Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed by the endless bounty of prettiness on the internet? I know I do. There are so many different styles, each one lovelier than the next. Sometimes you might wonder, how do I combine all of these disparate things that I like into something that actually feels like me?From "The Wardrobe Architect Week 1: Making Style More Personal" by Sarai of Colette.
But just because you like something, that does not mean it fits you. Enjoying looking at something doesn’t mean it has a deep connection to who you are, necessarily. Some things are just nice to look at and appreciate on their own.
"You are not what you look at"
The Internet
A new discovery for me because I'm lame and behind the times, but I can't get enough lately.
Saturday
me: Can I take a photo of your sign?
him: Of course! I only have one pose, though.
me: (uhh, that's fine...)
Totally obsessed with this cat's facial expression.
Yesterday: quiet morning at home, Chinese grocery store, haircut in rainy Kensington, pre-dinner killing time at Fika, Mother's Dumplings with Jules and Brad, post-dinner killing time at Onehour Cafeteria, Nuit Blanche. Trying to get to know my X20 a little better.
Aziz gets me.
"...if I could throw out the Internet as well, that’d be great. I never read anything. I’ve never read all these novels that are like these beautiful stories that have continued to have a resonance with people for so many generations, like beautiful works of art that I could read at any point. But instead, I choose not to read them. And I just read the Internet. Constantly. And hear about who said a racial slur or look at a photo of what Ludacris did last weekend. You know, just useless stuff. It’s like, I read the Internet so much I feel like I’m on page a million of the worst book ever. And I just won’t stop reading it. For some reason it’s so addictive.
...the times where I haven’t read... the stuff that I normally read on the Internet, just nonsense blogs or whatever, the next day I’ve felt like I’ve missed nothing. You know? I deleted Twitter and Instagram off my phone... And now I don’t read it. I don’t see those pictures. And I don’t miss it. And I feel like a lot of people do a lot of this stuff. And if they cut it out I don’t think they’d miss it that much. I really don’t. I mean when I don’t check in on those blogs and stuff... If you don’t read it for a week, right, and you come back, you don’t go back and read Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Cause you’re not reading it for the information. What you’re reading it for, and this is just my personal theories about this stuff, what you’re reading it for is a hit of this drug called the Internet. The phone world. You just want a hit of it. Like when you scroll down and you see a new blog post you’re like oooh! That gets your brain excited. It’s like, oooh! There’s something new! And you click it and you read it and you’re like, oooh, but it’s garbage. It’s nothing. Like ok, alright. Somebody dropped an N-bomb. Great. Alright. I mean that is kind of a cool story, but, but you’re just searching for this new thing. When you look on your Facebook feed and you see these pictures it’s like, none of that shit really matters. You just want to see a new thing on there and it just gives you something to do. I’ve sat at my computer. I still do it. And I go on like Facebook or whatever and I’m like, what am I doing? I’m going on a loop with these same four sites for no reason. I’m not genuinely interested. Like, here’s a test, OK. Take, like, your nightly or morning browse of the Internet, right? Your Facebook feed, Instagram feed, Twitter, whatever. OK if someone every morning was like, I’m gonna print this and give you a bound copy of all this stuff you read so you don’t have to use the Internet. You can just get a bound copy of it. Would you read that book? No! You’d be like, this book sucks. There’s a link to some article about a horse that found its owner somehow. It’s not that interesting."
From Aziz Ansari's "FREAK-quently Asked Questions" interview on Freakonomics Radio - quotation starts around 16 minutes.
"Intellectual humility"
Let me preface this by saying: I still love vet school. Three years in, and I'm still grateful to be here. More so than ever, I'm interested in what I'm learning and it's exhilarating to think that I'm on the cusp of clinical experience. But, three years in, I'm also feeling that vet school is wearing on me.
It seems inevitable, when you think about it. From hundreds of applicants, you select the highest achieving, most ambitious students. Suddenly, the cream of the undergrad crop find themselves surrounded - six, seven, sometimes eight hours a day, five days a week - by a hundred other exceptionally exceptional individuals. Add the natural clash of personalities and the stress of weekly exams, and it's not a surprise that you can create a less-than-nurturing environment.
This is a public blog post, likely read by no one but technically accessible to anyone, so that's all I'm going to say for now about my issues with the vet school environment. I'm not out to accuse my peers or make myself up to be some kind of victim. I'm pretty sure that most of us struggle, some more quietly than others, with the double-edged sword of a highly driven personality, both as the individual wielding the sword and the individual surrounded by them. Drive becomes competitiveness. Attention to detail becomes pedantry. Independence becomes selfishness.
This morning, I read an article in The New York Times titled "How to Get a Job at Google". (I read it because I'm always daydreaming that Google or Apple will decide to add "on-site veterinarian" to their suite of enviable staff perks. Don't laugh; if they'll freeze your eggs, it's not long before they'll vaccinate your dog, right?)
This part really resonated with me:
"Intellectual humility". It bounced around in my head all morning, appropriating whatever little brain matter was still trying to make notes for hemolymphatic pathology (spoiler alert - not a lot). I couldn't stop thinking about it. For weeks I've been trying to intentionally re-wire the harmful aspects of my highly driven personality into a kinder, less reactive, more compassionate... more intellectually humble personality. It just clicked; it's the perfect descriptor for how I feel about what I want to be and what I feel is lacking from my vet school experience. And the best part is that someone else said it, someone else gets it. It's not my highly sensitive brain in overdrive - it's a senior VP of Google.
A few weeks ago, I was really unhappy. I was in this place where I could tell that I was letting the environment get to me, and instead of responding in a positive way, I was multiplying all the negativity back tenfold, perpetuating the environment. I couldn't decide what felt worse - the problem, or being part of the problem. Since then, I've been trying to approach all the microabrasions of day to day life more intentionally. Things feel a lot better. I can't do anything about how other people act and react, but I can be self-aware of my own actions and reactions and choose to be different - to be intellectually humble.
It seems inevitable, when you think about it. From hundreds of applicants, you select the highest achieving, most ambitious students. Suddenly, the cream of the undergrad crop find themselves surrounded - six, seven, sometimes eight hours a day, five days a week - by a hundred other exceptionally exceptional individuals. Add the natural clash of personalities and the stress of weekly exams, and it's not a surprise that you can create a less-than-nurturing environment.
This is a public blog post, likely read by no one but technically accessible to anyone, so that's all I'm going to say for now about my issues with the vet school environment. I'm not out to accuse my peers or make myself up to be some kind of victim. I'm pretty sure that most of us struggle, some more quietly than others, with the double-edged sword of a highly driven personality, both as the individual wielding the sword and the individual surrounded by them. Drive becomes competitiveness. Attention to detail becomes pedantry. Independence becomes selfishness.
This morning, I read an article in The New York Times titled "How to Get a Job at Google". (I read it because I'm always daydreaming that Google or Apple will decide to add "on-site veterinarian" to their suite of enviable staff perks. Don't laugh; if they'll freeze your eggs, it's not long before they'll vaccinate your dog, right?)
This part really resonated with me:
And it is not just humility in creating space for others to contribute, says Bock, it’s “intellectual humility. Without humility, you are unable to learn.” It is why research shows that many graduates from hotshot business schools plateau. “Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don’t learn how to learn from that failure,” said Bock.
“They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it’s because I’m a genius. If something bad happens, it’s because someone’s an idiot or I didn’t get the resources or the market moved. ... What we’ve seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They’ll argue like hell. They’ll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, ‘here’s a new fact,’ and they’ll go, ‘Oh, well, that changes things; you’re right.’ ” You need a big ego and small ego in the same person at the same time.
"Intellectual humility". It bounced around in my head all morning, appropriating whatever little brain matter was still trying to make notes for hemolymphatic pathology (spoiler alert - not a lot). I couldn't stop thinking about it. For weeks I've been trying to intentionally re-wire the harmful aspects of my highly driven personality into a kinder, less reactive, more compassionate... more intellectually humble personality. It just clicked; it's the perfect descriptor for how I feel about what I want to be and what I feel is lacking from my vet school experience. And the best part is that someone else said it, someone else gets it. It's not my highly sensitive brain in overdrive - it's a senior VP of Google.
A few weeks ago, I was really unhappy. I was in this place where I could tell that I was letting the environment get to me, and instead of responding in a positive way, I was multiplying all the negativity back tenfold, perpetuating the environment. I couldn't decide what felt worse - the problem, or being part of the problem. Since then, I've been trying to approach all the microabrasions of day to day life more intentionally. Things feel a lot better. I can't do anything about how other people act and react, but I can be self-aware of my own actions and reactions and choose to be different - to be intellectually humble.
Thoughts on sewing
I find that people react in one of two ways when I tell them that I'm wearing something handmade:
The first group treat me as though I've accomplished a superhuman feat. That sounds flattering, and I know it's meant to be flattering, but it doesn't make me feel great. There's this unpleasant implication that I'm able to sew because I possess innate sewing talents, that I was lucky to be born with the appropriate traits. This response is a real sore spot with me because I feel like it undercuts the time and effort I've put into developing these skills from nothing. Sure, my personality is detail-oriented and creative - but it's also impatient and easily distracted, and I didn't grow up with any family or friends who sewed.
I have this (unresearched, unsupported, totally just my own musing) feeling that it used to be much more common for people to have hobbies. And, in this context, I don't just mean something you do in your spare time for pleasure - I mean something you do in your spare time for pleasure that involves developing a skill and setting and achieving goals. Cooking, baking, going to the gym, going to yoga classes, running, hanging out with friends - I think most people my age would list these as their "hobbies" but unless you're doing a Julie and Julia and deboning ducks in your spare time, or practicing daily to master that bad ass yoga handstand, I don't think it's the same.
I think this is coming across a lot more judgmental and harsh than I intended... I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to spend your time doing any of the above "non-hobbies". There's a lot to be said for making your own food in this age of processed convenience foods, and obviously everyone should be active and nurture their social relationships. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think I get this response to my sewing because people are so disconnected from skill-based hobbies, and I think that's a shame.
Of course, the second group of responses I get are those that want to know more about the process, how I got into sewing, if I think they could learn it too (the answer is always YES!), how specific details are made, etc. These people may not sew, but I do feel they are kindred spirits in their own way, and I am so grateful to them for encouraging me to share my hobby with them.
This post was inspired by Sarai's recent post at Coletterie entitled "The 3 biggest reasons I sew".
Burda Gathered Dress 06/2012
I finished my first dress this morning. It was essentially done a few days ago, but I dragged my feet on finishing the sleeve hems. Honestly, I think I was relieved to be finished and couldn't take any more!
This dress is a modified Burda Gathered Dress 06/2012 #126. I made a muslin for it - no significant findings. I made a note to bias bind the gathers on the final version, but I didn't think it was worth doing on my muslin. Haha. Hahahahahahaha. Doing it ended up being a total pain in my side. I unpicked it twice before settling for a shoddy product. I should have stopped there, but I stubbornly pushed forward... and butchered the front. I unpicked that three times before giving up. I don't know if it was the heat (first day of a week-long heat wave) or what, but maaannn that was a terrible sewing day.
The next day, with fresh eyes, I decided that I'd have to make peace with the front (the poor chambray was in no shape to be unpicked yet again), but that I had to fix the gathering. There was no way in hell I'd want to wear this dress if it continued down this road to the scrap heap. I ended up altering my pieces (both front and back have gathers) to have a straight seam. This fixed my messy binding problem and actually looks more interesting, I think. After that, it was like a phoenix rising from the ashes. (Too dramatic for describing sewing? Haha.) I added side seam pockets and French seamed everything. Rather than rolling the bottom hem, I bias faced it. One of my sleeves isn't eased that well, but I can live with it.
I'm in love with this dress now. I wear it proudly knowing what a total shit heap waste of fabric it could have easily become :)
Ithaca and the ASPCA/Maddie's Institute shelter medicine conference
A few weekends ago, my friend Melissa and I drove down to Ithaca, NY for the ASPCA/Maddie's Institute shelter medicine conference at Cornell University. We arrived late Friday night and checked into our airbnb apartment - thank god we were lazy procrastinators and couldn't book hotels, because airbnb is fantastic!! I've been converted.
Lectures 9-5 every day meant little sight seeing time, but we did sneak out over lunch to wander the Cornell Plantations that parallel the campus. We also spent some time downtown on Saturday night, having a great tapas dinner at Just a Taste and local ice cream at Collegetown Bagels. The downtown is really, really adorable - there's art everywhere, from murals on any and all concrete surfaces (goodbye, ugly parking lot!!) to eight-legged sculptures scurrying down office buildings.
The conference itself was wonderful as well. There were lectures in three streams (DVM/RVT, staff/volunteer, management) and you were welcome to attend whatever you liked. We were also lucky to sneak into a DVM-only Zeuterin training session - very cool stuff that I hope comes to Canada soon. We toured the Tompkins County SPCA, a gorgeous facility. The dogs had their own private rooms with plexiglass doors and "sniff holes" for visitors to interact with the dogs in a non-threatening way. Some of the rooms even had doggie doors that opened to a fenced yard. No cages, no bars, no concrete runs!! The cats were group housed when possible, again with lots of enrichment. Cats that needed private housing were in beautiful, modern cages - two levels plus a separate cubby for privacy. Obviously it's not feasible to retrofit all clinics like this, but wow. It was a world of difference from your traditional cage/run-based facilities, and you could see it reflected in the animals' comfort and sociability. Really, really interesting to experience.
Can't wait to go back to Ithaca and Cornell. Special Species Symposium 2014, perhaps? ;)
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