THIS IS LOVE

This past week as we shopped for a Navajo bracelet, my husband explained to me that turquoise is usually filled with stabilizer.  Of course my first thought was that I wanted an original, unadulterated stone.  Cracks and flaws and all.
But I have to accept the true nature of turquoise; that it's beautiful but prone to cracking.  Without stabilizer, maybe it would crumble and be lost.  My mom had some like that.  It disintegrated into beautiful dust, so fine and blue.

Family, if you are lucky enough to have it (and if you're not, then friends are a good substitute), is the spackle that holds the crack-and-crumble prone institution of marriage together.  The filler, the binder. The stone itself is beautiful.  Precious.  But fragile.  And where the cracks form, the binder fills and smooths over and makes whole again.  Maybe not perfect.  Not original.  But sturdier.
It's important not to mistake the binder for the stone, though.  Glue is no substitute for precious stone.

This is what I was thinking as, one day this week, members of both our families converged in Virginia City.  In the blistering, funky Western streets of a ghost town in the mining hills of Nevada we all merged into a giant, amoebic, wild family.  You bought the ice cream of whoever was in line with you. Shepherded with two arms a gaggle of strollers and boys, accidentally pulling in peripheral children who seemed disappointed when plucked out of our happy mob by their lone parent.  Nephews of one family and second cousins of another were just cousins. joined by being of the same height and a strange and strong, instantly recognizable thread of family belonging. A bloodless cord.

Like cells, pieces broke off, joined members across the street, and then rejoined having grown in size; having gained an ice cream cone or a bow and arrow play set.
I set the toddler of my cousin on the back of my tree-like oldest son and he accepted the burden naturally, gracefully. Maybe even thankfully.

Later she ran ahead to walk with me and take my hand, saying, "I just want to be with you." At first I wasn't sure I had heard right.

When my oldest graduated from middle school, this enthusiastic mob showed up.  The older girl-cousins had glittery hand-made signs.  Great grandmas whispered conspiratorially.  The little cousins were held up on shoulders to see.  And when his name was called, our cheers were deafening and prolonged.

My son said later that his friends had asked, wasn't that embarrassing?
What did you say, I wanted to know.
I said that's not embarrassing, that's my family, he told me.

I went to see the foreign film I Am Love a while back.  As we left, a woman who was writing a book approached theatre-goers and asked them, what is love?

When she asked me, I answered immediately, "Showing up."

Showing up, and maybe screaming with all your heart.

It Used to be Easy to be Cool

until the internet ruined it.

A golden-haired girl and I, we have a little joke about blogging.  We were riffing on the idea that if you were young and lovely, recently employed at a well-known magazine, lived in New York and owned an Apple computer in 2002, creating a popular blog was ridiculously straightforward.

We made up a hypothetical blog post from this quaint era, and it goes something like this:

"Food-have you heard of it? I discovered it in Brooklyn this weekend!  Do you think you would try food?  Discuss!"

Fast-forward to today and every blogger is an HTML-writing, photoshopping, link embedding, monetizing, branding, logo-designing, networking, non-gluten-eating, nasty green drink-making, tomato-growing, live edge coffee table-owning mo-chine.  Even the newest and most obscure of blogs makes the online presence of major corporations look prehistoric.

To prove how easy blogging used to be, I just came up with six vintage-style blog posts in six seconds!  It was that easy.

2004- "Amy Butler fabric-I want to buy some and make pillows!  Which Amy Butler fabric do you like best?"

2005- "Design Sponge-I discovered it yesterday!  Have you heard of it?  Copy and paste this URL until I Google instructions for creating live links!"

2006- "Bunting-You can hang it over your bed OR your sofa!  Do you have bunting?  You don't?  Why not?"

2007- "I saw a girl on a bike with braids in Brooklyn this weekend!"

2008- "I went to the best wedding this weekend!  The amazing bride and groom used giant balloons and mustaches on a stick in their photos!"

2009- "I discovered that you can drink out of Mason jars!  Would you drink out of a Mason jar?  Here is a link to the instruction on how to drink from a Mason jar!"

I bet you can think of many more!  But now I'm tired, because creating a modern blogpost takes so much energy.  Some day our robotic body-doubles will do it for us, or maybe we will outsource it to India.  The future of blogging is anyone's guess.  I just don't know what I'm going to do with all this unused bunting...

Feet Leave the Ground

Sorry the Haus has been so quiet!  
There's the usual intense internal dialogue going about some major things...I've been a real Thinker Thinkerton over here, but have felt much more private lately.  Weird, huh?


At the end of the day yesterday, after Pizza Port-ing and butterfly sightings at the beach, we pulled over at a quiet spot so the boys could surf.  There wasn't much surf to speak of, but their skinny, flu-weakened arms couldn't have handled much anyhow.

Every time I look at Sage now, I think of the word akimbo.  He's all lines and angles and I think to myself, "Arms akimbo!"

I watched him running towards the water yesterday, and for a brief moment as he jumped over a pile of seaweed, he was airborne.
I thought, that's how you know you're happy; when your feet leave the ground.

I used to love to open a book when they surfed, but I don't do that anymore (and yes, I do plan to join them!)

I watch, and I soak it up.  Remember in the beginning when you would watch them breathe?  You do it at the end, too.



........................................

Once...

Dusty photo of Eiffel Tower, 2003

I don't remember anything else about that day.

Deranged by the time change, we probably overslept and then couldn't get a bite of breakfast in any of the old restaurants of the Pigalle. The sturdy husband-and-wife owners would have looked at us sharply and pointed to cold ham and buttered baguette sandwiches, unglamorously piled in plastic wrap on the counter.

If the husband pitied us, he would switch on his great, steaming beast of an espresso machine and bring us an au lait. A few men nursing tiny glasses of late morning wine at the counter would look at us curiously.

The chef was gone...it was not time to eat in Paris. Anyone would know that.

Using flash, film camera, 2003

This day, we probably took the wrong Metro stop again and ended up below the statue of Louis XV instead of above it. We would have hitched our bags up, rounded our shoulders against the climb, and walked in silence, me using the snowy domes and peaks of the Sacre Coeur to navigate.


Perhaps this was also the day I asked the hotel concierge, in perfect French for the first and last time in my life, where was the Opera Garnier, earning me the briefest warmth of an approving smile.


But perhaps this was also the day that I unfolded a shelf of clothes in a boutique and made the clerk grimace; the day a fat waiter told me I would be much more beautiful without my ugly wool hat.

From the window of my hotel, 2003

It was not a good trip in the way you would imagine it would be; two young women in Paris for their first time.

I had picked the wrong traveling companion and things had begun to unravel immediately. She spoke French but refused to.  Refused, in fact, to use a map, learn the name of the street our hotel was on, pick a restaurant, ask for water.

She sulked when, on our third visit to Fuxia for hand rolled pasta with goat cheese and pine nuts, it was me, not her, that the waiter kissed on both cheeks after an animated Frenglish discussion about eggplant vs. aubergine (he was, I think, surprised to find Americans had the capacity for such whimsy regarding the vegetable kingdom).


It could have been any one of these grim and beautiful November days in Paris that we left the Metro deep below street level and had to exit through one of those endless, white subway-tiled corridors. We were alone in the corridor, this being a work day in a working neighborhood. The fluorescent tube lights flickered blue against the white tile, reminding me of an igloo entrance.

Red bag, Eiffel Tower

My red bag was slung cross my body as usual, zipped and resting under my left arm. Somehow I felt the weight of one fingertip more added to my burden. I whirled and caught in my hand the skinny wrist of a very young, very beautiful boy who had the corner of my wallet in his hand.


"Bon!" he congratulated. "Very good, very good!" he praised me in English.


He dropped my wallet, bowed, and then this very young boy who had just been ready to rob me blind, turned my hand over, kissed it tenderly, and ran off. At the end of the tunnel his friend peeked out, laughing.


"Very good!" he yelled one last time, turning to wave. And then he disappeared.


It was not an act of aggression or violence. There was no malevolence. My little thief had, in fact, been the most French; the most charming and proper person I had met in Paris.


I no longer have that friend but I do have that bag, and there is still so much I don't understand about Paris.


Pardon me while I grapple with the fact that BLOGGER HAS CHANGED EVERYTHING OVERNIGHT... I was thinking about the idea of "once-ness" when I wrote this down. You know, those experiences that are so singular and so memorable.  They can't be planned or replicated.   I wrote about another "once" moment here.


.......................................

A Week in Which the Internet Becomes Reality

Heather shares her awesome eye of newt recipe with Bianca, Alex, and Jennie!

I nearly poked her in the face to make sure she was real.

But I didn't. I behaved *pretty* normally when I ran into one of my most long-term "internet relationships" at the thrift store the other day. I was looking down, trying to tame my outrageously overgrown Elvis pompadour with some spit and a prayer, when I heard my name. I turned to see her standing there next to the tie rack, adorable and uncertain. The chaos of the thrift store fell away and I approached as if in a dream. We held hands and spun around in a field somehow and then we braided each other's hair.

No, silly. We didn't do that! We chatted about Mexican blankets for a few minutes like normal thrift store ladies, and then said goodbye.

She was smaller and skinnier in real life, just like celebrities are. Joel McHale was on our flight to Kauai last week and he couldn't have been more than 120 pounds. Seriously, he was EMACIATED (and p.s. he totally initiated a conversation with my husband but I was like, hey this book I'm reading upside-down is way more interesting and I'm not even listening to you!)

This pretty much set the tone for the rest of the weekend, because on Saturday I was invited to a gathering of bloggers/small business owners, some of whom I've "known" for quite some time without ever meeting.

I drove with Erin and although we've never met in person, it was as if we were picking up the thread of a conversation that had just been briefly interrupted. I love, LOVE Erin's thoughtful, academic writing style and wish I could be as clear-thinking, direct, and simple in my approach to blogging as she is.

We parked down the street and downed a few shots from my hip flask of Bach Rescue Remedy (I'm just kidding, only I did this) which proved completely useless against my most special talent, social anxiety. I spent the rest of the evening willing myself NOT TO SAY ANYTHING SUPER INAPPROPRIATE, which must have worked because some of the ladies are still talking to me!

There are two major things I took away from the evening:

1) If you want to grow your blog or business or change anything about your life, make yourself uncomfortable and put yourself out there. Go take a class or host an event yourself. You can only go so far in life alone in a room with a computer screen. We are social creatures and we need the creative stimulation of others in order to move forward. Alone with our thoughts, we just get stuck!

2) Women are super heroes . Guys are ok for some things, but ladies are awesome. We get a bad rap for being "catty" or jealous or whatever (gee, I wonder who's responsible for that stereotype!), but in my experience we thrive on helping one another succeed and will even put aside our own interests to do this. The organizers, Alexis and Jules (who came and set up despite having food poisoning!), testify to this.

Attending this event reminded me of how starved I am for some good female energy in my "all-dude-all-the-time" life! So many generous women came up to me or contacted me via email later to discuss certain aspects of what I had said, give advice and feedback, or just be generally encouraging and supportive.

I felt the love, ladies. I felt the love, and I want you to feel it too. But not in a gross way.

Evelyn

I spent the morning with my grandma.

7,000 boys went down with the Arizona, she said. Your grandfather wanted me to see it. To see my reaction, she said. That was the first time I went to Hawaii. I didn't want to go, she said.

Darjeeling, India. That was the best trip of my life. We spent five weeks crossing India, she said. Your grandfather was very good to me, knew I loved the mountains, knew I wanted to be near the Himalayas. We had no itinerary. At every stop, we asked at the hotel where we should go next, and we went there. The people were so nice, so beautiful.

The train in Darjeeling Limited comes to mind. The image of my nearly Gothic Victorian grandmother in a hat and pearls, her white-white hands clutching the railing as their 1st class car rocks back and forth. Tea. There would have been tea.

The best I've ever had, she said.

Was he deployed during the war, I said. What war? My dear, there have been so many wars since I was a little girl, she said.

Korean, she said then. For two years he went back and forth to Hawaii. I didn't see him shed any tears when he had to leave, she said. I had a baby each time he left.

You can't shake my faith, she said. I've known what was true all my life, it just took time to find others who did too.

I hope someday I'll see more of you, she said. You know you can always stop working. You chose to start and you can choose to stop, she said.

I can't, grandma. I have to work. I would just have to do something else, and I would be even busier.

Not even if you were very careful? she said.

Not even then, grandma. Not unless I very carefully turned back the clock, married a big sailor, had a mess of kids, and hopped trains across India. Had daughters with issues and granddaughters with questions. Not unless I was you.

But I will take you to the Himalayan restaurant. And I won't cringe when you tell the polite waiter about Darjeeling, how good the tea was, how much your husband loved it there. I won't cringe at all. I'll let you be you since you love me.

CAMPAIGN DESK

Once upon a time I bought a beautiful house and claimed a room in it as my office. This room was not large, and the dumb old antique glass doorknobs always fell off when I slammed the door shut and yelled, "Be quiet! I'M WORKING!!!" Sometimes they fell off on the outside, which meant eventually someone had to come and let me out. This still happens in the master bath, and so, if you haven't seen me in a while, please check there first.





But it was my room. OK, so I shared it with the ironing board (taunting me always) , a guest sofa, several friendly guitars, and enough amplifiers to recreate the Who's WALL OF SOUND. Yet, when I said the words, "I'll be in the office," I wasn't referring to a blanket fort under the dining room table. You didn't have to follow the extension cord until it ended at me, sitting on the floor in the stair landing, typing furiously. It was a room with a door, and it was mine. Occasionally my family was even kind enough to leave a pen or half-chewed pencil there for me to use.





Fast forward a few phases of child development, and it became necessary to give our sons their own rooms. Among other things, the top bunk was being used to investigate certain laws of physics. Growing up in a house full of girls, it had never occurred to me to see if I could pee on ANYONE'S head from the top bunk. There is simply no way to prepare for certain things about parenting.





There followed a whole year where my "office" was an old desk three feet from the blissful marriage bed, from which my husband would lovingly glare at me, turn over, sigh loudly, and bury his head in three pillows. I felt great about it. I was also able to conserve nearly all my calories, since my commute for the day was: roll out of bed onto rolling chair, push self off wall over to desk. Never had gaining weight been so easy, so automatic!





I decided to rejoin the living by sharing the family computer upstairs. Commence six months of wondering, was it just me or did everyone in my family chew food/breathe so loud that I could not focus on what I was doing? (It was me)


This is my long, I'm-sick-in-bed-so-I'm-going-to-tell-you-my-life-story, way of saying we are turning the garage into an office and I painted an old campaign desk Kelly green. Behr's "Mint Sprig" green to be exact. The rug and the chair look a little awful with it, but nothing says "These would be perfect for mom" like random things dug out of the basement. I know...my selfish materialism knows no bounds.





SO, come visit me in the new office. We can hold important meetings and try and ignore that the garage door was just sprayed by a skunk. I hope you like centipedes and mice as much as I do! Of course, if you don't find me there, it's possible that another family need has forced a relocation of my office. Look for an extension cord. Follow it. There are a few spots we haven't yet tried as my office. There's a crotch in the tree out back I may be able to use...

The Trouble with Reading

I've fallen down a rabbit hole but it's ok, I've been here before.

As a kid I spent entire years of my life here, reading book after book, walking around with barely one foot in this world. Having kids meant I had to choose the Now, although I could have easily become one of those professors that bumps into things and wears the same clothes three days in a row.

I could have been even weirder than I am now. Imagine.

I watch my son, coming late to the experience of really reading, doing the same. He comes home late from school and immediately excuses himself, apple in hand, to his room. He lays on his bed sideways, propped on an elbow, facing the wall and curled around his book.

I make no sound when I see him there-the large, messy pile of books next to his bed a small version of my own. I know that he's not really there, and that if I speak to him the voice that answers me won't be his.

Inside the books he is finding the things that I want him to find, and the things that I'm afraid he'll find. He reads about the Chumash, the Maus graphic novels that make their ugly but necessary mark on him, John Muir's memoirs.

At this age I know that each book will somehow be about him, while the books I read are less clear to me; a Chinese scholar swatting flies under Chairman Mao's rule, a plain slave marrying a farmer and living through cycles of want and prosperity, a Black Atlanta teenager navigating a complicated family, Indian immigrants and the seductively academic world they inhabit. I recognize the universal problems of "being", the work of becoming oneself among the complications of community and family, the blurry line that context makes between right and wrong.

And when I get up from my books, I have that old familiar feeling of being a little tender and lost in the world. I look at a lamp and try to force myself to think "lamp," but I can't.

Today my mind is curled around its books. I am turned towards a wall, but I see everything.



What I'm reading this week:

The Bitter Sea, Charles N. Li
The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck (again)
Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri (run, run, run to buy this)
Silver Sparrow, Tayari Jones
Swim Back to Me, Ann Packer
The Power of One, Bryce Courtenay
Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv

An Increase in Natural Disasters-What Does it all Mean, Modernhaus??

I hear your cries for my leadership on this matter. So believe me, I am formulating some ridiculous thoughts to share. I am culling from the most cutting-edge research and will be prepared to disseminate my findings soon. Which is different from inseminating them, which is technically impossible (but I bet there's a lab in China where they're trying it out).

Is it global warming? My armpits say yes. I have indeed observed an increase in rank sweat flow. It can only mean one of two things: 1)the Earth is becoming hotter, or 2) I am becoming a old European man.

If, despite my personal experience you are still skeptical, here is shocking proof found buried in the research of this acclaimed researcher (government cover-up? I think so!)

You should know that the image you are about to see is graphic, and some may find it disturbing. Especially those with good taste in lawn furniture.



I'm sorry you had to see that. But now you know. Global warming is a fact, and the end is nigh.

Do we have any classes together? or Does anyone blog in the summer?

It's been awhile. But I promise I thought about you all summer. How I should call you more. How we should catch up over a couple of Dairy Queen ice cream cones. Ride our bikes down to the park and lay under the big pine and talk about which is grosser; having someone stick a finger in your bellybutton or your eye (I will vote bellybutton and you will vote eye, every time). Compare leg tans (you always win).



Summertime blogging is kind of like that summer between 9th and 10th grade. The one where you crushed on some boy hard, and guiltily ditched your best friend all summer to hang around him. But as school approached you start hoping she'll forgive you. The guy turned out to be needy and have sort of bad breath. But her? She's perfect, as best friends always are in that intense, you-were-made-for-me, symbiotic girl-love sort of way.

You call to offer your best tank top for her first day of school outfit. A guilty trick to woo her back, and it works. You compare school schedules and arrange to ride together on the first day. She's forgiven you, and you love her all the more for it.

I'm gonna GOOP you Gwyneth-style with some Spain deets shortly. But first I had to make sure...you'll still sit with me at lunch, right? I'll let you wear my Esprit tank top if you do.

If by "winding down" you mean going crazy, also eBay

There's no way you can say that the end of a school year "winds down". That implies that something is gradually slowing down until it completely stops.

If by winding down they mean a manic two week frenzy of events, finals, yearbooks, daily demands for more volunteers and money ("if every parents donates $100, twenty hours of time, and all the supplies, we can make this school carnival a raging success!"), "balloon bouquets" attacking you from behind while you try maneuvering your car to the 10th graduation ceremony that week, a gaggle of kids that no longer view a crisp $10 bill and a pat on the back as an acceptable gift, all culminating in a huge Costco sheetcake-fueled nervous breakdown in somebody's streamer-bedecked garage, well yes, then I guess things ARE winding down over here.

But this year I am prepared. A little more than a week from now, I'll be luxuriating in my rented Mid-Century Palm Springs house, and there will be absolutely no balloons or sheetcakes allowed. Here's a peek of where I'll be staying:







Meanwhile I've managed to get a bit of work accomplished, although I'm not sure it matters. With all the events everyone has going on, eBay is getting as much traffic as Charlie Sheen's parenting website. Actually, less. No, he doesn't really have one. I made that up.

Check the store here.

Huge, chunky, wild 70s Danish teak dining table:







Set of eight comfortable Danish chairs:






Some vintage campaign furniture:

The Bill and Melinda Gates School for Hipster Children (where Obama almost came to speak)

It was my turn to drive carpool the other day, and I pulled over to capture this with my cell phone:



It's the view from my kid's school--sparkling water, a sprinkling of yachts, the downtown skyline. You know, pretty much like every other school NOT.

This is the school at which, this semester, the kid's elective class is tightrope walking in the park. The school at which his roller derby-playing, band-member hipster Humanities teacher explained to me that my son is not being lazy and talking too much, but rather "socially maturing" and "fomenting his masterpiece". I know, look it up.

I just walked in on them playing bongos and singing "Don't Stop Believin". With their teacher. I joined in of course, because I am a parent who gets involved.

Yet the kid still occasionally wails that he wishes school had "never been invented".

Oh, you mean that air conditioned fun-factory by the bay that I take you to every day? Yeah. I feel you honey.

When I was his age, I was spending my days in Home Ec, accidentally sewing sleeves on inside-out with a 100-year old sewing machine, while getting regular updates on my breast and butt development from a fat red-headed kid named Brian.

So you know what? Don't get all "I know why the caged bird sings" on me kid. Go foment something why don't you?

Shout out to the Echo Park Cru, a.k.a. the Brick Haus sale was awesome!

First, I'd just like to thank L.A. for being the most kooky and randomly amazing place ever. Where else would you get Kate Miss and the neighborhood Cheech & Chong look-a-likes (so drunk they had to hang onto the walls...except Ms. Miss who could stand up pretty good on her own so talented she is!) shopping your pop-up vintage sale?

That is what I call a broad customer base! Corporations would kill for that, and we will sell our marketing secrets to them for a mee-lion dollars.

Actually, the secret is in the sauce. The people sauce, that is.

Morgan was the meek and reclusive star of the show (whose nametag I stole for an hour just to see what it's like to have everyone subtly bending at the waist in a Japenese-style bow when introducing themselves...also not looking directly at my face).

Seriously, how many times did I say, "I know, she is incredibly talented!" yesterday? SO MANY.

This is the best picture I could find of her...she's so secretive!




And then there was Picasso and Eva Peron's granddaughter--raised in exile in the jungles of El Salvador (which is why she knows plants so well)--Bianca of TerriPlanty. She's like a snake charmer with babies, dogs, adults, plants, roving swarms of Africanized bees, whatever. If it's alive, it loves her and does what she says. I am no different.

This is one of her magical terrarium pieces:



Her crafty set-up at Unique LA:



And this is how everyone looked at her pieces--totally, completely enthralled:



And the boyfriend,"Handsome Andy Sandberg" Erick? A total keeper. You hear me Bianca??

Rounding out our Echo Park Cru was famed French photographer/writer/designer Laure Joliet (from HGTV, Apartment Therapy, Dwell, and yo mama!), our deceptively muscular blond project manager. Her uncle, Jack Nicholson, had this to say about her: "Laure is a star! Uncle Jack loves you baby!"



And I'm only slightly exaggerating some of this...because we were in L.A., the normal six degrees of separation from famous people was reduced to like a point three degrees. The air was tingling with famous-ness. Or maybe it was the downed electrical cable laying in the puddle nearby. Hmmm.

SO, a big wet-lipped kiss to the Cru and the gorgeous people who showed up for the sale. Especially the guy in line who yelled, "You said you were opening at noon!" when we tried to go put on deoderant. You, my friend, are a treasure.

It was the most fun I've ever had in a parking lot, and I've been to some damn fine parking lots, sooo...

Were you there? Do you wish you were? And who bought my hippo cookie jar? Can I please buy it back?



p.s.-all photos stolen without written or verbal permission from anyone. Sorry.

The World Without Blogger

In an uncharacteristically stupid move, the government temporarily disabled Blogger recently to test the effects on society.

And by society of course I mean women.

Men are just changing the oil and shuffling papers around desks to look busy. The government already knows this. They invented it (during Prohibition there was indeed a rise in oil changes and paper-shuffling rates among men. But nothing else changed. Nada. End of social experiment).

Some questions they are trying to answer:

Would workplace productivity go up?
Would houses be cleaner and school bake-sale participation increase (it's a little known fact that bake sales account for 10% of our national GDP--no wonder they are concerned!)
With a few extra minutes on their hands, would the women help the dudes fix the recession/national debt/oil prices?
Can they really trace the decline in school test scores, job creation, and spending at SEARS to the rise in popularity of "A Cup of Jo"?

All these things needed answering, and there was only one way to find out: cripple Blogger and watch what happened.

Only instead, this little experiment has led to epic lifestyle chaos.

How do we make choices if the guiding lights of our socity are suddently shut off?

It's like if in the Olde Days someone took away the Bible, the Farmer's Almanac, insect plagues, and moonshine. No moral compass! No way to determine who is evil! No more spontaneous fiddle dances!

Why, just this morning I saw a poor, bewildered woman walking down the street wearing equal parts Benetton and Esprit. With jelly shoes. She had apparently reverted back to the last time she made a style choice on her own without the help of blogs...1989.

Kiosks selling hair scrunchies have sprouted up at malls seemingly overnight!

And somewhere a once-stylish and confident woman is at Home Depot choosing Navajo White paint and buying fleur de lis drapes at JC Penney. Before this cruel experiment? She would have chosen a color called "Soot" from Fine Paints of Europe's "Places Bombed in WWII" historical collection. And curtains handblocked in India by the slaves/artisan community run be a famous textile designer. And maybe, if she read the edgier blogs, some invisible chairs from Philip Starck's new "Practical Joke" line of furniture.

So please, Nancy Pelosi, end this madness and give us our Blogger back. Cup of Jo is getting cranky. She hasn't washed her striped boatneck French terry Petit Bateau t-shirt in days.
Purchases of fascinators and owl-themed items on Etsy are at a stand-still! Cupcakes and Cashmere is actually trying to make cupcakes! We are forgetting how to spell "lurve" and no one has said "I heart that" since Monday. These important traditions could be lost forever if you don't act quickly.

Thank you.

Lurve, Modernhaus

Things Teens Dread...the parked car conversation

(alternatively titled "I Give Up, I Can't Write a Blog About Style, Having Finally Admitted to Myself That I Have Very Little Knowledge of this Subject". Should you require style information, this blogger is the way to go. This one is not. Overplucked eyebrows, frosted lipstick, and "athletic" legs in mini-skirts and Forever 21 shoes does not a stylista make...and don't be fooled! There are NO CUPCAKES! I've looked!).

Anyhoo...

There's nothing like being locked into a tightly confined space with a frowny-faced parent to inspire the deepest sense of dread, impending doom, and the imminent loss of some privilege or freedom in a teen.

You remember how this goes, I'm sure of it...close your eyes and think back.

The car rolls up to it's destination even slower than normal, and your mom, (because this is a uniquely mom-move...dads handle the same matters by smacking child on back of head and hollering "Don't be such an idiot!"), your mom is very slowly, very carefully, so as not to alert your teen/animal senses, turning down the stereo with one hand and simultaneously reaching for the automatic door locks with her other hand.

Except your teen/animal senses recognize this maneuver immediately and send you into a deep primal panic.

You want to wail, claw at the windows, send Lassie for help. Because your mom is now turning to you and speaking the eight most terrifying words in the New Revised Teen English Dictionary: "I want to talk to you about something."

Oh. Crap. Teens have died of hunger, grown old while waiting for their moms to finish "talking to them about something"!

So, as a survivor of this kind of torture (I actually spent years 13-16 locked into a Volkswagon Vanagon while my mom "talked to me about something", surviving off of old popcorn kernels I found on the floor and eventually being rescued when an S.O.S. note I scribbled onto a page of the bible was found by a passerby!), I am nothing if not compassionately sensitive to the feelings of my teen children.

I like to think I am not only cooler, but sneakier, by not introducing the talking part with an announcement (thus by-passing the groan and eye-roll!) and just jumping right into it. I do this WHILE the car is still moving and the radio is on. They have no idea what's happening! We are just cruising down the highway when suddenly words like "private parts" and "self-discipline" start coming out of nowhere (my mouth)!

In this way, my children will always associate Arcade Fire with warm talks about perverts, and Green Day songs will always elicit memories of friendly threats of beatings if grades don't improve.

Of course, the dad-method has some value, too. So I try to follow up my sneak attack with a jaunty head-smack and, when they've jumped out of the unlocked car and run with newfound energy towards school, a loud shout out the window, "and don't be an idiot!"

Because how will they develop any character without at least a little public humiliation? It's where I got all mine from, and I'm filled to the brim with character! Thanks mom!

Nervous Acne

No, it's not the name of my new business venture or band. Although it does work on a lot of levels...

After months of goofy blog commenting and messaging back and forth about the perils of furniture and the ever-dwindling supply of radness, and shamelessly brain-picking one another about business-y stuff, I finally stopped internet dating Morgan and drove out to the desert to meet her (and her shopping haunts!) in person.



I almost peed my pants and got a nervous zit in anticipation. The zit wasn't nervous. I was. I hope that's clear.

I'm not about to reduce her to a bunch of overused superlatives. You know how I feel about that. Even though she is the best-est, most-est, talented-est, etc., that's just not the whole of it.



She spent the day propping me up to everyone we met, although failing to mention who she was, and simultaneously fielding calls all day from famous people I won't mention (but I reeeeeeeally want to), demurring about how freakishly in demand she is ("Oh, it's really nothing. All I do is write some blog.."), hesitating to reveal to others the magnitude of the projects she's working on. And she gently shamed me with her knowledge of art. You could say she's down-to-earth, but that really doesn't quite do it. She's also admirable and educated and sweetly shy and modest. And tough, and kind, and driven, and generous.



I really wish I had taken some pictures, especially of the ex-model junk shop owner with green hair and my Ace pot pie. And the windmills we criss-crossed back and forth through a thousand times, and the snowy San Jacinto mountains suddenly looming out above us like some desert Mt. Fuji. But I was bewitched and forgot about the 10 pounds of camera in my purse.



And the Brick House? It's even better in person.


Thanks for everything, Morgan. Love, Coy Pooper