Archive for September 2010

25 to 25.

In exactly than 15 weeks (105 days), on January 10, 2011, I’ll hit the quarter century mark. Don’t worry about me getting my quarter-life crisis, kids; I’ve been going through that since I was 21.

I’ve always looked forward to 25 because you basically have every single right attributed to you by the Constitution and car rental companies (except the ability to run for president, which comes at 35). I’m also looking forward to 25 because it’s going to be my first year of stability in a long time. From 17-21, I moved into a new dormitory or apartment every August and started a new semester of school every 4-5 months. At 22, I uprooted my entire life to move to another city then moved back home at 23. By 24, I experienced my third career change in a matter of two years. In my 25th year, I want to stabilize.

Every year, I get myself a birthday present. Last year, it was a new tattoo followed by an unlimited mimosa brunch. The year before, it was a shopping spree and a great, yet snowy dinner, at a delicious restaurant on the Lower East Side. This year, for my 25th birthday present to myself, I’m giving myself a new body:

I will lose 25 pounds between now and my 25th birthday. It’s a completely attainable, and important, goal requiring me to lose just 1.67 pounds a week.

I don’t normally celebrate my birthday, but this year, I’m promising myself that no amount of snow, illness, or seasonal affected disorder will prevent me from having my first birthday party in a decade. In addition to celebrating my birthday, I will also celebrate my achievement of this goal.

FYI: I’m taking offers for people willing to join me in this challenge (maybe by helping me learn how to ride a bike?) and/or for the birthday party.

SEE YOU IN JANUARY!

It’s like riding a bike.

I love bikes. They’re beautiful, elegant, economically and environmentally friendly. I love all kinds of bikes: racing bikes, vintage bikes, bikes with baskets, tandem bikes, and bikes with baby seats. Honestly, what’s not to love about bikes?

What’s been stopping me from getting a bike? Well, riding a bike is supposed to be a very easy thing you learn as a child. You know, your dad gets a pink bike with a basket, training wheels, and some streamers coming out of the handles and you ride it up and down the street. Except I grew up in a log cabin, three miles from the nearest paved road. I never understood that expression, “It’s just like riding a bike. ou never forget.” Why? Because I don’t know how to ride a bike.

That might all be changing soon…

Today, the Capital BikeShare program officially launched with 110 stations in D.C. and Arlington making it the largest bikesharing program in the U.S.

Normally, I’d wind up ignoring something like this because of the lack of convenience and my fear of possibly killing myself. That’s not going to happen this time. There are 8 stations within a mile of my apartment – one is so close I can literally see it from my window!

Sometime over the next few weekends, I’m going to buy a helmet, rent a bike, and get the help of a few friends and learn how to ride a bike. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get someone to document the inevitable hilariousness that will ensue. If not, I’ll just photograph my injuries after the fact!

Why do I want to ride a bike so badly? Aside from loving the basic aesthetic of bikes, I’ve wanted to get one for a really long time. My current commute is more than $4 a ride, plus a mile walk to my office through cobblestone roads. If I take the bus from the metro to my office (if it’s too hot or too cold outside), my one-way commute costs more than $5.

Furthermore, I love bike culture. The environmentalist in me loves the idea that we could replace one car with three or four bikes. In D.C., they’re gradually installing more and more bike lanes to encourage bicycle/vehicle safety. One day, I’d love to see D.C. end up like this:

Fancy Little Things: Round 2!

Three ladies, two months of planning, 20+ participants = one successful clothing swap! However, even though today’s swap was highly successful, we still have a LOT of clothes left.

Now, we need your help to get rid of them!

We have dozens of pants, shirts, sweaters, and accessories in desperate need of a good home! Tomorrow (Monday, September 20th) from 5pm to 7pm, at Sisarina HQ, we’ll be holding a bag sale to get rid of all the remaining clothes. For just $5, you can take home as much clothing as you can fit in one bag (and drink and eat our mimosas and cupcakes). If you registered/attended Sunday’s swap, you can come back for free!

Just as with the swap, all entrance fees will go to a well-deserved charity: New Endeavors By Women.

Check out some great finds modeled by Chelsey and Grace (and a shot of organizing the DELICIOUS cupcakes from Enjoi Cupcakes)!

Everything is not awesome.

I don’t normally go for cheap ploys when I write blog posts, but I feel as though the nature of this post requires me to do so. So, let’s start by showing you adorable pictures of my cats as taken by my good friend Lisa Rowan of Quarter Life.

OK. Here comes the not-so-fluffy content.

A new friend recently told me that you’re not any one thing 100% of the time. I like thinking about that for several reasons: I’m a realist and sometimes realists are confused for being pessimists and, on rare occasions, I consider myself an optimist.

I’m a firm believer in not sugar-coating anything in life and being honest, especially with yourself. Not everything is hunky dorey all the time, not everyone you come into contact with is a good person, not every movie you see is good. Everything is not awesome.

I’ve noticed that this word is grossly over used by people my age, often including myself. Some people that are serious offenders of overusing “awesome” in their daily conversations calling everything and everyone they come into contact “awesome.”

Me: Do you know so-and-so?
Friend: Yeah! They’re awesome!

Me: This is one of my favorite songs.
Friend: Yeah! It’s awesome!

Me: That bar was really lame.
Friend: No! It was awesome.

While these are very basic, I think you get the point: everything is not awesome. Sometimes things are terrible, heartwrenching, defeating, and incomprehensible. Furthermore, sometimes things are beautiful, happy, incredible, unexpected, simple, complex, shocking, and so on.

There are more than a million words in the English language with nearly 15 new words being created each day. Even if just a quarter of those words are adjectives, that means there are approximately 250,000 adjectives in the English language. Shouldn’t we start to branch out a little with our adjectives?

Also, you get one more cat picture for the road for reading this entire post:

Make your own scene, dammit.

Have you ever had that feeling like you just stepped into a movie? The setting is just right, you have a slight sense of deja-vu, and a song playing over the radio (or your headphones in this wacky, modern era) completely sums up every feeling in your body at that moment.

I first got that feeling in Christmas 2007. My boyfriend at the time had just moved to Los Angeles and we hadn’t seen each other in a month. Even though I was supposed to move five months later, that span of time seemed like forever (it eventually turned into “never”). We had just visited some of his friends and didn’t talk much on the way home. It wasn’t silent because we didn’t have anything to say. In fact, I think we both had so much to say, neither one of us knew where to start. As we were driving, my favorite song ever (“Everlong” by the Foo Fighters) came on the radio. We both just kind of sat there for the first chorus and he slowly put his hand on mine. In that instant, I felt like I was in a movie; a cheesy, corny, indie RomCom.

I have that feeling on occasion. I’m never sure where, why, or how it’s going to happen. The newest Delta Spirit album, History From Below, makes me feel like that from start to finish. I’d heard a few of the songs when I saw them this July at 9:30 Club, but listening to them with noise-canceling headphones makes a big difference and is if I just stepped into a movie. With it’s grand, swelling sounds, harsh vocals, and unpolished sound, it feels so personal and lively and your emotions rise and fall with the tempo on each track.

Have you ever had that feeling; that overwhelming feeling like this moment in time could make a really self-indulgent scene in an independent movie? Sometimes, when I think about this, I get mad at myself for relating this moment in time with a cinematic one and think, “Make your own scene, and stop trying to live in someone else’s, dammit.”

Maybe I’m just crazy.

Reasons being a cat is awesome.

Note: I fully know going into this post that I’m sealing my deal as a crazy cat lady. Most people who know me already know this to be true, but this is pretty much solidifying it.

1. Someone will always scratch your head, no matter how adorable, or unadorable, you may be. This is the worst thing about being a grown-up. Your mom isn’t around to play with your hair or scratch your back when you had a rough day. If you’re a cat, you have nothing to worry about – people will always do this for you. Other humans? Probably not.

2. You’re not high-brow. Instead, you’re amused by little things like string and birds hanging out in trees. Every day for a cat is like being a toddler again and discovering new things like pencils, hair-ties, string, and cardboard boxes.

3. Your spine is crazy flexible. As someone with intense back pains on a constant basis, I’m crazy jealous of this cat trait. I’d kill to be comfortable as this guy, laying on his back, spread eagle while taking a nap. HOW IS THAT COMFORTABLE?

4. Someone else cleans up your messes. Self explanatory.

5. People make videos about how adorable you are and put them online for the whole world to see. Even better, if you’re a cat, you don’t have to worry about that embarrassing YouTube video ruining your potential bid for president in 2026. That, and there’s no real invasion of privacy because you don’t even know what the Internet is.

6. Enough people are terrified of your kind. This allows you to hold a lot of power over people’s heads. My friend Jesse is a well-educated young man with absolutely no feline-related experience. When you move your whiskers and tail, the thinks it’s your warning sign you’re about to maul him.

7. Someone will always cuddle with you. You’re fuzzy, you’re warm, you purr when people touch you. These things just encourage cuddling. Start licking my forehead or arm and I’m a goner.

8. Your biggest worry is whether you’re going to have New England
Boil or Cowboy Cookout for dinner. You definitely don’t have to worry about the post-meal smells coming from your body because, well, you’re a cat. You lick your own butt, you don’t care about a little smelly post-dinner gas.

9. The things you do would normally be qualified as creepy, but instead, they’re funny. If any other guy followed me into the bathroom or watched me get undressed when I came home, I’d call the cops. Instead, cats generally just get to do these things. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, this guy just stares me in the face.

10. People think it’s cute when you’re fat. As a woman, it’s not good to tack on a few extra pounds. However, fat cats are ADORABLE. Everyone loves your flabby belly, especially when it moves from side to side when you run around the room.

New friends, old memories.

Maybe it’s the end of summer/changing of the seasons, the beginning of the fall TV schedule, or the post-Labor Day slump, but September always winds up being a rough month for me.

For 17 years (yes, I spent 5 years in college), I started school every September (or at the end of August) and, for the past two years, I moved into new apartments in September. In 2008, I made the DC to Brooklyn transition and, 12 months later, I made the transition back.

In addition to these transitional phases in my life, September is a month filled with memories, good and bad: my parents got divorced in September, I quit ice skating in September, and I started dating two ex-boyfriends in September. My weird, psychotic memory and it’s ability to memorize any number and date have kept all these dates in my mind years (even decades) later.

They get pushed further and further into the archives of my memory. But, over the past three months, I’ve met a lot of new people and formed excellent relationships with a handful and, every time a new bond is forged, old memories are frequently discussed. Ex-boyfriends, roommates, college stories, childhood memories are all things that people who really want to know you… want to know. That, and there’s only so much small-talk and so many discussions about “current affairs” you can have with these new friends before they decide to delve deeper into who you are, and vice versa.

For me, talking about these things can be highly emotional. While I’m good at hiding my emotions around others, it’s tough to keep it in when I’m at home. One look at cuddly cats in my bed and I get all sappy… think how much worse it is talking about ex-boyfriends or growing up without a present father. I rarely talk about any of these things because most of my friends know these things about me and I don’t need to talk about it.

It’s a bit of a double-edged sword. I’m gaining all these positive, exciting new relationships and, at the same time, I have to keep thinking: new friends may cause me to rehash old memories, but hopefully the good ones will stick around to create some new ones, too.