make tea, not...

get your creative juices flowing...

fin

instagram

why hello, technology & social media, how are you??

i caved yesterday - i upgraded my old school black flippy phone to an iphone 4

and i am never going back!!

you can follow me @daisyjunkie

here's a peek at my instagram photo map so far!

vintage bubble hat, purrrrfecttt condition

mum and i stopped for lemon yogurt cake & pink lemonade cupcakes yesterday

headband from puerto rico, and clip-on bangs

vintage rhinestone cat-eyes that i bought thrifting yesterday

the benefit of having a florist for a dad

records: i could sift through them all day long!

[ fin ]

technology & traditional art

"Currently, at any stage of its creation, any idea or concept is digitally adapted. What will be retained in the future? What will happen to all of these billions of megabytes we stock on computers? In ten years? In five hundred years?" 

- leo caillard

Art Game

a reflection on the problems of our new digital world

by: leo caillard

marc jacobs

 [frida gustavsson shot by juergen teller]

i have so much admiration and respect for marc jacobs

fashion week 2005

Marc Jacobs was born in New York City on April 9, 1963. After graduating from the High School of Art and Design in 1981 he entered Parsons School of Design. As a design student at Parsons, Jacobs was the recipient of some of the schools highest honors including Design Student of the Year. 
[you can stalk marc jacobs life on his website, like i do]

my favorite mans quotes -

"I love to take things that are everyday and comforting and make them into the most luxurious things in the world."

//

"I'd like to believe that the women who wear my clothes are not dressingfor other people, that they're wearing what they like and what suits them. It's not a status thing."

//

"Sometimes there are two very opposite directions, and we go with the stronger one at the end. It's an impulse thing, like, 'Oh, I love both so much, but it's got to be one or the other because the two don't work together."

//

 "I like the sort of 'nothingness' of the jeans and the T-shirt. I feel that's about as close as I can get to the future because it seems like something so old that 

will always be, so I feel it's a safe bet for the future."

"It's a cliché, but when I drank I was taller, funnier, smarter, cooler," Jacobs told New York Magazine in 2005. "I would come into work and fall straight to sleep, and then I would tell everyone to come in on a Saturday because we were behind, and then I wouldn't show up."

[fin]

yummmm...

girl hate

If you see a beautiful girl walking down the street, your first thought is generally not an internal compliment, raving about her voluminous hair or natural waif-like figure. The thoughts swarming around in your head are more likely to be sharp jabs at the beautiful girls non-existant thigh fat, or imagined caterpillar eyebrows. We have all done this at least once in our life - we have all done it probably more than once this week - we may not be sure why at the time, but when we see someone superior to ourselves, we can’t seem to fight the urge to cut them down to size. Smaller than us, to be more exact.

Why is it that when a coworker gets praised for their new and innovative idea, we scoff and mention how they probably got the idea from someone else, instead of just giving them a pat on the back and a vocalized, “job well done!” Why when we see a gorgeous girl with a handsome man, we tell our friends that they’re probably just together because she has an easy reputation, instead of noting how adorable they are. Rather than call the sales attendant rude for getting us the dress in the next size up, why do we not thank her for her honesty, by telling us that the dress we picked out was too small for our hips?

We don’t all call World War Three to action every time someone intelligent or charming gets in our path, and it’s not like we haul out the missiles the second another person receives attention, but if you really take some time to analyze the little moments when other people upset us, you will realize that - whether we assert our disdain internally or externally - there is a pattern in our negative behavior: People are put off by others that exert superiority to them. Whether that predominance be measured in brain-power, sex-allure, beauty, charm, or kindness, it is all the same: If you assume someone is better than you in anyway, the claws are coming out.

Maybe there is some tie to our animal instincts. As a human race, we have evolved from cave men (and women) who spear bears to the - while sometimes questionable - civilized people that we are today. We have that natural, wild instinct. It is innate. So why let it go to waste? Instead of using our animalistic instincts to protect ourselves from wild beasts and keep safe shelter in our slabs of rock, we use them to defend ourselves from our new form of competition: the new girl in school, or the successful law firm down the road from your companies.

Maybe it stems from our wildly instincts, but there is something very naturally and ferociously independent about each of us, even if we have yet to realize it. Our bodies and minds want us to be self-fufilled, and in order for us to be the best that we can be, we must have self-confidence. We won’t get into why so few of us have a genuine confidence in ourselves - the list would go on for days - but many of us do not. In an attempt to fuel us to reach our full potential, we trick ourselves into a false confidence. How do we acquire this false self-confidence? We cut down others that we see as a potential threat. Not very nice, but it gets the job done. With each refueling of this temporary confidence, we allow ourselves to succeed in whatever task we are attempting to accomplish, whether that be writing a work proposal, getting ready for a date, or being charming and adorable while at a family dinner. It’s like a drug. Compare it to abusing adderall to complete your stacks of paperwork, or smoking a cigarette to ward off hunger and lose weight. In the end, we are only harming ourselves. Rather than hopping on a treadmill, or getting our work done in the daylight as opposed to procrastinating, we opt to take the easy way out. It takes much less energy and self-reflection to throw a hurtful name at a girl in a sexy dress, than genuinely believing that we look sexy in a dress of our own.

But abusing cigarettes and adderall will you kill you, eventually. Sure, the paperwork will be done and the weight will be off, but what will you have to show for it, knowing deep inside that your outcome did not come from your own work? Just the same, you will never love yourself so long as you don’t love others. Alternately, you will never love others until you love yourself. Put down the celebrity gossip magazine, and pick up a mirror. Pick up a paper from middle school with an A plus stamped on the front page. Tell yourself you are beautiful. Tell yourself you are intelligent. Ah - and well you’re at it - tell a stranger that today, as well. You’ll soon begin to realize that it’s a cycle. Treat others the way you’d like to be treated, as they say. Pay the positivity forward, and you’ll get it back. Wouldn’t you rather have a stranger approach you, telling you your hair looked nice, instead of noting your imaginary thigh fat?

- Teagan Laurel Alexander

for that melancholy mood

a little boost of sunshine

goodmorning!

good morning beautiful, how was your night?

time to wake up! forget the alarm clock, eye candy wakes me up

dear mister akin

I read something today that really rustled my feathers. Have you heard the word on Mr. Akin and his legitimate rape remarks? 

Well...

From The New York Times, written by John Eligon and Michael Schwirtz:

"In an effort to explain his stance on abortion, Representative Todd Akin, the Republican Senate nominee from Missouri, provoked ire across the political spectrum on Sunday by saying that in instances of what he called “legitimate rape,” women’s bodies somehow blocked an unwanted pregnancy.

Asked in an interview on a St. Louis television station about his views on abortion, Mr. Akin, a six-term member of Congress who is backed by Tea Party conservatives, made it clear that his opposition to the practice was nearly absolute, even in instances of rape.

“It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare,” Mr. Akin said of pregnancies from rape. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something: I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”

--------------------------------------

I find Mr.Akins words outrageous, and following in my favorite feminists Eve Enslers footsteps, I am going to write Todd Akin an email, and I encourage all of you to do so, too. 

Click here to contact Mr. Akin

And, here's my letter: 

Mr. Akin, 

I would like you to know it has taken just over two years for my mind, body and spirit to recover from my rape. You can say now (in your retraction statements) that you sympathize to the fullest extent with victims/and/survivors of sexual assault, but your off-the-cuff statements reveal your true feelings towards rape culture. 

It honestly breaks my heart that a (precievably) intelligent individual such as yourself would make a comment so ignorant towards women, and rape culture. 

I - of course - have a personal connection to the issue as I have stated above, but I do not want that connection to make you think any less credible my opinion. If anything, it should strengthen the words I am about to say.

The very words you used (LEGITIMATE RAPE) make me sick to my stomach. There should be no instance when a rape is considered/referred to as not legitimate. By declaring some rapes legitimate, you are automatically saying that some sexual assaults are not legitimate... Do you know how many women a year are told that their rapes were "not legitimate?" Do you have any idea how many women slip into depression, self-medicate, take their own lives, because of ignorant men and women telling them that they weren't "really" raped, that it was their fault, that they were asking for it? 

It goes without being said that victims of sexual assault have experienced a very intense personal trauma, one that has many negative effects — these negative "symptoms" of rape are only increased tenfold when the survivor is blamed by friends, family, the media, etc.

Victims of sexual assault have enough to deal with, without obnoxious anti-abortion snobs taking away their RIGHT to have an abortion, if that is so their choice.

Many sexual assault survivors already have to deal with the torment of many people saying that their rape was not legitimate, that it was their fault, that they were asking for it — now, women who are raped also have to hear that it is their fault that their rapist impregnated them against their will, because their body should have stopped it.

Are you kidding me? Did you hear the words coming out of your mouth?

You have already backtracked your statement, but no amount of back-peddling will ever erase what you said, and I consider that a good thing - I hope people do not let your so-called "politically correct" back-peddling statements ease their minds: You meant what you said, that's why you said it. I hope people never forget your horrible words, and it brings forth positive change in our world.

I hope more than anything that maybe the opposing words you are hearing will sink in, and change your views.

With respect,

Teagan Laurel Alexander

life magazine

LIFE Magazine may be the most perfect publication of all time. The throwback photographs of issues past are just gorgeous.

After spending about an hour and a half (ooooops) sifting through pages of LIFE photograph archives, these are my favorites to share with you!

 This is one of my favorite pictures/stories in the entire world. 

"This detail from a photo by Robert C. Wiles was published as a full-page image in the 12 May 1947 issue of Life Magazine. It ran with the caption: “At the bottom of the Empire State Building the body of Evelyn McHale reposes calmly in grotesque bier, her falling body punched into the top of a car.”

"Around 10:40 am Patrolman John Morrissey, directing traffic at Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, noticed a white scarf floating down from the upper floors of the building. Moments later he heard a crash and saw a crowd converge on 34th street. Evelyn had jumped, cleared the setbacks, and landed on the roof of a United Nations Assembly Cadillac limousine parked on 34th street, some 200 ft west of Fifth Ave."

"Evelyn, still clutching a pearl necklace, looks disarmingly placid and composed – as if simply asleep. Around her, however, the broken glass and crumpled sheet metal of a car roof show the brutally destructive evidence of her 1050 ft jump. Some 60 years later the photo remains as haunting and affecting as when it was first published."

"Across the street, Robert C. Wiles, a student photographer, also noticed the commotion and rushed to the scene where he took several photos, including this one, some four minutes after her death. Later, on the observation deck, Detective Frank Murray found her tan (or maybe gray, reports differ) cloth coat neatly folded over the observation deck wall, a brown make-up kit filled with family pictures and a black pocketbook with the note which read:"

“I don’t want anyone in or out of my family to see any part of me. Could you destroy my body by cremation? I beg of you and my family – don’t have any service for me or remembrance for me. My fiance asked me to marry him in June. I don’t think I would make a good wife for anybody. He is much better off without me. Tell my father, I have too many of my mother’s tendencies.”⁵

"Her body was identified by her sister Helen Bronson and, according to her wishes, she was cremated. "

There is no grave.

Can we talk about how brilliant that story is? It's tragic, but it's just brilliant. Wow.

Oh if only we saw ads like this nowadays...

Damn women and their apples...

[fin]

aberrant

aberrant - to deviate from the proper course

Aberrant. That’s my life. Aberrant. Deviating from the proper course. That’s how my life is now, and how I always want it to be. I don’t want to go through the pre-paved steps of people before me.

I have no doubt that life would be easier if I just accepted some pre-determined destiny of mediocracy. It would be so simple, sure. I’m just not programmed like that, though. I can’t just get in some routine and never get out. I don’t want to be like one of those people who do the same shit all the time and don’t mind at all. I don’t want to be a hamster spinning around and around on the same hamster wheel until I’m dead.

Graduate college. Get an internship. Get a job. Drink some wine. Take a two week trip to Europe: an attempt to convince yourself that you are a traveler of the world. Buy a new car, get a new job. Drink some more wine. Get married. Have a baby, and loathe it for giving you stretch-marks and stealing your youth. Bake some cupcakes for your kids soccer team. Stop dying your hair. Wave goodbye to your sex life. Begin seeing a pretentious therapist who wears a bow tie. Take some zoloft. Have an affair. Send your kid off to college. Resent your wedding band tightening against the skin on your fattening finger. Paint the walls of your house. Cry on your kids wedding day. Cry at your husbands funeral. Have a stroke. Move in to a retirement facility where the television is always tuned to Jerry Springer and the food always tastes like cardboard. See the family you have left on Christmas and Easter, when they bring you a new pair of socks and try awkwardly to talk to you. Lay in bed day after day. Then eventually and with a tiny unnoticed gasp, die. 

It’s the plot of some depressing and uninteresting movie, which would be fine if that’s all it was - some dvd at the store that never gets bought -  but unfortunately it is more than that: it is the average life of most people. It is bleak and it is dismal and it seems a little bit hopeless. It’s absolutely awful: and it is nothing that I want for my future.

What would I want instead?

Spend time working on an organic farm off in the hills beyond some urban city. Fall in love multiple times with multiple different people in different ways. Spend hours upon hours sifting through records in thrift stores. Hop on a plane to Europe with a duffel bag and a wad of cash, bouncing around hostels. Drink good beer. Waste days away sitting in museums pondering art. Laugh with strangers. Have a few fun odd jobs before working finally as a performer, or a writer. Put passion into everything I do: and if I find it impossible to place my heart into something I am doing, then stop doing it. Immediately. Continue going on the types of family vacations with mom and dad that I loved so much growing up. Spend time living in Chicago, New York City, Canada, San Francisco:  but call no place home. Finally get the tattoo I’ve wanted. Climb Mount Rainier with my father. Always keep my vintage Minolta in hand and rolls of film in my pocket, and capture memories everywhere I go. Smoke some weed. Read the greats: Hemingway, Kerouac, Fitzgerald. Be arrested for publicly protesting social injustice. Find the love of my life. Do nothing that makes me unhappy, or leaves me feeling empty. Be a bartender and listen to the average people going through the motions bitch about their lives. Never resign my hopes and dreams to my age; keep doing what I want, and what I love until I die - which will not be taking place in a nursing home. 

I really do believe that it is possible to live a life like this. Jack Kerouac traveled the country getting shit-faced and shagging strangers, while writing novels. Sure, he was beat up in bars an awful lot, and died because of internal bleeding due to an abuse of alcohol - but damn, did he have a life to write about. People may criticize for his temper, his personality, but do you think Kerouac would have had anything to write about if he stayed in school, drank wisely and kept his opinions to himself? Not a shot in Hell. He had a pinch of insanity, and it was genius. 

For some people a wanderers life holds little appeal: but there is an artist - no matter what size - inside each of us that craves it, if even just a bit. It just boils down to how much of that inner-artist we allow to escape, bubbling up to the surface of our skin. 

Kerouac said this in his novel On The Road, “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!”  I can’t think of a statement more soulful and honest than this. Is it mad to screw the social standards and the common, average reality of life? Well sure it is, but for some people there is that burn, burn, burning flame inside that intensifies with each day of commonality. I feel a burning inside of my chest, my heart. I need to do something about it.

***

I wrote this twelve days before I left. I hadn’t taken my medication for a week. 

I packed a duffel bag and I hit the road. I actually did what I had been daydreaming about for months. Driving off into the dusk with my radio blasting I’m sure I looked like some badass free-spirit with not a care in the world - but in reality I had no idea where I was going, how much money I actually had with me, and I was about one sad song on the radio away from a panic attack. 

I looked down at my hands on the wheel and saw that my knuckles were white, and that I had blue ink smudges on my palms from the scribbled note I had left for my parents.

I think they will understand... I think they knew this was coming.

Escapism? Sure. I don’t know what it was exactly that I wanted to get away from, but I wanted to get away.

I sped up to sixty-five miles per hour and kept driving.

***

I threw my duffel bag on the chair and flung myself onto the stiff twin bed, but not before locking the door. This cheap motel had Norman Bates written all over it, but I didn’t care because I finally did it - I finally found the courage to hop in the car and go. Right now, even the thought that I was about to be hacked to bits in some musty hotel room my first night on the road didn’t bother me.

I must have laid in that bed for two hours before I fell asleep, staring at the rusted ceiling fan until the sound of my temporary neighbors screaming put lulled me to bed. I had a wildly vivid dream that night... I was in a hotel suite in New York City, on fifth avenue. There were people with me - friends, I suppose - but I hadn’t seen their faces before. We were blowing up balloons and on our sixth bottle of champagne from the mini-fridge. Some guy called room service and ordered lobster like it was something off the dollar menu. I was throwing balloons off the balcony to the street below, as this blonde girl snorted coke lines off of a Chanel blazer. Who snorts coke off a Chanel anything? It was the most realistic dream I ever had; You can imagine my disappointment when I woke-up not to find a chandelier or champagne, but my damp thirty-dollar a night room. A cockroach scuttled across the floor: that was my cue to leave. I didn’t even change my clothes from the night before, just grabbed my bag, ran downstairs and after buying a can of pineapple juice, I was on the road again.

***

One thousand two-hundred dollars. That’s what I had with me. Unless I could find a way to make money on the road that didn’t involve pushing drugs or my body on someone else’s, less than two grand was my life-savings. If I was going to make this last, I would have to watch every penny. I pulled over to the side of the highway and grabbed a notepad from the backseat. Hotel: One night, thirty dollars. I thought of Henry David Thoreau, in the first few chapters of Walden when he wrote very descriptively about building his house, including in detail how much he spent on materials (twenty-eight dollars and twelve and one-half cents). I recalled being assigned that book in sophomore literature, and being quizzed on how much Thoreau had spent on nails. A whole book filled with these transcendental, progressive thoughts, pages on the beauty of nature, and you’re going to grade me based on if I remember the amount of cash Thoreau dished out on nails? Well yes, excuse me societal discoveries and the realms of the human condition, I’m going to have to ignore you now and focus on whether Thoreau spent four dollars on nails, or three.

This is why people don’t like to read.

I cranked up the radio, scribbled down “One can of pineapple juice: Fifty cents” and pulled back onto the highway.

***

I floored seventy for twenty hours, pulled into some little coffee shops parking lot and slept until noon the next day. When I woke-up, I had the urge to turn around and drive back home, but home was too far away by now.

***

I would love feedback on this - this is a sneak peek of a book I have been working on for months now.

What do you think about it, thus far? I'd love to know.

the bad-tasters

audrey kitching, tavi gevinson, iris apfel :

 famed for their fashion faux-paus

well i think they are just brilliant

knee socks, hair buns, chunky frames, and a classic tee? 

...isn't that just the beeeeeeeeeeees knees!

[it is, they are]

collages and hodgepodges

i made some collages this morning, images that woke up my mind.

cupcakes and cashmere

i feel like i need to share one of my favorite bloggers - emily schuman - with all of you!

emily writes for cupcakes&cashmere, a lovely website divided into four sections: outfits, recipes, how to, and decor

not an official "section" of the site, my favorite posts from emily are five things, a post that happens about once a week, where emily posts five random things she's diggin' at the moment.

here's some of my favorite outfits from emily!

get ready to drool over her effortless style.

you can go into the archives, and see emily's fashion evolve from the year 2008, up until today. you can definitely see a maturation in style - and it's brilliant.

emily authored a book by the same title,

which is going to be added to my barnes&noble cart very soon.

*** sometimes there seems to be an awful lot of competition and girl-hate between fashion/beauty/lifestyle bloggers, which i think is ridiculous. we all have the same interests, passions — i use other fashion blogs for inspiration, for critique — and i recommend becoming an avid cupcake&cashmerer, like me. 

more eye candy please!

let's bring the grunge scene back into mainstream media/fashion, can we?

there's no big story to go with this, or anything...

i just wanted to share how purrrrrrrfect mk & ashley are.

fashion washion

ahh, hello!

what's going on in the fashion-sphere, you ask?

one. u.s customs got their hands on over twenty thousand pairs of knock-off louboutins at lax/// that's about eighteen million dollars worth of illegal pumps.

those border protection bitches don't look so happy - if only the knock-offs were a bit upper scale.

two. my favorite bankrupt designer is set to launch a spring dress line// praise the fashion gods, betsey johnson isn't dead yet. the dresses are estimated to cost between $99 and $249 and be sold in boutiques and in department stores - the day betsey gets her stores back, i will cry tears of hot pink and leopard joy - the dresses will make their debut on the runway at a fashion show this september. 

i'm excited to see betsey be reborn. hopefully with a bit more money smarts this time around.