You get it, Seth Stevenson, you get it!

NY Times Op-Ed Contributor, or, as I lovingly refer to him as..."God of Andrea approved travel".

So we are condemned to keep riding on airplanes. Which is not really traveling. Airplanes are a means of ignoring the spaces in between your point of origin and your destination. By contrast, a surface journey allows you to look out on those spaces — at eye level and on a human scale, not peering down through breaks in the clouds from 35,000 feet above — from the observation car of a rolling train or the deck of a gently bobbing ship. Surface transport can be contemplative, picturesque and even enchanting in a way that air travel never will be.

But isn't it pretty to think so?

*Last week I had roughly three friends send me links to roughly three blogs all about food. Each subject line of the aforementioned emails went something like this "Right up your alley!" or "thought of you". I've been pegged.








*I've been reading (re: loving) Justin Taylor's "Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever" (it's where this posts title is from). Sometimes I have no idea what he is talking about and sometimes the stories are boring and the messages lost on me, but that man can put together 17 words and make the most beautiful sentence ever. Par example: "We're intense and idiosyncratic, just like everyone else. We love out of fashion. We call exes in other states just to chat."


* I'm trying to grow zinnias. They should look like this. They don't, however, because someone decided to eat pistachios on the balcony (fire escape) and throw them in the flower pot.



*Downright.obsessed.with.Beaujolais.Nouveau. A friend of mine happened upon it the other day and seeing how it is typically tough to find after it's debut in November, I quickly ran out (literally, ran) and bought four bottles. Sadly, I now know why it's more of a seasonal wine and not the type that gets better with age- tasted like fruit punch. Buzzkill.

Life is sometimes the opposite of thinking.

Game. Set. Match.

I collect matches. I love matchbooks. Boxes of matches.

The smell of sulfur is up there in ranked scents with firewood, lavender and Vanilla Frosting Bonne Bell Lip Smackers.

I found this guy in Union Square yesterday who sketched on the inside of matchbooks. LOVE.



Then I was thinking what else can you do with a matchbook. Right, naturally,teach the world to sign.



AND I found vintage matches form Belgium at the antique store!

The Winter of Mixed Drinks

Is the new album from Frightened Rabbit. And I love it. Truth be told, though, I fell in love with the album name first. Obvi.


I had a seasonal (hopefully) breakdown yesterday. Tears. Tears. Tears. My winter of drinks (mixed, shaken, stirred, what have you) has lead me to realize that I am not exactly where I want to be. With work, with friends, with love, with everything. I don't know if I like who I am right now. It's going to take some time but it needs to be fixed. Pronto.

I'm hoping some good will come out of the upswing in weather conditions. I have a busy month ahead~ a spring of all sorts of drinks and I'm optimistic that I will stumble upon what it is that I need.

For the three of you that actually might read this blog...

VOTE VOTE VOTE

I want a new tattoo. Bad.

Into the caverns of tomorrow with just our flashlights and our love, we must plunge, we must plunge, we must plunge.

~Bright Eyes

With baited breath

AV Undercover Teaser


I found this picture I took in Madrid of an octopus holding a beer and some tapas. It was painted on the wall outside of some terrible eatery. I miss Europe.




I'm not completely into Kurt Vonnegut but I apparently like him enough to keep googling the shit out of him and finding comfort, solace, hope, happiness in his wisdom. I.e.:

"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"

"The sun shines brightly on a Jersey afternoon"

She's driving down the shore on a Jersey afternoon
She's driving down the same old roads her parents took her through
Hypnotized by those broken lines, broken records lost in time
She's turning down a road that is new and she can't turn back

~"So Jersey" The Bouncing Souls






B's surfing with the guitarist from the Bouncing Souls. Friends are across the street for a yummy French brunch. I'm happily stuck inside the antique store (check out the new website www.mackeyblue.com), listening to The Good Old War, hanging out, hating the Bumble and bumble curl creme I put in my hair because i feel messy and jotting down this month's festivities in a 1976 Hoboken Calendar because starting on March 1 the days match up for 2010!

Wonderfully unhinged.

So my French-word-of-the-day email today was desaxe which mean "unhinged; unblanaced; mentally disoriented; off center" Awesome.

These emails are always accompanied by some sort of photograph that is supposed to clearly illustrate what the word means. It never, in my opinion, does. HOWEVER- todays pic was so so dreamy that even though the correlation with the word was lost on me, it made me nearly book a flight to Paris the second after I saw it.



To me this chick looks totally together. The only thing "off center" is the shot. That room! My gosh...strands of white lights, a Great Gatsby poster peeling off the wall, giant old mirrors on the floor. This is exactly the kind of room where I would be the opposite of desaxe. I want to be there with friends, with wine, playing a card game.

So my goal today was to be anything but unhinged...it's going so-so. I'm reading Alice in Wonderland for obvious reason. My aunt and uncle gave it to me for my 10th birthday and I like to re-read/look at the pictures from time to time. It makes me feel fuzzy. This activity=totally f*ing hinged. And charming?



Then, I just agreed to let an ex-boyfriend crash at my apartment tomorrow night in what is sure to be a complete and utter drunken mess of an evening. What? UNHINGED!

Accolades! Yay!

I love you, V...

For this


and that



and this

Makes me want to play Mousetrap.

Spring Cleaning

When I was little I used to say that there were only two things that I wanted in my "future adult house". 1- a wrap around porch with preferably the sickest porch swing ever. 2- a library, or, less grandiose, floor to ceiling bookshelves in almost every room. This house might sound like it needs to be gigantic, but trust me...I would choose a 1 bedroom ramshackle of a thing with an outhouse if I could obtain the creature comforts of housing 1,000's of books and being able to swing on a bench and look out at the world. Lately, though, since working from home, I have started to realize that I will need to add another luxury to that list. I need an office. My bedroom is being consumed by paper: business cards, steno pads, notes I jot down on everything from fancy stationery to old receipts, stacks of competitors publications, stacks of old Time Out NY magazines I haven't thumbed through and felt the weight of regret as I haven't gone and done half of the cool shit they always tell me to go and do, a pile of birthday cards that I don't have the heart to through out, postcards from Paris dating back to 1908 that I keep telling myself I have to translate, and more business cards. It's a mess and it needs its own room. Even though it's current home is too tiny and it's making me nuts, after I took a picture of the mess it looked kind of pretty. Hanging out with old pictures, a cup of tea, an Altoids tin that I sometimes keep pot in, my contacts, a Gaslight Anthem CD, mini seashells I found in Beach Haven and colored pencils from when I was a kid that my grandma found in her house recently. So, pretty messes I can live with...I can hold out on my dream house with no indoor plumbing.


Quickly~ I'm eating Gobstoppers for breakfast (Andrea=the epitome of health) and it has forever always bothered me that the actual real life Everlasting Gobstopper looks nothing like the one from the movie. While delicious, I secretly wish they were the same, even if sucking on something that is rather large and shaped like a jack is kind of scary.

Subtleteas and Suntan Lotion

It's official! Winter is over (according to me...and my ridiculous mores). As of March 1, I refuse to wear any sort of outer wear that contains a lining and/or down. Thank goodness it's been mildly temperate because in years past I've come close to pneumonia with this somewhat uncalled for rule. But I'm done, no more bundling. HOWEVER- I have recently taken to sleeping with a scarf on. It doesn't provide any extra sort of warmth or comfort but I'm a burrower when I sleep and it's just that much more fabric to snuggle into.



I know I haven't been saying much, loving much, appreciating much lately. But it's been cold and I've been busy. Here's a mini-list of what's been keeping me focused on the goal...the goal being warm weather:

~I love Peter Gabriel. There, I said it. And i'm a sucker for cover songs (again, lame? kind of?) So when PG's album Scratch My Back came out I became a smitten kitten. A Radiohead cover?! A Bon Iver cover?! A Paul SImon cover?! And my favorite favorite...the cover of The Magnetic Fields "Book of Love". I mean, really?




~I'M ABOUT TO BLOG ABOUT NINTENDO. That's for Katie! i bought a bunch of classic Nintendo games for Wii. The past week has been spent trying to remember how to get to the Warp Zone on board 2 of Super Mario Bros. But the real treat was when I found 'Bubble Bobble" which I would say consistently occupied my sister and I from 1988-1992. And by occupied I mean enraptured. She came over last week to play with me and the game totally held up over the years. You're basically a little monster (we were) that runs around blowing bubbles to kill other little monsters (sadly we couldn't do this in real life) and then those dead monsters turned into food that you voraciously ate (we still eat like that). A paraphrased convo from last week's playing:

Andrea: "Holy crow was that a jello mold?!"
Jessica: " I just consumed 6 martinis!"
Andrea: "Haha. A bell pepper!! Nice."




~Amidst old school video games and cover songs, I celebrated a birthday. While everything and everybody made it so so special, one present took the cake. One of my dearest beach friends who knows me so disgustingly well bought me Demeter's Suntan Lotion perfume. I have, for years, applied, sprayed, slathered sunscreen on my body every during single month, season, week, you name it. I can't think of a single smell that even comes close to what happens when I inhale sunscreen. Nasal hallucinations begin to occur and I'm somewhere else (usually LBI)...making out on beach at 5 am, riding bikes in the rain, collecting seashells, loving life. It cheers me up like no other and now I don't have to a slimy mess to obtain that. Ei....I love you for knowing me so freaking well!


~Mumford and Sons. Amazing band. Amazing album. Even better album cover. It's pretty. I want to frame it. They've been my new "driving band". It's all yummy sappy brit pop and it's goooooood. "With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair"....seriously? How can anybody want anything more than that!?



~I've been watching Dexter like it's my job. Which is good, because I technically don't have one.


~Lastly, my sister bought me what is probably my favorite tea to date from Subtletea in NYC which is probably my favorite tea house to date. She went there and described to the guy exactly what kind of tea nerd I am. Decaf? Check. Green? Check. Chamomile? Check. Not very sweet? Check. Earthy tones and textures (I guess...)? Check. And she was spot on with her selection....however it happens to be the "Herbal Infusion Digestion Helper" which is probably the worst named tea they have among their totally cool and clever collection...to date.




Wow....guess I needed to write.....

I've been really into cinnamon toast. I mean, really.

"If you're going to believe in God," Rosenblatt explains, "if you're going to take that leap of faith, as I do, then the God that seems the most comprehensible to me would be the God who set us spinning and said 'Good luck.'
~from Roger Rosneblatt's memoir 'Making Toast'






When it snows...toast, wisdom and the like are as apropos as building snowmen, playing board games and laughing.

I was trying to feel some kind of good-by

J.D. Salinger passed away today. You and I will never speak again. And this sign was the first thing I saw after looking up bleary eyed from a text that read "I think we're done here".

It's a pretty good song maybe you know the rest.

I resolved to give up using ellipses for New Years.

...I'll wait until Lent. For now...I need them.

The contrived tree rends a healthy workload.

It's a new year and I'm selling my soul. Along with antique globes.