How he writes faces

She was arrestingly beautiful. The color in her cheeks was centered like the color in a picture -- it was not a 'high' color, but a sort of fluctuating and feverish warmth, so shaded that it seemed at any moment it would recede and disappear. This color and the mobility of her mouth gave a continual impression of flux, of intense life, of passionate vitality -- balanced only partially by the sad luxury of her eyes." 

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Winter Dreams"

Bath time with Great Grandma

Smile

Chloe with Grandma

Kind

via

Travel

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” ~ Marcel Proust 


"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.  Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."  - Mark Twain

Snow globe on my finger

via

Cool women

With Great Grandpa

Garden State

"We may not be as happy as you always dreamed we would be, but for the first time let's just allow ourselves to be whatever it is we are and that will be better. OK?" 
- Large

Toys

via

Happy when I see you

Melanie

Let's work at not being this

When asked what surprised him the most about humanity, the Dalai Lama said,

"Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future. He lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived."

Stephen Chbosky

"We accept the love we think we deserve."  

                                   -The Perks of Being a Wallflower

You're my people

It was less than a year ago when I stumbled upon this diagram and saved it on my computer under "someday.jpg" -- except now, that someday that I was thinking about is today. It's everyday with Bear. 

Happy 2 year 4 months! 

With my cherub

Macaulay, Leo, Winona

In another life

Sexy eye, r u srz?

Does this burger eye make you hungry

PASSED

my colloquium!!!!!!!!!!!

[twenty minutes of unbridled joy]

now i'm gonna eat some mushrooms cooked in hot pot sauce, throw back a cup of coffee, and get slamming on those final papers.

Lord Henry

"The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."

Pale days teach you to see

A room in the house is always warm
Stretched out on the bathroom floor thinking
of fair days your future may hold

Love comes like surprise ice on the water
Love comes like surprise ice at dawn

-Kings of Convenience

Lovers

New York City is littered with pieces of bikes: pillaged, unfortunate. If you steal enough parts of a bike, you can make your own.

Bodies are not bikes. Hearts, even more so, are not bikes.

Love is my two Bears

Dostoevsky

"The most unbearable misfortune is when you yourself become unjust, malignant, vile; you realize it, you even reproach yourself – but you just can’t help it."

Dostoevsky's second marriage

Afraid of rejection, Dostoevsky at first disguised his proposal as a plot for a new novel. He told Anna that his character was a writer, middle-aged, sick, and tormented, who has fallen in love with a young girl. He asked Anna if she thought it psychologically plausible that this young girl might return the old man’s love. Anna replied that she thought it was possible. Her reply gave Dostoevsky the courage to come to the point:

“Imagine,” he said, “that the artist is – me; that I have confessed my love for you and asked you to be my wife. Tell me, what would you answer?”

Anna Grigoyevna understood, from the inner torment manifest in Dostoevsky’s countenance, that “if I gave him an evasive answer I would deal a deathblow to his self-esteem and pride. I looked at his troubled face, which had become so dear to me, and said, “I would answer that I love you and will love you all my life.”

They were married a few months later, in February 1867. From the start, the marriage was marked by difficulties. At their wedding reception, Dostoevsky had too much champagne and had a terrifying epileptic seizure. The episode was severe: Dostoevsky screamed in pain for hours. When the screaming subsided, he was incoherent and seemed “mad.” Not a good introduction to married life for his young bride. Still, Anna acted well: she took Dostoevsky’s head in her lap and held it as he convulsed.

Dostoevsky would later tell her that he was terrified of dying during one of his attacks. From then on, Anna would stay with him regardless of his condition, sometimes sitting on the sofa near his bed for days. via

Why Drew is Awesome, Reason #49

He bought me an insulated travel mug from Singapore Day. This patched up the blues I was feeling after shattering the lid of my beloved tea mug.

I said to Drew

--Your big toe looks unusually short and stubby today.

--I know. I bit part of it off.

--Ewww. Was it gummy?

--Kinda chewy, kinda cheesy.

--Was it hard to swallow?

--Mmm, tasted like a hot dog.

Capote on Breakfast at Tiffany's

"I think I've had two careers. One was the career of precocity, the young person who published a series of books that were really quite remarkable. I can even read them now and evaluate them favorably, as though they were the work of a stranger... My second career began, I guess it really began with Breakfast at Tiffany's. It involves a different point of view, a different prose style to some degree. Actually, the prose style is an evolvement from one to the other—a pruning and thinning-out to a more subdued, clearer prose. I don't find it as evocative, in many respects, as the other, or even as original, but it is more difficult to do. But I'm nowhere near reaching what I want to do, where I want to go."

It'll make life easier

Omg 豆花

We love naps

Meditations in an Emergency

“Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.”

“My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up.”

-Frank O'Hara

As I get better

I'm very thankful to have a big Bear who takes such good care of little Bear.

Frank O'Hara

"Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there'll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

Why should I share you? Why don't you get rid of someone else for a change?

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love."

Beauty & the Beast

Perfect love casts out all fear.

Paying for coffee in change

A smile falls on my shoe.
You? Yes. You, too.

A tooth falls on my shoe.
And I just do. I chew.

Chloe channels Peko girl

Lalala

delusional.
in denial.

lalala.

You know

The girls in polyester band aid dresses are blinded
and dizzy and starving for dirty-nailed finger
fucking that dries under the nails of the boys
who drag their cologne-clouds home with them at 5 am,
kicking cans over chewed apples and naked cockroach
exoskeletons

shouting wildly down
the pre-dawn street

Chump the grump

Waaah wahh! Hungry! Angry! HANGRY!!!

Waaah...

Waaahhhhh...

aaahhh...

What? There will be what soon?

Meeeelk, did you say? MEEE-lk?

Belated 26th M.

Me + You + Strawbelly = a whole lotta Love.
Thank you for liking this pajama-wearing, cookie-craving, occasionally whiny P. from the start.

François de La Rochefoucauld

“If we had no faults of our own, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others.”

Hello, turtle

It'd be nice to be you right now. That is, assuming that the turtle is being set free into the water (not stolen from the sea)

Paddle on.

I eat you

feeling incredibly swamped with work. can't wait to graduate, yet at the same time i just can't see how i'm gonna make it to the other side with this monolithic concrete wall in the way.

hmm. whatevs. tough times won't last, but TOUGH PEOPLE WILL. so yeah, watch me bust out my inner Cristina Yang.

(Drew and I have been catching up on Grey's Anatomy. So good.)

Okay, back to work.

Brunch with cousin Tammy

It was so beyond lovely catching up. I love seeing family. <3

Happens way too often

Chloe in a bonnet

Nectarine things

This reminds me of the lavender bushes in my Aunt June's front yard. It also reminds me of the little girl named Lavender in Roald Dahl's book, Matilda.

Always been a fan of contrasting patterns.

I can't wait to paint on all sorts of unconventional things with Chloe, including clothespins. We'll use shaving cream mixed with food coloring to paint on bathroom tiles. And leave little messages & symbols on foggy windows.

Sigh... still on my Whole Foods cookie ban. :(

Bet you never thought paradise would come by the way of an elephant. The only elephant I own is one named Alfred Veronica, a delightful little creature that my sissy brought back from Bangkok.

Mailbox & daisies.

1. I don't know why I think of marbles when I see the colors on these pants. 2. I'm aware that there are many who'd find these pants quite unbecoming. 3. But I'd like to rule the world in them.

Legit.

To be frozen: strawberries dipped in greek yogurt. When I first saw this picture, I thought it was white chocolate. I'd be lying if I said that didn't excite me more.

It's all about how high you're gonna set your standards.