folk art!

i've been so desperate for art [more color!] in our loft lately. we have scores of photographs from our travels and wedding. i've even given pi the ok to get his old basquiat out if his closet that i've always hated and told him we could find a place for it.

so when i found these little treasures for $5 buried in a sale bin earlier in the week i couldn't resist! the wall decals add the perfect amount of folksy color to our bland hallway. and since we got the new tv stand, our old one has been moved out into the hall.

it just what the space needed, i'm convinced!

we are headed off to nyc tomorrow to see family and getaway for the weekend [again]. the city in spring is just lovely - can't wait to come back with pics!

til next time...

REAL life, unedited.

a great reminder for today.

guys, i read this today and i LOVED it.  it's on instagram's envy effect.  oh wait, here's yet another link to it.  because.  it.  kicks.  ass.

if you aren't going to read it, here's a little summation.  it's about the snippets of lives that we see on the internet.  and about what we edit out of our status updates, what's just out of the corner of that square crop on your photo.  it's incomplete.  they are moments that are highs, which is why we want to share them.

but what about all the other moments?  the photo may be of the great outfit you picked out today, but what about the days you don't get out of your sweatpants?  niequst [the author] also points out the happy couples that don't share their fighting, or the great meal you made but not the mess to be cleaned up. 

again, these are the moments to be shared.  no one wants to see your dirty dishes.  no one wants to see you in sweatpants [i mean this mostly to myself, as a reminder].  the things you want to share with other people - and strangers in some cases - are the highlights of your life, of the things you do.

but the result?  it's that everyone lives perfect lives without those tense, awkward, heartbroken moments.  that spouses don't fight, that chicken doesn't get burnt, that you don't have bad hair days.  it's just not realistic.  and part of the point of increased networking is to be there for one another, is it not?  to share in times of joy and triumph, but also help one another when things aren't going their way. 

there are days that this social-media-filter really effects me.  days when i would get a negative pregnancy test yet again, and hop online to see four more girls who went to my high school were pregnant.  days when i would feel so fat, being unable to get my skinny jeans to make me look skinny thanks to my fat bulge, but would see a girlfriend in a bikini with her perfect flat belly.  days when i would be feeling a little lazy, just lounging around with the tv, and would see a facebook friend out in front of the coliseum.  it makes you feel bad.  people have topped documenting their struggles, and the result is facebook news feeds and pinterest home pages and instagram shares filled with just successes.  and if you are down, it's easy to be knocked further down looking at what everyone else has and you don't.

i know i am guilty sometimes.  i look at it as sharing my high points, the things people will be interested in.  and fights i may have with pi, well, those are personal.  but i try to branch out, too.  i recently started sharing about our infertility issues, i blogged about the outrageous stress of going back to school while working and volunteering.  and i want to continue to blog about the challenges i face, as well as the high points i have.  i don't think i'm as bad as some [helloooo, i instagramed a pic of my busted-up knee last week], but i could make some improvements too.  i want to be real with everyone.  i want them to know the highlights as well as, sometimes, the low points.  

i'm making some changes to my blog, and one of the changes i want to make is to be more forthcoming.  to share with you all a bit more of me [yes, there IS more], and to be real.  to share my struggles so i can connect with people and help participate in a community; one in which we share our high highs, but our low lows as well.

post something REAL today.  put it out there, on some social media platform you use.  step out from behind the veil of perceived perfection.  it doesn't have to be a secret, just something real - piles of laundry, or the pizza you ordered in for dinner because you didn't cook a martha-stewart-style meal.  it will be refreshing, i promise.

here's my SOMETHING REAL today:
my blood results from last week reveal that i am still pregnant, according to my hcg levels.  pretty disappointing.  should all be done by now, but it isn't.   so i have to go get by blood taken yet again at the end of the week.  and let me be a little bit more real by telling you that i don't do well with needles in my veins.  i've puked half of the times my blood has been taken since this pregnancy disaster began.  so i don't know where this leaves us or what will happen after i get my blood results at the end of the week, but it's disappointing.  and i wasn't going to share it because... i don't really know.  i just wasn't.





til next time...

golden age thinking.

this afternoon i fixed myself a martini and sat down to finish the book i was reading, the great gatsby.  i actually never read it in middle school or high school like most people, and felt the time was high for me to read it. 

i have an endless curiosity of the lost generation, of hemingway and gertrude stein, of paris in the jazz age and during the war.  as a lover of literature and writers in general, i dragged PI to the famous literary cafes and the shakespeare & company bookstore, and devoured midnight in paris three times in the theaters [of course it doesn't hurt that we both love woody allen].

anyway - i found gatsby to be an amazingly beautiful novel.  i fell in love with a few lines of fitzgerald's and wanted to share them, of course..

'let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.'

 and the last lines of the novel were absolutely haunting:

'gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year receeds before us.  it eluded us then, but that's no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... and one fine morning --

and so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'

given gatsby's great obsession with the past, they were of course very fitting.  but sometimes i feel like i have that same nostalgia, that same wish to recreate that which has already happened.  i find it all the time in working on my book, in reading my old journals from my time in prague, in conversations i have with PI.  i want to go back to the time when my life was in it's golden age, when i lived far away, making friends with new people on 'the continent' and i never wanted it to end. 

on that note... a little woody allen dialogue on nostalgia.

 til next time...

:)