Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose

How lovely?

These perfumes, from Ineke, have perfectly wonderful names like "After My Own Heart" and "Balmy Days and Sundays" (cue The Carpenters) and notes of raspberry, lilac, heliotrope, plum, angel's trumpet, and cinnamon bark. Cinnamon bark!? It sounds like it has my name written all over it, in big lissome cursive letters. An evening edged in gold...it sounds like a Klimt painting.

Happy almost New Year, dear readers! Usually I find New Years to be an anticlimactic holiday one often filled with disappointment and thoughts of "Is this what I have to look forward to for the rest of the year?" But this year, I am hoping for an evening of sparkles and feathers, old friends and possible new ones, and a chance to dress up as quirky and carefree as I want. I will be in Chicago, surrounded by masquerade (paper faces on parade) and hopeful harbingers of good tidings to come...no expectations for anything grander.

snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes...

Snowed in! To venture out or not? It's quite white outside...and it's still coming down!

I find beauty here

(loveliness)

so come on courage, teach me to be shy

There's still a little bit of your taste in my mouth

There's still a little bit of you laced with my doubt...

There's still a little bit of your song in my ear

There's still a little bit of your words I long to hear

You step a little closer to me

So close that I can't see what's going on...

My eyelids and curls and deepest thoughts are bubbling with the joy of champagne and apple cinnamon candles and luscious chenille. I wish I had more to write...but the truth is that life is relatively uneventful right now. I'm so thankful for a moment to breathe, and yet I feel guilty that I have yet to do any work over this break. I have, however, read one and a half pleasure-reading books, seen Julie & Julia, The Brothers Bloom, and Invictus, bought a gorgeous antique lamp and a crystal bowl that looks like sunshine and is shaped like a swan, listened to Damien Rice live and unscripted, avoided email like the plague, adored the quirky neighborhoods of Baltimore (Federal Hill) and South Florida (Atlantic Avenue in Del Ray)...

Life is uneventful, but good. Now I just want a sensitive poet-pirate without emotional issues to stumble my way...to make 2010 my year in the sun...

"This was a story about a girl who could find infinite beauty in anything, any little thing, and even love the person she was trapped with. And I told myself this story until it became true. Now, did doing this help me escape a wasted life? Or did it blind me so I didn't want to escape it? I don't know, but either way I was the one telling my own story..."

sepia-toned loving

Sometimes what you really need is a day of sleep and a night of blog loving, Mexican hot chocolate, Simon & Garfunkel, The Weepies, and Pete Yorn on my itunes Genius mix, and The Merchant of Venice in my lap while curled up on the couch...an old issue of McSweeney's bought for a song at Half-Price books on my wrought-iron table...

(here)

you don't know what I fear

I'm completely lacking in inspiration. I don't know what to write about or where to find beauty. I'm tired and stressed and either imagining or experiencing doubt from my superiors at school. I'm dreaming of sparkly eye dust and twinkle lights and fire pits and hydrangeas and peacock feathers and fur muffs and lovely literature and wings of poetry and satin slippers and sepia tones and rose-colored glasses and words like "nebulous" and "ephemeral" and jazz vocals and full-throated ease and half-light and Bardot curls and British dandies and porcelain keys and key-lime gelato and little princess and chiffon swirls and capelets and raspberry coulis and Audrey and Grace and papercuts and eyelash flutters and soft caresses and zephyrs and snowflake droplets and lavender and hummingbirds...I feel like I haven't seen a hummingbird in ages.

In my dreams I'm bathed in violet light, and I have my pirate by my side, who whispers poetry to me in a voice so soft that it feels like a petal brushing my cheek. I'm light and airy and my insecurities are gone. Popsicle lips. Snow-dusted lashes. A velvet cape.

It's not about the pirate, although his company lends peace and pleasure, that deep-seated swoon from the inside out that I recapture in memories now. It's about me and my poetry, my voice, my crooning of Joni Mitchell ballads that float from mouth to sky like Sebastian's smoke in Brideshead Revisited.

I remember Oxford, stopping by The Grand Cafe for champagne tea and passing by the Botanical Gardens on my way to tutorials. I remember channeling Oscar Wilde and as I sipped tea and slipped into cushioned corners at The Old Parsonage. I want the Oxford of John Fowles, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh. I long to fit again, to be certain of my place.

What do you do when you feel blue? Dearest readers, I am filled too much with longing and too little with satisfaction in being.

Some days I feel like if I don't write I'll just explode. On a day like today I'd probably burst into a blue flame of book pages and student essays. I need to keep telling myself that I'm happy because otherwise I'll forget. It's easy for me to forget how good I really have it when I get myself into one of my stirred-up moods. I was just feeling oddly homesick today, which is strange. I'm homesick for all of my homes from the last 5 years-- St. Louis, where I have so many wonderful memories and with so many artistic marvels within arms length...New York, where I have exbf and Bryant Park and so much activity and culture...DC, where I have the best friends a girl could possibly ask for, true soulmates...and Cleveland, with my family, where I discovered some hidden treasures this weekend and where I oddly feel myself drawn, even to teach at my former high school.

When I started this blog two years ago, I remember remarking that this time of year is hard for me. I think it might be that I always feel slightly on the outside of the holiday cheer, because I'm so often transitioning to a new city and trying to find my "home," and this time of year is really all about loved ones, memories, and special places. It's also the time of year when exbf and I first became friends and, not too soon after that, more than friends. It's always difficult to be flooded with those memories when things are so different now. This time of year, and the accompanying chill, always makes me long for body heat and familiarity. It makes me long for lighting candles together and eating holiday cookies, and being so overwhelmed with joy that you actually twinkle. Then again, I recognize that I'm working on developing myself as an individual right now and that romance will follow. I'm supposed to be with somebody; it just always happens when I'm not looking.

(here)

And high above or down below

When you're too in love to let it go

But if you never try you'll never know

Just what you're worth

Lights will guide you home

And ignite your bones

And I will try to fix you.

We passed the hash pipe, we played our Doors tapes

This still remains one of the best things I've ever seen:

Who knows what tomorrow brings

You're not a dream

You're not an angel

You're a man

I'm not a queen

I'm a woman

Take my hand

We'll make a space

in the lives

that we'd planned

And here we'll stay

until it's time

for you to go

Yes we're different

Worlds apart

We're not the same

We laughed and played

in the start

like in a game

You could've stayed

outside my heart

but in you came

And here you'll stay

until it's time

for you to go

Don't ask why

Don't ask how

Don't ask forever

Love me now

This love of mine

had no beginning

it has no end

I was an oak

Now I'm a willow

Now I can bend

And though I'll never

in my life

see you again

Still I'll stay

until it's time

for you to go

Don't ask why

Don't ask how

Don't ask forever

Love me now

You're not a dream

You're not an angel

You're a man

I'm not a queen

I'm a woman

Take my hand

We'll make a space

in the lives

that we planned

And here we'll stay

until it's time

for you to go.

"Then in the middle of my set, I'd throw in this love song that I had written, because, you know, I was in love, and I found out that, you know, sometimes you just have to leave a space in your life for life to happen, see?"

~Buffy Sainte-Marie~

(photos from here, ever beautiful)

The smoke it sank into my skin

I want a man with a poet's eyes and a pirate's voice.

"Her heart was so laden

She fell by a tree

Sang of some pirate

Who haunted the sea

A wail through the willows

All hollow through the willows

She'll wail through the willows

Till she finds him."

"There's a man who's been out sailing

In a decade full of dreams

And he takes her to a schooner

And he treats her like a queen

Bearing beads from California

With their amber stones and green

He has called her from the harbor

He has kissed her with his freedom

He has heard her off to starboard

In the breaking and the breathing

Of the water weeds

While she was busy being free."

Dee dee dee dee dee

Incredible.

Sunday kind of girl...

An Education. Masterful. I'm in love.

I think my version would include these:

(all items from Anthropologie and J. Crew)