A World War I poster from the U.S. Food Administration by F.G. Cooper.
I would like to hang it in my kitchen.
Via Wall Blank, $24.
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Author: Rebecca Healy
My goal is to help you find meaningful work, enjoy the heck out of it, and earn more money.
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Red Balloon
Please tell me you’ve seen The Red Balloon? It’s a charming short film that follows a little boy across Paris who is following a red balloon. This print is a charming nod to the spirit of the film. And yes, I’m on a balloon kick.
Monsieur III via The Shiny Squirrel, $30.
For the past eight or nine months, I’ve created a bubble around me of people I trust, making sweeping efforts to withdraw from drama. Through this process, I learned; the bubble always pops.
Here’s what that’s like for me: Imagine, you’re a crumb and you fall onto the sidewalk and an ant discovers you. His tiny ant friends are soon alerted and before you know it, you’re swarmed! A disgusting black blanket moves furtively and anxiously to completely and methodically chew through your every last morsel. The very thought makes me sick.
And more than anything, this is what it’s like when things are outside my locus of control. And I love control, especially in all of its anxiety-ridden devastation.
“Anxiety is not fear, exactly, because fear is focused on something right in front of you, a real and objective danger,” reports the New York Times. “It is instead a kind of fear gone wild, a generalized sense of dread about something out there that seems menacing — but that in truth is not menacing, and may not even be out there. If you’re anxious, you find it difficult to talk yourself out of this foreboding; you become trapped in an endless loop of what-ifs.”
For me, the what-ifs appear with even the simplest of situations. Ryan will inquire, for instance, if I would like to attend a concert last-minute, and my chest will immediately be gripped with all of the possible unknowns, and how all of these unknowns make it impossible for me to go.
Where is it? What time does it start? Are we going to get there late? Do we have to pay a cover? Will I have to walk in heels? I don’t have a cute outfit without heels. It’s going to be cold outside. Will I have to stand at the concert and carry my coat? Will it be hot? Will there be a lot of people? Are the people going be younger than me? Will they be boring? Will the band be good? Who’s going with? Are we going to get drinks after? Will the restrooms be clean? I can’t stand public restrooms.
No, I don’t want to go. I can’t go. Rationality urges me to do my make-up and try on clothes while anxiety grips my heart so tightly that I’m dripping with angst. By the time Ryan arrives, I’m paralyzed into doing everything I can not to burst into tears.
I distinctly remember my first such outburst in a sixth-grade hallway. After an elementary school of calm, I peeled back the doors on middle school to discover inequalities, insecurities and the bulging wart of worry – a reoccurring blemish in my otherwise untarnished path towards happiness.
Taken together, panic, social anxiety, phobia, obsessive-compulsive, post-traumatic stress and generalized anxiety disorder, make anxiety the most common mental illness in America, affecting an estimated 40 million adults, reports the Times. That’s not even counting the garden-variety worriers like mothers who fret when their daughter doesn’t call, or husbands that believe a phone call in the middle of the night signals a terrible occurrence.
My coping mechanism is to nest as methodically as anxiety chews. Withdrawing further perpetuates the vicious cycle of shrinking into comfort, into habits, into a place that is safe and away from criticism or mistakes or hurt or anger. I crave the days that are built around everything going according to plan.
Research shows that I’m good for the human race. Without those who are hyperviligant, we wouldn’t be able to leap into action so quickly. High-reactive kids are “less likely to experiment with drugs, to get pregnant or to drive recklessly.”
The Times also reports we’re “generally conscientious and almost obsessively well-prepared. Worriers are likely to be the most thorough workers and the most attentive friends. Someone who worries about being late will plan to get to places early. Someone anxious about giving a public lecture will work harder to prepare for it. Test-taking anxiety can lead to better studying; fear of traveling can lead to careful mapping of transit routes.”
But for me, the mental anguish of wearing myself ragged “with a brain that’s always on high alert” is suffocating. I long to be laidback. To be the kind of person who doesn’t wring their hands under the table. The kind of person who “gives up any notion of being guarded or protected” in order to be intimately known. A person that can arrive effortlessly to a concert.
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How do you measure up?
We’ve all heard that how tall you are at work can help and being overweight can hinder you. But did you also know that being short is a big part of the mix as well? The New York Times reports:
The shorter you are in America, the more likely your chances to develop coronary heart disease, diabetes or stroke... A decrease in a man’s height to the 25th percentile from the 75th — roughly to 5 feet 8 inches from 6 feet— is associated with, on average, a dip in earnings of 6 to 10 percent…
And like obese people, short people are less likely to finish college than those of average weight. A paper from the July issue of the journal Economics and Human Biology used survey data from more than 450,000 adults to conclude that male college graduates are, on average, more than an inch taller than men who never finished high school…
The economist John Komlos has shown that the United States is losing height relative to other developed nations, and some American demographic groups are even shrinking in absolute terms. Yet we tend to discount shortness as a mere byproduct of genetics and early-life experience, while treating the obesity epidemic as if it were a grave danger to public health. Why can’t our campaign to reshape the American body have two fronts? If we really want to make our country healthier, let’s have a war on shortness too.
This ring is one of the more unique and cute versions of the large flower ring I’ve seen and comes from the same designer as the Plaid Pintuck Dress.
Via Spool No. 72, $24.
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Weekend Ride
If I could do anything this weekend, it would be to go on a hot-air balloon ride. And I’m not sure there is anything as iconic as the hot air balloon to represent pure, fanciful imagination… ah. Happy Weekend, everyone!
More photos from Celine via A Cup of Joe.
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Your passion is lost on others
13-year old Tavi posted this excerpt from a Washington Post piece on her blog:
It’s always a bit discombobulating when people raise their voices in anger because they’ve gotten wind that designers are making and selling $25,000 dresses. After all, it’s not as if the existence of a dress that costs as much as a car negates the availability of cute $25 frocks at Target. And it isn’t as though edicts have been issued that all women must now dress like one of the superheroes on Balenciaga’s runway.
For personal and sometimes tortured reasons — I can’t have it so no one else can! — observers declare that they just don’t understand the attraction of these strange and expensive clothes. That would be a fair argument if those same complainers lashed out at people who spend thousands of dollars on Redskins season tickets, vintage wines, first-edition books or midlife-crisis cars. But those industries don’t stir nearly as much ire from people who are uninterested in them.
Everyone has a passion that is lost on others.
From The Washington Post via Style Rookie.
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Ignore Fox News?
Journalism is taking hits in more places than one. Not only has its validity and usefulness been questioned by the entire blogosphere, but increasingly, its integrity has taken a beating as well. Nowhere do the shiners show up more than upon the face of Fox News, whose incredibly biased coverage on President Obama has raised red flags, all the way up to the White House.
Slate Magazine shared their take this past weekend:
Any news organization that took its responsibilities seriously would take pains to cover presidential criticism fairly. It would regard doing so as itself a test of integrity and take pains not to load the dice in its own favor. At any other network, accusation of bias might even lead to some soul-searching and behavioral adjustment. At Fox, by contrast, complaints of unfairness prompt only hoots of derision and demands for “evidence” and “proof,” which when presented is brushed off and ignored.
And while I agree with Slate and detest Fox more than I can say, I can’t help but remember another opinion piece by Frank Rich at the New York Times, where he argued that during the first 100 days of the presidency, Obama’s mere presence cottoned such unprecedented praise and agreement that the press couldn’t help but gush. And sometimes positive bias is as worrisome as negative.
Ignore Fox via Slate.
For whatever reason, the art of writing seems more fully expressed when published via a typewriter or your own hand. Words seem especially poignant. Like when Mick Jagger tells Andy Warhol, “He will probably look nervous and say ‘Hurry up’ but take little notice.”
Ever since Carol Bartz became CEO of Yahoo, I’ve been watching her closely. I love that she’s a woman leading a tech company, I love that she’s outspoken, and despite all her detractors, I think she’s going to do amazing things for Yahoo. Every interview she does is awesome, and I particularly liked these quotes from a recent piece in the New York Times:
When people come to me and say, “I can’t work for so-and-so anymore,” I say, “Well, what have you learned from so-and-so?” People want to take a bad situation and say, “Oh, it’s bad.” No, no. You have to deal with what you’re dealt. Otherwise you’re going to run from something and not to something. And you should never run from something.
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I grew up in the Midwest. My mom died when I was 8, so my grandmother raised my brother and me. She had a great sense of humor, and she never really let things get to her. My favorite story is when we were on a farm in Wisconsin; I would have probably been 13. There was a snake up in the rafter of the machine shed. And we ran and said, “Grandma, there’s a snake.” And she came out and she knocked it down with a shovel, chopped its head off and said, “You could have done that.” And, you know, that’s the tone she set. Just get it done. Just do it. Pick yourself up. Move on. Laugh.
—
Via the New York Times.
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Japanese Poster 1
This print is by far one of my favorites right now and in fact, I bought it and it now hangs above my laptop at home. Artist Valero Doval is based in London and has a devastatingly interesting portfolio. I’m loving some of his newer work too – see Drawers, IncorporealEnergy and HiddenCompositions – and would buy them in an instant if only they were on sale.
Japanese Poster 1 via inPRNT, $40.
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The Burning “T”
Normally I don’t go for things that are ridden with deeper, darker associations, but set designer Gary Card’s Burning T was just too powerful to pass up. Created for New York Time’s Tmagazine, Card describes his work as “a burning effigy in a dramatic countryside setting” which “sounded like too much fun not to do.” Other inspirations came from The Wicker Man, a 1973 English cult horror film that features pagan ritual and is a film I will probably never, ever see.
“We lit it with a blowtorch,” Card continues, “and then ran for our lives.”
The result is one of the best sculptural pieces I’ve seen.
Via The Moment.