BOTH!

Waaaaaa - it's been almost a week! I know, and that had made me sad...but like I said last Friday, my little brother had been in town and we have been running around like little puppies, which makes it hard to sit down and write.

And I wish I was better about that.

But apparently I can focus on just a few things at a time.

Which makes me wish that I could have had both. Both my brother in town, running around, oyster-bakes, and hiking, as well as funny gifs and lovely blogs.

But apparently both is hard to have.

And that makes me cry, because BOTH is my favorite thing.

BOTH was the reason that I knew I was going to marry Steve on our first date. It was creepy that I knew, and it really freaked me out that I had that thought, but it happened.

We were sitting in a pew in the private backroom of a little swanky Chinese restaurant in Hollywood, listening to a singer-song writer, and Steve leaned into me and said "Can I bring you something to drink? I said yes. He asked "what?" I said, "whatever you're having."

(Ladies, this was my way of finding out what kind of drinks he liked. Lol.)

He went to the bar, and was gone a little while.

He came back holding several beers.

He said, "Well I didn't know if you liked Guinness or Fat Tire....so I bought you both."

As he sat down in the pew next to me, and put his arm back around my shoulder, I heard this little sound in my brain. It wasn't like a firework, or some loud explosion, it was that sound when you pop your finger out of your mouth:




Yea.

It made that sound.

And then this thought, "I could do this. For a very long time."

And even though it took me several months to get over the idea that my brain had that thought....it was settling to know that no matter what happened, I was with a guy that understood the power of both.

Here are some other things that I totally LOVE, because I feel like you are getting BOTH:

1) MASHUPS.

I know this makes me the stereotypical white-girl in a club that goes crazy when you hear a mashup. I know lots of people think they are shitty. But you know what? I feel like they are the all-you-can-eat buffet of music. You get to have all the music you love, and you don't have to wait for it, or prioritize it or anything. It's like a magical explosion for your ears.

Don't believe me? Listen to this one, and tell me you're not in love:



Yea.

I can listen to this on repeat for like 12 hours and not even be a little bit bored.

2) Adult Root Beer Floats.

Can't decide between an after-dinner dessert or an after-dinner drink? Why pick just one? Have both!

1 part baileys +  2 parts root beer + tons of vanilla ice cream.

RIGHT?

3) Buffalo Chicken Pizza

This one has a special place in my heart. You know why? BECAUSE ITS A MASHUP OF MY FAVORITE FOODS IN ALL THE LAND!

If you haven't learned this by now, maybe we're not friends.

Buffalo wings are honest to god some of my favorite things. So is pizza. If I had to pick one of them and couldn't have the other for the rest of my life, I would think long and hard and then just do this:

So I gave a special place in my heart for whatever genius thought of this:

It makes me tinkle a little when I think about it.

4) Long Dresses

We all have mornings when we wake up and feel like this:

And really, thinking about going into the office makes you do this:

You know what really helps?

Maxi dresses.

I'm serious.

For some reason, rolling into the office in one of these tricks my mind into thinking that I'm about to leave on vacation to Hawaii or something, so I feel giddy all day instead of hating life. Maybe it's because THEY'RE LIKE WEARING PAJAMAS TO THE OFFICE:

This trick works so well, my friends seem to have caught on. Now when I wear a "vacation dress"  they know that I REALLY don't wanna be at work that day and make this face:

5) Gummi Vitamins

Gummi candy + strong nail beds?

6) Last and finally, my all time favorite.....UNICORNDOGS.

think about it.

think about it.

think about it.

Alright my little bunnies, those are my favorite both things. If you have some that you love and you're dying to share...drop me a comment.

Love and fairies,

J

Brother!

My brother's coming to town this weekend/next week! Which is kinda amazing because he has not yet come to see me in San Francisco!

Growing up, there were 4 of us. Matt, me, Jason and Michele. Matt always had a lot of energy and had the tendency to bully Jason and I. So when we were sitting in my mom's van, Michele (being like 2 years old) was the only one who could handle sitting next to Matt. Maybe he had something against hitting babies. I don't know.

So Matt and Michele sat in the very back row, leaving Jason and I to sit in the middle row of the van. These were our seats for all of childhood. Or forever....if we were to get in a van now, we just might instinctively choose the same seats.

This permanent seating arrangement meant Jason and I became super close growing up. We shared that little storage compartment on the left-hand side of the van, goldfish crackers, and used entertain each other with weird-kid-shit, like trying to make up our own language so that Matt and Michele couldn't understand us. Well, Michele was a baby...so we were mainly trying to keep Matt from pestering us. It didn't work out. We would turn to each other and say "Ester balloon tra la monkey" and the other person would be like:

And then whisper..."I forgot what that was supposed to mean."

We were weird. But also awesome.

This combination of weird-awesome has earned Jason a special spot in my heart. One might say that he is my "favorite brother" if one believed in favorites. I don't believe in favorites though. So I wouldn't say that.

We called each other "booney" for most of our childhood, which is some embarrassing derivation of the word book....which I can't believe Im actually telling the entire internet about this because I am realizing while I am typing that my brother and I used to call each other "book" as a nickname.  We were weird.

My brother had a ponytail as a little boy, that grew into a kinda-mullet as he got older...but it was badass. And now he doesn't have a ponytail or a mullet, but he's still badass. He's a stunt actor at Universal Studios and does cool tricks like jump from a 40 foot tower that's on fire and lands into a pool that also has boats and jet skis racing through it. It looks kinda like this:

Badass.

He's coming with his girlfriend Autum, who is also badass but in a sparkly, girly princess kind of way. She has actually been the princess in the Pirate's Dinner Adventure Show, and one time had her face on a billboard. She was cast as a dancer in a traveling show called Moster Rock in Singapore and wen't on tour for a while.  Her life looks kinda like this:

So I'm kinda stoked to have them here. I kinda feel like this:

Happy Weekend folks. The weather here is supposed to be amazing. So put on your bikini and go frolic.

-J

A Trip Down a Blogger's Past

These past few days I have been going through some of my old content from a blog that I posted on over five years ago. It's kinda been a trip.

I almost feel like I've been reading a diary from Jr. High or something (which doesn't say a lot about my blogging skills at that point...great blogs are not just public diaries...oopsies).

Some of the posts are borderline embarrassing - the things that used to perplex me, the things I grappled with, how hard I tried to figure out what my life was "supposed to look like" - at some point I almost wanted to grab my own shoulders and shout "JUST RELAX!"

I realize that I spent a lot of my time striving...for what, I'm not exactly sure...but I know that at the time it seemed to me that life had  script, and as long as I was responsible, and made good choices, and worked hard, this script would unfold itself, showing me where to go next and giving me cues as to what I was supposed to be doing with my life.

Flash forward five years and maybe I'm just beginning to understand what people mean by "march to the beat of your own drum." I may have thought that I was doing that before, but now I see how internalized the metronome of life can be. I wasn't really making my own music, but instead just playing to the beat of what I thought it was supposed to sound like.

Now I just don't give a fuck.

I don't know what changed, or how I got here, but the vast difference between who I am now and who I was in those posts is that now I don't care what I "should be doing"  - I'm just goin' for it. I'm making it up as I go along, probably making a mess of everything, vastly aware that I am not perfect and should not be left to my own devices.

But there is a downside over here.

I discovered this after having lunch with a girlfriend earlier this week. She's in the publishing industry, and works for a company that produces cookbooks. She's been an awesome resource on my cookbook project - asking me great questions, helping me think through the viability of my book, and continuing to push me to make progress.

But after I walked away from lunch - I felt so overwhelmed. 

The downside of marching to the beat of your own drum is that it is TOTALLY EXPOSED. There's no band to hide behind, no one to take lead when you're faltering...it all you.

As I walked through the financial district, swimming with thoughts about my book, I had this one over arching thought.... "What if I fail?"

What if it sucks? Or worse what if I don't finish it? Or worst of all, What if it's not real and substantial, but just some cute little project that a bored little housewife put together to keep herself occupied?

fuuuuuuck.

Those thoughts came roaring through like a fire engine. And they've been hanging out in the background since Monday.

This morning, something else came charging back from 2007. But not from my old blog, or from my twenty-four year old brain.

Oddly, from Pandora.

I have a station that plays just normal music - it's for when I'm busy and I just need background noise. Nothing good ever plays on this station, and definitely nothing from five years ago.

This song shows up [play it, do it do it do it do it]:



Yes.

Rascall Flats.

When this song started playing, I literally came out of the bathroom with a sponge and cleaner in hand and did this:

This was a song that I listened to like 12o9235h,13729357837,98 times during a rough time in my mid twenties. It made me feel like I had a fighting chance of making it through all the crap of being twenty-four.

Listening to this song five years later, I remembered something.  I remembered I was tough, and I'm kinda rad sometimes, and that I can handle failure. So then there was these thoughts:

"Who cares if it's real? Get out there and do your thing - you know who you are, and you know what to do...it may be scary as hell to make your own way, but amazing things are never going to happen to you unless you're willing to be your weird-crazy-destructive-creative-I-do-what-I-want self. Good things will come from that girl. Let her out."

And then I made this face:

Ok sweet angle faces, thanks for indulging me in a reflective-emotional-country-music-playing Thursday. I hope reading this, and listening to my favorite song from 2007 makes you wanna stand up and scream:

Hug and Kiss,

-J