304. I can’t
April 14th, 2010 § 15 Comments
think of what to say because anything I want to say would be too sad or too lively or too public or too intimate or too inviting or too incongruous with these photos taken earlier in the day. I suddenly wondered out of nowhere if anyone from my high school reads this blog, except it wasn’t out of nowhere because wearing this dress from Sophomore reminded me of Long Island and how high school in Long Island almost tricked me into thinking it was a good thing not to possess any cleverness, wit, or intrigue, but now I’m set free, as Lou Reed would say, and I also thought about the time I made a life size mummy and scared my mom in the middle of the night, and the story of my dad’s cousin who was kidnapped from his village because he was so hungry, and the time I needed to be the center of attention and also the other time and the other time and other time and the other other other other times, and the time I was jealous of a stray cat because I wanted to be petted too, and the time in Croatia when a very strange man gave me a tiny sheet of paper smaller than the dimensions of a matchbox and on that sheet of paper was a very long request in handwriting for me to be his ‘reason for living,’ and when I looked up from this tiny piece of paper, the man was gone and there were some sailboats preparing to race, and I was too excited to find and rejoin my friends to care about what just happened.
Love, Jenny
303. my margeurite duras hat and lovers and too much coffee
April 13th, 2010 § 13 Comments
Vintage dress from Adore Vintage, vintage shoes from Kennedy Holmes, hat from Urban, black Tabio tights
I know that my apartment is a messy mess mess, but my excuse is that in the last week I’ve been putting 95% of my belongings in boxes and spent a painful amount of money shipping them across the country, with the exception of my Best Dresses, which Chris is schlepping around the country in a giant suitcase before he goes back to San Francisco (thanks, best husband ever!). Consider it a fantastic backdrop. Mess of my apartment, mess of my mind, etc.
And my mind is a bit of a mess. The close of my time here as a graduate student is filling my skull with all manner of stress and nonsense; my thesis is due on Wednesday, and I know that I will pass unless I somehow forget to turn it in, but anyway, moving is hard, and saying goodbye is hard, and I’ve been having lots of random anxieties due to my anxiety-threshold being lowered by stress (why, for example, did I gain weight, but shrink in measurements? it can’t be all the exercise that I’m not doing). Lessons that I have learned this week: learn to be able to tolerate confrontation, instead of holding bad feelings inside; maintain self-confidence despite outside forces trying to grind up your soul; this will all be over soon enough; magazines are really heavy, and if you want to ship your magazine collection across the country, be prepared to pay a lot of money.
xo, mw
RESPONSES TO 298. PICTURE POST
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districtofchic, Diana, starr crow, Nina, Indy, tiffany, Liset, Gina: Thank you! It’s packed away now, but I’m sure that it will make it into an outfit post at some point!
catherine_sr: That story about the camel coat is amazing! What did you do with it? Is it in storage somewhere? Living in Taiwan is weird, weather-wise — though in the winter it’s still sort of cold, right? Chris and I need to go back there for our wedding banquet, which is Super Late by now… I’d love to meet up!
302. Nudes, showing skin, ‘must-haves, ‘and my spring/summer style icon, oh and you’re all wonderful!
April 12th, 2010 § 8 Comments
Hi morning glories and twinkling stars that light up otherwise lugubrious evenings in the Midwest, thank you so much for leaving me such kind and encouraging and sweet comments on my last post. My bad allergies that I’ve had every Spring since I was a little tart with a melon head are here again, disrupting my life and leaving me unable to read a single sentence from a book without sneezing four times and needing to shove tissues up my nose to keep snot streams at bay. Still, there have been some nice days, warm enough to break out new and old dresses with cut-outs and bare legs. I’m not really one for ‘Must haves for Spring!’ type lists, but if I were, the list would contain: dresses with cut-outs, onesies that don’t turn into a walking cameltoe, and white eyelet tops.
These two babies are good examples of what I’ll probably be wearing all summer: pink eyelet teddy from Hautecountry Vintage(worn in my last outfit post) and 70′s white eyelet tank from Hungry Heart Recycler.
Some of my worst tendencies led to wearing three different pairs of shoes with this khaki cut-out dress with hook-and-eye closures in the front from Need Supply that I’ll probably end up wearing all summer, despite this dress’s wardrobe malfunction tendencies, like when the top few hook and eye closures came undone as I was gesticulating wildly about sheep in heat in 1970′s China. Thank goodness the lighting was dim and that I’ve had too many embarrassing wardrobe malfunctions in my life to aspire toward any kind of dignity or composure.
Outfit details: Khaki dress from Need Supply, black jacket from Miss Selfridges, DKNY Anouk sandals in nude from Gilt, old gray gladiator sandals from Bonadrag, yellow peeptoe Swedish Hasbeens from Endless, vintage heart necklace from Painted Bird in San Francisco.
By the way, have I shown you my summer style icon yet?
It’s Samuel Beckett, of course, on the cover of Bookforum, walking the streets of Tangiers in short shorts and a purple shirt, as shot by François-Marie Banier. Who needs to fail better when you have stems like Sam? And if Beckett can get away with booty shorts, I would be doing myself a disservice by not emulating my hero among heroes!
By the way, I’m pretty sure a few summers ago, Michael and I saw Molloy on a train to Poland. Our ‘Molloy’ had a bowl hair cut and and was eating peanuts like crazy and had sad scabs on his hands. By the way, my friend Karan wrote an awesome review in this latest issue of Bookforum. Read it if you feel like wishing you were a genius with infinite talent. By the way my throat is sore and I need a strawberry popsicle with a lime, lemon, and orange popsicle waiting in the wings for rounds 2, 3, and 4. By the way, I ate three raw cloves of garlic and accidentally had an ‘intense’ conversation with someone who has an ‘acute’ sense of smell. Oops.
Love, Jenny
301. Giveaway Reminder: Last chance to enter for pearl earrings from Louis Anthony Jewelers
April 10th, 2010 § 1 Comment
Hi everyone!
Thank you all so much for your sweet encouragement and congratulations. I’m frightened to let myself get too excited about moving to France, but it helps so have such amazing readers and supporters. I promise I’ll post my Shanghai photos and reply to all your comments soon.
In the meantime, I just wanted to remind everyone that today is the last day to enter our giveaway for a pair of 7 mm freshwater pearls (value: $100) from a jeweler in Pittsburgh.
You can add your entry for a chance to win here.
xo, mw and jz
300. My big, happy news + an old radio interview + not letting my art flower totally in secret and here is some of my writing and even less of my self?
April 7th, 2010 § 25 Comments
When I was a kid, I used to eat the worst foods first and save the best for last. This led to some undesirable results, like when I went over this one lady’s house, the house that terrorized me because once her son locked me in his mom’s bedroom and laid me on the bed and kissed my forehead a little too tenderly for a nine year old, and another 1,000 times he made me cry, but also she cooked these terrible potatoes and with boiled orange slices that I despised, but I would always gobble it up right away so I could save her best dish, roast chicken, for last. But she would see me shoving awful potatoes in my mouth and keep heaping more potatoes on my plate until I ate them all and was too full to eat the good stuff. I’m not making that mistake now, so I’ll start with the good:
I got a fellowship to teach English in France. I’m moving to France! Most likely, not for a few more months, but sometime this Fall and somewhere in the south.
Meggy did such a marvelous podcast a few posts back, that I was inspired to do one of my own. It never came together because 1) I have no idea what to say and 2) I have no idea how to record a podcast. However, last year I did a really embarrassing reading and interview on KRUI radio, the student-run station at school. I think Michael would approve of my attempts to neglect my ego and not nurture it by worrying excessively about how lame my interview responses are and how badly I read my story and blah blah blah, and just be brave and present myself to you without trying to control the presentation of how I am presented (and whoops, too late.) The show is called the Lit Show and there are tons of great interviews and readings in the archive by other super rad fiction writers and poets from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
My little interview is here:
THE LIT SHOW: Where I talk about my obsession with childhood and find myself unable to articulate my thoughts on writing!
By the way, the story I read from, “The Empty, the Empty, the Empty,” was published in issue 9.4 of Diagram last summer, if for some crazy reason you want to read the entire thing online.
Okay and lastly (I’m sorry if this is going on too long! I always feel very very self conscious and strange at these ‘AND NOW ANOTHER ANNOUNCEMENT ABOUT ME’ junctures that seem to arise fairly frequently on blogs (and I always love it when other bloggers announce cool projects and news about themselves, so maybe there is the tiniest chance in the world that other people don’t want to slap me upside my bowling ball head for chatting about myself.))
Lastly, three of my poems are in the newest issue of Octopus Magazine. These are my first published poems and I’m very happy because I love Octopus and the poets and the books they publish and make.
The poems I wrote are, “Relish this moment. Hope it will comfort on this raining day,” “The Kumiho Inside a Dumb Waiter,” and “Let them lay their butterflies on a pocket-handkerchief on the gravel.”
And here again are my double-jointed arms:
Wait, that wasn’t the last thing. The last thing is: THANK YOU to everyone who reads our blog. We are so grateful to you, and I’m so grateful to everyone who somehow can stand my long, unrefined sentences and thoughts. I often feel crude when blogging, but at the same time, too self-censoring to feel a more exhilarating, sublime crudeness, but then I read your extra kind, extra forgiving comments on my last post, and I feel a little better about my half-assed crudeness. (Thank you Jocy, Eline, Jane, Jen, and Joylynn!)
Indoor outfit:
Eyelet lace teddy worn as a camisole from Hautecountryvintage’s Etsy store
Lucca Couture shorts
DKNY Anouk sandals from Gilt
Vintage clasp bracelet
Outdoor outfit:
Also includes F21 cardigan & Miss Selfridges tights and jacket
Love, Jenny
(PS: Don’t forget to enter our giveaway for a free pair of pearl earrings (valued at $100!) from Louis Anthony, Pittsburgh Jewelry store)
299. Back from China and my back is a bad back and it’s bad to be back when I’d rather not yet be back, good back or bad back, don’t let me be back
April 5th, 2010 § 9 Comments
Playing mahjong with my grandmothers (the neon pink and black jacket was handsewn my by my grandmother!)
Posing with dad, brother, grandmother (Grandma: cobalt blue coat and vintage fur collar; Brother: the beginning of the tentative end of surliness; Dad & I: I’m wearing my dad’s Raybans and my dad’s wearing his own Rayban’s. Me again: H&M Trench coat; vintage 70′s dress; Dav rain boots from Gilt. Please use my code to join!) All photos by Mom!
The one time in college I took a cab from Stanford to SFO airport, the driver kept asking me what it was like to live under the OPPRESSIVE COMMUNIST REGIME OF THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA? If only I had had the ovaries/nutsac to say, It’s fucking fragrant as roses and sweet as cinnamon, and can your eyes perceive that I live in America, or is it not possible for your eyes/any part of you to accept this? But I was ovaries/nutsac-less and let him think that I was going to the airport because THE COMMUNIST REGIME IN CHINA was going to threaten and kill my family if I didn’t return to America. He kept telling me that he was afraid to speak frankly with me because he suspected that I would report it all to THE COMMUNIST REGIME IN CHINA. I felt awful when we arrived at the airport, and I gave him a tip even though I felt depressed and humiliated and sad.
I’m hearing now from my best bud in Shanghai (hi Sam!) that some of his expat friends are pregnant and choosing (or at least considering the option) to give birth in China. What a wonderful thing to move to another country and be provided health insurance, not just adequate health insurance, but health insurance decent enough that one would consider having one’s child in China and not in one’s native country, and live in apartment buildings and houses that are better than what 99% of the native Chinese population get to live in! And what a messed up health care system we had and still have. Ten years ago, my neighbor’s dog leaped onto my grandmother and she fell and split her head open on the curb. Of course, those who move to America to be reunited with family are likely to be uninsured, and she was left with no option but to return to China for proper medical care. I’d say all that now to this cab driver if he’s still so afraid of THE COMMUNIST REGIME IN CHINA, but with flowers in my hair that don’t make me sneeze and elbow guards so I can shake the paint chips off my elbows when I bump into walls like it’s no big thang.
It’s been disturbing these past few years to document and experience rising anti-Chinese sentiment, and I’m too cowardly to go on because I’m afraid of comments accusing me of being blind to HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES and BLIND NATIONALISM, like this one website I found, where 80% of the people on the website voted that it’s normal to ‘hate the Chinese.’ Of course, the person who posted this made sure to note that hating all chinese people is NOT a form of racism:”It’s wierd like, cause i don’t hate-hate them but I cannot tolerate them more than any other group of people… I just find them annoying. And Im not a racist… not more than your average person is anyway.” The 80% in agreement have all sorts of reasons for why it’s normal, ranging from ‘i think they smell,’ to ‘their weird English accent is really annoying.. like “Hey its laining.. lets get an umblella”.. WTF…’ to ‘youre culture is comparable to that of a swarm of locus’ to ‘human rights abuses.’ Let’s talk about human rights abuses for both countries, and actually let’s talk about it with regards to all countries, violators and the violated (and the many countries who fall into both categories,) and let’s talk about eradicating the right for imperialist countries to invade, oppress, subordinate, exploit, destabilize and destroy other countries.
Or I could tell you about getting shredded daikon radish buns on the street and knocking over ten motorcycles, walking past the restaurant where my father used to take my mother on dates, wearing floral rainboots everywhere, seeing the most amazing street style and coming home to search the internet and find only expected pictures of Chinese people in their pajamas or other ‘streetstyle’ pictures that seem from another era because everyone pictured is so crazy unstylish, having four meals a day and each of those meals including more than 12 dishes and one soup and one of them including more than 30 dishes, two soups and three desserts, going back to my first home where I lived for four and a half years, where my grandparents and aunties and uncles taped these endless 120 minute tape cassettes of me singing and telling stories/lies about my life and times in preschool for my parents who were living in America and who I did not recognize in photos because my Dad was wearing glasses and my Mom had her hair in a bun and when I was three and half, living in Shanghai while my parents were in New York, I could have sworn the nape of my Mom’s neck was not as long and white as when she piled her hair in a bun.
More expansive, sheltering photos to come (and text/stories.)
All my love,
Jenny
(PS: Don’t forget to enter our giveaway for a free pair of pearl earrings (valued at $100!) from Louis Anthony, Pittsburgh Jewelry store)
