a few weekend links

YUM.

I turn 35 in November. Gah! I think I'm going to make this ice cream cake to celebrate. Nothing says happy birthday like an ice cream cake, right?!

Eat, Pray, Love, Get Rich, Write A Novel No One Expects.

Super cute kids sandals.

I'm seriously crushing on these Ali Golden bags. My friend Melissa has one and every time I see her I covet it...

Saying goodbye at preschool has been a challenge. I appreciated this Motherlode post on easing the transition and separation anxiety.

This adorable book is one of our favorites at the moment.

TED Talk 2012 Flashback: Chip Kidd. Designing books is no laughing matter. OK, it is.

Can't wait to go to this new Oakland beer hall.

Fall is in the air. The dusklight sweater.

Domino Magazine is back.

[photograph credit: ashley of not without salt]

"the ghost of me was still there"

The Interestings, more than any book I've read in the last year, really stuck with me. I bring it up often, with anyone who will listen. I talk about how deftly Wolitzer tackles coming to terms with growing older, realizing the self you are is not necessarily the self you imagined yourself being in your teens and twenties, and facing an unexceptional life at middle age that does not necessarily mean uninteresting. This November I will turn 35, an age I never imagined myself being, and don't really feel. I don't feel uninteresting and I know that the life I lead is, in so many ways, unexceptional. But the truth is, I find happiness in things I doubt my 25-year-old self would, and in shrugging off the desire and impulse to live that exceptional life, I am a happier person for it.

Over lunch today, I read the Tracey Emin interview "The Ghost of Me Was Still There" in The New York Times Magazine, and again started thinking about The Interestings, growing older, living with the detritus and substance of our youth, and looking back at our younger selves with distance and a bit of wonder. This part of the interview fascinated me:

Charles Saatchi owns your famous piece “My Bed,” an unmade bed with the detritus of a bad few months of depression in 1998. How does the bed get installed when it travels?
I install it. Everything is in sealed containers, and it’s all labeled, like a crime scene. I did it in Frankfurt last year. I hadn’t seen it since 2008. I was thinking, with the cigarettes, that’s so weird because I don’t smoke anymore. I haven’t had sex for years, and there’s this condom. God, there’s a tampon, and I haven’t had a period for years. There’s my ex-boyfriend’s marijuana, I would never be with anyone who smokes marijuana now; there’s a whiskey bottle, and I don’t drink spirits. I get inside and pull the covers over me and then fold them back to look natural. I can actually smell the past. When I touched the condoms, I thought, Oh, I really loved that person who wore that condom. It’s a strange feeling, a good feeling. This ghost of me was still there.

[image: "My Bed," Tracey Emin, Saatchi Gallery]

living in the russian wilderness

I just finished reading this fascinating Smithsonian article by Mike Dash about a Russian family who fled into the Siberian wilderness in 1936 and weren't seen or heard from for 40 years until a team geologists found their home, more than 150 miles from civilization.

"Led by Pismenskaya, the scientists backed hurriedly out of the hut and retreated to a spot a few yards away, where they took out some provisions and began to eat. After about half an hour, the door of the cabin creaked open, and the old man and his two daughters emerged—no longer hysterical and, though still obviously frightened, "frankly curious." Warily, the three strange figures approached and sat down with their visitors, rejecting everything that they were offered—jam, tea, bread—with a muttered, "We are not allowed that!" When Pismenskaya asked, "Have you ever eaten bread?" the old man answered: "I have. But they have not. They have never seen it." At least he was intelligible. The daughters spoke a language distorted by a lifetime of isolation. "When the sisters talked to each other, it sounded like a slow, blurred cooing."

[photo: The Smithsonian]

[hat tip: Kottke]

the opposite of loneliness

Have you guys read about Marina Keegan? She died in a car accident on Saturday right after graduating from Yale, before she started a job as an assistant at the New Yorker, at the young age of 22. She was a talented writer. Here's an bit from "The Opposite of Loneliness," the commencement piece she wrote for the Yale Daily News.

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place.

It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt.

So young. So young.
And so talented.

[photo taken from Facebook]

scenes from sunday

Just reading the Sunday paper

Kinfolk + oranges

New cookbook: Poulet

Tiger needs naps too

Chewy lemon-coconut cookies with lemon icing

wayfare

I love to travel but will admit that it is getting harder and harder with Stells. I used to actually look forward to long plane rides (movies! magazines! reading time!) but now they seem like a particular kind of cramped torture. Which means that reading about distant locales and looking at pictures of far off cities takes on a new kind of appeal. Wayfare, the newly-launched digital magazine "celebrating the art of the journey," is just the thing to transport me with its gorgeous images and focus on design.

Wayfare design director and editor, Anne of Prêt à Voyager, recently wrote about how the magazine came into being. Read about it and take a look inside...

For the moment, today, I am happy to sit in my sun-filled living room grazing through the Sunday New York Times and scrolling through the Wayfare blog with a cup of tea while Stella naps, soundly and completely spread out, upstairs.

[cover image by Peggy Wong]

magazine crush: apartamento

I have a new crush... Apartamento: an everyday life interiors magazine.