I haven’t bought something in season at full price in ages except for this pretty little A-line dress from Prada. It’s the perfect quintessential Prada shape. For me it’s the ideal layering dress for every day. I bought this from Farfetch, it arrived at my door about 3-days later, and I’m literally looking forward to getting dressed every day for work again because this dress has that kind of power to get me out of bed and back to wanting to look put together.
Prada
Do over
Is it crazy we are full steam ahead with a home remodel a few months into a pandemic?
I don’t think so. Or maybe I do. It depends what time of day you ask me.
Besides being incredibly lucky to still be employed, thanks to two UX tech jobs, we also had purchased a little house in 2012. It cost my entire life savings up until that point; I was 26 and working 3-4 jobs to make it all work, and even then I was hanging on by a thread. I had my full time advertising job, I had my weekend freelance gig for a real estate agent, my weeknight design job redoing a well-to-do blogger’s website, and my gig as a design/fashion blogger and all the PR/emailing/schmoozing that comes with that. I was also balancing being really good at my job(s) and being in a relationship. Oh yeah and we got a cat, Suitcase. I was exhausted all the time, and when it was all said and done I was pretty much back-to-zero broke. Buying a home, especially an old one is even more expensive than you buffer for.
Since then, my career has evolved and so has my salary. So yay. The point is we were able to put some roots down in the Bay Area, which was nuts and insane. We all know the headlines now about millennials being set up for the uphill battle of a lifetime to afford anything just about anywhere. So look at me, a girl who grew up super duper poor, coming to the US from Mexico, growing up in LA, then busting my ass through high school to get a scholarship to UC Berkeley. Which brought me here to the Bay Area. It felt like a real achievement (and still does), being able to look around and say “This is a piece of shit, but at least it’s my piece of shit.”
The house was far from ideal. Is far from ideal — as in, it currently is a house from the 1920s with about 100 years of problems. I know all about delayed gratification. I can put my mind towards anything and just blast forward until I achieve the goal. I power through. I push myself, past pain, yell at myself to rub some dirt on it, cry for a minute but then get back to work. That kind of work ethic. The kind that can get toxic if unchecked.
Well, this story isn’t about an unchecked work/life balance. It’s about finally committing to putting my needs first. Nick and I are moving forward by essentially going back: we are tearing our house down. Starting over. New rules. New life.
It’s terrifying. Exciting. Expensive. But we are two highly committed alphas that have our sights set on a beautiful home on top of the beautiful land in the pretty little neighborhood we already have roots in.
More updates to come. Obviously.
Animal Industry
Just a close up of what is possibly my new favorite over-the-top shirt to wear to work.
You Can't #regram This
This couldn't last forever: The blog format as I knew it for about a decade is probably, for the most part, officially dead to me now.
I can't really motivate myself anymore to take time out of my life (and my husband's life) to photograph an outfit, then come back to my computer, download the images, and then edit them for color, or even moodboard them, upload them, formulate a creative opinion, and type it all up. As time consuming as that all was, the process used to thrill me and stoke my creativity on a daily basis, so that's why I did it for so long.
One time, like in 2009, I had a chat with the PR people at Net-a-Porter who considered my blogging efforts beautiful and "exhausting" because of the pace I was posting. I felt like that was a badge of honor, which it was, but the reality is that it was so tiring to keep it up. Now I feel like this format has been done to death because what was once an elite routine thing most easily executed by creative types and those with a bit of code logic now is possible for anyone with internet access and a SquareSpace account to choose a beautiful template and be a voice on the internet, a blogger. That's great as a whole for more people having a creative outlet, but as someone who has been doing this it for such a long time I start asking myself, What now?
Now that there is so much saturation of opinions on the internet, what's next?
Well that is the million dollar question for me. It's by no means a crisis of any sorts more than it is just needing to explore new territory for me to feel creative in. Just recently, I quit the advertising industry after almost 10 years of experience to join the ranks in Conde Nast and learn what art direction means in editorial. I'm thrilled with the new industry because of its newness and completely different politics and possibilities for advancement. I could not have gotten the job without the constant posting to this job to tell my point of view on design and such, so that is something I'm always grateful for.
Blog wise? I can tell you this: I've reverted back to just posting my inspirations and whenever I can I'll post something a little more special. Honestly, nowadays when I feel super-inspired I do the thing I've always wanted to do but never seemed to know how to start; I paint. I've had years of sketchbook, secret plans to make paintings that would make me proud to hang them in my home and maybe even share with my friends. I don't know why it's taken me this long to start putting brush to canvas and just going with it, but I am just happy painting is my new creative routine now, picking up where I left off at Berkeley.
You know what else? It bothered me that as a blogger I was no longer feeling truly creative anymore. I was just another fish in the sea of sites and the harder I tried to take photos and make original moodboards that were beautiful enough to share and put my name on, the more I realized the internet makes it impossible to retain any creative ownership.
I recently gave a talk at the newly opened flagship Apple store in collaboration with VSCO in front of about 100 people to discuss my creative process and while that recognition was certainly nice, it still bugged me on some level to see my images across the internet reblogged and reposted without credit.
Like a lot of people who make things from scratch, my creativity is being used for someone else's blog or personal gain on the internet and that bothers me. But more than anything it finally compelled me to pick up a paint brush and paint. The fact that I can regain control over my creative products in a digital age is motivating, exciting, inspiring, and really captivating for me right now.
So I'm going to run with this. I like being in control, so why not? I paint every weekend now because I love it. Because I have so many ideas! To reclaim my creative ownership over my work. I'm seeking a format that is mine again, that only I can do, that yes, differentiates me again from the crowd. Why? Because I guess I need that. I guess I really am that type of creative that needs to feel a little special, a little different, and most of all original. Of course I can share images of my progress and finished work here or on Instagram, but at the end of the day the original painting is just that: original. And there is just one. Mine.
