Life! and Baking! (what else is there?)

I requested the score breakdown of my FSOTs (did I mention I passed? I did. I don’t think I wrote an entry on it though) and part of me is glad that I did and the other part kind of wishes I hadn’t.
The part that is glad I did is because I passed by a pretty narrow margin (you need 154 total and I have 160.9 total) and it kind of makes me take the whole thing a little more seriously: I am not going to coast by on this one. The part that wishes I hadn’t is the part that was super confident that I could do this. I’m a big believer in confidence getting you through things. If you are confident that this is something you have in the bag, that confidence is going to work you through the stress and the nerves and the whole process in general. And now, I’m researching all these people who are better qualified than I am (e.g. they speak Chinese) who did not pass the FSOT process the first time around. The confidence is still there – in the form of I am completely confident that whatever I end up doing, once I commit myself to it, I will be fully capable of doing it well.
But I mean, shit. Like I want this, I think it would be awesome, I think I would enjoy my life as a Foreign Service Officer but it hasn’t been my life ambition. I want this career because I think it would be dynamic and meaningful. I would be directly effecting people’s lives in the consular track and yet I wouldn’t be doing the same damn thing in the same damn place – it appeals to my need to move around and my tendency to get restless every few years. The thought of doing this whole process over again is frustratingly tedious.

I’ve been tweaking the Plan B and Plan C (and rotating back and forth which is B and which is C), making sure I have all the research and ducks in a row for career alternatives if this falls through. But I’ve also started thinking about continuing to pursue the FSO track regardless – maybe going to graduate school, spending the next year lining things up to make this actually happen if it doesn’t happen this round. The thought that I might have committed to this is scary. It’s one thing to sign up for the FSOT on a sort of whim and start the process because I don’t have any better ideas and I think I’d love the career. It’s another thing to actually want it. Now that I actually want it, and want it badly enough to consider starting the process all over again if I fail, now that I’ve actually committed to it, it will be all the worse if I get knocked back to square one at any step along the way.

I had dinner and went to the Midori class (through Whole DC) with J last night. He was amused because he got the impression that it was a pretty tame class for kink standards and that I was definitely easing him in. Which is true. We had fun though, all covered in scarves like a deranged “kinky” Christmas present.
I was telling J about my Plan B and Plan C and he pointed out that he’s dated me for two months now and I’ve gone through how many possible career tracks? I haven’t really gone through them and we started dating right after I signed up for the FSOT, so it’s not as bad as all that, but yea. Part of it is that I want a dynamic life. I fully intend to be that person who has had so many career changes and life changes that my resume will look as ADD as I am (which is not, actually, technically ADD, but whatever). I’ve wanted to be a professor/academic, a lawyer, a sex therapist, a foreign service officer, an event planner, and a pastry chef. I’ve laid the groundwork for lots of those – took the GRE, am working in a law firm, took some practice LSATs, took the FSOT, made connections with other event planners, researched culinary schools, spoken with current students…
Eventually something will fall into place, I’m sure of it.

Life just kind of works that way.

Things baked recently:

• Black bottom cupcakes with orange food dye in the cream cheese filling (for Halloween, recipe from smittenkitchen.com)
• cauliflower and pancetta puffed crepes (from Savory Baking by Mary Cech)
• Apple-Apple Bread Pudding (from Greenspan’s Baking)
• Peanut butter Crisscrosses (also from Greenspan)

My favorite was by far the Apple-Apple Bread Pudding. Oh gods do I love bread pudding and this was so tasty I was kind of surprised I made it. The puffed crepes were also wicked tasty, combined with mild surprise that I actually managed to cook a dinner that tasty but they look bloody forever. That cookbook, Savory Baking? I got it through Amazon’s vine program and it might be my new favorite cookbook (not to be beaten out by Greenspan’s work). I don’t care how complicated and time consuming it is, I want to bake everything in it. That’s right. BAKE. Because simple things like a decent pasta dish and sauted veggies are beyond me but a three hour long dinner involving egg yolks and egg whites and mixing things just so is totally doable.

Recent Book Reviews:
Savory Baking by Mary Cech
All Cakes Considered by Melissa Gray

Carb Overload

Yesterday I went out to my parent’s house in the ‘burbs. My father taught me how to make the bread that his Aunt taught him how to make (using loaf pans that date back to the 1930s and are very well seasoned to say the least). He’s not a very good teacher, but I think I picked up enough where at the very least my future attempts to make “Pain de Manage” (my family’s French-Canadian and my father could not quite translate “Manage” when I was like – bread of what? – and google translate is not helpful) won’t be a complete disaster. I don’t know if I have enough pent up aggression to truly knead bread like I should, but we’ll see.
I also went to Wegmans, which is like Mecca for those of us who bake and live in the city. I bought some 20 lbs of flour (99 cents for 5 lbs – one 5lb would easily be $3.50+ at any of the stores I frequent here in DC) and an excessive amount of brown sugar, regular sugar, and confectioner’s sugar. Basically, I now have a very well stocked pantry. And by pantry I mean the kitchen cart that is in my bedroom that also doubles as my dresser. Multi-purpose furniture, it’s a feature of city living.

Last night, I slept for eleven hours. Now, y’all that know me know that I usually get some five hours of sleep and that more than seven is extremely unusual for me. I can thank the allergy medicine that I took for that marathon sleep session. I can also probably thank it for the dream I had about being a vampire during the second Noah’s flood to that as well, but I usually have weird dreams (that have only gotten worse since I got on the NuvaRing), so that might not be a chemical’s fault. (Though actually, the weirdest part of that dream was not the flood or the vampires, it was the having sex with an ex girlfriend. I mean. Really.)

And if you thought spending the day baking bread was baking-intensive, today was more so. I made lemon bars, mostly for my office manager who was with me during my marathon working this past week (where I worked 32 hours out of a 38 hour period – small law firm, filing due Friday). So the lemon bars are a sort of Monday pick me up. I make these bars rather well, if I do say so myself. They’re not terribly difficult – the main ingredients being butter, sugar, eggs, and lemon juice. But they are just the right amount of lemon and just the right amount of crunch.

Shortly after that, my friend Brittany came over and we baked. Well, we started it off with some my family’s home made bread, fried and spread with nutella. We then proceeded to make the Double Apple Bundt cake on p.184 of Dorie Greenspan’s Baking and Pumpkin Lasanga (courtesy of Brittany’s brain – she didn’t follow a recipe for this one). The pumpkin lasagna was tasty and nicely spiced and I like the vague sweetness of that better than your traditional lasagna. The Double Apple Bundt Cake tastes like fall. It’s moist with a good texture and with a lot of subtle notes to it, like all of Greenspan’s recipes that I have tried. It’d make a good coffee cake – we had ours with Blue Moon’s Harvest Ale (more carbs) – but it is warm and spicy and a perfect fall recipe.

So that was my lazy Sunday. I love days like this. I mean, I love being busy – I looked at my calendar recently and realized I have all of two days free between now and the end of the month – but I love when my “busy”/”plans” are hanging out with a friend, drinking beer, and baking.

That being said, I am entering a carb coma. I’m going to roll myself into bed and read a book for awhile.

Grumpy Morning Monster!

It’s been well established that I’m a morning person. I wake up at 6:30 am even when I don’t need to pretty regularly and I haven’t slept past 9am since college. It actually throws off my entire day if I sleep past 8am so I usually just don’t try.
I wake up and I am cheerful. Like, if I am sharing a bed with someone I have to consciously reign it in because most people cannot handle my level of happiness in the morning. Some lovers to the point of turning down morning blow jobs.
Do you hear that? People have turned down enthusiastic morning wake up calls. I mean, yea, it was like, 6:30 in the morning on a Saturday but that is not the principle of the matter. I am wide awake, cheerful and sexual and I want nothing more at 6:30 in the morning than to please my lover until they wake up the neighbors with their fun noises and they’d rather sleep an extra two hours. Or three. I have a hard time comprehending that, but I can restrain myself, I swear.

So yes. The fact that I am a morning person is well established. But this week, as fall has finally settled into Washington D.C. and it has been mostly rainy or almost rainy, I have been nothing but grumpy in the morning. I wake up and it is barely light out and I groggily drag my ass through my morning routine, debating whether or not the hour at the gym is really worth dealing with this clearly uncheerful morning. It has been colder than a witch’s tit in my room lately – we finally turned the heat on in the house, but with my wonderful windows and the door to the sunroom it gets drafty. When I crawl into bed it takes a good forty minutes for me to stop shivering under my down comforter and wool blanket. I’m even wearing flannel pjs and a sweater to bed (and let me tell you, I don’t usually wear my pjs for any reason other than to comfort my roommates when I’m wandering around the house).
So in the morning, my bed is the absolute warmest thing in my room and the sun is not up and it’s rainy and dreary and this has done loads of damage to my over all mood lately (other contributing factors: my period, overtime at the office, and prolonged, unintentional, celibacy).

So yes. I miss being cheerful in the morning. I miss feeling that the world smells so wonderful and that I could achieve anything I set my mind to it and that nothing could be better than being alive right now. Because for real, I feel that way every morning in the hours before 10 am. Usually. But not lately.
I miss the morning sun.

What I Want to be When I Grow Up

Foreign Service Officer (Consular tract)
Why I’d be good at this: Analytical and people-oriented. The “international studies” field is an interdisciplinary one that covers many of the things I’m interested in intellectually – history, culture, diplomacy. I had fun taking the test for it.
Why I want to do this: The State Department would give me a chance to use my leadership skills while still allowing me the direction of an established career. The adventure of meeting new people and experiencing new things.
Why I don’t want to do this: The people in my life right now are really important to me. I want a family. I want to own a house. I want enough stability to be able to do that and spending the next decade or so flitting around the globe in a manner out of my control possibly closes the door on that.

Event Planner
Why I’d be good at this: I’m very organized, an effective planner, and good at networking. I really enjoy researching and get a kick out of etiquette and culture. I love being behind the scenes and am generally calm during times of high stress. I love doing something that I know will make someone (or multiple someones) happy and if I’m doing my job right, I’d be doing that a lot.
Why I want to do this: Offers the adventure of meeting new people and traveling while still allows me to be use DC as my home base. Utilizes my organization and planning skills in a proactive, creative way. I have a background in art, composition, and graphic design – while I’m not an artist, those are all skills that I miss using and would use in this field. Would possible be in the form of a small business owner (eventually) and that’s something else I’ve always thought that I’d be good at.
Why I don’t want to do this: I’d have to be “on” all the time (on = putting my best face forward all the time). Dealing with people who have impossible visions for events (e.g., “I want to have a fairy tale wedding at this venue for $15,000 or less.” “But the venue costs $10,000.” “Make it happen.” “…”)

Lawyer
Why I’d be good at this: I have an analytical mind, I love research and I’ve got more than solid writing skills. I think like a lawyer in a lot of ways. I enjoy working on briefs.
Why I want to do this: The career is very flexible and usually has a solid financial result.
Why I don’t want to do this: Dealing with lawyers for the rest of my life. Going to law school.

Any thoughts on the above?

(Is it cocky of me to feel like I would be good at anything I set my mind to? That really, it’s just a matter of figuring out what I want to set my mind to?)

Musings on Being a Woman

I own seven dresses. Three are little black dresses.
I do not have room for all of my heels in my ten-shoe closet hanger. Granted, I also keep booze there, but that is not the point.
Most of my clothes are Anthropologie or Free People brands. I specifically like Ella Moss and Ric Rac. (I don’t pay full price, I bargain hunt)
Earlier this month, I also bought perfume from Anthropologie.
I just invested money in getting a basic (mineral based sheer veil, various kinds of lip gloss, mascara, brushes, etc.) make up set going.
My RSS feed has three wedding blogs on it. In my defense, mostly B’s fault.
I really, really enjoy sex with men. Not all men – there are still distinct types of men I want nothing to do with and I feel they are still the majority – but once you filter those out… yum.
I crave chocolate like woah.
I cry during chick flicks. Even those I’ve seen before.
I read romance novels. I actually have particular authors that I like.
My amazon wishlist is mostly kitchen supplies.
I absolutely love baking.

What makes someone female?
I thought about that constantly during high school and college, when I felt like “girl” did not fit. Or, it fit, but rather awkwardly, like a pair of hand me down shoes two sizes too small. I came to the conclusion that the problem was not me. Rather, the problem was society’s definition of what a woman was.
Yet now, years later, I might actually fit what society’s definition of girl is.

But none of those above listed things – things that were absolutely not true three years ago (or less?) – make me a girl. Nor do they make me a term that does fit rather nicely – woman.
I would have become a woman without those trappings. So what made me a woman?
This process, this becoming a woman, is actually what my back tattoo symbolizes. I can’t even articulate the process, but that is what I was thinking when I developed the idea for it.
It drives me crazy that I don’t have the words for that shift. Not the external trappings I just listed off – but the inner changes that snowballed myself into something completely different. Externally, people comment on how I have seemingly done a one-eighty from my lesbian-birk-wearin-andro-butch days. I don’t feel like it was a spin, I don’t feel like that’s accurate at all.
If anything, I feel more solid. More grounded. I have no idea where I am going in my life and I don’t have the words for how this all happened, but I feel at peace with myself.
I feel like whatever happened, whatever changes that have gone on in my habits, I have remained true to myself. And I know who I am. I like who I am.

I don’t need words for that.

On the FSOT and my life

So, I took the Foreign Service Officer’s Test (“FSOT”) this past Friday.¹

Like most of my major life choices, I decided to sign up for the exam on impulse during a stressful time (when my life gets stressful, I take action, even when that action is not directly related to the cause of my stress). It wasn’t a whim – I’ve thought about working for the state department on and off again for years and have done plenty of research on it – but the decision to go for the October FSOT was a little last minute, I registered only a month before I ended up taking the exam itself, after it just kind of clicked. In that, hey. I should do this kind of way.

The FSOT is step one of forty bajillion in a hoop-jumping process to work for the State Department. If I passed, I will have to take a day long “Orals” section – somewhere between oral tests and a job interview – and then there’s a few more steps that I haven’t allowed myself to really think about yet because I’m a one-step-at-a-time kind of girl.

Here’s the thing: I find myself wondering if I actually want to pass this exam.

Working for the state department is something that I am confident that I would be good at. It is a career that I would enjoy and grow with and an environment that I would thrive in. I had fun taking that exam. I had fun reading up on the field before I took the exam. The career itself is not the problem. The problem is just how important my friends and family are to me. How much I rely on the support network I’ve developed to keep me sane. How much I would miss the life that I have here in DC. I want to own a house. I want a long term, primary partner. I want a cat. Kids, eventually. How much of that is really possible if every two years I’m shipped off to some random country? I’m fucking terrified that if I follow this career path I’m shutting the door on all of those things and loosing everything that I have and love here. That I’ll end up completely alone in another country without the solid groundings that I currently have.

I know I can do it. I’ve done it. And it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Yet I’m still drawn to it. I still think that this has the potential to be a very fulfilling career for me.

Which would be perfect if I was the type to think that a career is everything.

Plan “A.2″ (Plan A.1 being the foreign service) is to work my way into the event planning field. Start taking courses at GW for the certificate, start sending out resumes, building up a savings, networking… The problem is, I’m impatient. I’m restless with my current job and I want to get moving on this career thing now.

It will be six weeks before I know if I’ve passed the FSOT or not. If I passed it, it will be goddess knows how long before I take the Orals and know if I’ve passed those. The whole process takes eight months to two years depending on various factors. Do I even have the patience for that? Do I want it badly enough to sit on my hands for the next few months? What do I want? Is a fulfilling career more important to me right now than family and friends? What good does a fulfilling career do me if I’m miserable in other ways? Who will I be if I put this above my friends and family? Who will I be if I am halfway around the world for funerals, weddings, graduations? There’s a lot of those coming up in my life and I want to be there for them.

Is it possible to do both? To have all of the things I want in the realm of family and friends and still be a foreign service officer?

I wish I knew. I wish there was a way to know.

¹ I think I did well? I don’t know, finishing first is usually enough to make a person nervous. I didn’t feel drained though, I felt energized and generally feel more positive about this than I did with the GRE. Which is good, because I did not particularly do well on the GRE.

Goals for October / Next Six Months

Goals for October

• Loose three pounds. completed 10/12 – new goal: maintain
• Eat out less, cook at home more (these two goals might conflict with each other).
• Learn how to Bake Bread

Things I Want to Do in the Next Six Months

• learn how to bake my father’s bread.
• start rock climbing again
• finish my lace blanket project
• go camping
• go some place I’ve never been before.
• get a new job
• get a new computer
• start re-learning French
• recoup my savings.

Cinnamon Rolls

Baking home made cinnamon rolls is apparently an all-morning project, something that I did not really think through when I decided to make them. However, I think the verdict was that the extra time and effort does produce something significantly better than cinnamon-rolls-in-can.

I followed smitten kitchen’s cinnamon swirl bun recipe. Some alternations: I forgot the salt in the dough (typical, if I’m going to forget anything, it’s the salt). The dough took over an hour to rise the second time around, so prepare for about three plus hours of rising in general. I also used a 9 x 13 baking pan instead of two 9 x 9s. They barely fit into the pan (as in there was barely enough rolls to fill the pan), but they expanded a bit in the oven. Three hours of rising and only twenty minutes of actual baking! Sheesh.

And they were tasty. Way better than the roll-in-the-can option and the cream-cheese based frosting totally makes it.
Of course, being told that they’re only really good for a day, that means I just had to consume as many as I could handle before they go bad. I mean really, all that effort? Can’t let it go to waste. Instead, it went to my waist. Maybe I’ll wake up earlier tomorrow and burn some extra calories to take the edge off that binge? I feel like I have to roll myself into the kitchen and make ginger tea to help the sugar-induced indigestion.

Anyway. So I had friends over and we all had little fiber arts projects to work on, so after coffee, cinnamon rolls (and option apple pancakes, which I also made, using shredded tart apples, lemon juice, vanilla, and a significant amount of cinnamon. They were tasty, but overshadowed by the rolls), and 5 cent tours of my new abode, we hung out and watched Hocus Pocus while knitting (or crocheting. Soybean just likes to be different like that). I’m currently working on the second glove of my fingerless gloves, just in time for fall to actually arrive in Washington, D.C.
Soybean also bought me a really bad ass print for my room. It’s a mixed media piece by Erica Moen of DAR, who was at the Bethesda Small Press Fair last weekend. It’s a nude woman in the style of a Catholic saint (complete with the golden halo) who has ball gag and wrist cuffs. It says me so much that I just know it will have to come down when my Super-Catholic-Conservative father comes by next.

It was a good afternoon, though I crashed hard post-sugar high. After all that cooking, I’m going to nuke myself some left over thai food and read my trashy novel instead of studying for the Foreign Service Officer Test – an exam that I will be damned surprised to do well on and am largely unmotivated to study for other than thinking that it’d be a cool job and an actual career.

I don’t know. We’ll see how that goes this Friday, eh?

It’s Been Awhile

I think that I lost myself there for a bit. In general. Then I had this major stress explosion back in August.

And in September?

I started dating J.

I moved into DC (I have the internet now!).

I worked ridiculous over time.

And, after spending most of the past month fighting, I broke up with Kiwi this past Monday.

The last was really unexpected and not planned, but that’s how the cards fell.

It’s weird, to know that you can love someone but realize that you don’t want to be in a relationship with them.

That you have values and priorities that six months ago, you didn’t know you had.

I’m still settling into those realizations and the internet has enough mutual friends where the details don’t need to be gone over. Ask me over coffee, perhaps. Or don’t. Either way, continue to love us separately. We’re both still us, though I am acutely aware how many of our mutual friends are in couples now.

So here I am. It’s October. The past two months have been rather hellish. Tuesday and Wednesday I was so completely emotionally drained and run down that I was practically useless on many levels. Poor S tried to tie me up and I could barely keep my hands up for the wrist cuffs. Being dead tired and burnt out does not lead to good scene energy.

And yet. Thursday morning, waking up to the smell of October… Gods I love that smell. I felt reassured that I’ve made some right decisions, reassured that I’m on the right track. That I’m moving towards something. What that something is, I don’t know. But I can actually see the path in front of me now, I’ve stopped looking for the road signs to lead my way and instead, I’m following my instinct. Road signs can be misleading, anyway.

October has started out on a note of contentedness, on self-assurance, on a new sense of identity and purpose.

Life is good.

* * *

I went dancing at Phase 1 (lesbian bar in DC) last night. Realization: I no longer feel any connection with the lesbian community. That sense you get when you walk into a room with a bunch of people that you have something in common with – it’s not there anymore. I’m still attracted to women, but lesbian is a label that well and truly does not apply to me any more. There are a few things I miss about having sex with women on a regular basis (women are generally just so much more responsive, for one. breasts, for another). But if I wanted to have sex with a woman, I could. So what’s stopping me? Why am I only involved with men? Why do I enjoy sex with men so much?

I feel almost straight. Straight and divorced from the community that I grew up in.

* * *

Went to the Crafty Bastards Art Fair this afternoon with C. It was like etsy in person. Only I like etsy better because I don’t have to fight back feelings of crowd-induced claustrophobia. One notable vendor though, artist Jaime Zollars. If I could have justified buying this print, I would have. But that’s a print that I would want to frame, so the $35 impulse buy would easily double in price and – well. I’m trying to be better about money.

I’m always trying to be better about money and I’m always failing. This month, at least, is filled with lots of at home meals. Never mind the money I just dropped on a new suit outfit (classified under “professional investment purchases” so it didn’t have to take it out of my month’s budget); or the perfume I bought because the smell makes me want to have sex with myself; or the fact that I need a new computer like woah because mine is pushing six years old now; or that I’m considering buying a wardrobe at IKEA to fill with all the clothes I’m running out of room for; or the halloween costume I am putting together; or the new porn video I’m lusting after.

(Realization #1: It will be over a month since I’ve had sex by the time J gets back from Turkey, where he’s spending most of October. Realization #2: I’m actually really okay with that. See? Not sex crazed.)

Anyway. So, constant failure at the not-spending-more-money-than-I-should thing. At least I’m not digging myself into debt in the process, just not building up the savings I want to.

* * *

Today I baked: “My Best Chocolate Chip Cookies” on p. 68 of Dorie Greenspan’s Baking Book.

There is now a mountain of chocolate chip cookies in my kitchen. I really only wanted one. Such is life.

May Goals & Ridiculous Shopping Exploits

I’ve been trying to be… generally more aware of things in my life. It’s a general goal, with some subgoals related to finances, money, relationships, personal time, and the like. Considering May is just about over, a brief reflection on my goals for May (Originally posted here):

Save more / Spend less… A miserable failure that was compounded by Memorial Day Sales this weekend. Need to re-think budgeting for June. Most of my money goes to eating out, books, and clothes. If I’m really going to save more / spend less it’s going to have to be a whole-lifestyle-decision. I’m not entirely sure if I’m ready for that level of commitment considering one of the reasons why I am delaying any major life decisions is to have fun and not have to worry about such things.

Loose 4 lbs… Success! From the first of May to currently I have lost four pounds. I’m currently at my lowest weight that I’ve been in… oh gods know how long. Before puberty.

Consume less alcohol… Success! I think I had maybe one or two drinks the entire month.

Take vitamins every day… Success! Calcium (& Magnesium/VitD), Women’s General, & acidophilus. The latter is as an infection preventative as my body gets used to the nuva ring.

Spend more time with friends… Success? Perhaps? I don’t know this one really isn’t quantitative.

Get re-started on the current knitting project… Success! I am currently half way through Chart C on the blanket that I am making (if you look at this picture, I’m roughly almost done with the flower part of the center). Now that I’m on a roll, this pattern is moving really quickly, I might even wrap it up next month, what with all these damned graduations and other such family things that I need to go to.

Musings on June goals to follow when May is actually over.

I spent Saturday with Kiwi, which included an impromptu three hour nap in the middle of the afternoon. It’s ridiculous, I don’t know what it is about cuddling with him but if it doesn’t lead to sex it leads to me falling promptly asleep. Some context? I don’t nap. I’ve never been able to nap, I’m one of those unfortunate people who is usually more grumpy after naps than I was beforehand. But pretty regularly I fall asleep either in the middle of the afternoon or really early in the evening at his house. It’s like – warm and cuddly and zzzz. It does lead to random spurts of energy around one in the morning, which either leads to mid-sleep sex or me cooking raspberry breakfast bars at one in the morning (or both, as the case may be).
The breakfast bars came out okay (or were well received at the following morning’s picnic, anyway), but I really liked the Brown Sugar Bundt Cake recipe (a recipe that I got from a co-worker who got it from this book, which is a book that I will have to buy after my self-imposed ban on book buying) that I made Friday night. It’s probably one of the favorite things I’ve made so far, filled with buttery brown sugar & pear goodness. It might have inspired me to actually buy a bundt pan, so now I’ll just have to make tons of brown sugar bundts to justify the purchase.

Thanks to memorial day sales, I now own two camis (black & forest green, ann taylor loft, $25), a pair of shorts (gap, $25), an endless supply of little black thongs (Victoria Secret – 10 pairs / $25), and a club-date-night halter top (in black, banana republic, $30) which was purchased solely to show off my shoulder and back tattoos.
(It’s weird, looking in the mirror when I wear clothes that show off my back and my shoulder – I look Tattooed. An odd aspect of my identity that I wasn’t expecting to encounter.)
In short? I spent my Memorial Day Weekend doing my patriotic duty to single handily save the economy through rampant consumerism.

I mentioned that I failed miserably at the save-more-spend-less goal, didn’t I? That’s not even going into the money I spent on eating out and books (1, 2, 3 – I need more books like I need a hole in the head) this weekend. The good news is that I am completely done with my spring/summer wardrobe. No more buying clothes until fall. Books on the other hand, will take more self-restraint.