Mid-week Links

It seems like every time I’ve been posting recently it’s been prefaced by an apology about my lack of consistency.  I’m here again and again with another excuse- you would think being homebound with a bad ankle would lead to more posting rather than less, but instead I’ve just generally been very off my game for the last week.  Thankfully I’m starting to shape up and am more or less ready to rejoin the land of the living/productive, which is good because we’ve got some family trips lined up which I would never for the life of me be missing.
But that does also mean I’m unlikely to be posting consistently for another week and a half.  The boondocks of PA doesn’t even have phone connection, much less WiFi.
See you on the other side!

In the meantime, I’ve amassed a hideous army of motley links from around the interwebs.

Why so many posts about Instagram?

• Intimidatingly stylish Insta-kids. I do not follow these small people but I do have to say that Jayde Robinson looks like the cutest thing ever.
• Is ‘personal taste’ being replaced by an algorithm?
• The Call Me By Your Name x Monet mashup you didn’t know you needed. Summer vibe.
• Some pretty art photos.

Peace and Acceptance:

• “It’s two years after Pulse and too little has changed.”
• On Polyamorous relationships.
• 7 LGBTQIA stories to celebrate Pride

On Films:

• The trouble with Hollywood’s gender flips: “These reboots require women to relive men’s stories instead of fashioning their own. And they’re subtly expected to fix these old films, to neutralize their sexism and infuse them with feminism, to rebuild them into good movies with good politics, too. They have to do everything the men did, except backwards and with ideals.”
• The Pop Culture Detective strikes again! The topic: Abduction as Romance.
• The Hate U Give. This looks pretty great.
• What is Cinemascore?

Miscellaneous:

• Real men smell like flowers.
• Testing the new Glossier cloud paints on different skin tones. Dawn looks pretty amazing on darker skin, IMO.
• My personal kama sutra.
• There’s a garden on top of Fenway (how did I miss this?!) and the truth about New Haven’s masked boombox man.

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Friday Links 5/11

Happy Friday and Happy Mother’s Day weekend!
Do you have any plans?
In a few hours we (my parents and I) will be going up to Belfast, Maine to spend the weekend with my Aunt Susan and Bill, whose mother owns an alpaca farm.  There will be alpaca shearing, vegan food, and tactful discussions about Infinity War without mentioning to movie fan Bill (it’s so nice to be around other movie fans) that I never plan to see it.

I’ve been reading a lot, falling behind on the films I have checked out from the library, gardening for hours a day, and enjoying the springly weather. I also cooked some interesting pancakes yesterday so that  have foods when I return next week. I will report back.

What’s happening on the worldwide web?

• Speaking of movie people, this film looks like it could be amazing. Also really excited for The Seagull, an adaptation of one of the few Chekhov pieces I’e actually read.
• A beautiful essay that I’m at a loss as to how to describe.
• The Duchess of Northumberland sounds like a fun lady- she created the garden at Alnwick Castle, possible the deadliest garden in the world.
• How does Deadpool always win the promotion game? This is genius.
• One of the greatest things about being back in America is the access to SNL’s youtube uploads. I know the main story (DESERVEDLY) is the release of This is America by Donald Glover- but let’s not forget about the Barbie skit.
• #MeToo and Junot Diaz: Cycles of victimization and victimizing, sexual harassment, celebrity and race.
• When two celebrity ladies (internet fashion personae?) give birth in close succession and get together to share their experiences with the early days of motherhood.
• I love this Public Place Meditation Guide– it’s very closely related to some wisdom my mother shared with me years ago: practice seeing the divinity in everyone around you.
• A mathematical model may explain how two brains agree on the experiential profile of smells.
• Possibly the most charming interview I’ve ever seen. I think I may have just fallen in love with all three of these men.
• Have you liked any pages created by Russian bots?Ask Facebook.
• A complex algorithm predicts the likelihood of final season Game of Thrones deaths. Bye, Daenerys.
• An amazing photograph. I love whales.

Links 4/29

It’s been in some ways an absolutely awful day but I’m still pretty content.  To explain the first part of that, I was fueled by food poisoning sometime around 2 am last night and my stomach is still feeling pretty tender.  On top of that, I wasn’t able to find the perfect plantings for my garden urns.  I’m thinking maybe nasturtiums.
To explain the latter part, it’s the birthday of one of my best friends and I got to see her for the first time in what feels like forever.  And in spite of my relative nausea, hanging out and catching up was lovely.

I’m enjoying Middlemarch, A Quiet Place was fantastic, and seeing the Art in Bloom exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts yesterday was beautiful and completely brought out my inner elderly white lady.  But what can I say, I love flower shows and I won’t deny it.

I have a scarcity of links this week, and you can decide if that’s good or bad!

• Allure on women in the fragrance industry.  Like fashion, its a business led by men that caters largely to women.
• Certain scents are found to reduce dogs’ stress levels in animal shelters.
• A list of things that intimidate me. Oddly relatable. What would be on your list?
• Self-discovery comes in all shapes and sizes.
• Scientists discover an enzyme that can break down PET plastic.

Truly, that’s all I have. It’s pretty shameful.

BUT

The yoga retreat has been picked!
*drumroll*
RADIANCE SUTRAS FLOW
Man am I ready for some ecstatic dance

I mean, not right now, because I have food poisoning, but in general.

Sunday Links 10/29

Lily and I are in the north of France!

• Pierre Dinand, the man behind some of the world’s most iconic perfume bottles.
• I really relate to this illustration.
• Favorite vanilla perfumes? I’d like to add Memoirs of a Trespasser by Imaginary Authors.
• Perfumer Christophe Laudamiel is offering an interactive experience in NYC inspired by Suskind’s book “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer”. Sounds super cool. Also super cool? I met Christophe a few weeks ago. He’s great and he has a great dog.
• I want to see this ballet but I can’t figure out yet how to buy tickets. It also looks like Giselle and Coppelia are coming next year, both of which I’m super interested on.
• Sex and love on the streets of New York- introducing the Love Map project.
• The economics of consent: “Weinstein was a gatekeeper who could give actresses a career that would sustain their lives and the livelihood of their families. He could also give them fame, which is one of few ways for women to gain some semblance of power and voice inside a patriarchal world. They knew it. He knew it. Weinstein could also ensure that these women would never work again if they humiliated him.”
• Super into the trailer for Phantom Thread. Daniel Day-Lewis is the bomb dot com.
• The joy of not wearing a bra.
• Reading Jane Eyre while black.
• Teen Vogue on #FreeMelecio. So glad to see the Yale student body uniting behind this.
• Today is the end of Asexual Awareness Week.
• Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood Beauty Standards, and Abuse: “We need also to recognize that many wealthy and powerful moguls who dehumanize women in private, treating them like consumable goods to be used for their pleasure — like products — are the very same people responsible for the commodified images of womanhood that bombard us everywhere.”
• Seeing (and smelling) a blooming corpse flower is on my bucket list.
• Have you heard about this popular new Amazon service?

Playlist: Long Sultry Summer

The first of my anemone flowers started blooming yesterday, which means summer is drawing to a close. Or more accurately, that the end of summer is drawing to a beginning.

Summer isn’t really saying goodbye until the asters and goldenrod are in full swing.

My plane tickets have been bought- my ticket, really, because as of yet there is no return trip.  A one way trip to Charles de Gaulle.

And I may have watched the last film that I will watch that takes place in my city- the last one before I go. It was Gone Baby Gone.  I love it when films make detours to my hometown to find unsavory people, murder victims, and other desperate characters. My favorite movie trope.
And I’ve decided that Jared Leto and Casey Affleck share a category in my head- creepy and lanky white boy actors who seem to take themselves too artistically seriously and who I don’t want to meet.  Much as I admire Jared Leto’s ability to wear way too much Gucci at once. And much as I admire Casey Affleck’s… nothing really, never mind.

How is my Garden Growing?

I’ve a busy day (as I did yesterday) so just a quick rundown of the plants that are really thriving in my garden at the moment:

• honeysuckle- it’s blooming and climbing all over the porch!
• lavender- not blooming yet, but after being harshly cut back in early spring (it was getting far too craggy) it’s really taken off.
• coral bells- I wasn’t expecting these to come back this year, but they’re here and they’re blooming.
• phlox- We’ve two white phlox plants in the side yard and again, I wasn’t expecting them to return this year but they’re here and apparently pretty satisfied.
• grape vines- We need to do some cluster thinning.
• bleeding heart- Another thing that I planted last year that I didn’t have the highest hopes for, but they’ve just ended their spring blooming. Lovely to see them.
• sea roses- We have some sea roses on the street by the side of the house and they’re looking amazing and fragrant and making the bees very happy.
• anemone- Not blooming yet, but they really seem to adore something about the light or soil in the front garden.  They’re not blooming yet, but they’ve been here for years and they’re spreading, which makes me very happy.

Keeping an eye out for my guard, sea holly, etc.

Save it for a Rainy Day

Rain. It’s not my most favorite of weathers, but it’s a simple fact of life in the spring.

There’s a lot to love about rain- the way it throws people together (thank you random people who have gifted me clothes after I’ve been soaked), dramatically watching raindrops race down a window, memories of rain songs from childhood, and the sound and feeling of being cozied up and dry while there’s a storming happening.

But if you’re going out in it- because we all have to sometimes- there are some material things you can add to your life to ease the rainy day gloom.

“A Field of -…”

If you could have a great big field of any plant, what would you choose?

A Shower of April Links

This is my new desktop for the month of April! Isn’t it lovely? (And not at all in line with the cold wind we have in New Haven or the sloppy snow I’m hearing about from Boston, but hopefully it will be more appropriate by the end of this month).
The photograph is from this delightful-looking book, Encyclopedia of Rainbows.

I always feel like March is the month that pasts the fastest, although logically you’d think it would be February.  Maybe March feels like such a flash because you’re bolted into it from February and before you know it it’s already rolling.  It might just be a matter of personal history for me; March was the month that it first occurred to me how quickly time passes.  I have a distinct memory of some time in Elementary school- I think second grade- sitting on the big communal rug, watching the teacher flip the calendar and contemplating the lightning-quick passage of the month of March.
Anyway, I’m thinking of doing two list posts a month because I seem to accumulate way too many interesting links in a span of thirty days to compose a normal length post. Any thoughts? Do you enjoy these random excursions into the internet, or should I cut down my number of links?
But that’s a question for a different month (May? Is it really so close as all that?), for now, buckle your seat belts.

Unusual Flower Names for Girls

Break has continued to be a whirlwind of activity flying under the title of ‘relaxation’. Hunkering down during today’s snowstorm, helping Dad give his head a shave, and hosting the traveling company of Yale’s Ballroom Team yesterday for numerous rounds of mafia and numerous pizzas.

Despite being fairly exhausted and feeling a bit of apathy about writing, I’ve decided to just pin myself down for a bit and churn out a post from an idea I had a little while ago- the feminine counterpart to the Flower Names for Boys post.

Obviously flower names for girls are rather more common- we’re all very familiar with classic flower names like Rose and Lily, Violet and Jasmine. But there are many more flora sources if you’re looking for more whimsical/spunky, less standard/traditional girl names.