Despite my grim expression in the photo above, I woke up this morning in a pretty good mood--pleasant reverberation from last night, when K whipped up an incredible Hungarian Mushroom soup and we watched "Christmas in Connecticut" (we've been seriously slacking on Christmas flicks this year--this is our second, after Christmas Vacation--K's choice--which I had never seen).

I'd wholeheartedly recommend the 1945 film about a clever magazine writer who has found fame and fortune pretending to be a happy housewife and gourment cook on a farm in Connecticut. When her Publisher requests that she welcome a heroic sailor into her home for the Holidays she manages to drum up a makeshift family and a Connecticut farm, but chaos inevitably ensues. To be clear, I am not recommending the 1992 remake directed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not sure what to say about that.


(dress: charlotte russe; tights: GAP; boots: ALDO; cardigan: old navy; belt: thrifted; necklace: DIY)

Even more wholeheartedly, I recommend finding a man who knows how to make a mushroom sing. Not literally (I'd leave that one to VeggieTales), but it makes life so very mm oh yes yum delicious when you experience something so sumptuously savory as Hungarian Mushroom soup. I swear, K is a Gourmet, and if I had made this very same soup it may or may not have been entirely unpalatable... but here goes:

HUNGARIAN MUSHROOM SOUP


(via AllRecipes.com)

Ingredients:

4 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 cups chopped onions
1 pound fresh mushrooms, sliced
2 teaspoons dried dill weed
1 tablespoon paprika
(I know K didn't use paprika, because we don't have any!)
1 tablespoon soy sauce
2 cups chicken (veggie!) broth
1 cup milk
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
ground black pepper to taste
2 teaspoons lemon juice
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
1/2 cup sour cream

Directions:

Melt the butter in a large pot over medium heat. Saute the onions in the butter for 5 minutes. Add the mushrooms and saute for 5 more minutes. Stir in the dill, paprika, soy sauce and broth. Reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer for 15 minutes.

In a separate small bowl, whisk the milk and flour together. Pour this into the soup and stir well to blend. Cover and simmer for 15 more minutes, stirring occasionally.

Finally, stir in the salt, ground black pepper, lemon juice, parsley and sour cream. Mix together and allow to heat through over low heat, about 3 to 5 minutes. Do not boil. Serve immediately with local ciabatta bread to your patiently waiting girlfriend and watch her love you even more.

Another nice thing about having a boyfriend who cooks for you is that you don't know just how much butter is going into the pot and can therefore pretend that it's healthy because it is soup (and in this case I was pretty sure that it was just too creamy to be good for me). However, according to AllRecipes.com, one serving of this soup has only 200 calories! Yes, please & Merry Christmas (& more cookies for me).

i want i want

Although my love of Modcloth is no secret, this is the first time I am inspired to dedicate an entire post to my covetousness. Oh Marion Dress, you are perfection. Look what you do to me...

And while I'm at it, I would also die to own these beauties in this order:

Marion, please stick around until Christmas has come and gone. Wait for me, Marion... I love you (but if you leave me I will happily settle for Fresh Grounds, so watch out!)

stopping by woods on a snowy morning

Oh la la, je suis fatiguee ce matin!

Last night I found myself in a baking frenzy. My college girlfriends and I are doing a book-and-cookie exchange for Christmas and I had to get everything shipped out this morning so I've been a little frantic. I spent about four hours beating ingredients (by hand!) and opening and closing the oven before collapsing on the couch around 10:30. I made three kinds - peanut butter chocolate kiss, ginger and oatmeal raisin (K said his favorite Christmas cookie was oatmeal... I've never heard of such a thing, but you've got to please the public!)

Today's outfit was inspired by a couple of things: my semi-new green wool jumper (which i was debating returning because it fits a little bit larger than I would like) and my shiny new Ruche headband:

I just like the green wool too much (and it's in such great condition!) that I can't bring myself to give it up. Besides, with the mountains of leftover cookies hanging around the apartment, a little leeway might not be a bad thing!

(jumper: SnapVintage on Etsy; dress: H&M; fur collar: H&M; boots: ALDO; tights: layered black&white lace; headband: ShopRuche; rings: Minion Vintage)

I have a confession to make. Now that there is snow on the ground, I'm really struggling with finding an appropriate place to take blogfotos. It was one thing to let my heels sink into the mud during the fall, but a foot of snow? It defeats the purpose of even wearing shoes! This is a serious creative challenge.

I was in a rush this morning (who am I kidding, I'm always in a rush) so I copped out a little bit. I tried packing down some snow outside but that was difficult in my pointy shoes and I gave up pretty fast. After a few blah photos on the stoop:

...I retreated inside & stood in the "foray" (if you can call it that):

Please pardon the broom and the hacksaw.

My weekend was so unbelievably uneventful, I can't even really remember what I did. Most of it looked a little something like this:

Although I have little to no interest in watching the new 90210 on CWTV, it did inspire me to watch the original show (instantly on Netflix!) and it's awesome! The clothes, the characters, the cheesy morals... it's good, wholesome fun and I really can't imagine how I've never seen this before. It even made me step back a little bit and re-evaluate the television shows of today that I indulge in (guiltily, but not guiltily enough to stop!) and how utterly obnoxious and pointless they are. Whereas Gossip Girl has practically no plot and revolves entirely around outrageous fashion and revolving relationships (with the occasional spoiled rich-person problems thrown in but never productively addressed... and lessons never learned), each episode of 1990s 90210 has a fully-formed message that comes across clearly and with minimal cheese. Relationships seem to be secondary, and I was rather surprised how the show could transition so seamlessly through such serious issues (social injustice, racial tension and stereotyping, date-rape, AIDS, drugs, teenage motherhood), managing to hit a point home without hammering you over the head with it.

Anyway, I'm impressed. And did I mention the crazy clothes?

all i want for christmas (or whenever)

1. a sewing machine.

2. perfume (VERSACE VERSACE or YSL PARIS)
3. skinny jeans (gray and black and blue)

4. lined black leather gloves

5. big fur hat

6. books books books

7. a passport

polar bear games

Holy smokes, it sure can snow around here.

It's been blizzarding for days! This is not people weather--this is most definitely polar bear weather. At least my new ornament friend is comfortable:

This week was a whirlwind of quasi-productivity. I say "quasi" because we got some things done but it took wayyyyyy longer & wayyyyyy much more effort than it probably should have.

For example, after K and I got the Christmas tree we decided to wait until the next evening to decorate it, because we were tired (read: lazy) after a day of tromping in the forest. The next night, when we finally got in gear, we realized that all of our Christmas lights from last year were kaput:

So we drove to the store in my sleigh. The store was closed.

So we drove to the big store (grumbling all the way, except not really because it was an adventure) and purchased one box of 100 lights. We drove home, set up our Christmas music on Pandora, and K started stringing them up. They barely reached halfway up the tree.

After weighing our options we got back in the car and drove to the big store again, where we purchased a second box of 100 lights.

We decorated our sweetly scrawny tree and let it blaze in all its 200-light glory:

Isn't our tree charming? Times like these make me really glad that my parents got me a special ornament every year while I was growing up. At this point I have quite a collection of meaningful ornaments that take me back through the years every time I unwrap them for the season. To carry on the tradition, K and I have been collecting our own ornaments each Christmas for the past three years and Polar Bear is our latest addition. We welcome him warmly to our tree family.

In other Arctic News, our very own Polar Express passed by while we were throwing away our old lights:

Now the only thing left to do is eat Christmas cookies, overdose on rum-nog and watch my favorite Christmas movie of all time (along with some others, I'm sure)!

an education

This weekend K and I went to see An Education, and I loved it! I think K was kind of indifferent, but then he was never a sixteen year old girl with a passion for literature (although, unfortunately, I think at sixteen I was in a literary latency period between Sweet Valley Twins and Simone de Beauvoir that resulted in really bad fashion choices and even worse taste in music. I know I’m not the only one out there who wishes she had been a supremely intellectual, well-dressed, well-coiffed teenager from the sixties and somehow just… wasn’t).

The film is based on Lynne Barber’s memoir by the same name, and it follows a young girl through her relationship with a much older man in 1960s London. Jenny Mellor is a pretty typical teenage girl with above-average intelligence whose only dream (encouraged, if not established by her parents) is to read literature at Oxford. To improve her chances of accomplishing this singular goal, her young life is a carefully constructed collection of “hobbies” and other extracurricular activities that make her appear well-rounded. There is more to it, of course. Jenny tolerates the dirge of daily life because she views her acceptance to the distant Oxford as an invitation to intellectual Nirvana—a place where her mind will expand to prodigious proportions. In the meantime, she concerns herself with perfecting her precocious pretension and imagining all things French to be the epitome of romance and the cerebral experience, which unfortunately only emphasizes her naivete.

Then, one rainy day, a charismatic older man offers her a ride, and everything changes (one can’t help but note the metaphorical significance of David “taking her for a ride”). We can tell right away where this is going. Peter Saarsgard’s portrayal of the seedy-but-suave David doesn’t leave much to the imagination (although Saarsgard is almost incapable of playing a character seed-free, if you ask me), and even if you haven’t heard the story before you can intuit the ending from the moment she slips into his car. However, you do get the sense that Jenny knows exactly what she is doing. It didn’t strike me as a story of stolen innocence in the slightest. Throughout the film, as David escorts his young mademoiselle to concerts and art auctions and later on weekend trips to Oxford and Paris, you do perceive that Jenny is falling in love—but not with David. She is falling madly in love with the culture-rich life that he offers her.

They spend all of their time with another oddly-matched couple, the charming Danny and his delightfully dim-witted mistress, Helen, and it seems as if the only thing keeping the foursome together is a shared love of the good life (and a prosperous business partnership).

With Helen’s help, Jenny is transformed from an average school girl into a glamorous young likeness of Holly Golightly.

The only real potential chemistry is between Jenny and Danny. His relationship with Helen is a joke (his eyes roll almost instinctively every time she speaks), and he is clearly drawn to Jenny’s genuine, earnest love of culture.

Although nothing develops between them, I’m not sure that it would have mattered to Jenny which man ultimately pursued her. She loved the lifestyle enough that the partner was secondary. When the subject surfaces, Jenny seems neither surprised, excited or disgusted by the prospect of eventually sleeping with David—she simply accepts it as a reasonable condition of her position.

After her romantic trip to Paris, a seriously awkward incident with a banana and an almost-as-awkward marriage proposal from a considerably confused man, Jenny logically weighs her options. She can study her way through the remainder of her senior year, which is a complete drag, or she can gallivant around the world on the arm of a not-altogether-revolting gentleman and live her life free of worry and certainly devoid of boredom. Her parents, somewhat inexplicably enamored of David from Day One (I know my parents would have responded much differently had I brought home a man twice my age when I was in high school, but I assume in this case David also acted as a catalyst for the aging couple to rediscover a side of life they had lost in the day-to-day of married life), suddenly encourage Jenny to skip Oxford and settle down, revealing new feelings on the subject of a woman’s education—that she really only attends University to find a husband. When Jenny expresses that it seems the headache of all the hard work and studying was a waste of time and that it would have been a whole lot easier for everyone if her parents had just sent her prowling around nightclubs, her father’s response is that it was probably worthwhile—after all, David probably wouldn’t have been interested in her if she were a dunce. To further cement her decision, Jenny looks around at the well-educated women in her academic environment and determines that they are all dead already—wasting away while grading exams, teaching dead languages, wearing prim suits and spectacles and apparently doing nothing exciting or adventurous with their lives. She discovers too late that she will only ever have the life she wants if she creates it for herself, and that she cannot depend on anyone else to create that life for her.

However, her decision resonated with me for many reasons. We’ve all been there. After four years of college, I maintain that the most valuable lessons I learned were from the so-called “University of Life.” This is not to say that I have no appreciation for the academic experience—I do value the education I received—but I often find myself wondering if it was really worth it, or if my time in Boston was really just an absurdly expensive social experiment. Especially now, as I consider pursuing a Master’s degree, I wonder … why? Is it merely because I want to shake things up a little bit? Use higher education as an excuse to completely overhaul my current lot? Is it because I feel uninspired and I want to learn something new? Because if that’s all it is, I could save a hell of a lot of money “reading literature” in a café, rather than a classroom. Is it because I need a syllabus, a schedule, or some other sort of direction? Do I need the motivation of a grading system? Do I really think there is a career out there that I would want to dedicate the next two years of my life to? If I want to travel, wouldn’t it be best to keep the debt-level down?

I won’t get into my many opinions on the educational system in this country, but I think it’s absolute madness that I torture myself over the decision to go back to school. If finances couldn’t stop me, nothing could—I’d be back in a heartbeat with a book under my arm and a skip in my step, and I’d do it properly this time. The first time around I was in school for all the wrong reasons. I had to get a degree. I didn’t know for sure that I wanted to work in film, I just knew that I liked movies and I liked making movies and maybe something might come of it. That’s a good enough reason to make a movie, but not a good enough reason to drop $160,000 (granted, my share comes to about $14,000) on sort-of learning how to make movies. And so be it. It was a good four years and, for the most part, I don’t regret it. But now that I actually want to figure out what I’m going to do with the rest of my life, I’m stuck. And if K suddenly became insanely rich and wanted to escort me to concerts and art auctions and jazz clubs around the globe I would very happily settle in to a lifetime of reading literature in cafes instead of classrooms and living, living, living, living, living!

But I can’t depend on anybody else to gift me the life that I want, so I must create it. There can be no shortcuts to this: