The Summerest Summer

The Snow White vignette at Fairyland Caverns.

I don’t know that I’ve ever had such a summery summer. Last summer I spent almost entirely in my apartment, wearing pajamas, hiding from the heat and working. This summer is completely different.

Days in my apartment wearing pajamas are still around, but instead of using those days to research doctorate programs and read for my thesis, I’m using those days to re-read books I love and catch up on the movies and television shows everyone has been talking about but that I’ve been ignoring. Last night I watched the first four episodes of the first season of True Blood. Everyone has been talking about it lately, and I do love guilty pleasure vampire romance, so I thought I’d give it a try. So far I’m highly amused, and I think I’ll even read the Sookie books after I finish the season.

But what’s really summery about this summer is the traveling. After D. and I got back from Edisto Island, I spent a weekend at Panama City Beach with my mother. (Oddly, she chose that beach over Destin and many other nicer beaches.) Shortly after returning from that second beach vacation, I came down with the flu or some other god awful illness that had me running a fever over 103 degrees for four days. Needless to say that wasn’t terribly summery. I laid on my couch and watched Season 4 of House and all of Rome and felt sorry for myself till it passed. Then I went on another trip!

D. will be starting film school at Unnamed Midwestern University this fall, so we took a road trip up to Hippyville (not it’s real name, obviously, but I enjoy making up fake names to preserve anonymity) to find him a place to live last week. We drove through some of the most beautiful country, places I’ve never seen before. We spent one night at D.’s parents house in rural Tennessee, and I couldn’t believe how much the countryside there looks like someone’s dream of rural life, all pristine red barns on rolling green hills dotted with black cows and white horses. West Virginia, all mountains and sunshine, proved one of the loveliest places I’ve ever traveled through.

In Hippyville we ate at a local, organic, employee-owned restaurant, went to a potluck at a co-op, and watched on our television at the Holiday Inn Express (in a room Unnamed Midwestern University paid for, by the way) as Michael Jackson died. It was a little surreal to get the news that the King of Pop had died in a city full of hippies.

On the way back home, we stopped at Rock City (at my insistence). Unfortunately the sky was too hazy for us to see all seven states from the top of the mountain, but I’m pretty sure we could see three. The best part? Fairyland caverns, pictures of which (stolen shamelessly from other people’s flickr accounts) adorn this entry.  If you haven’t been to Rock City, go. So creepy, so wonderful.

The vignettes, painted in day-glo colors, glow eerily under black lights.

To ramp up the summery-ness even further, I’m going to spend the weekend of the 4th at the lake with my family. During the day I’ll be drifting on the warm water on a hot pink float, drinking cold beer and trying my best to laugh at my father’s and brother’s silly jokes. In the evenings we’ll sit on the porch with margaritas and I’ll lazily assemble the same jigsaw puzzle for the third time or so. I can’t wait.

Watch as I drown my sorrows in summer pleasures

L. left a week and a half ago to spend summer with his family far far north of Southern College Town. He will not be back before I depart for Pittsburgh. So I am putting all my effort into distracting myself with the best of summer diversions.

Sunrise with Birds

I spent last week on Edisto Island, South Carolina, with D. and his family. We were twelve in all, staying in a ginormous house just a block and a half from the beach. D’s little neices, ages six and eight, delighted me to no end (when they weren’t driving me nuts whining or fighting or demanding my attention when I was in the middle of a conversation with someone else). I taught them card games and used my impeccable child logic to diffuse hostile situations. D. and I spent many, many hours sitting on the beach under a giant rainbow-colored umbrella, reading and drinking Miller High Life and watching people be dumb or funny or picturesque. This was only the second time I’ve seen the Atlantic Ocean, and I liked it much better this time (last time was at Cocoa Beach in Florida), though I still think the beaches on the Gulf Coast are highly superior.

Now that I’m back home, it’s a little harder to drown myself in summer fun, but I’m trying. I’m reading Jane Austen novels and watching old Cary Grant movies (The Philidelphia Story! One of the best movies ever!). D. and I are going to make it our goal to watch every stupid big budget movie that comes out this summer. We already saw and laughed at Star Trek. This week we plan to see Drag Me To Hell! A movie with a title like that is bound to be hilarious. I think we’ll try to repeat the scenario of the last movie-going experience: drink two margaritas and eat mexican food, buy soda and candy at the gas station and stuff it into my bag, down an iced coffee at Starbucks, and watch the movie drunk/caffienated/sugar-jazzed. I highly recommend it.

I’m also considering re-reading the Twilight books, though considering the situation with L., it might only send me into a spiral of weeping and feeling sorry for myself. Is the movie out on DVD yet? Have you bought it? I’m pretty sure I’m going to : )

Here’s an interesting Twilight-related article: a boy who loves Twilight and thinks other boys should too.

Personal Aesthetics , vol. iv: Reading

frisson n. – an emotional thrill; an emotionally triggered response when one is deeply affected by such things as music, speech, or recollection.  Etymology: French, shiver, from Old French friçon, from Late Latin friction-, frictio, from Latin, literally, friction (taken in Late Latin as derivative of frigēre to be cold). Pronunciation: \frē-ˈsōⁿ\

Two things I want from reading material: to be taught; to be delighted. It is best when these two come together in one package,and I get this special frisson. But some of the things I read only do one or the other, and that’s okay.

Most mornings during coffee I spend some time with Google Reader. I’ve been adding and pruning blogs continuously in an attempt to create the perfect balance of delight and learning. Here are the blogs I’m reading now:   101 Cookbooks is written by a woman who owned over a hundred cookbooks and realized it was time to start cooking, so she posts great vegetarian recipes with commentary and tips; Mark Bittman and co. write Bitten, a generalist food blog, for the New York Times; other wonderful food blogs include La Tartine Gourmande,  Orangette, and Smitten Kitchen; I love Garance Dore and The Sartorialist for great photos of real people with interesting fashion shot on streets all over the world; A Continuous Lean and Ivy Style deal in men’s fashion, which I find fascinating because it is based on endless variations on a limited number of forms; I’m trying out On the Runway for fashion news from the New York Times; and finally, I can’t stop reading the blog of Pia Jane Bijkerk, an Australian stylist living in Amsterdam, just because I envy her life so.

In books, I mostly alternate between those that delight and those that teach. In the category of delight lately, I’ve been reading The Series of Unfortunate Events, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, and the Winnie-the-Pooh books. In the category of books that teach, I’ve been reading Edward Said’s Orientalism, Davidoff and Hall’s Family Fortunes, Daphne Kutzer’s Empire’s Children, and Peter Coveney’s The Image of Childhood. On occassion I read a book combining learning and delight; recently there have been Isabel Allende’s Afrodita, a memoir/cookbook/study of aphrodisiacs, and Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees, a novel set at Cape Cod that, through Dillard’s exquisite attention to detail in nature, taught me lots of things about life on the Atlantic coast. Next on my list of books to read: John Ciardi’s How Does a Poem Mean? and Italo Calvino’s The Uses of Literature.

Sunday stroll

Well, it’s the second prettiest time of year for Southern College Town. Want to come for a walk with me?

Everywhere I look there are azaleas blooming in fiery shades….

The church a few blocks over has a cross of flowers for Easter today.

The flowers on it really are stunningly bright and fresh.

Hey, let’s follow that path!

What do you think these bricks are here for?

Weird! They look like old wells or reservoirs or something.

Let’s see what’s up these stairs…

Another path! Where does it lead?

What is that building?

It’s a greenhouse!

Can we look in?

This house sits right beside the building in which I teach:

No one lives there anymore, but the groundskeepers take care to plant the garden around it full of flowers.

Don’t gates in vine-covered walls make your imagination go wild? I think this gate is a good spot to leave our imaginations lingering.

Hope you enjoyed our spring walk! And soon, you’ll be going on walks with me in Pittsburgh! I’ve decided to go to the University of Pittsburgh for my PhD!

T/here we are again

Overnight the trees blushed green with new leaves and when I opened the blinds yesterday morning there were dapples of shade and warm sunlight outside my windows where just a day before there had been only wan winter light. I walked around town and saw that while I slept, all the trees and grasses and the sun and breeze had conspired to take off their winter drab and put on their spring finery. It is a different town.

And every year there is a day like this, a day when I recognize Spring, and it always makes me think of that first day in grade school or high school when you got really excited because you realized summer break was actually coming really soon. And so the unofficial First Day of Spring this year made me think of riding the school bus with the smell of cut grass in the afternoon; of milling about in the parking lot at Prattville High after school let out deciding whether to go to your house or go get Subway or go to the park; of grade school P.E. and kickball and the dust sticking to my fingers; of walking single file to the lunchroom and looking at the backs of the knees of the girl in front of me who was wearing shorts for the first time that spring; of sprawling on top of a pile of squirming teenagers in the grass outside the high school during a fire drill; of Dr. Pepper and Mountain Dew and that little stream that runs through the park in Prattville down to the pond. 

Remember this time our senior year everyone was so excited to finish high school and I counted down the days till graduation, posting the number of days left on my locker every morning. Except I didn’t want it to end, so the smaller the number got, the sadder the little drawings that I made to go on the mini-poster were. I knew I would miss high school once I was gone. I knew I would long to go back and be with my friends and eat lunch in the stupid lunchroom and sneak around the halls with Mrs. Harrison’s bathroom pass to look for someone to talk to when class got boring. And I do miss it. I don’t wish I was still in high school. But I do wish I could go back and have just one day there, a day like today, a Second Day of Spring, a day when everyone is excited and glorying in their bodies and we can’t stop pouncing on each other and holding hands and skipping and ignoring all of our responsibilities, which aren’t many to begin with. 

Do you ever want to go back?

Personal Aesthetics: Vol. iii, Color

Pink: a pale red color; the use of the word for the color was first recorded in the late 17th century, describing the flowers of pinks, flowering plants in the genus Dianthus. Pink itself is a combination of red and white. Other tints of pink may be combinations of rose and white, magenta and white, or orange and white.

Tuesday L. and I went to Nearby City for shopping and dinner. I purchased five things. Not until I got home did I realize that three of the five things are pink. Fuschia (or “Fuxia” as it says on the box) Marc Jacobs shoes. Chanel nail polish in Ballerina. J. Crew magic wallet in a pink shade they are calling “stone seashell.” Apparently, I am digging pink right now. Probably the arrival of spring has something to do with it. Also, I’ve been feeling sort of fun-deprived lately, and pink is a fun color.

Those shoes are a much more outrageous shade of pink than the above picture suggests. L. had to convince me that buying a pair of bright pink shoes for $60 is not foolishly extravagant and completely impractical. (In my defense, they were on super sale—originally $200.) I’m glad I decided to make the silly purchase, because I wore the shoes all day yesterday and couldn’t help smiling every time I looked at my feet.

Buying the Chanel polish was a bit nervewracking. You know how the salespeople at makeup counters hardly ever have anything to do? Well, the ones at Saks had all congregated together next to the Chanel counter. As I approached them—they were making snarky comments to one another, fussing with their edgy haircuts, and picking invisible lint off of their hipster-chic outfits—I whispered to L. that maybe I wouldn’t even buy the polish I wanted, because I didn’t want to stand there and be judged by them. L. whispered back that we had already been appraised and deemed uncool by about a third of them.  I squared my shoulders (metaphorically) and marched (metaphorically) up to the counter. I asked to see the new summer shade of nail polish, a coral that turns out to be too orange for me. I rejected the polish, turned on my heel, and walked out the door. I immediately remembered that I had meant to buy the ballerina pink polish. But, of course, I couldn’t go back in there.

So I waited until the next department store, circled the cosmetics counters until the man at the Chanel counter was alone, and pounced on my opportunity, buying the polish and retreating as soon as possible. I felt like a wimp. But a wimp with pretty new nail polish.

a dream is a wish your heart makes

Last night I dreamed of snow. I dreamed of walking in it, driving in it, holding it  in my hands, letting it fall on my tongue.

Fifteen minutes ago my phone rang. I was still lying in bed with all my curtains closed, though I wasn’t still asleep. It was L. calling. This is our conversation (slightly edited):

L: Are you sleeping.

A: No, I’m just lying in bed.

L: Then you don’t know it’s snowing.

(I jump out of bed and open the curtain on the nearest window.)

A: SNOW!!!

L: I was afraid you wouldn’t look outside until the afternoon and you’d miss it.

It’s really coming down out there still. Bigger flakes than we usually get, and lots of them. The ground isn’t totally covered, but the roofs of the houses are totally white. What a wonderful morning to wake up to.

Personal Aesthetics: Vol. ii, Films

Wonder: The emotion excited by the perception of something novel and unexpected, or inexplicable; astonishment mingled with perplexity or bewildered curiosity.

Delight: pleasure, joy, or gratification felt in a high degree. Charm.

These are the emotions I’m looking for in films lately. I watch a lot of movies. I don’t have cable, so I only get 4 television stations, none of which show much of interest to me. So watching movies from Netflix is the way I escape.

Mostly I’ve been finding wonder and delight through the films of Japan’s Studio Ghibli. I don’t know whether you are familiar with their work, but you’ve at least heard of Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, I’m sure. Everything they produce is so incredibly superior to most American animation I’ve seen.

Some elements recur frequently in Studio Ghibli’s movies, especially those written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki: flight, nature, magic, family, unlikely friendships, pigs (I know, that last one is funny, right?). They usually center on a young girl who discovers a side of the world that is hidden from most people. I’m always completely lost in the story and the feel of the world created, its beauty and wonder, within the first five minutes of the film. At the end of the movies, I find myself reassured about something integral to life that I can’t quite put my finger on, but it has something to do with believing again that the world can be wonderful and delightful.

I don’t know if little Josh is enjoying movies yet, but some of the Studio Ghibli films would be great for you guys to watch together. A few of them might be a little scary to him (the two I mentioned earlier, for example), but My Neighbor Totoro would be great for both you and little Josh. There’s a really good American language version (Disney does the voice direction). Dakota and Elle Fanning do an amazing job voicing the two main characters. Here’s a trailer:

Personal Aesthetics: Vol. i, Hair and Wardrobe

 

So I thought I’d start a series of posts outlining my personal aesthetic. You should do it too. It’ll be fun. I’m going to start by showing you what I’ve been liking in terms of hair and wardrobe lately.

Gamine – French. Feminine form of gamin, originally meaning urchin, waif or playful, naughty child. In the 20th century, came to be applied in its more modern sense of a slim, often boyish, wide-eyed young woman who is, or is perceived to be, mischievous, teasing or sexually appealing.

This is the best term I can come up with to describe my tastes in clothes and hairstyles right now. It’s a little classic, a little subversive, a little precious…

 

Jean Seberg’s Famous Pixie Cut

I wore my hair like this a few years back now and loved it. I think that was the beginning of a transformation in my tastes. For a while before that, I had been doing a sort of grungy American teenager type thing with my style. It didn’t fit the haircut. Slowly my wardrobe was remade to match my hair.

Natalie Portman’s Pageboy on cover of Vogue

This is pretty close to the last haircut I had, just before winter break. (Alas that it didn’t make me look just like Natalie Portman.) It has grown out a bit now, so it’s an inch or two past my jawline, but I’ve been keeping the bangs trimmed above my eyebrows. I think I want to keep growing it out until I can’t stand it anymore.

It Girl Alexa Chung (Photo by Garance Dore)

This girl keeps showing up in magazines and on blogs wearing outfits that are damn near perfect. Of course it helps that she’s loaded and can afford all the spectacular clothes that I can merely drool over pictures of. Anyway, this particular outfit is close to the look I have in mind for myself.

Essential Pieces

Cropped Trench

Striped Tee

Slim Dark Jeans

Sailor Dress

Keds

These are the things I don’t think I can live without this spring. The sailor dress is the only thing I haven’t managed to get ahold of yet. The Keds I just bought on sale last week!

So what is your hair and wardrobe aesthetic at the moment?

that sinking feeling

I drink too much. Don’t be alarmed. I’m not anywhere near alcoholic territory. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that I’ve consumed a lot less alcohol in my life than many of my students consume in their freshman year of college. But alcohol does rotten things with my emotions, and I’m beginning to feel worn down by it.

My emotions run high as it is. Drinking magnifies all that. Sometimes this means that after a few drinks I’m high-spirited, happy, laughing, impetuous, up for anything. Sometimes it means after a bottle of wine I can’t stop crying and I’m pissed as hell about stuff I wasn’t even aware was bothering me and I lash out at people I love—whether to punish them or myself I’m not sure. Sometimes both reactions happen in one night. I never know what it’s going to be.

I know drinking does this to most everyone, at least to some extent. But I’ve spent a lot of time around drinkers, and I’ve rarely seen anyone who seemed as affected as me. Like I said, I don’t think I drink immoderately. I just think moderate drinking has immoderate effects on my emotional life. So, I’m thinking I’m going to give it up.

I’ll let you know how that goes.