Nobody Likes You When You're 23

I was exploring a new dating app the other day, new to me at least since it was my first time using it. I deleted it about ten minutes after logging on because it's a location-based one (not Tinder, side note: does Tinder have an e in it? I feel like it's hip in app-naming-lingo to have as little vowels as possible. I could look this up in .4 seconds but I'm committed to running this sentence on. I looked it up. It does have an e. How progressive.) Anyway, I don't like location-based apps of any genre for the very practical reason that they drain my phone battery, and this one required that little arrow in the top right corner of my screen to stay on at all times so you can see when potential matches pass you on the street. Talk about being always on, amirite? I deleted it because I want to find love but I want to preserve my iPhone battery more. And also I was scared of the awkwardness that would ensue should I have seen the guy who sits in the cubicle adjacent to me in my feed.

Okay, so the point of explaining the dating app was that in the ten minutes I was using it, I saw a guy's profile in which his tagline was "nobody likes you when you're 23." I immediately thought of two things. One: That Laguna Beach episode when the gang goes to the Blink 182 concert and Trey almost has a fight with a little person. Two: Wow, that is so true. I didn't like the kid because he had the potato thing going for him and I'm more committed to the radish cause, but I wanted to send him a message to say a simple "word" or something, but I don't think that's the way to go about things on dating apps. So I kept to myself, thought about it as I maximized the life of my phone battery, and came here to say more or less, word.

Not only does nobody like you when you're 23, but you don't even like yourself when you're 23. I'm out of the 23 zone but close enough to give it some thoughtful, retrospective analysis. It was pretty awful. I didn't even have fun on my 23rd birthday. I did have a good outfit though, so that's nice to remember.

Twenty-two starts out fun because, hello! you're a senior in college and if you thought being a senior in high school was the bee's knees, then wait until you're a senior in college. It's the best thing ever. You basically rule the world. Then you graduate and you simultaneously get slammed in the face by a door and a club. I cried a lot of times in the immediate months after I graduated college, started working and lived at home. I cried eating ice cream in my car, on the subway, on the crosstown bus, at work: at my desk, in the office bathroom, in the elevator, in the bathroom of the coffee place next door because there was a cockroach in the bathroom at my office, on my couch, on my kitchen floor, on my dining floor, while hyperventilating in a paper bag, while running in Central Park. I don't even know why I was crying half the time, but what can I say, I'm an emotional person and it's a really confusing time.

Delia Ephron says that in your twenties, everything awful that happens is awful in a romantic way. If I had heard that when I was 23, I wouldn't have cried half as many times as I did. I would've laughed at the situations in which I found myself, the mindnumbing work I did, the guys I wasted my thoughts on, the stupid nights I spent valuable shoe money on. I've been thinking about that quote a lot lately, and it makes the annoying stuff a lot less earth-shattering. The good thing about being in your twenties is that you don't have to take it all so seriously, I think. I hope.

That's all I've got to say. I'm going to get a Diet Coke.

Buh-bye.

Seltzer vs. Diet Coke

Ladies and ladies, friends and sisters (seriously, only my friends and sisters read this), you pinged me and I responded, so without further ado, here's my half-drafted/half-assed thoughts on seltzer, Diet Coke, and the friend zone.

I'm a Diet Coke addict. Though I limit myself to one a day, I can't go 24 hours without it. I get one sometime in the afternoon as my daily reward for just being me. My addiction has inconvenienced me and anyone else in my company when the desire strikes, except my dad who is both my accomplice and enabler in our joint struggle against DC.

I used to have two a day, but the stomach bloat and acne that started to plague me on the reg made me reduce my intake to one. In the time that I'm not drinking Diet Coke, I sip seltzer. I like seltzer for its carbonated properties and faint tastes of raspberry lime and cranberry-apple, but I don't crave it like I crave DC. That's the thing with seltzer and Diet Coke: seltzer is great, you like it, but it isn't as good as DC, and while you're waiting for the time to come to have your Diet Coke, you sip seltzer.

That's what it's like being in the friend zone. Think of it like this: the object of your affection is the consumer/addict of carbonated beverages and you're the carbonated beverage. Are you seltzer or Diet Coke? If you're the friend, you're seltzer. Diet Coke is the dream. You're friends with the guy, and while he likes spending time with you, he's always waiting for something better. You satiate his need for company/hydration, but at the end of the day, you're just flavored water. You don't have the za za zoo of Diet Coke.

GET IT?!

Now, where does Diet Dr. Pepper fall on the spectrum?

The Babysitters Club

After two nights of babysitting this week, I've come to the conclusion, succinctly put by a friend, that it's the best gig on the block (literally speaking: 83rd street). I realized this as I rode down the elevator of an Upper West Side building with a wad of cash in hand after spending three hours sitting on the couch of a young couple who four years ago was just another pair of attractive magna cum laudes announcing their nuptials via the New York Times. Instead of going to an ATM to take out cash, I ate Thai food on someone else's dollar, watched Anthony Bourdain on Netflix, and read magazines all for the sake of making sure nothing happened to a sleeping baby who I've never seen in the flesh. Pinch me, I live the life, I really do.

There's something about babysitting that causes me to revert to my high school self. Whenever I babysit, I feel the need to raid the kitchen cabinets of whosever house I'm in. This habit started way before I hit whatever level of maturity comes with entering high school. My older sister used to call me from the neighbor's house where she was sitting to tell me if there were any cookies or ice cream worth coming over to eat. Usually there were because the only semblance of junk food in my house was stale pretzels, so yes, any offer of a cookie would propel me across the backyard. By the time I was responsible to take care of someone else's small children on my own, I knew how to tactfully eat my way through a snack cabinet. Like, which type of fruit snacks are worth opening a new box for? Answer: Fruit rollups. They're so worth it that it's probably best to eat the entire box so the mom doesn't realize that she bought them in the first place.

(Don't even get me started on the snacks I ate while babysitting in France. Girl talk: I literally can't.)

Second, I still wear an iteration of the outfit I first put on to babysit at 15. When I went to a friend's house post-childcare gig the other night, she looked me up and down and declared, "classic babysitting outfit." If you too came of age in the mid-aughts watching Friday night ABC Family lineups on a neighbor's couch, then you know what I mean: ill-fitting jeans, shoes that are easy to put on as to avoid the awkward "you already paid me but now I need to tie my shoes at the front door" moment, a brightly colored North Face rain coat or fleece, and a Longchamp bag with books and a laptop should the remote control be too complicated to figure out. I wore black skinny jeans to guard a sleeping infant not too many months ago, but they weren't conducive to eating tortilla chips and watching TBS on a sinkable couch.

Since this blog vaguely rallies around the theme of fashion, here's an outfit idea for the mat-ure babysitting lewk. It features a Rag & Bone sweater, but I'd like to note that if you're wearing Rag & Bone sweaters to babysit, you probably don't need to be there in the first place.

Citizens of Humanity jeans, Vans, Rag & Bone sweater, Stephane Verdino bag, button down shirt

We Can't Go Back To College, And That's Okay

Hola readers and friends,

An essay of mine was recently published on Thought Catalog. You can read it over there, or below. It's sappy and honest, enjoy!

I was recently looking at my alma mater’s Twitter page, and I suddenly found myself in awe of the background picture: an aerial shot of campus on a fall day. In the middle of the picture is the hilly two-lane road that cuts through campus and gives the school its nickname as the College on the Hill. The autumnal colors that abound are striking enough to make you wonder why anyone would ever want to live anywhere else.

Yet it wasn’t this picture that made me cry, but the road itself, and what it reminded me of.

You see, the road runs through a quaint one-Subway downtown, across campus, and off into the middle of nowhere. During the last days of school — at the end of finals when most of us were done with exams but other people had one more to go but before the week dedicated to senior parties began — my friends and I went sunset chasing. Three of us were done with finals; the fourth wasn’t, but she came anyway. We got in my car, opened the sunroof and all the windows, put Robyn on at a blaring volume, and drove up the road towards the sunset. We sped past acres of cornfields into the vastness of Central New York, not quite sure when to turn back.

One part of me wanted to keep driving. Forever. I didn’t want the song to stop, the sun to set, college to be over. The other part of me knew I had to go back — drive my friend back to the library, say goodbye to underclassmen, start the rest of my life. We turned around eventually, not so much out of choice than out of necessity. My friend’s baseball hat had flown off her head in the chase and we drove back at 10 miles an hour to look for it on the side of the road.

I think about those last days of school a lot. It’s not healthy. It’s not quite nostalgia as much as it’s emotional cutting. A small part of me wants to go back, but we can’t stay at college forever and we can’t repeat what we had.

A fellow sunset chaser asked me the other day over Gchat if I felt lonelier in college or in the real world. My first thought was to say in the real world, but that wouldn’t be true.

Sure, I no longer spend most of my waking hours with the people who bring out the best in me, but the freedom out here is addicting. You can do and be anything you want. You can move to LA or New York or San Francisco for the sake of adventure; you can easily shrug off the awkwardness of a bad date because you’ll never have to see the guy again; you can take two days off work and fly to Paris for a long weekend.

College was fun. It was awesome. It lives on in our memories, and in the thoughts I revisit on my morning runs. Because in college, we found ourselves, if only for a few years. We found our people. We found our interests. We found our roads into the real world.

Where's Your Happy Place?

It's 3:18 PM on a Friday. Less than 3 hours to go until I turn Robyn up as loud as my first generation iPod will allow and literally run down Park Avenue South to get on the subway that will take me to the place that smells faintly of sautéed onions and curry, whose floors are covered in carpets from the hashtag motherland, and whose DVR is 78% full with Masterpiece Classics: home.

I really really love being at home. I'm a homebody and can often be found lying on my couch wearing dumpy butt sweatpants and a sweatshirt with toothpaste stains down the front. I really excel at taking naps, and since the best naps occur on one's couch at a midday hour, I'm at my best when I'm taking a nap at home on a weekend afternoon.

But home isn't my happy place. It's too…mundane. In fact, I'm usually quite bitchy and crabby when I'm at home. Happy places are places, or even memories of being in places with certain people, that invoke feelings of peace, calmness, and content. The thought of being in your happy place right. now. should elate you to the point of jumping out of your seat and running towards the door in pursuit of said place.

I have a few happy places. Friday at 5 pm in my college suite surrounded by my roommates. Paris with Ellen. The kitchen in my beach house with my family and watermelon. Driving through San Francisco in my sister's Hyundai when the seat warmers are burning my butt. Zara.

Zara.

It's true. Zara is one of my happy places. I only allow myself to go to Zara once a week in an effort to both save my money and build excitement at the thought of new arrivals. I go every Friday after work. My end of the week reward is to absentmindedly waltz through Zara and try on as many items as my arms will hold. I know Zara is my happy place because the thought of going there in T-minus three hours makes me pee my pants.

Oopf. Gotta go.

On Weather

I'm usually vehemently opposed to talking about the weather. It's one of the more repetitive talking points out there--didn't we talk about the same thing the last time it was 60 degrees and raining? I get a bout of conversation anxiety ("How long are we going to be stuck on the weather? How will we transition into new territory? It takes two to tango, but it seems like X is really committed to talking about rain.") when I find myself in a weather-related conversation. You can imagine how frustrated I am with myself now that I'm about to write upwards of 200 words on the weather, but, like, eff this weather.

It's winter. I'm supposed to be wearing my wool blend duffle coat, not my spracket (spring jacket that doubles as a rain coat, duh). I'm currently wearing a cotton sweater, which should be at least 40% wool given the month and my geographical position on the Eastern seaboard. Even the cotton is too heavy though, so I've stripped down to one of those tshirts that you put on in the morning with no intention of taking the layer over it off because it's nubby, see-through and has pit stains.

This weather has me all out of sorts, and I just decided about a second ago that I'm going to take up global warming as a cause. Save the glaciers, save the polar bears, save my sweaters. (JK, I've always been concerned about global warming, don't ya worry.)

Too right.

Deciding What's Cute and What's Creepy in the Digital Age

Hey people,

The below post is an essay of mine that was originally posted on The Gaggle earlier this week.

Here's the context: I wrote it after I watched the last scene in the Season 2 finale of Girls, the one where Adam and Hannah face time at the end of the episode. The moment was the stuff that romantic comedies are made out of, thus making me squeal and run around my living room. Then I started thinking about how technology has changed romance, so I obvi thought of my favorite movie You've Got Mail, and below are my thoughts on the whole thang.

xoxo, you know you love me.

+++++++++

I remember the first time I went online to talk to an object of my affection. The platform was AOL Instant Messenger, I was in ninth grade, and the object in question was a boy a year older than me who was so crush-worthy that I physically couldn’t figure out how to form words in front of him. I went painstakingly out of my way to get a hold of his screen name, and once I did, I messaged him to tell him that I liked his band. All I remember of his response was that it was typed in 10-point orange Comic Sans MS font, and that it quite literally sent me spinning out of my chair and through my house in excitement. I was hooked.

Since then (when I thought it was cool to wear not one, but two, popped collars) I’ve felt many of the same adrenaline rushes upon receiving text messages, Facebook messages, and emails from guys on whom I’ve wasted too many hours thinking about. And I know I’m not alone in my excitement—I have a friend who admits that some Facebook notifications have a tendency to make her heart flutter.

I blame my faith in the power of the digital message on my lifelong obsession with You’ve Got Mail. A resident of the Upper West Side, I’ve curated the perfect “in the steps of Kathleen Kelly” tour of my neighborhood. I’m also somewhat of an introverted old soul and feel a kindred spirit to middle-aged women who wear sweater sets and live by the rules of Pride and Prejudice. You’ve Got Mail introduced the digital sphere as an acceptable means of getting to know someone.

In the fifteen years since You’ve Got Mail has come out, the online world has undergone such a radical transformation that we no longer have to turn on our computer and dial-up to check for new mail. We live in a world of mass communication, one in which we can virtually contact anyone, anytime, anywhere. The screen is a new form of comfort zone, and we use it to say things that sometimes we’re too inhibited to speak aloud. Such constant communication makes it almost too easy to articulate ourselves to our potential main hangs.

A few months ago, I received a text at 2 AM. Its author had begun a habit of texting me in the wee hours of weekend mornings, and he had evidently interpreted my prior nonresponses as encouragement to up his game. Half asleep, I looked at my phone and saw a line of illegible characters in a foreign alphabet. I went back to bed after immediately thinking, “What the fuck?”

After waking up on Sunday and telling my roommates about the cryptic message, one of my friends suggested that I type it into Google Translate.

“It’s probably what he wanted you to do, anyway,” she advised me in the way that friends do when they indulge each other in these matters.

I copied and pasted the text into Google Translate. After a few seconds, the sentence, “you’re a really pretty girl” appeared in the right-hand box.

“What the fuck?” once again, was my initial response. Was I being courted, and was this complement part of the wooing process, or was this a less generic, albeit creative, way to initiate a booty call? The sent time of the message and the presumption that its author had imbibed the current alcoholic beverage want by college-aged hipsters steered me towards believing the latter.

Rather than feeling flattered that he thought I was pretty, I was annoyed. It was the same annoyance that women feel when they walk down the street to a chorus of catcalls. In the context of a late-night text message, this guy’s intended compliment was seen as an invasive way to lure me to his room.

The text has joined a growing inbox of other messages that have failed to make my heart flutter. Instead of creating an intoxicating adrenaline rush, these messages now fill me with a sense of frustration towards dating. And so I worry. Have late-night texts and the intention behind them tainted the act of digital correspondence that You’ve Got Mail rendered so romantic?

Then again, think about it: NY152 didn’t profess his love to Shopgirl over the internet. In fact, he didn’t say anything remotely romantic over e-mail. He saved the good stuff—the cliché lines that make romantic comedies so squeal-inducing—for a personal, face-to-face interaction. So when romantic gestures are limited to the digital sphere, when do they stop being seen as charming and start being construed as sleazy and creepy?

You can read the original post on The Gaggle, here.

The #Hipsters Are Coming

I've been thinking a lot about hipsters lately because I've been to Brooklyn more times in the past month than ever before in my life, excluding the summer that I commuted to Bed-Stuy every day for a part-time unpaid internship (read: volunteer work). I've decided that the original suburb is a nice place to visit but not to stay--at least until I have a few kids and the money/creative energy to buy a brownstone of my own. Until then, I'm only staying as late as I can take the L train home.

My usual subway etiquette is to avoid staring at other riders due to the overabundance of crazies that inhabit the underground transit system, but I couldn't help but gape at my fellow commuters on the L the other night.

"Observe the hipsters in their natural habitat," I whispered to myself as Wrecking Ball blasted in my headphones.

There were enough beards within a 6-inch radius of my face to make me fear a lice outbreak if it weren't for the solid colored beanies covering everyone's head. My invasive tendency to peer into people's lenses on public transportation to see just how optically necessary their tortoise shell frames are was put to good use too, and just as I suspected, not as many people need glasses as it may seem. The best part of the whole commute was the beanied girl standing by the ticket machines reading Slaughterhouse-Five, a sight to which I thought: "#really? It's 10 pm on a Friday."

According to Tumblr's Year in Review, 2013 is the year of #hipster. As much as I ridicule their sartorial, literary and musical choices, I can't help but feel that we all have a little hipster in us. I have two pairs of thick rimmed glasses and I sometimes wear plaid shirts around my waist for the sole reason of it looking cool. My mom wears desert boots, my sister drinks from a (monogrammed) mason jar, and my grandpa wears plaid shirts with his semi-maintained beard.

My friends and I have spent many a conversation debating the hipster prototype, but the only thing we can agree on is their general fondness for owls. So, what makes a hipster a hipster?

(Guys, that's an incentive to leave COMMENTS! --> click on the post to do so, working on making it easier, ya know?)

P.S. How hip are these clothes?

Olympia Le-Tan clutch, Mother High Waisted Looker jean, Rag & Bone jean jacket, Felt-Trimmed Chukka, Wallace & Barnes Buffalo Check CPO Jacket, red beanie, Warby Parker Duckworth glasses, Great Gatsby graphic t

OMG, Monogrammed Clutches

If there's one piece of diction that's been a main-stay in my vocabulary since before I proactively began learning new words (shout out to Hot Words for the SAT), it's OMG. No need to point out that it's actually an acronym, you get the gist.

For a brief period in 5th grade, I used OMG so often that it only made sense to change my AOL screen name from sunnyelly to Omg265, whose numerical latter half has no connection to me whatsoever and was automatically generated by AOL. It wasn't long before I ditched Omg265 and settled on the generic nickname-random number combination that has since become my online identity: ellie2635.

Screen names aside, I haven't been able to kick the OMG habit. I insert OMG into sentences where Valley girls use "like" and most of my thoughts start and end with OMG. I have to censor myself when speaking so I don't sound overly excited at every minute life detail.

So it only made sense that when I saw the below picture in a J.Crew Facebook post this morning, my first thoughts were "OMG I need it." I didn't realize the post was an advertisement for monogrammed bags until I went to J.Crew's website and hopelessly searched for said clutch. On a related note, my lack of middle name makes monogrammed items an awkward option for me, so I might just have to buy myself an OMG clutch.

PS: Isn't it so obnoxious to see OMG written so many times?

Cars as Coats, Coats as Cars

A couple of years ago, my friend and I went on a romantic two-day trip to Venice. We had snagged a four star hotel room for 90 euro per night that came with plushy robes, which we wore while we ate Magnum ice cream bars and taught ourselves how to mix Adele and Glee on Garage Band (you can listen to the final products here. Disclaimer: your ears will bleed). This introduction has nothing to do with the rest of the post, except to note that I once went to Venice for two days, where I noticed that everyone and his mother (but, actually) wore a Moncler jacket.

My Venetian-tripping friend and I spent a good portion of our time discussing where we would eat next and why everyone seemingly had a Moncler jacket. It didn't make sense. Surely, if Italy is in the economic crisis in which Angela Merkel et al. claims it to be, most of the Italians mazing through Venice couldn't afford a Moncler jacket. So we formulated a theory.

Most Americans consider cars to be status symbols. For those of us who don't live in this ratty (ha!) concrete jungle, the car that you drive is an extension of yourself. Kanye West sums up this American car-as-a-status-symbol theory pretty well: "What you think I rap for, to push a fucking Rav-4?" I take a little offense to this because I used to drive a red Rav-4, but back to Moncler jackets.

In Venice, people don't consider cars to be status symbols. If you don't have to drive anywhere, why would you waste your money on a nice car when nobody can see it? (This isn't my view, I'm just sayin'). The thing that people always see is your chosen piece of outerwear. So it only makes sense in the status-seekers eye that wearing a nice coat implies that you can afford a nice coat, so in short--you've made it. “Debt? What debt? I’m wearing Moncler. It’s shiny.” That's why everyone has a Moncler jacket in Venice.

I can't really remember what the point of this post was supposed to be, but I think it had something to do with me waking up this morning and thinking how much I wanted a light down coat, so I thought of Moncler. But here's what I want to know: are they really warmer than Uniqlo's ultra light down coat? Why buy one Moncler jacket when you can buy ten Uniqlo jackets? That's shallow. I hate myself.

Marathon Chasing

The New York City Marathon is upon us this weekend, and its most tangible effect on me and my block thus far has been the teams of European runners yogging between the hotel on one corner and the park on the other.

Marathon chasing, the two times that I've done it, is close to becoming my favorite past-time. It's invigorating to watch the runners and feed off of their adrenaline. While they physically and mentally exhaust every ion in their body, us spectators get to watch from the literal sidelines, drinking coffee and wearing lovely fall clothes.

Bada-bing, the perfect transition to answering the materialistic question that plagues clotheshorses every day in different contexts. What does one wear to X? X, in this case, is spectating the marathon. Luckily, I have a personal anecdote to guide us (me and my gang of five readers) in answering such a mind-numbing question.

The last time I watched the marathon was when my mom ran it four years ago. I was a freshman in college and still trying to figure out just how many muffins one could eat before acquiring a muffin top. I knew I was pretty close to figuring it out because earlier that week, the button on my favorite pair of jeans had spontaneously popped while I was sitting in the library. My pants had ceased to fit, and I had nothing to wear when I came home from school to watch my mom traverse the five boroughs by foot.

(This reminds me of an interview I had for a job that I didn't get in which the interviewer (asshole) asked me to give an example of a time that I creatively solved a problem. I finally have it--THIS is a time that I creatively solved a problem!)

Problem: I had discovered the world of dining hall pastries and none of my pants fit.

Solution: I found a pair of jeans in my house that belonged to another member of my family who was at a different metabolic phase in her life. The pants were a little loose around the waist (score) but were too short, so I snipped them above the knee, cuffed the frayed edges, and voilà, I had a bomb.com pair of jorts (jean shorts, duh). I wore a pair of black tights under my jorts to both shield my limbs from the November temperatures and passersby from my hairy legs. I paired with a neon green schoolboy cardigan to match the neon green nail polish on my fingers (ew).

As pictures from the day remind me, the outfit was truly awful. Also worth noting that my sister had been testing out a new camera setting, and I had been testing out a new bronzer, so I appear to have a nice neon orange glow. But the outfit turned me on to the comfort and utility of jorts. Jorts give a little more room in the midsection than do regular jeans and can be worn year-round by adding a pair of tights. I may or may not watch the marathon this weekend, but if I do, I'm going to channel me circa my freshman fifteen and wear jorts and tights.

Colorblock sweater, Levi's black denim shorts, grey tights, Aperlai booties, Isabel Marant Ioline Jacket, Baseball Cap, Shinola Watch

Happy Halloween, snitches

Please excuse the digression from the usual theme as I air my thoughts on Halloween.

A couple of years ago, during the transitional time between college graduation and full-fledged 9 to 5 adulthood, my sister went through a behavioral period which my family dubbed The Dark Years. The kitchen floor meltdowns and binge TV watching that constituted The Dark Years make for a lot of retroactively funny material, one being the time that my sister tried to cancel Christmas. She declared it at at dinner one night and refused to decorate the Christmas tree the next day.

As I stepped into my apartment building's elevator this morning on my way to work, I looked at the mistakingly conjunctioned "Trick and Treating" sign-up sheet and thought to myself: "Oh my god, Halloween 2k13 is [my sister's] Christmas 2008. I want to cancel it."

I had a feeling this would happen a couple of weeks ago when one of my friends asked me what I was planning on dressing up as this year. A normal question for the latter days of October, especially because I had told the same friend about my 2012 costume nine months in advance, on the day that Whitney Houston died. (I was three nights of Whitney Houston, one decade per night, since there are three nights of Halloween in #college.) The hype that I built surrounding my 2k12 costume merited an inquiry into the state of my 2k13 costume, but I didn't have anything to tell her this time around. My office isn't dressing up, I'm not going to any Halloween parties, and no, I'm not participating in the Greenwich Village Halloween parade.

My lack of costume isn't the only reason that I'm canceling Halloween. Reason number two is the general absence of free candy. The only time I came across candy today was during my lunchtime jaunt to Duane Reade, where I saw a pile of Jolly Ranchers and Tootsie Rolls sitting next to a display case of Essie nailpolish. I wasn't sure if the candy was free, and I didn't see any similar piles anywhere else in the store.

The third reason, which I alluded to earlier, is that there is a trick or treating sign-up sheet in my apartment building. I guess it makes sense that apartment units should choose whether or not they want sugar-rushed kids banging on their doors in pursuit of king size candy bars, but I grew up in suburbia where any house was fair game.

So: no costume + no free candy + no trick or treaters = no Halloween.

Amirite?

No poorly pixeled pictures today as I'm working on the mother of all collages.

I'm Addicted to Parkas and Here's How I Know

My affinity for parkas is a foolproof indication of my clothing addiction. 

I bought my first parka two years ago when I was studying in Paris from--where else--Zara. It was the first weekend of my year-long stay in the #cityoflights, and friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend told me and my gaggle of American girlfrandz that the Zara at Madeleine restocked its inventory nightly. Within minutes of being told an urban myth of such materialistic vigor, we boarded a bus at the Luxembourg Gardens and ventured into then-unfamiliar Right Bank territory in search of said Zara. The selection of army green cotton jackets that greeted me upon entering the store induced an episode of vertigo that could only be remedied by buying a parka and wearing it out of the store. Fainting spell averted. 

Parka No. 1 kept me perfectly warm until the beginning of December, when I realized that the quilted insert did nothing but make me look fuller and that I was missing out big time by not having a fur-lined hood. As most clothing addicts with limited funds do, I first tried to fix the problem from within my closet. I took the black faux fur collar off my leather jacket (note: the only leather jacket worth buying is one that comes with a removable fur collar) and fastened it to the collar of my parka. I knew I was taking a sartorial risk, but the various inflections of "ew" that came out of my friends' mouthes confirmed my poor decision. 

I surmounted the fur hood obstacle by going to the Gap and buying Parka No. 2, a coat identical to Parka No. 1 but equipped with a fur-trimmed hood and a faux shearling lining. A look back at my 2012 New Year's resolutions reminds me that Parka No. 2 failed to completely satiate me. I was tempted by other parkas. My sixth resolution reads: "No buying new clothes until March, unless I see a camo-printed fur-lined parka." Good news is that I didn’t see a camo-printed fur-lined parka, bad news is that I definitely didn’t go between January and March without buying clothes. Mid-January sales are unreal.

The camo-print fur-lined parka of my dreams

A year passed and I was back in Central New York and its surrounding tundra for my senior year of college. Here's the thing with winter in Central New York: it's really effing cold. Brain freeze inducing cold. Parka No. 2 proved to be futile in shielding me from the biting wintry mixes that I woke up to every morning. I had to go arctic.

Parka No. 3, better known as Malakai

And that's when Malakai entered my life. I found Malakai online, whose namesake comes from the character in Save the Last Dance who wears an identical coat. Malakai is 80 percent down, but looks to be 150 percent. It has a fur-trimmed hood and heavy-duty pockets in a lot of unnecessary places. It's uncomfortably bulky, and if someone were to tap me on the shoulder while I was wearing it, I wouldn't notice. When the fur hood is up, it blocks my peripheral vision, and when it's down, it pokes passersby in the eye. 

J.Crew's lesser version of Malakai

New York City winters, as much as its inhabitants like to complain, aren't body-numbing enough for Malakai. So I'm in search of Parka No. 4, which I imagine to be a hybrid of Parka No. 2 and 3. I found one from Isabel Marant, but its price tag leads me to believe that I wouldn't be able to do anything but sit on park bench and test its warmth if I were to buy it. J.Crew just unveiled its November style guide on Pinterest today, and among the looks is a less-intense version of Malakai. Here's to hoping it isn't part of their In Good Company picks and from Isabel Marant.

First two images via Google, last image from Pinterest 

Taking It One Doc Marten at a Time

I've had a rocky relationship with Dr. Martens over the past 15 or so years.

When I was in third grade, I graced into my new elementary school wearing a pair of Dr. Martens Mary Janes, which I wore every day until a growth spurt caused me to forgo them in favor of a roomy pair of fluorescent Adidas running sneakers. In retrospect, an ugly but acceptable choice because the only groups that can wear running sneakers with jeans sans judgment are little kids and dads.

In fifth grade, my friend and I secured our bffaeaeae status by buying the same pair of Dr. Martens knock-offs courtesy of Skechers. There's nothing more effective at warding off new friends than by wearing matching bowel movement brown oxford lace-ups. I'd say that the shoes lasted as long as our friendship, but we're still friends and the faux rubber soles deteriorated a couple of days into middle school.

I didn't consider Dr. Martens again until The Princess Diaries came out and deemed itself the Best. Movie. Ever. (Obligatory Anne Hathaway sucks comment: she has yet to deliver a performance better than her portrayal of Mia Thermapolis.) Despite their being Mia's footwear of choice pre-Paolo makeover, the Dr. Martens don't look that bad, and they seemed to be a practical choice for navigating the hills of San Francisco.

It's fitting then that I was in my company's San Francisco office last month when a co-worker who I don't personally know walked in to work wearing black Dr Martens with grey skinny jeans, a graphic tee, and an oversized car coat. She didn't look like a high school misfit/overanxious hipster, she looked pretty chic and put together. And since then, I've been pining over a pair of Dr. Martens 1460s.

I don't know. I've seen enough girls on the street with pink hair and floral (or worse, purple) Dr. Martens boots to taint my perception of them. Then again, typing Dr. Martens into StreetPeeper's search box renders images of edgy models and bloggers wearing the boots, swaying me back to the pro side.

Something to think about.

(Who else is streaming Katy Perry's new album today? So pop, so mainstream, so good.)

Columbus Day Prints

In what seems to be all-too realistic punk by human resources, I had to work on Columbus Day. I didn't consider the gravity of the situation until I trekked up the Northeast corridor and into Vermont this weekend with three of my gal pals, and soon realized that I was the only one having to return to our respective concrete jungles on Sunday for pre-Monday decompression (which I spent watching the Cory Monteith tribute episode on Glee). It wasn't until I walked through my curry-wafting door on Sunday night that I noted my sister's absence as indication that she too, who works in an industry mirroring my own, had Monday off. And my mom, though not the 9 to 5 regular, had signed herself up for a Columbus Day nature hike across New York.

That's okay. I'm not bitter that everyone I know celebrated Columbus Day. I consoled myself by taking a personal D.E.A.R. hour to read up on the day's significance. For a reason that has to do with the algorithm responsible for the placement of articles on the New York Times homepage, I also read a little too much about Bill de Blasio, so I now will always associate Columbus Day with the New York mayoral election.

As expected, nothing eye-popping stands out re: Columbus Day. The New York Times did note that the day's weather was perfect for a parade, which Bill de Blasio, coincidentally or not at all, also marched in.

I'll pick up where the New York Times left off. Columbus Day falls (watch out, we're in pun territory) on the perfect fall date. To take a Miss Congeniality quote out of context, it's not too hot, it's not too cold, all you need is a light jacket.

Mid-October presents the perfect opportunity to wear a fleece jacket. I'm not talking about the solid-colored fleece coats of the Patagonia or LL Bean variety worn by hot dads everywhere, but of the crazy printed ones well-suited for women over the age of 65. I envision the print to be in fleece, though it could take form in a bulky sweater as well. The material should be able to handle the occasional gust of wind and be patterned with a print that can only be appropriately displayed in the autumn.

Here's what I'm thinking: A jacket or sweater coat with a) a lumberjack pattern b) an aztec print, or c) a hybrid of a) and b). When worn with loose jeans/corduroys/cargo pants and a pair of booties, you may have found the ideal balance between comfort and #fahshan. Also: tortoise jewelry. So chunky.

Denim and Supply Patchwork Shawl Cardigan, Gap Crewneck, NSF Boyfriend Jeans, Golden Goose City Boot, Necklaces from Adia Kabur

Why Every Woman Needs a Fall Fest

I remember the first time I fell for a fur vest, which from here on out will be referred to as a fest. It was 2007, and I was living the life on a weeklong trip to Paris. A French woman walked past me on the street wearing a shaggy fest over a leather motorcycle jacket, and I was floored. I returned to suburban New Jersey dreaming of faux fur and pleather, and I immediately went to the mall and bought a tan fluffy fest at Urban Outfitters. #gold.

I wore my fest to my very public high school the next day, where both me and my new piece of outerwear were the objects of much scrutiny. My peers didn’t understand the fashion potential that could be borne out of my fest. They didn't get it--the fest wasn't just a trend piece, it was a wardrobe staple. Couldn’t they see that I had found the new classic? In any case, self-consciousness, paired with a bout of paranoia about ruining my faux fur, made me retire said fest after one wear. 

In came 2009. Fests were everywhere--in blogs, in magazines, on TV. I tore out every picture I saw of fur and collaged my collection into a fest moodboard of sorts. Some were real fur, some were fake, some were pink, some were blue, all were awesome. I debuted my fest to my college peers, but once again, it was scrutinized and paled in comparison to my preppy peers’ Patagonia fleeces. I decided my fest would do just fine in my closet; it would be one of those pieces that you buy solely for the way it will hang in your closet (shallow alert: I do that). 

In an entrepreneurial kick last winter, I attempted to start a small business that entailed me sewing custom-made fests. My plan would land me in the pages of Vogue. I forced a few of my friends onto the waiting list, but I quickly realized that my mom's 1980s Singer sewing machine was no match for yards of fake fur. Reality set in: self-employment wasn’t going to work out, and I wasn’t going to become fest empress.

So why buy a fest, after hearing of my trials and tribulations? Because they look good with everything. Try on everything in your closet without a fest, then with a fest, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

The best of the fests, those that warrant a bag of flour being thrown at you on the red carpet (Kim Kardashian, I'm looking at you), are upwards of $2,000. But go into Zara, close your eyes, put your hands into a rack at random, and chances are that you'll find a reasonably priced and looking fur vest in your hands. Cha-ching.  

Pictured: Rachel Zoe, the no. 1 fest advocate (Image via Google)