NOT JANE AUSTEN

[notjaneausten]

I hate that it takes me a really long time to write really terribly.  I also hate that it is ten after two (period, I hate that I couldn’t finish before noon) and all I’ve eaten is salami, gluten-free chocolate chocolate chip cookies, and 99% Lindt chocolate because #writingsnacks.

[notjaneausten]

Torn between the Def Leppard Hysteria tour t-shirt and a black turtleneck to go see some French circus performers.  This is today’s hungover dilemma along with trying to find enough shit to put in my ThriveMarket cart to justify my automatic annual subscription renewal.  Exciting stuff.

[notjaneausten]

 @losertakesall is the best nuff said forever.  

[notjaneausten]

Gotta love how guys always—even after bold, blatant, inexcusable absenteeism—expect us to be excited to hear from them.  

[notjaneausten]

Call Her Savage, 1932. Another brilliant example of a romper that wouldn’t be out of place today. I immediately thought of the label Mary Green which went out of business two years ago. They just missed the resurgence of all the garments they were most known for.

A really fantastic post on pre-code Hollywood lingerie from The Lingerie Addict.

[losertakesall]

Graham Swift / Mothering Sunday

AND WHILE I’M AT IT, this is one of my favorite tiny gasps of the year. A love interrupted, the oldest story there is, and Swift makes it brand new, and it cut me to the quick. #tinybookreview

[notjaneausten]

ditto: i read this in one sitting, on a Sunday, and did. not. want. it. to. end.  one of my favorite books of the last 5 years.

[notjaneausten]

It is 7 p.m. on a Monday night and I can hear mom squeeging the shower door in her bathroom.  She’s just finished her daily swim, in the pool, in our backyard.  I am in California for a week, visiting the folks.  It is 90-something degrees outside, 70-something inside, and the central air conditioning is humming happily away.  

I am yet again surrounded by my mountain of past lives that fills my old bedroom:  Beatrix Potter’s complete stories, a library of ballet history books, presents from the ex-boyfriend (including the painting he made for me which I have yet to hang up), pink sweatshirts with kittens on them circa 1989, a tie-dye velvet pillowcase (with fringe), an enormous collection of unorganized photographs taken by me, a smaller collection of miscellaneous photographs taken by complete strangers and collected over many years, grandma’s Oz books, my Penguin Poet books and so many others, more things from the ex (a Ruskin dish, a paste deco necklace, a partially used artist’s sketchbook, a rotary donut phone), topographical maps of the North and Eastern Sierra Nevada, ancient CDs, cassette tape collection, and of course, more books, and of course, buckets of old, almost never finished journals.

I’ve never kept a consistent diary.  I threw out most of my childhood ones, for fear my mom would read them, and find out I liked boys.  I threw out a bunch of really old datebooks—agendas I kept throughout school with detailed schedules of ballet, tap, and piano lessons—the last time I was home, and I still have too many personal journals leftover, most of the scribblings from the last 10-14 years, the oldest of which feel as if they were written by a different person.  Even ramblings from as little as 5 years ago, also feel not alien but drenched in fog.  Out of reach.  Did I ever actually live in London?  See that man in that blue suit or go into that museum?  Did I really look at 15 flats across North London in one day, go to Paris after work on a Friday and roll into work in London on Monday morning, drunk?  Apparently I did.  Other memories are crystal clear, and I can find no trace of them in any of the journals.  Why are they all different?  A random assortment of different types (blank, graph paper, lined, colored, white paper, yellow, composition, Belgian composition notebooks...) now drive me mad.  Why couldn’t I be one of those anal, Rhodia or Moleskine-only types?  Those people who file the journals of their lives neatly on their shelves like regular books, dated in a crisp neat hand in the top right hand corner, or on a tape around the binding?  Why am I not inherently organized and tidy as a person?  Why did my sister get those genes, and I got stuck with the magpie mess?  Luck of the draw I guess.  As much as I hate having to find a place to stash this shit, going through them makes me wish I had kept a better record, and in turn, kept a better stash of the right shit. Did I really need to FedEx myself home a near archive of British music magazines and vintage stationery when I moved back from London?  I like to think that now, my hoarding tendencies are sharper, better edited, and pray that history won’t repeat.  Many of the CDs and DVDs are going, the tiny t-shirts I can’t fit into anymore are going, some, not enough, of the exes presents are going, but what little I have of my ill-documented, uninteresting life, I am keeping, however embarrassing, however obnoxiously indulgent and overwrought with detail.  I should throw the journals out, but I won’t, both out of stubbornness and as a reminder that I should be better about documenting my life in NY even if 99% of the time I find it more irksome than pleasurable.  There are moments, like when I see a woman on the Upper East Side “walking” her dog in a remote controlled BMW, or when I overhear two old white men with canes in Hawaiian shirts walk down 2nd Ave. discussing how crowded New York is getting and exchange coupons for Duane Reade, or that time I saw Bill Cunningham leaving work and cycling right by the museum—all these moments I am losing faster than they happen.  I cared about this stuff in S.F. and London, for some reason, I am neglectful, less motivated about documenting NY for myself, but I will try to fight it, even if all it means is that I generate another dozen notebooks full of embarrassing, wistful material.

My only hope is that in the last few months, as these notebooks have been sitting on top of a dresser in my room, that mom did not find a particular journal and open it up to a particular page, in which, at an embarrassingly late age, I fantasize about my perfect guy: ”salt and pepper hair, intelligent, thin, tall, with an ample but not overly large cock.” 

[notjaneausten]

Getting there....

[notjaneausten]

Dana Kyndrova

[notjaneausten]

I need a really good friend over here asap to help me drunk pack ‘cos this shit ain’t hopping in boxes by itself.....

[notjaneausten]

TODAY’S TO DO: WINTER CLOTHES, ALSO SCARVES AND A DRILL

For the fourth time in two years, I am moving.  This time, however, I will be saying goodbye to Brooklyn as home, and making the flying leap to Manhattan.  I have changed my address.  The buzzer and the mailbox at the new apartment have my name on them already.  My room is a wreck and I sense my roommate wants me out.  For some reason ever since I gave notice a few months ago, the vibe has been that not staying has been taken as a personal affront (we’re not close but it feels like I’ve insulted the house, or something, by leaving) when the real answer is very simple: I want to walk to work, and not live with anyone else.

 After three solid weeks of looking and being sent countless unvetted addresses by brokers (not at all meeting the specs I provided yet they still want their $3500 broker fee), I saw a real dump.  It looked like the kind of place I would have lived in when I was 21 and not a minute after.  Carpets.  Fridge in the room.  One closet.  Cracked walls.  Stench of rat poison.  Everything I had seen that weekend online was snapped up before I could even view it, gone within minutes.  It didn’t help that my replacement in my current place has already started to store her stuff onsite (a month early) and my ex-boyfriend had emailed to say he’d signed a lease on an entire house (he is perpetually unemployed, has zero tax records--really, and has an eviction record....); even he had found somewhere to live.

I went back to my office and immediately applied for a small studio in the only clean apartment building I saw during the course of my search that was in my price range.  It didn’t meet my full list of criteria but I couldn’t face the thought of living in another decrepit building or another day of searching.  After handing over everything that makes you susceptible to identity theft, and a bunch of money, I got it, and a few days later I was in the real estate office signing my life away to a New York landlord.  There was a broker I’d never met overseeing the signatures, there were handouts on how to recycle, throw out the trash, and apply for Time Warner internet.  I was given the super’s name and patted on the back with a congratulations and sent on my way.  I could say it felt liberating but it felt more like a pact with the devil.  I have had leases in my own name (I do currently) but haven’t been the lead on a lease in a long time.  I’m capable but it became evidently clear to me that if something goes tits up, it’s just me, there’s no handy roommate to help drill, hold the ladder, or yell at a crappy landlord (if that happens) in a collective fashion.  

Two seconds after I signed my lease, my cell phone lit up with my boss’s name.  I thought a meeting had been cancelled or started without me.  Nope, she would be leaving work that minute, no two week notice, nothing, just gone.

By the time I will have been at “new job” a year (August), I will have had six different bosses and three different directives.  I sincerely hope I am not next on the chopping block.  I shouldn’t be, but given the way things are going, anything could happen.  While there are certain advantages to living here, I really am only here for career reasons, so if this doesn’t work out, I will be wide open (and bankrupt).

Everyone keeps asking me if I’m excited to move and I shrug.  I just want it to be over.  I still have to get a hold of Con Ed (electricity), get some blinds up (hopefully the super will do that for me), and get the A/C installed (I am biting the bullet after 2 years without it) I am tired of battling this city and in other ways I will continue to battle.  My income to rent ratio will go back to 50/50, which means no more mad money.  Because of all the shakeups at work, I haven’t even been able to use my mad money—go on trips, etc.  Most of it will go on coffee grinders and trash bags for the new apartment, a drill, some plants.  The hope is by not having a horrendous commute, I will have more energy for socializing, for ballet class, for “real life,” including creativity.  And that I’ll eat better (I currently have no local grocery stores).  There are pubs, bars, and PEOPLE in the new neighborhood, and an EXPRESS train.  There is a KILLER “junk” shop with antique anatomy figures and globes gathering dust across the street.  These are things I am excited about.  But I will continue to be torn between living here and in California (largely due to family reasons rather than career--there are no jobs for me there).  I just keep trying to think of myself as moving forward.  I have gone from book retail to publishing and back to book retail again in two years, albeit on an entirely new level, and hopefully this new place will continue to foster this forward motion.  I haven’t written anything for myself in over a year (dance writing doesn’t count).  I never felt fully at home in this apartment, and lose 3 hours a day and countless spikes in blood pressure standing on the subway for it.  I am trying not to get my hopes up that this “room of one’s own” will answer all of my prayers, cure all of my stress, make work easier, give me more energy and solace, but I am cautiously optimistic that I might, I just might, like my new home.

[notjaneausten]

I love how shopping for kitchen shit for your tiny ass Manhattan apartment means you’re shopping for the same things as RV owners.

[the-library-and-step-on-it]

If you doubted there was gender bias in literature, this study proves you wrong | Lisa Dempster

A new Australian study reinforces what global research has already proved: women writers aren’t making it into reviewing pages, regardless of merit

[notjaneausten]

One of the things I am most looking forward to in moving into my own place is that I can finally shave my lady parts in peace.  No roommates needing the bathroom, no fucked up razors, no other people’s junk in the shower.  It’s all my time, my razors, my legs, my pussy, my space.

[notjaneausten]

How I’ve spent my weekend....everyone seems to have tons of advice on how to find an apartment in NYC, on your own, and yet....none of it gets you anywhere....what’s frustrating is this entire operation has merely been to finally invest in myself, to spend the money and stop gnashing my teeth every day because of a shitty commute, and I still don’t seem to be able to do it despite earning the most I have in my entire life....

If anyone knows of a livable studio or 1bed going in NYC for less than $1750, I’m all ears....but chances you are, you don’t and I’ll be stringing up a hammock in my office....

[notjaneausten]

Oh email sidebar, you know my needs (silver foxes, Europe, and good lingerie) so well.

PS I give“My Austrian” mad props for using a man instead of a female stewardess as their advertising tease....more please.

[iworkatapubliclibrary]

A library user helped to repair a torn page in a book.