“This is not the look I was going for.”
Towel in hand, the photographer is wiping up the dusty remnants of a weekend renovation spent dividing two windowless studios into three windowless studios. It looks like a stable for animals and something about the encroachment of space has made the task seem less humane. They’ve taken away the sofa in the corner and now everyone has to share the same music while we shoot ecommerce all day.
IT’S 9 p.m. and I am coming to grips with the fact that I am royally f’ed up, possibly unsalvageable. Though that should hardly come as a surprise. For the last eight months, I have masochistically subjected myself to hanging out with a boy who never wanted to hold my hand and who struggled, most of the time, to look me in the eye when talking to me. On a few occasions, he would listen to me from across the expanse of his living room, and he would look at me then, safe in the ten feet of distance between us. Still, a palpable guardedness lived just behind the stare, nervously peering at me from behind a wall he built, as though if he engaged with me in a real way, he would fall down some rabbit hole. I watched him cling to that edge for months on end, waiting for him to slip, to connect, to commit in some way. But he was unyielding. And so now, thanks to him, I have my own walls.
The following is an excerpt from a piece originally featured on The Style Con:
The year is 2004, 2005, or 2006, and it is some month that ends with a letter from the alphabet, probably an “r” or a “y” given probability and statistics. I could try to furnish you with a more specific timeframe, but Los Angeles, with its painfully weatherless void and ever-sunny disposition, has robbed my memory of signposts, of welcome signifiers that are imperative to detailed storytelling. While the time might be a blur and the window during which it happened wide, I have clarity of a few arguably more pertinent details:
One, it happened in a parking lot.
Two, he was a massively painful douche.
The following is an excerpt from a piece originally featured on The Style Con:
Sure you’ve all heard about it. Robin Thicke did some alleged screwin’ around and then got the boot from the wifey (good on you, girl), Paula Patton. There’s only so much Miley Cyrus-stage-groping, Emily Wat-ta-tow-kow-ski whatever tit-shaking a girl can handle. Locks were changed, phone calls ignored, you know, BREAKUPS. And so Robin Thicke did what every boy I ever dumped did for me (HAAAAAAA), wrote an album about it. It’s called Paula. Every song on it is dedicated to her. And that is weird.
The following is an excerpt from a piece originally featured on The Style Con:
There are stacks of shoes in the living room, piles of sandals and sneakers and everything else foot-related we’ve dragged into our little Mexican casita for the holiday weekend. My pair is there: strappy and delicate and now, unfortunately, completely covered in mud. There they sit, simple and feminine, amongst four other pairs of Birkenstocks, none of which belong to the granola-munching, hemp-milk making, farm-working hippie that they have been associated with over the last one billion years. They belong to my friends, who are, if you’ll forgive my boastfulness, some righteously fashionable babes.
The following is an excerpt from a piece originally featured on The Style Con:
“Love the sinner, hate the sin.” Aside from the opening line (“Life is difficult!”) of The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth—junior year required reading that replaced something more, I don’t know, of actual literary value—the sinner/sin phrase is one of the few things I actually remember from my Catholic high school education, stamped down in memory not for its truth, but for its utterly unfathomable judgment, piousness, and cruel exclusion—something I was readily able to recognize as a still-developing 16-year-old.
The following is an excerpt from a post originally featured on The Style Con:
In an effort to expand our social reach in the time-honored tradition known as click-bait journalism (that doesn’t have to do with Terry Richardson touching young women inappropriately, or appropriately, depending on what you’ve taken away from that recent article in New York Mag), we’ve reluctantly decided made a very conscious editorial decision to interview fashion blogger Kassidy Karmine of the incredibly popular Style Water Bottle, to learn about her arduous journey in the biz—offering an intimate glimpse on how she went from a community college dropout to one of fashion’s most pseudo respected, unfathomably well-paid and categorically untrained voices in the industry.
The following is a piece originally featured on xoJane.com:
A pair of very hot hands hover just above my hairline, nearest the right side of my face. My eyes are closed, my brain doing its very best to think of nothing whatsoever, when a memory of a guy who ripped my heart out three years ago comes rushing towards the surface. He’s right there, in these cells, a series of repressed memories living just beneath the surface of my skin… at least if you believe in the power of Reiki.
Impulsiveness. It’s the scourge of the Aries, a type of marked characteristic that likely defines murderers, thieves, and people really bad at calm, stable, interpersonal relationships. Whether or not this can actually be attributed to my rising sign (my moon sign sucks, by the way, and we’re not going to talk about it), it’s the type of thing that causes me to fire off emails before thinking of the repercussions of my words. It’s what spins me on my heel and sends me running after feeling the sledgehammer of hinted rebuke. Do now! Think later! That’s impulsiveness.
The following is an excerpt from a piece originally featured on The Style Con:
“You got anyone you can set Vance up with?”
I’m sitting on a set of patio furniture likely worth more than what I make in a year, basking in the unadulterated sun that this mansion’s 80 sprawling acres of land provides. A drop of sweat slides down my torso to settle near my waist. I look at Vance. I look at his friends. I consult my mental Rolodex of girls I hate enough to set up with this person.
“No.”
