kinda really awesome.

“I’m not going to take off my heels. You’re short. Embrace it.”
—Disney star Selena Gomez responded to Justin Bieber’s request that she change her shoes so Gomez wouldn’t tower over him. What a good role model: never sacrifice footwear for a man, er, boy.



Copied straight from here.

today feels like.

Giorgio de Chirico's Melancholy and Mystery of a Street.

slapstick by kurt vonnegut.

Life, ideally, I think, should be like the Minuet or the Virginia Reel or the Turkey Trot, something easily mastered in a dancing school.

and

"History is merely a list of surprises," I said. "It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again."

swoon.

Via our labor of love.

an excerpt from truman capote's biography.

"The young Capote got a job as a copyboy at The New Yorker in the early forties, but was fired for inadvertently offending Robert Frost."




Note: currently reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Love it. Never realized how scandalous Holly Golightly really was.

i did it! i conquered my bibliophile everest!

I FINISHED READING WAR AND PEACE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It was one of the most modern books I've ever read despite being set against the Napoleonic Wars. Timeless. And Tolstoy's impeccable, beautiful character descriptions.






This has been a goal of mine for a long time. Ever since my extremely well-read Aunt Barb lauded it as her all-time favorite and after I was so enchanted by the less intimidating Anna Karenina. And it was totally worth it once I got all of the characters straight...

Count Pyotr Kirillovich (Pierre) Bezukhov
Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky
Princess Maria Nikolayevna Bolkonskaya
Count Ilya Andreyevich Rostov
Countess Natalya Rostova
Countess Natalia Ilyinichna (Natasha) Rostova
Count Nikolai Ilyich Rostov
Sofia Alexandrovna (Sonya) Rostova
Countess Vera Ilyinichna Rostova
Pyotr Ilyich (Petya) Rostov
Prince Vasily Sergeyevich Kuragin
Princess Elena Vasilyevna (Hélène) Kuragina
Prince Anatol Vasilyevich Kuragin
Prince Ipolit Vasilyevich
Prince Boris Drubetskoy
Princess Anna Mikhailovna Drubetskoya
Fyodor Ivanovich Dolokhov
Adolf Karlovich Berg
Anna Pavlovna Sherer
Maria Dmitryevna Akhrosimova
Amalia Evgenyevna Bourienne
Vasily Dmitrich Denisov
Platon Krataev
Napoleon I of France
General Mikhail Ilarionovich Kutuzov
Osip Bazdeyev
Tsar Alexander I of Russia

...now get me a Chelsea Handler book. Stat.

a whale of time.

...I know, it's way too many whale pictures. But I couldn't resist.

On Sunday Walker, Meg, Casey and I made a Big Gulp Diet Coke filled trek to Catoosa, Oklahoma to see the famous blue whale of Route 66.
Built in the 70s as a water slide feature of the now defunct swimming hole, the whale was as campy, abandoned, beloved and weird as I had hoped.

We also made the mandatory stop at Queenies for grilled cheese and slices of cake.

But mostly I loved getting to spend time with my three favorite people.

Home, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros

i think everything that is wrong in politics right now can be summed up by what happened to shirley sherrod. disgusting.

Even though the egregiously misleading excerpt from Shirley Sherrod’s 43-minute speech came from Andrew Breitbart, the dirty trickster notorious for hustling skewed partisan videos on Fox News, few questioned its validity. That the speech had been given at an N.A.A.C.P. event, with N.A.A.C.P. officials as witnesses, did not prevent even the N.A.A.C.P. from immediately condemning Sherrod for “shameful” actions. As the world knows now, her talk (flogged by Fox as “what racism looks like”) was an uplifting parable about how she had risen above her own trials in the Jim Crow South to aid poor people of every race during her long career in rural development.

The smear might well have stuck if the white octogenarian farmer saved by Sherrod 24 years ago was no longer alive and if he didn’t look like a Norman Rockwell archetype. Only his and his wife’s testimony to her good deeds on CNN could halt the lynching party. Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture who fired Sherrod without questioning the video’s patently spurious provenance, was far slower to reverse himself than the N.A.A.C.P. Good for him that he seemed genuinely chagrined once he did apologize. But an executive so easily bullied by Fox News has no more business running a government department than Ken Salazar, the secretary of interior who let oil companies run wild on deepwater drilling until disaster struck. That the White House sat back while Vilsack capitulated to a mob is a disgraceful commentary on both its guts and competence. This wasn’t a failure of due diligence — there was no diligence.

Even now, I wonder if many of those who have since backtracked from the Sherrod smear — including some in the news business who reported on the video without vetting it — have watched her entire speech. What’s important is not the exculpatory evidence that clears her of a trumped-up crime. What matters is Sherrod’s own story.

She was making the speech in Georgia, her home state, on March 27, the 45th anniversary of her father’s funeral. He had been murdered when she was 17, leaving behind five children and a wife who was pregnant with a sixth. Sherrod had grown up in Baker County, a jurisdiction ruled by a notorious racist sheriff, L. Warren Johnson, who was nicknamed “Gator” for a reason. Black men were routinely murdered there but the guilty were never brought to justice. As Sherrod recounted, not even three witnesses to her father’s murder could persuade the grand jury to indict the white suspect.

Sherrod had long thought she’d flee the South, but had an epiphany on the night of her father’s death. “I couldn’t just let his death go without doing something in answer to what happened,” she said. So she made the commitment to stay and devote her life to “working for change.” She later married Charles Sherrod, a minister and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, whose heroic efforts to advance desegregation, including his imprisonment, can be found in any standard history of the civil rights movement.

None of this legacy, much of it accessible to anyone who wanted to look (or ask), prevented the tarring of Shirley Sherrod last week. And it all unfolded while the country was ostentatiously marking the 50th anniversary of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”




Excerpted from Frank Rich's opinion piece in the New York Times. A must read.

And Jon Stewart's refreshing take on it.

dog days.

There are only two things I love in this world, everybody and television.
(Kenneth, 30 Rock).


...in tribute to me begrudgingly giving up on my dear, bespectacled Frank on The Bachelorette, the upcoming Mad Men premiere, and its possible interference with True Blood.











Mark your calendars for July 27th: Oklahoma primary! Jari or Drew - I still can't decide, they're both just so nice, decidedly bland and uncontroversial.

Speaking of bland and uncontroversial, Elena Kagan is set to be our new Supreme Court Justice and I can't even summon an ounce of enthusiasm. Thanks a lot super crazy conservatives and pundits for sucking the soul out of my interest in politics.




Kettle Chips salt and black pepper crinkle cut potato chips.
F is for Fake. I want to go to Ibiza so badly now.
Inception.
Natasha Rostov in War & Peace. Halfway there!
Dog Days Are Over, Florence + The Machines
Here I Come, Fergie
For Nancy, Cos' It Already Is, Pete Yorn
Motorpsycho Nightmare, Bob Dylan (best accidentally heard over nighttime NPR programming while making the long way home with your boyfriend who is attempting to get into Cuba).

garden of eden post-script.

Happiness is your own backyard.

summer goal number one: s.p. dinsmoor's garden of eden in lucas, kansas

S.P. Dinsmoor, a Civil War veteran and ladies man, began building his Garden of Eden in 1907 at the age of 64, showcasing his religious and Populist political viewpoints through intersecting statues and concrete trees built over the yard of his limestone cabin home in Lucas, Kansas.

Walker heard about it here and we decided we had to go, perfect summer day trip.

Every statue told a story in a total Tim Burton-esque style, pre-Tim Burton. It was seriously one of the coolest, creepiest, eccentric and inspiring things I've ever seen.

I sort of imagined it as Dinsmoor having these ideas inside of him that he had to get out of him and express, that he put everything he had into them. That this was how he transcended the every day life in 1907, how he defied his old age and dealt with immortality, how he conversed with God, etc.

And perhaps the cherry on the top - seeing Dinsmoor's embalmed dead body in the crypt and glass coffin of his design. Beard completely intact.

I plan on writing a novel about the place, no kidding.

Other highlights include delicious curry and a stop at Little Sweden in Lindsborg, aka my worst little wooden horse nightmare - thank god for delicious German sausage sandwiches.

"The is the tree of life. The angel is guarding the apples so we can't live forever. That is tough, but it is according to Moses, and when I put the braces across to the devil's elbow and tree, I noticed he had his fork poised on a little kid. He is always after the kids. I thought if it was my God he would throw up his hand and save the kid."

- S.P. Dinsmoor

summer goal number two: a field of kansas sunflowers.

Just What I Needed, The Cars

ode to bon bon.

The first picture is unexplainable and the second picture says to me, What, I'm just bein' Bonnie.

It's Bonnie Hartwig (roommate) 's birthday today!

Bonnie is super funny. The kind of funny that I find funny and influences me to be funnier. Like, motorized beds that would jet us down to the Theta kitchen funny, like there is no one I would rather see Eclipse at midnight (even if she is Team Jacob) with funny.

She is also so put together and with it.
The most thoughtful, unselfish person I know.
Solid. Such a good friend, which is probably why she's been bridesmaid extraordinaire this summer.
Wise.
Cute as a button.
A dedicated lover of So You Think You Can Dance and a never-misses-a-game, earned-enough-points-for-a-jersey, makes-the-best-championship-in-Miami-mixes Sooner sports fan.

She also describes things in terms of me, like: That is so Kate. Or Kate, your room is so Kate.
And it feels like the highest compliment.

I miss the Treehouse.

ode to popsicles.

Popsicles make me think back refrigerators, and our house and entire backyard strewn with clear, vertical push pop wrappers, and perpetually electric blue tongues.
And the exotic couple that moved to our neighborhood from Norway, taking walks around the block while holding hands every single summer night, waving around identical orange popsicles in their free ones.

Right now, my Popsicle Du Jour would be the Melona Bar. Oh em gee it's so refreshing and creamy.
Meg's boyfriend Andrew introduced them to her and she introduced them to me and I am now addicted enough to make special trips to the exploratory jungle that is Super Cao Nguyen in order to have them.




A passage from Orangette, my favorite food blogger and former Oklahoman:

Where I grew up, in Oklahoma, summer shut us inside. Unless you were submerged up to the neck in a swimming pool, it was too hot and humid to be outside. But this city, my adopted city, opens wide up in the summer. Every window is propped up or swung out, everywhere, and everyone is in the street. I am writing this with the front door open, and from the neighbors’ house, which also has its front door open, the Supremes are singing “Come See About Me.” Two nights ago, on a walk around the neighborhood with the dog, I passed an old man playing the guitar on a front porch, a kid in gym shorts playing the guitar on another front porch, a young man playing the cello on a third front porch, and a house whose curtains were clearly so ecstatic about the weather that they sneaked out through an upstairs window to billow and twist in the breeze. It’s time for a popsicle.

It is so true about Oklahoma in the heart of summertime as compared to my summer in an alive and outdoor D.C., you really shut yourself inside to survive.
Maybe the remedy is more popsicles.




p.s. Totally unrelated, except it may be another way to stay cool and keep the hair off your neck - I'm obsessed with fishtail braiding now thanks to FreePeople's instructional video.

if you like pina coladas.

Walker and I bought tickets to Lima, Peru for January.

I seriously have journal entries dating back to the 9th grade where I daydream about seeing Machu Picchu and backpacking through South America with my scruffy-haired boyfriend, identity unknown at the time.






I firmly believe there is nothing else I would rather spend all of my savings on.

what if we took all the energy we spent faking and used that energy to enjoy the lord instead?

gummy frogs.
beautiful friends i miss being constants in my life.
really good mashed potatoes.
classic red lipstick.
cicadas.

Meredith and Skylar's wedding this past weekend was just so happy.
And really, what more could you ask for from a wedding?

spin.

I adore bike subculture.

the fourth.

First Place: Meg, Buttermilk Pie with Strawberry Mint Compote
Second Place: Kate, Chocolate Pie with Cinnamon Whipped Cream
Third Place: Casey, Blackberry Lemon Tart

Favorite Firework: Snakes!

Also spent the long weekend at Kori's family's beautiful new lake house on Eufala where I ate a ton of good food, successfully got up on the wakeboard, spent the majority of the time in a swimsuit with crunchy lake hair, went on a covert nighttime peach picking expedition, watched fireworks over the lake and came home sunburnt. Pretty much perfect.