Sometimes you gotta go big or go home.
For this list, I asked a few editors, authors, friends, and assorted very cool people to tell me what they'd ask Santa for if Santa had recently come into a very large and unexpected inheritance and/or won a class-action lawsuit.
(The number of people who asked for an escape hatch of some sort - a.k.a. a time-travel machine or an island in the middle of the ocean - was spectacular, if not surprising.)
Woops.
Every time the news alert on my phone beeps, I have a teeny, tiny heart attack. I mean, whatever it is, you know it's not good.
I think we could all use a little time-out from the real world this holiday season.
(Just went ahead and had Kendrick write this one.)
Gift Ideas For Someone Who Is Just Like Me.
by Kendrick
Everything I own needs to be able to survive my children.
Gift guide rollout: commence! In the coming days, I'll be posting gift guides for people who need a break from reality (a.k.a. everyone), gift guides for pregnant people, white elephant gift guides, STEM gift guides for kids, and more.
Whew.
Zara sweater (similar) & jeans (similar) | Jimmy Choo ankle boots (similar)
There are some things that live in your DNA - like, say, eye color, or a taste for Yodels - things that are guaranteed to be a part of your life practically from the moment of conception. (Kidding about the Yodels, but only a tiny bit: Yodel-loving is definitely part of my personal genetic makeup.) Some of these things can feel like an essential, even necessary part of who you are, but even so: that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to define your future. Not if you don’t want them to.
Take, for example, my stage fright. The stories I can tell about the ways that my anxieties about speaking in front of people wreaked havoc on my life and my career are too many to count.
This is not the face of someone without a diabolical plan.
In lieu of an actual, information-containing post today - because I have to spend the day working on an insane number of side projects (including logistics surrounding a verrrrrrryyyyy exciting project that I'll be able to formally announce in a week or so - hint: book book book book book), allow me to present to you a series of outtakes from the holiday gift guide shoot I did with Kim Ebbets last night.
Just trust me and scroll down slowly. It's so good.
Oh hell no.
Remember how, last week, the guys working on my garage told me they "might not" be able to complete the project? Amazing news! They totally showed up, got to work, and made it happen, and now my three-months-in-progress garage renovation is done!
I started being treated like an idiot in the seventh grade. I'd transferred out of a school where I was so nerdy and ostracized that a pair of "popular" twin boys took to leaving death threats on my parents' answering machine, and entered a school located all the way across town, where nobody had any idea who I was. I had a blank slate. Over the summer before I entered my new school, my bangs grew out, I shot up a couple of inches, the beginnings of breasts appeared, and I started to emerge from that tragic awkwardness that plagues middle-schoolers of the large-toothed sort.
Boys noticed. I noticed them noticing. I loved it.
I also spent a lot of time observing my new environment, and specifically the girls who seemed like they had a handle on it all; like they were important. I noticed that it wasn't cool to be smart, or to do well on tests, and so I started lying. I moaned over my grades when I was actually getting solid As; I asked for homework help that I didn't need; I giggled and pretended not to know what James was getting at when he and his friends came over to me in the cafeteria and he handed me a banana and told me they wanted to see me eat it.
I ate it.
Hellooooooo my love (via).
Yesterday morning, I had this post all written in my mind. I was going to talk about how, after I finish our garage renovation, I'm going to start thinking about redoing our bathrooms (hoorayyyyy home equity line of credit!). I was going to rhapsodize about cement tile (and specifically Villa Lagoon's tile, which we used for our entryway redo and which is gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous).
...And then guess what happened yesterday afternoon?
