Video Inspiration... That's Not My Name

Life Lessons...Always Buy Two

"...Finding a comfortable pair of jeans that still manages to make your ass look like it's fighting to get out." - Allison Glock

 Always Buy Two

by Allison Glock

There are people who trip into bliss, gentle, smiling souls who coast on a never-ending sea of frothy optimism and the immovable belief that tomorrow will bring even more blessings than today.  I am not one of those people.  I trust that life for most of the planet is a cruel, unrelenting struggle brightened only momentarily by flashes of serendipity and luck.  A baby's smile.  A punctual flight.  Finding a comfortable pair of jeans that still manages to make your ass look like it's fighting to get out.  Such gifts are as rare as comets. Which is why, when you stumble onto something perfect, something that really - no debating, no shrugging - works, you should always buy two.

I learned this lesson early from my mother, who, being a Southern lady, wore stockings to work.  She also wore diamonds, and diamonds tend to shred nylons like so much pulled pork - a cause for panic unless you happen to have another pair stashed in your bureau drawer, which my mother inevitably did because she always bought two.  Of course, she could have removed her diamonds prior to pulling on her stockings, but because she'd bought two, she didn't have to.  And really - who removes diamonds when it isn't strictly necessary?


During an average day, most women drown in compromise.  Good enough.  It'll do. They look okay.  That's fine. At least he's employed.  Sure. I don't mind.  Whatever.  No, really.


When indisputable flawlessness enters our worn little worlds, it is cause for celebration.  And for stocking up.  I'm nt talking about SUVs or face-lifts here, but basics.  Staples. The white T-shirt that compassionately floats over your stomach.  The boots that don't suffocate your calves.  Lip gloss that gives you the pout of a teenager without sticking to your hair.  Toilet paper that doesn't shred or leave dust on your bathroom floor.  


Two offer symmetry and security.  With two you never ever run out.  With two you can break one.  With two you can breathe easy.  Three many seem even safer, but it borders on overkill and eats up valuable storage space.  Unless you're Oprah, who I've heard, buys 10 because she can.  Start with two.


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repost from American Elle: "The Most Important Thing I've Learned"

Image: Robin Bardot skinny jeans

We welcome your comments & suggestions. "Life Lessons" now appears every Saturday... If you have a Life Lesson article or topic you'd like to post, please email us at EyeCandy58@yahoo.com

 

Life Lessons...Less Is More

We welcome your comments & suggestions. This new feature "Life Lessons" now appears weekly... If you have a Life Lesson topic you'd like to post, please email us at EyeCandy58@yahoo.com.

Less Is More

by Tracy Chevalier

Twelve years ago I left a job in publishing to do an MA in creative writing. My boss, Daniel - a fine editor who taught me everything I know about fixing bad writing - gave me as a farewell present an eraser inscribed with the famous dictum by the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: LESS IS MORE. At the time I thought he was simply being witty, but in retrospect he couldn't have been more prescient if he had thrust a Vermeer painting in my arms and said, "Here, write about this - and keep it simple!"

Simplicity is a virtue that comes with experience. When I look back on early writing attempts, I cringe at my wordiness: the unnecessary adverbs, the elaborate synonyms for said (exhorted, anyone?), the tortuous formal sentence structures. As an editor I began to apply the less is more approach to others' writing, muttering to myself, "When in doubt, cut it out," as I wielded my red pen.

But it was really only when I wrote the novel Girl With a Pearl Earring and decided to try to imitate Vermeer's painting technique with words that I incorporated spareness into my own style. A poet friend helped, looking at my sentences and showing me how many words were unnecessary and could be discarded without losing meaning. It's surprising how little you need to tell a story. Vermeer painted many of his works in the same corner of the same room and he managed to reveal a whole world in that corner. I too discovered that simplicity doesn't mean a story is less complex

Ove the years I have applied "Less is More" to other parts of my life too. I wear less jewelry now - earrings or neclace, not both. I use tinted lip balm rather than lipstick and apply mascara only to my upper lashes. I avoid patterns in clothes. I listen to sonatas more often than to symphonies.

Sometimes I'll read a particularly baroque sentence in a novel and say to myself, I wish I could do that - rather the way a woman accustomed to wearing Armani might wonder whether she could pull off a Versace moment. But I know what's best for me - I've applied Daniel's eraser to my writing and to my life and it has made all the difference.

repost from American Elle: "The Most Important Thing I've Learned"
Image: 'Beckoning' by Mike Pedersen

September Focus...INTENTION

Intention

When we are filled with possibilities, we have an opportunity to filter them through our intention.

The intentions we create for our life determine what we focus on, what we practice and the results we will achieve. Focusing on our intention, gives us integrity.

When we live by integrity, we have a filtering system that increases our self-confidence and self-esteem giving us more personal power.

excerpt by Rhonda Britten, Intention E-Book
image...Hindu Deity, Rama, who is the model of reason, right action & commendable virtues.

Life Lessons...The Past Can Set You Free

We welcome your comments & suggestions. This new feature "Life Lessons" now appears every Saturday... If you have a Life Lesson Topic you'd like to read about or have a life lesson that you've written about and would like us to post, please email us at EyeCandy58@yahoo.com.

The Past Can Set You Free

by Amy Tan

For the first 30 years or so of my life, I tried to distance myself from my mother and her dark waters. She flailed as she called out senseless tragedies: the suicide of her mother, her first marriage to an evil man, her second marriage cursed by the deaths of her husband and son just six months apart.
I, her ungrateful and secretive child, was often on the list of laments. She would pound her chest and wail, "Why?"

I tuned out her complaints. I vowed never to be like my mother, who tormented herself with what could not be changed. Nonetheless, I still feared being pulled down by her undertow.

Twenty-one years ago, when I felt that my work had become meaningless, I began to write fiction - just for pleasure, I told myself. Yet no matter how different I made the characters from the people in my life, my family crept in and made all the stories seem bleak and senseless.

About a year later, after believing my mother had died of a heart attack, I was jolted into realizing how little I knew of her. So for the first time, when my mother recounted those same sad stories, I listened. I wanted to know what had happened and why. As I imagined the past - the grand house, the hollow room, the still woman on the bed - suddenly I was there, experiencing it as it unfolded. I was the little girl with the breaking heart. I was alone with my dead mother lying on the bed. And I was crying as she did: "Why can't you take me with you?"

Dwelling in the past wasn't useless, I discovered, for I could change it. I could witness my mother's hopelessness as she endured the unbearable. I could be her voice, her mother's voice, the voice of the voiceless. And I could finally give meaning to all she had gone through. That was what she had wanted all her life. That was what I wanted as well: to give meaning to my life.

In freeing her, I freed myself. The legacy of my family is no longer dead weight. It buoys me with strength and curiosity. It is a reminder to look at all thing - the ordinary, the wondrous, and especially the difficult - and to ask why. In so doing, I see the many answers as they continue to unfold in the past and in the new day.

repost from American Elle: "The Most Important Thing I've Learned"
Image: 1912 - Lucile with a client and mannequin at a fitting

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Pretty Things Inspiration...Cameron's New Groove

I like my girls brunette, the darker and more mysterious, the better...But, it's no secret that I also have a thing for blondes...the MORE blonde, the better.

* ❤ *

In a September's V Magazine {which HAS been out for a while, I know}..., Miss Cameron Diaz toughened up and rocked it out as a super hot platinum blonde vixen for their “Beauty Issue”.

Photographed by Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott in London and shot rather reminiscent of Madonna in her "True Blue" period.

Interesting facts... Cam's tats were painted on-set by a tattoo artist and her bra, bustier and shorts were made of gaffer's tape by a stylist.

.More info on Cam's shoot...

Life Lessons...Quit Comparing Yourself

Our New Feature "Life Lessons" now appears every Saturday... If you have a suggestion for a Life Lesson you'd like to read about, have one you'd like to post or would like to suggest another type of feature, please email us at EyeCandy58@yahoo.com.

"I will reward each one according to their faithfulness. You're on a even playing field with everyone!"

~ Don Franklin

Quit Comparing Yourself

by Daphne Merkin

I have often wondered whether I am tone deaf when it comes to learning from experience, whether I lack the basic self-preserving mechanism that would lead me to draw the requisite conclusions and not open the wrong door again, ushering in the same old demons in new outfits. It would be a nice compensatory gleam of light on the bleak horizon of growing older [as well as saggier and more forgetful] if the idea that people accumulate wisdom with age were a self-evident truth rather than an example of wishful thinking. But if Freud got anything right, it was that we humans suffer from repetition compulsion. I think of all my doomed romantic choices, despite umpteen years of costly therapy and rabid introspection and my refrain might well be: Do it to me one more time, once is never enough, with a man like you.

And yet even I have to admit to a small but signal change that has come with the passage of years. By the time I turned 40, I had stopped [well, almost] comparing myself to others. I had ceased, that is, running a kind of permanent college reunion in my head, a life contest in which I always fell last in the lineup of imaginary rivals. It's a psychological tic -a corrosive habit of mind- that is almost impossible to break. Virginia Woolf was beset by this compulsion, aided no doubt by the fact that she was one of many siblings and was intensely competitive with her older sister, Vanessa. Her need to scope out her place in the literary landscape among other women writers, such as Katherine Mansfield, is writ large in her letters and journals and frequently got in the way of her friendships.

I myself grew up as one of six closely spaced siblings and my mother compared and contrasted us with one another at every opportunity, usually to my detriment. My two sisters and I were examined and characterized in mutually exclusive terms; they were what I was not, they had what I was missing. So I formed the notion that the only way to know what I was feeling about my life was to assess it according to the self-incriminating standards set by others. Being a person of hyperventilating, even brutal imagination, I took this to ludicrous extremes. I remember lying on a beach chair in Maui on my honeymoon, wondering why I wasn't on someone else's honeymoon. [Yes, my marriage eventually ended in divorce.]

I knew I had to change. I had before me as a cautionary example a much older friend, a woman writer who had been married to a more famous literary figure. Both of them had been part of the incestuous circle known as the New York intellectuals, and my friend had never come to terms with her place in the world, continuing to be racked into her old age by feelings of being insufficiently admired, compared with Mary McCarthy, say , or Hannah Arendt. Watching this woman ravage herself scared me. Somewhere along the line I stared experimentng with inhabiting my own life, without recourse to envisioning the life of imaginary or real Others. Having a child helped ease me into the constriction - and occasional vivid pleasures- of being me and no one else on this carpet ride. I'm not yet up to celebrating myself a la Walt Whitman, but one of these days I just might get there.

repost from American Elle Magazine: "The Most Important Thing I've Learned"
...Image: "The Rokeby Venus" by Diego Velazquez

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Life Lessons...Perspective, Perspective

Our New Feature "Life Lessons" will now appear on Saturdays... If you have a suggestion for a Life Lesson you'd like to read about, have one you'd like to post or would like to suggest another type of feature, please email us at EyeCandy58@yahoo.com.

Perspective, Perspective

by A.M. Homes

It's hard to know what came first, my desire to not worry or an overload of the worry systems---so much to worry about that I couldn't possibly do it all. Maybe it was a brush with death -or watching others die-and the birth of my child. I'm pretty sure it was right in there between death and birth...losing a parent I'd never known, a beloved grandmother, and a best friend...and watching the planes hit the World Trade Center from my window. After all that and my daughter's birth, following two miscarriages and years of fertility treatments, I like to think I've gained a certain perspective.

Maybe it was also the fractured disk I suffered seven months into my pregnancy, the two months I spent in a wheelchair and my accidental opportunity to experience the world and its flaws as a handicapped person...and then the back surgery four days after the baby was born, which left me wondering if I would walk again. I learned a lot -or more like I gave up a lot. Any ideas I had that one has control over one's life, surroundings, destiny all went out the window. And with that came freedom--I no longer care how great my hair looks or whether I have the right clothes for a party [Well, OK, I still care-but less than I used to]. Frankly, as a single working mom with a two-year old, I find just showing up a minor miracle.

Importantly, though, it wasn't as if this perspective just "happened". It was a decision I made to step back, to learn to wait, to pause before reacting. I meditate, I breathe, I remember to wait--if not necessarily to think--before acting: to feel and to note what I am feeling and to tell myself that it is just a feeling or a thought and that not everything needs to be acted on. I have taught myself to be mindful of small moments. And when I'm having a bad day, when I can't get a real person on the phone, when it feels as though all of life has been outsourced, I take inventory--beginning with the acknowledgment that I am in fact very lucky, I have a happy child, I am walking --and today, at least, no one I know has died. On good and bad days alike, I am also aware of what I can do for others--extending out of my own life and into someone else's, not just taking care of myself and my own but embracing the larger world. Maybe I knew that already--but it doesn't hurt to be reminded.

repost from Elle Magazine's "The Most Important Thing I've Learned"

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Life Lessons...Enjoy Your Skinny Years

Our New Feature "Life Lessons" will now appear on Saturdays... If you have a suggestion for a Life Lesson you'd like to read about, have one you'd like to post or would like to suggest another type of feature, please email us at EyeCandy58@yahoo.com.

Enjoy Your Skinny [or Skinnier] Years

by Ayelet Waldman

I have a notoriously dreadful memory. I forget everything: the titles of books I've read, the plots of movies I've seen, my children's favourite colours. Once, when I was single and living in New York, the true extent of my wretched momory was brought home by an unexpected phone call. The caller told me his name and waited. I felt a familiar clutch of discomfort. Was I supposed to remember him? "From college?" He said, "Jesus, Aylet. We slept together!" I paused, waiting for his name or his voice to trigger something, anthing. Finally I said, "I'm really sorry, but you're just going to have to narrow that field down a little more for me."

There is one aspect of my life, however, for which I possess perfect recall: I have a photographic memory for my bathroom scale. I'm like one of those savants who can recite the day of the week for any date in history. Tell me September 1986 and I'll say 102 pounds. May 1992? 107. July 1997? 170 [calm yourself, I was about to give birth].

I have always, from the moment I passed the 100-pound mark in my sophomore year, done battle with my weight. I've never been fat [pregnant! I was pregnant!], but I've spent the past 21 years feeling fat. I felt fat last June at 124 pounds, nine pounds more than the maximum dictated by the charts for a person of my height and birdbone frame--but I also felt fat in June of 1993 when I weighed 112 pounds...and in June of 1989 when the scale read an earthsaking 105.

I wasted so much skinny time torturing myself about my weight.
I've never had an eating disorder; my one attempt at bulimia involved six eclairs that tasted oddly the same on the way up as on the way down [March 1985: 101 pounds]. That experience has kept my fingers out of my throat ever since. But I've spent far too many of my waking hours the way so many of us do, standing in front of the fun house mirror in my bathroom, staring at every part of my body blown up out of all proportion and reality by my anxiety and self-loathing. If I had known in September 1991 [105] that 10 years later I'd be packing on 19 extra pounds, I would have worn a bikini! I would have pierced my belly button! I would never have worn relaxed-fit jeans.

This morning the scale read 120 and I thought, 'God, I'm so fat.' And then it occurred to me: Twenty-one years from now, am I going to wish I hadn't wasted this moment feeling fat? If there is a single lesson I've learned in the past 21 years, it's that as time goes by, most of us only get bigger. Someday I'll remember these years as skinny ones and I'll regret having wasted them just as much as I now reget my foolishness during the past 21. One of the hardest things to do is to see your body clearly. After 21 years, isn't it about time for me to do that? And anyway, if I think I'm fat now, just imagine what I'm going to look like in 2026.

repost from Elle Magazine's "The Most Important Thing I've Learned"

July Focus: SURRENDER

SURRENDER

When we are willing to surrender who we think we "should" be, true freedom is revealed and acceptance of "what is" becomes paramount. Surrender is not about giving up your Essential Nature, in fact it means embracing it fully and completely. When you surrender to the "real you," self-acceptance becomes the order of the day. No more wanting to be different instead, acceptance gives away to understanding, love and kindness.

When we surrender, we are willing to release what we think is "right" for "what is." We are learning to accept. We can let go of the past we give the power of forgiveness room to blossom. When we are truly willing to surrender, our egos are put aside for the truth; the truth of our actions, our language and our thoughts. In acceptance, we are free to make the conscious powerful choices necessary to alter our lives without guilt, shame or doubt.

excerpt by Rhonda Britten, Fearless Living

Pretty Things...Illustrator Amelie Hegardt

Blushing mannequins enveloped with bleeding ink and splashes of water color give Stockholm-based illustrator Amelie Hegardt her trademark look.

Amelie's illustrations are sensual, timeless, sometimes suggestive and altogether gorgeous ...making her work a staple amongst such high-end clients like Mac Cosmetics, Elle, Marie Claire, Black Book, Bloomingdales, Neiman Marcus, Vogue and more!

...More from Illustrator Amelie Hegardt

Pretty Things Inspiration...Photographer Solve Sundsbo

These images by photographer Solve Sundsbo are not new, but the inspiration each invokes is endless...

From: Numero May 2008

Photographer: Solve Sundsbo

Confessions of a Collectaholic

Via Better Homes & Gardens

If you are a collector, let other people share your pride and joy. Don't sprinkle your collection out of sight in a meaningless jumble. Notice how groups of small objects when they are well arranged, become important and effective... Collect what you will, but see to it that you arrange your hobby to its best advantage.
-Dorothy Draper

Via G-a-r-g-y on Flickr

Aunty Voon was my nanny from the time I was old enough to speak till I was about seven. From the time I knew them, there were always piles and piles of yellowed, hardened newspapers everywhere: hallways, front porch, corners of rooms, courtyards. I remember them already yellowed and this was the late 70s! Uncle Voon collected every daily paper since he was old enough to read (or something).

Via JasonTromm on Flickr

My sister's friend in Philadelphia hoards bicycles. We were stopped at the front door of his large shed by about what must be 500 broken, run-down, rusted out bicycles - I forgot to take photographs in my stunned condition!

My grandfather liked collecting old day-planners... never used. And torchlights, all with functioning batteries. And huge nail-clippers.

These were the type of people I use to label "hoarders".

I've come to realise now... that we are all, hoarders... collectors, gatherers. At the very least, like bower birds, dragging bits and bobs that catch our eye into our little nests.

Via maureen_g on Flickr

(Aren't these nests spectacular??? These nests are built by the male birds, who steal bits of bright blue from houses, courtyards, restaurants etc to attract their female counterparts. And they ONLY ever steal BLUE! Not pink or green or yellow! When my blue pegs from the line would go missing we'd know that there was a bower bird nest somewhere near.)

But collectors, hoarders, bower birds, always have different reasons for their inclination. Uncle Voon thought he could sell a newspaper of significant meaning one day. John repaired those bicycles to give away to kids who couldn't afford them. Bower birds drag in these shiny (and often blue!) items to make a beautiful home, to lure a mate and well... prolong their species.

And so do we (no, not build a home just to prolong our species). We interior-home-decorating nuts, we book-lovers, we baking-and-cooking-loving people... don't we like collecting what attracts and inspires us?

I collect, I confess. And I don't think I"m alone by a long shot. Celebrity interior designer, Nate Berkus collects a piece of rock or shell from every vacation as momentos. Martha Stewart collects.. well.. everything... but her jadeite fireking collection is second to none.



I thought I'd end this musing with a guilt-free show of a few of my collections:

Books

Nicola by Loui Shabner now graces the creative home of Kim from Desire to Inspire!

Vintage ribbon


Art glass


50s brooches

Little girls' frocks


Paper napkins


Children's books

Stationery


Art










China






(Incidentally, don't you just love what must be a treasured collection of antique 1880's Coalport Indian Tree china against the watermelon of the walls in the first photo?)

Bags


I also thought I'd add some inspiration from Flickr:

Pez:

Via One Good Bumblebee on Flickr

Eggs:

Via Heather Lucille on Flickr

Teapots:

Via *jenny b allsorts on Flickr

Pencil sharpeners:

Via sallyw3000 on Flickr

What collections do you have?
Anything quirky?
Like 50 year old lipsticks? ;)
Do share!