Tall Drink of Water

A certain Thompson LES owner made a beeline for me & my Swede friend last night while we were dining with friends at his hotel. He sat down, ordered a few rounds of "Top Chef" curry chicken & proceeded to name-drop like only a hotel owner can. I did my best to seem impressed (after all, MGMT is there in two weeks...)

He made a point of asking whether I was Swedish before telling me he exclusively dates Swedish girls. I assured him I was not. A couple bites of chicken (his) and a few polite laughs (mine) later, he stood to leave.

"You could totally pass for Swedish" he leaned down to whisper in my ear as he stood. "I have a thing for tall blondes," he winked as if he hadn't told me this several times before.

"Us tall blondes just love being reduced to our most obvious physical characteristics," I teased, "You must do well with that line."

Needless to say, he gave me his card. Guys like that crave a bit of sass.

Looks like I'm going to be poolside at the LES tomorrow! Couldn't have come at a better time, honestly. I'm losing my California color.

*scorpio*

Under the Tuscan Sun

So my Italian lover's surprise was an incredibly romantic motorcycle tour of the Tuscan hills, appetizers at a famous local bakery, a classic Tuscan dinner in front of a live Italian folk band, followed by a sweet bed & breakfast nestled in deep in the vineyards.






I was so taken back that he was a romantic? Where has that part been hiding for the past 4 years? He did get a little jealous that I was traveling to other Italian cities without him, but I am a Knockout Blonde in Italy so of coarse I had more than one Italian to visit ;)

*Aries*

Forbidden Fruit

Ever want what you can't have?

On Fear

Abridged from Jonathan Franzen's commencement speech at Kenyon College:

My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.
This is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. To love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.

And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. When you consider the alternative — an anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived. Even just to say to yourself, “Oh, I’ll get to that love and pain stuff later, maybe in my 30s” is to consign yourself to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources.
When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them.

And who knows what might happen to you then?


Jason leaves for Italy tomorrow. It occurs to me that this epic summer we have planned - both together and apart - will either make us or break us. He & I will spend 25 days apart while he's launching the Rome leg of his company. The most we've spent apart since we've met is 5 days. It's starting to get to that annoying point where even two days feels like a long time. I hate this point because I know what's coming...

Crippling co-dependancy. Loss of control. Fear. Pain.




Some people call it love, too.

*scorpio*

Survived

So much sexual violence in the news today.

An Egyptian General admits to administering forced 'virginity tests' to women protesting in Tahrir Square. These tests were ostensibly to prove that the generals didn't rape the protestors, when in fact, I'm sure you can guess what the 'test' itself entailed.

In keeping with the theme, an Egyptian banker was arrested for imprisoning a hotel maid in his room at The Pierre, while groping her. She was able to escape, and reported immediately to a manager who did not display the same sense of urgency. He was arrested the following day.

A Bangladeshi woman took matters into her own hands, literally, when she chopped off the penis of her would-be rapist.

And finally, 85-year-old New York woman was sexually assualted and robbed around 5 Monday morning. She is in the hospital and stable, he is still at large.

*scorpio*

Image from Getty Images

Timing is Everything

Yesterday, a tour of the Sistine Chapel in Rome ended with a mass in person blessing from the Pope.

After a deep realization while sitting in front of La Fontana di Trevi at 2am, I caught the right train seconds before it left and ended up at the possible point of my near future, Florence.

I am currently enjoying a long lunch for one with a glass of Prosecco in a lovely restaurant in Piazza Madonna. I am reviewing a course book from Lorenzo de' Medici. They offer a class called Love, Beauty, and Natural Selection: The Science and the Myths. Maybe I will come to Florence and study love....that would be ironic.

I occasionally glance up at the piazza to see the locals and tourists stroll by. I can imagine my life here. I am waiting for my Italian lover, who apparently has a romantic surprise for me?

Again, timing is everything!

*Aries*