and one day come up with nothing.

2)      On a similar note, the trick is to keep coming back. Is there a store near you, one which you could visit frequently? Keep popping in. Keep popping in once or twice every two weeks, even if it’s only for a few minutes. What’s great is that there’s a Marshall’s in my hometown in a big shopping plaza, so after my mom gets groceries she just goes in and out. It’s not super time-consuming.

3)      That said, if you don’t have the time to frequently revisit, be prepared to devote a good three to four hours of a weekend to digging. I only go to Marshall’s when I go home, but when I’m there I’m there for hours on end. I can safely say that a few hours in there can yield sweet rewards.

4)      Make sure you’re dressed comfortably. You’re going to be trying on a lot of things so make sure there aren’t too many buttons/snaps on your clothes (unless you don’t mind taking your time). Don’t get discouraged if they don’t fit the first time around—there’s going to be a Round 2 and 3 and possibly 4 of sweeping the store.

5)      Look on all the racks. A lot of times the sizes get mixed up, so you’ll find a small in a large section or vice versa. If you see something cute, grab it first, then check the size tag—you might just be in luck!

6)      Dig. Dig. Dig. DIG. You might have to comb the same rack two or three times; I know I’ve missed a thing or two on my first look around. I like to think of the first look as a general overview and the second and third as a detailed examination. You get the idea.

7)      Know your sizes! You have a ton of mixed brands all thrown together on one rack, so you might be a size 33 in one and a 36 in another. Don’t feel embarrassed about having to up a size because every brand is made a little differently. Sometimes you might also have to grab the same pair of jeans in two different sizes just to play it safe.

Second, some rules for pricing:

1)      All those cheap prices–$5 for a t-shirt, $10 for a skirt, $16 for a dress and so on are going to rack up fast, so if you have a budget you might want to prioritize your pieces, otherwise you might wind up paying $70-$100. But consider how much you’re paying for how many pieces of clothing, and if it’s still a good deal, go for it. Another thing I like to do is take the price of the clothing and divide it by the number of times I’m going to wear it per year, and if it’s a reasonable sum then I’ll buy it. This especially holds for pricey clothing, because you want to get the most wear out of it if you’re paying a lot.

2)      Designer clothing will be a bit on the pricier side, even at stores like these. However, if it’s well-made and you really like it, go for it, because in regular retail it’ll be way more expensive.

3)      Clearance rack first! I’ve found a super nice pair of jeans for $10. The exhilaration when one realizes that is almost enough to make you run up to the register, buy it and run out. But seriously the clearance rack first.

My rules of thumb for when it comes to picking clothing:

• If it feels like plastic, it probably is. That slithery shiny polyester material may be cheap but it is a big, BIG no-no. Just because your clothing’s cheap doesn’t mean it has to look cheap. It will also chafe your skin and discolor very, very quickly. It might even melt in the dryer. Ick! Look at the tag for the material—cotton, acrylic and softer materials are all right.
  • This applies to tights as well. I prefer acrylic and cotton tights to polyester and nylon; it’s just more breathable on the skin.
• Look at the way the clothing is sewn together. Look CAREFULLY. If it feels flimsy or, worse, you hear a couple threads ripping as you’re trying it on, reconsider, unless you’re good with a needle and can easily sew some tighter stitches on. Or a stitch comes loose and it doesn’t make the whole thing fall apart, etc.
• More delicate tops and dresses are going to need a little extra attention when it comes time to wash them. You don’t have to wash a dress every time you wear it (unless you bought it at a thrift store—then it’s always a good idea to run all your clothing through the washers once before you wear them) but when you do, wash all delicates (dresses, tights, bras, chiffon/silk things) in a pillowcase tied with a hairtie. You will save yourself so much hassle and so many tears from detangling or having the clothing rip in the washing machine. Plus, it’s just a good idea to wash your pillowcase once a week because you’re basically rubbing your face full of oil and makeup and whatnot into a piece of cloth, which can clog up your pores, so if you wash any bedding frequently, it should be a pillowcase. Most things will hold up all right in the dryer, but very sheer things of course are better off being line-dried.

Now, one of my most favorite things. You guessed it, shoes:

• Admittedly I haven’t always followed this rule because I’m a sucker for pretty shoes, but comfort is very important, of course, especially if you’re going to be wearing the shoes frequently. And there are such things as comfortable shoes outside of jogging sneakers. It all depends on what kind of arch you have. Do you have a low, medium or high arch? Personally, I have rather flat feet, so shoes with a little bit of a heel are optimal for me. I’ve heard that high heels work really well for people with a high arch, but it varies from person to person. Play it by ear.
• Again, like with clothing, you can tell really cheap shoes. Look at the shoes carefully. What do they feel like? Hard, flexible, plastic or faux leather? Check the tag if you’re not sure (I’m not even sure sometimes). Generally, real leather shoes are softer and easier on the feet, which is why I’ve always paid a bit more for the real deal. But if you’re vegan or against leather, then high-quality faux leather should work just fine.
• Make sure you try the shoes on. This is such a given, but really try them on. Walk around the store a few times. Is it still comfortable? Do they get more comfortable the more you keep them on your feet? Personally I love heels that are lined with suede, making it easier on your feet. If they’re heels, make sure you can walk in them!
• Flats are some of the easiest and hardest shoes to find. When buying flats, make sure they’re snug against your feet. I would go down a size when it comes to buying flats because they can stretch, especially if they’re made of leather—leather is more flexible than plastic. Loose flats will drive you crazy, so unless you’re prepared to stuff tons of tissues in the toes, go down a size or don’t buy them. No matter how cute they are.
• Unless they’re a gift from God (and I have had shoes that are a gift from God) all shoes are going to require some breaking in, so wear them in gradual increments. I made the mistake of wearing unbroken shoes on a day where there was going to be quite a bit of walking. The huge blisters on my heels can speak for themselves.

Here are what I consider some reasonable prices. I’m going to start at $5 for all of them and cut them off at a certain place. If you can find something awesome for less, more power to you and you are blessed indeed. Of course, things can be more or less depending on the designer—if it’s a nice designer and it’s marked down 75% of regular retail price, then hell yes it’s a steal! But designers aside, then this what I would normally pay:

Tops: $5-$15

Skirts: $5-$25

Dresses: $5-$25 (anything above, and you can probably find a nicer version in a place like Macy’s or something)

Jeans: $5-$25 (ditto the above)

Shoes: $5-$40 (shoes are a bit more expensive, especially nicer ones. $40 for shoes is actually really good considering how well they’re made, because you’re going to be wearing them a lot, so the price per wear ratio gets low).

Jackets: $5-$100 (again, jackets and coats are versatile and will last you a long, long time, so paying $45 for something you’re going to wear everyday of the winter will keep the price per wear ratio low).

Suits: $5-$75 (admittedly I don’t know that much about suits. It seemed like a reasonable cutoff).

So I’ve racked my brain for all I know about this stuff, and this is what I’ve got. Happy diving, you guys—I’m sure you’ll come up with awesome outfits. : D

vacation shenanigans

first off, happy new year! 2010 should be a good one. 2009 was kind of bad all-around. Drama and death galore! Anyway, I got back a few days ago from my trip around the West Coast. San Diego was definitely the nicest part–I loved the waterfront park where I sat and meditated on the green grass and watched the ocean. The seals at La Jolla beach were also super adorable–I’ve never seen such bizarre and cuddly creatures up close. They actually bounce en route to the ocean. Fat seals!

Well, fat seals and this little guy who came right up to my camera:

My favorite part about LA? Definitely the coffee shop we went to. My friend Elizabeth and I windowshopped around and came across this tiny place called Jack and Jill’s Coffee, which had two of the best things ever: green tea lattes and crepes. oh, the crepes. We split a berries and nutella one.

I’m back in good old cold New England, though, and going back to New York on Monday. In the meantime, here’s a poem and a drawing. I haven’t been doing much of either because I learned to crochet while in Vegas. My friend Shelly was there as well with her family and in-between the obnoxious casino hopping and window shopping she taught me how to chain yarn together, providing me with endless hours of entertainment during the long drives in the shitty rental car. My first project was this little guy:

I left him at my aunt’s because she enjoyed it so much (and because she made the most kick-ass bread I’ve ever eaten). Right now I’m working on a pink octopus. 8D This mouse wasn’t hard to make though. I had to do a little tweaking with his ears and legs because it was based very loosely off the octopus pattern, then improvised by decreasing the stitches around the nose, so there was no actual pattern for either the ears or the legs. Ah, well. it worked out just fine.

As far as creative productivity goes, I wrote a poem and drew a showgirl while I was in Vegas (you can see the rough version of the poem around the showgirl drawing):

PS: I discovered the MJ is, in fact, alive, while I was in LA. It’s also the fobbiest pose ever, and I look disgustingly excited at this discovery:

That’s all. I’m working on a short comic right now, so keep an eye out for it!

Snowy Kisses in the Streetlight

It’s 1:19 AM, and I’m vegging out after a final. What better way to pass the time than by watching silly romantic movies and drawing?

I’m trying out a somewhat new thing–mixed media. The drawings were all done with red mechanical pencil, inked over with a 0.3 muji pen and the backgrounds colored with markers and the snowflakes with white charcoal. Ah, snow, ah kisses under streetlights!

The first drawing is actually a re-do of a drawing of two people under a streetlight done last year around this time (I don’t think I scanned it, but if I do I’ll put it up for comparison). When I can’t think of anything to draw, I re-draw things I’ve done before just to see the level of improvement. I think in this case (and you guys will have to take my word for it) that there’s been a pretty significant improvement. I hope that next year at this time it’ll be even more of a jump in quality.

It’s Thursday now, and I’m contentedly munching on popcorn and listening to music. Because I haven’t done one in a long, long time, here’s a quick Things I Love Thursday

• Betsey Johnson sample sales. I’m glad Laura dragged me to it because I had the best time trying on dresses and buying one really pretty slinky little black dress that will no doubt last me a long, long time.
• Yaya’s Tea Garden in Chinatown, right off of Elizabeth and Hester (make a tiny right at Hester if you’re walking downtown) is pretty amazing. So far, I’ve tried the orasmathurs, chrysanthemum, rose assam and lavender lattes and am dying for more. Seriously go if you’re in the neighborhood. Mindy, the girl who works there, is lovely and engaging to talk to. The tea is unbeatable and the riceballs are delicious and it’s all reasonably priced. What else do you want?
• Disney’s The Princess and the Frog: SO ADORABLE. Disney never fails!
• Speaking of movies, Enchanted, Totoro, Spirited Away, Beauty and the Beast. Sighhh. <33
• bagels, coffee and poetry with my professor
• drawing endlessly
• upcoming winter break–it’s VEGAS, baby! Vegas, LA, San Francisco, and Phoenix. I’ve never been to the West Coast before and am thoroughly excited.
• big snuggly sweaters and brown combat boots
• lavender incense
• origami paper and decorative hearts
• laughing hysterically
• meeting lots of wonderful new people and running into old friends
• getting my inspiration back. I just really needed to sit down and draw something with concentration as opposed to random doodles of faces and heads.

Thinking Thinking Thinking

First of all, I present to you an adorable picture of my dog: See how ridiculously happy she is?

Truth be told, I haven’t updated this blog in awhile because, well, I have not been ridiculously happy. Or happy at all, for that matter, and I would hate to let people know that I get sad sometimes. It’s silly, but still, I wanted to preserve the image of a cheerful girl who always smiles and finds magic in life. Well, whatever. The truth is I was miserable for the last few weeks because it seemed like my life had come crashing to a standstill. There was nothing exciting going on, nothing new, nothing magical, and I couldn’t find anything magical to make out of the mundane, boring, bland situation I was in of just trudging along day by day waiting for the sky to give me a sign.

But one day a few weeks ago I woke up and realized it’s not all that bad. Maybe it was the calming bookstore I was in, full of the smell of incense and the sounds of soft music, maybe it was my ginger tea, maybe, maybe, maybe. Whatever it was, something in my brain clicked into place.

see we learn in psych class that nondepressed people actually have an overexpectation of how much they can control and that depressed people are actually the right ones–that they see a situation for what it is and how little control they actually have. But having an illusion of control keeps us happier. Because when we think we can control a situation we have more of an incentive to get what we want. And sometimes I think all these studies are just made up. I get into a mood where I question how real everything is, and ultimately the conclusion I always draw is I don’t know, and who cares, as long as I make the best of things, of where I am, of what I’m doing, then whether I really have control or not is irrelevant. Paint a big fat red “Whatever” on everything. Yet I haven’t stopped caring. Maybe not caring to the point where I’m always putting myself in an existential crisis, but just going with the flow.

I don’t know. I guess I should apologize for neglecting my blog for so long, but I don’t feel that way. I didn’t want this blog to become an online chronicle of everything I would say to a psychologist of HOW I REALLY FEEL ABOUT THINGS OKAY because let’s face it we always say things through filters. See me one way, see me another, nose pierced, not pierced, either way I’m still Wendy. I’m done bemoaning the fact that nobody understands, because people understand. It’s not that hard to understand another person, is it? All you really have to do is listen. Not hear, listen.

I’ve written a lot of letters lately, both in my head and out. Postcards to friends across the sea, silent monologues in letter form of HOW I REALLY FEEL ABOUT THINGS OKAY to a boy. That boy. Hey goat boy, you know who you are. If you’re reading this (betcha you’re not) here’s HOW I REALLY FEEL ABOUT THINGS OKAY: that even though I’ve heard it a thousand billion trillion times I finally realized it. I can’t save you. You don’t want to be saved. I’d wager that you’re either content where you are or too ambivalent to change your situation. You certainly don’t want a nosy girl in the way of whatever. Also, I don’t think you listened to that mix I  made you, nor will you probably ever, and that’s also okay. I’ll let myself have the occasional thoughts of wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if-we-were-closer but as each day passes those thoughts become less and less frequent and someday they’ll be an echo. You’re just a boy I loved, part of my college memories. I can tell you you’re a stupid goat boy all I want and it would still be like sliding down a window. I can see A and B and C about you that would be so so so wonderful if you would just rethink and reconsider, but that’s not my place to decide, nor will it ever be. it’s okay though, fate has funny ways of working, doesn’t it?

you said life is hard and you’ve certainly seen lots of hardness in life. After, I would think about how hard life was, too, especially when I was depressed and sad, when someone elbowed me on the street and knocked me down and I would have to get back up and dust myself off, I would fight back tears and think God I hate people. When I saw how vapid and shallow girls could be in my classes I thought God I hate people, and when I heard boys bragging about their sexual exploits I thought God I hate people. After awhile of thinking God I hate people I realized there was no point. What’s that going to change? It’s commonsensical, of course. So I’m going to stop trying to change people, to fix them. They’re not jalopies. They’re people.

And then I cheered up, and now I’m happy. Just like that. Of course the situation changed because I wanted it to change–you have to want it bad enough. A few weeks ago I wanted to leave all of it behind, college, and finish everything as fast as possible and move on, move on, move on. Well, I am moving on, but slowly, one step at a time, and it’s not an easy process, but it’ll happen eventually. I just have to be patient with myself, and so should you. You should all be patient with yourselves. Patient and gentle. When your body doesn’t react the way you want it to, be gentle, please. Say, “That’s okay,” and walk on, and keep walking. You’ll get there, I promise.

Entropy

One for the Subconscious

Art art art art art ART

yes, art. More specifically, doodling. You should all do it because I heard somewhere that doodling improves memory (maybe it was a study done by guilty college students who spend more class time doodling than taking notes, as I so often find myself doing). There is nothing better than a blank piece of paper in front of me and a pen in my hand. My mind drips through the molecules on the page (I’ve been writing way too much about molecules and neurotransmitters lately) and I find my fingers taking the most fantastic linear adventures along the way.  draw girls, faces, girls who resemble me, morbid bunny rabbits eating hands with sharp shark teeth, cats, hands, robots, bionic parts, wings…

Try this if you’re stressed: Take a piece of paper and draw whatever comes to mind. It can be something as simple as scribbles and hearts and stars or it can be an elaborately crafted dinosaur. Do it for the sheer pleasure of doodling, let your imagination wander and your mind dance. The best drawings I’ve made have all come from starting with a doodle and then just letting myself have fun with it, and to hell with making it conceptually clever or good in some way. As long as you put a lot of heart into it, it will show. Do it for yourself. When we draw sometimes we forget that the whole purpose of art is to just let yourself go. Well, let yourself go. Go, go, go! Go as far and fast as you want. Love the paper and the pen, love your fingers that move over the page. Love what you make and love it back to yourself. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

There is no death in my Tarot Deck

Two poems. (:

There Is No Death In My Tarot Deck

His daddy deals in death, he tells me,
and I wonder how many bodies he’s seen
effervescent, pale beneath fluorescence, with
glass marbles that prop eyelids up.

I wonder how many my condolences
he’s said to how many relatives who hold
handkerchiefs to their red raw potato
noses and blow. I wonder if he’s seen a widow
throw herself onto the box and scream like in a telenovella.

He tells me he’s not afraid of death
because his daddy deals in death.
Pause. Here are some
inkblots that drip between

the cracks in your ego; they firework over mental
maps and collages, amalgamated
so that you’ll have nice dreams without
the greatest anxiety, separation anxiety:

a former fetus torn from its mother
later becoming a lover that splits with a lover
like an amoeba, whose electrical impulses later
stop bridging the gaps between neuronal synapses
goodbye: dopamine, serotonin, all the spirit molecules
that dissipate like minnows

_________________

In Case You Didn’t Notice, Agnes is Dying

Agnes’ hair is haphazard, goosedown and glue
someone forgot to blow the dust off her feathery lashes
before they took her out of the box

she wears a limp yellow t-shirt over her saggy
limbs, immobile, no pretty blush, no shell pink lips
someone accidentally trips in the sandbox

over the pull to Agnes’ sound box and she shrieks
shrieks shrieks before the string runs out
the sound box click-click-breaks

Agnes’ mouth lolls open and a thread of spit
drops like a spinning spider
her corpulent caretaker strums a guitar, sings
eats a granola bar

everyone knows dolls can’t walk unless you
make them walk. The old man tells me it’s dementia
before the corpulent caretaker wheels her away
and says tut tut Agnes

what good is a doll that refuses to play
when you want it to play

Follow My Nose (and WATER)

I’ve tried to write this several times without sounding sentimental and mawkish, and now am just going to go with being sentimental and mawkish. I had my nose pierced last Friday. The impulse started Thursday night over bubble tea that stood in place of studying. As we sipped our frothy drinks the conversation somehow turned to piercings and I mentioned a nose piercing. That turned into my admiring Viv’s piercing. Vivi said we should go right then and there because Whatever Tattoos, where she’d gotten hers done, didn’t close till midnight, but I could not be that impulsive, so I decided to wait till the next day. I did some research, attempted to write a paper, finished the paper and the research, and went to bed well past three. The next morning I woke up, walked to Landmark Diner, ate a spinach omelette and had some of their amazing coffee and tottered off towards Chrystie St where New York Adorned was located.

With each step I thought it wasn’t too late to turn back. I didn’t have to put a big needle in my nose, really. I could just go sit in the park and get on with my homework like a good girl. But I knew, just as I knew that Manhattan was a relatively small phallic-shaped island near New York State, that I had to go through with this, and that it was good for me.

New York Adorned is a small and relatively inconspicuous storefront on Chrystie St. between 2nd and 3rd streets. A gray fan decorates the threshold. Google had rated it as the best place to go in the city. I was still a bit apprehensive as I stepped through the door. Cats, the receptionist, handed me the customary paperwork to fill out. She helped me pick out a tiny stud from the glass case near the register and then Chris shook my hand, introduced himself, and took me to the back. I asked to see their autoclave because I am a hypochondriac. He gladly complied. I sat up on the seat and Chris explained that he was marking my nose with a sterilized toothpick dipped in sterilized dye and to let me check the position to see if I was happy. He was very calm throughout the whole thing, talking me through, making sure I was calm and comfortable as well. He told me to take a deep breath. As I inhaled, I felt a pinch and as I exhaled it was over. I sat in the park for several hours afterwards.

Sometimes, we can’t just stick a toe out of our comfort zones. Sometimes we have to shove ourselves out, and are we falling? Is our comfort zone a hoop, a raised circular platform surrounded by nothing? The answer is, of course, not at all.

Getting a piercing is very cathartic. There’s all this pent up tension beforehand which curls and contracts itself into one tiny loaded spot, then the needle enters your skin, and then it evaporates. I promised myself that this semester I wouldn’t be afraid to put myself out there, to be more bold and daring. This was the first step, and the fact that I didn’t back out, or just simply toy with the idea of it, was a big step. I felt so good about myself afterwards.

I’m sure there’s some deep Freudian implication (that is, if you subscribe to the psychoanalytic approach) over why I felt so good about getting my nose pierced. But by the end of the day, I’m just a girl, just Wendy, same as I have always been, except with a tiny stud in my nose and a big smile on my face.

____________

I am heaping love on my friend Talia for encouraging me to drink more water. I had no idea how dehydrated I was until she said, “Chug as much water as you can before you go to bed and the difference will be noticable in the morning.” So I did. And good god I was shocked. My skin felt so nice and smooth! It was looking really ratty and nasty before. Water. Mmm. Not only did my skin look great, my mood improved (probably because my skin didn’t look like total crap). It did a world of good, so now I’m trying to keep as hydrated as I can. Bottom line: DRINK MORE WATER. Always. Don’t do what I did. One day I went to bed realizing I had drank nothing that day except a mug of soymilk and tea. BAD.

WATER. It’s good. The end.

it’s a bit early but here are some things I love Thursdays:

• bus stops
• Sylvia Plath (I’m rereading The Bell Jar and it’s so lovely)
• Ted Hughes (I’m reading his anthology Wolfwatching)
• WATER. WATER WATER WATER. I can’t get enough water.
• 75 cent tea
• homemade fried rice
• Emilie Autumn- I saw her in concert with my friend Ruth last night. I love her steampunk and her violin. “Enchant” is also a decent album full of fairy tale music, which of course is wonderful.
• being ahead in schoolwork
• the cold weather. I love wearing scarves and warming my hands with a cup of hot tea
• impromptu hair styling sessions
• bunnies that eat people
• Ovid’s Metamporphoses. I’m rereading him for class and he never ceases to make me sigh. Some of my favorite stories are “Apollo and Daphne” and “Pyramus and Thisbe” and “Actaeon.”
• Battle Angel Alita. I stopped reading this manga back in high school (why did I do that?) but I’m so glad I picked it up again! It’s full of cyborgs and artificial intelligence and also raises some interesting questions about the mind and how far it can go. The writer/artist obviously knows his psych as well as his chemistry. I’m thoroughly impressed.

Have a lovely weekend!

I May As Well Be A Vegetarian In College

What a hectic, insane, maniacal week this has been! My cognition exam today ironically fried my brain and I spent two hours on the train going back and forth because unknowingly my internship got canceled today, ah well. Here’s to a hopefully less busy week next week.

Last night I saw Alice Sebold present three of the Best American Short Stories of 2009 at the Sharp Theatre, and while they were all pretty good, the best one by far was the first. It was called “The Briefcase” by Rebecca Makkai (you can read it here). It’s about a chef who switches identities with a professor during a war. It’s surreal and haunting and beautiful, and Victor Garber read it with panache.

The days fly. I count back the years, one, two, three. Sometimes I still believe that 1998 was very recent. In cognition class we learned a thing about mental maps: how we have a skewed perception of different things on a map according to our heuristics, how streets appear in our minds like they’re 90 degrees, how college buildings appear closer because we group them together under the same semantic category: “college buildings”. I wonder if my cognitive timeline works that way as well. Maybe I still think I’m an eight year old inside, god knows that sometimes I behave like one.

So my new goal, before I wake up one morning and realize I’m eighty: do more spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment things! Maybe the reason why I’ve been so crazy is because my life has been revolving around a consistent schedule: wake up, go to class, get groceries, clean the apartment, go to my internship, do homework, go to sleep, wake up, do it all over again. There hasn’t been that much excitement. I’m not really the excitement-seeking type, either–I’m never looking for the party, or whatever. Excitement for me is just something new and unusual happening. Well, you know what? I’m not waiting forever for the universe to give me something. The universe doesn’t owe me anything. It doesn’t owe anyone anything.

I went out tonight with Vivi for bubble tea, and that’s when I decided I’m getting a nose piercing. I’ve never gotten anything other than my ears pierced before, and putting this statement out on the depths of the Internet makes me more and more assured that I am going to do it. This will be my present to myself. Here’s to some more change!

Other notable things that make me smile this week:

• the smell of the Nuts4Nuts! cart that I always sit near in the park. It’s honey and warmth mixed with almonds and peanuts and it’s always delicious.
• soymilk, which I’ve been drinking more and more
• impromptu  bubble tea runs
• my new feathered cloche hat from Forever21
• Gatsby parties on Governor’s Island
• leopard print
• cats
• all the adorable dogs that stroll past me in the park (it makes me miss my puppy)
• chocolate bars
• salad! I’ve grown to love it. These days I rarely eat meat anymore. I’m not quite a vegetarian yet, but I’m getting there- apart from frozen chicken cutlets that I just reheat in the oven. Really, it’s so much more convenient to cook without it. I eat massive amounts of spinach with garlic, tofu and salad, almonds, grape tomatoes, crackers, carrots, hummus and berry cereal, and eggs. I feel really good.
• My health. I’m glad I have it.

Make yourself a great big cup of tea and have a lovely weekend. (: