Well this day was bound to come. After nearly six years, 170 posts and a series of highly amusing life experiences, this will be my last and final post on The Yapper.
A lot has changed in the two years since my most recent post: I have moved to Washington (the city on the swamp), managed to be gainfully employed for this whole period, I’ve met and become friends with some really entertaining people, and I actually bought that Vitamix! This whole time, I maintained that I would one day return to blogging, just as soon as my kitchen table arrived. Well, it’s been two years and the damn thing is still sitting in Florida.
There was another reason I stopped writing: I honestly didn’t have anything going on in my life. Moving to a new city with just a random assortment of people I’ve known from different parts of my life combined with a work environment in which the colleague nearest in age to me is in his early 40s didn’t make it easy to meet new people. So there were a LOT of boring weekends and week nights.
While yes, all good things must come to an end, it hasn’t been all bad. I started this exclusively as a joke; I never tried to make money from it. It was just for fun, and yet I somehow managed to get two paid, editorial internships in New York because of it. Plus, I have a permanent journal of my life in college so I can remember the good times again when my memory starts to fail in a few years.
I’d like to thank all ten of my regular readers for actually reading everything I have written over the years, and I’d like to dedicate this final post to my favorite reader, Grace’s mother Isabelle, a wonderful person whose vibrant life ended far too soon earlier this year. Isabelle left a solid 70% of the comments on my blog and I’ll forever be grateful to her for never-ending words of encouragement.
This morning, I saw a quote on Instagram that read “And suddenly you know…it’s time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings.” I personally can’t wait to see where this new beginning takes me…
Last night, as part of my new crusade to try new things that I’d ordinarily never attempt, I went to check out New York’s newest exercise obsession, Soul Cycle. I first heard about it at work because our Editor-in-Chief is beyond obsessed and after four weeks of hearing about it, I decided I needed to see what was so great about it. So, I signed up and went last night at 19h30 for my first Soul Cycle class. Grace knew about Soul Cycle from some radio show she listens to that mentions it all the time, but even as I walked up to the studio on the corner 3rd Avenue and 83rd Street, I still didn’t really understand what I was about to partake in, let alone how long it lasted!
It turns out that Soul Cycle is part spinning, part yoga, part weight-lifting, part stretching, and part crunches/push-ups with very high energy music and an equally energetic coach. It was unlike anything I’ve ever done before. I should say that for the record, the only exercise I do regularly is running five miles, three times a week and then doing some very basic sit-ups, crunches, etc… I loathe gyms partly because seeing people bench-pressing my bodyweight while I’ve got the 15lb weights doesn’t help make working-out seem like any fun. The other reason I avoid gyms the same way I avoid families with small children is because I’m not out to look like David Hasselhoff when he was on Baywatch; I run so that I can continue to eat all of the desserts that I can’t live without and not die before I hit Sixty! It’s purely for survival and because of said running, I left Italy this May weighing exactly as much as I had when I arrived! I wish my roommates could have said the same thing.
Soul Cycle was unlike anything I had ever witnessed before. Before I knew what was happening, I was on a bike in dim-light room filled with a very odd mix of people; a few people my age, but mostly people in their 30s or 40s; there was one woman who looked late 60s-early 70s, but no one older than her. Our instructor, a man by the name of String, got right into things after a very fast orientation for myself and the other newcomer. I was in the back row, thinking the fan would be blowing on me directly though I quickly learned that it was above me and so I barely got any air on me during the one hour class. After the brief rundown of the do’s and don’ts, we were off.
I began like all beginners, like a deer in the headlights, fearing that I should just leave before I make a complete fool of myself. However, I figured that I should just stick it out and if I don’t like it, then I won’t come back. By the end, I had sort of figured out all of the different positions we were told to get into throughout our session. My legs didn’t stop moving the entire time, which was most painful when we simulated riding uphill! There were times when I thought I would pass out, but String and the extremely upbeat music kept me going right up to the end.
After leaving the studio an hour later, I stood on the corner for a few minutes just trying to grasp what I had just done. I now get why Richard, my Editor-in-Chief, is obsessed with Soul Cycle; it combines so many different exercises into one and is the perfect thing for someone who doesn’t have the time to do all of these exercises individually. Despite being kind of expensive ($32 for an hour session), I will definitely be going back a few more times before leaving New York for Charlottesville, where they don’t have Soul Cycle (yet), next Friday! Plus, starting in November, they reopen the South Beach location, so I’ll be driving down from Palm Beach regularly this winter to get my Soul Cycle fix. To say the least, I’m hooked! My only regret is that I didn’t try it earlier. Now if y’all will excuse me because I need to get to bed now because I’m dead tired, so until next time…
Last week, I went to the Vinegar Hill Theater in Charlottesville to see Woody Allen’s new movie, “Midnight in Paris.” I know the movie came out in late May, but it’s better late then never! Okay, so I loved it, but probably for the wrong reasons because for me, it was more about seeing Paris and less about the story that Woody Allen created around what is probably the most beautiful city on earth.
In case y’all have been in the Sahara for the last year,”Midnight in Paris” follows Hollywood writer Gil (Owen Wilson) and his new money fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams), on their freeloading trip to Paris with Inez’s parents (Mimi Kennedy and Kurt Fuller). Inez and her parents remind me of the cast of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. I say this because only people from Beverly Hills would check Goyard luggage and bring multiple Birkin bags on one trip.
Gil goes out for a walk and ends up going back in time to the Paris of the 1920s, meeting Hemingway, Picasso, the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein, and Dalí. It’s an era that Gil feels was Paris at its best. It’s at this point in the movie when I began to question why he was engaged to Inez, a Malibu-loving label whore whose mother is one of those women who thinks she has great taste and has turned herself into a decorator because she hast too much free time and nothing to do! Inez is the exact opposite of Gil and it becomes quite clear that they have little in common and she really just with him because he’s rich.
All of that said, I loved the movie! I thought it was Woody Allen at his best. No, it wasn’t “Manhattan” or “Annie Hall,” which will forever be his greatest movies, but it was really quite amazing. The way Allen shows Paris is just as magical as the way he shows New York in “Manhattan” as a character on its own, and it was just so enchanting that I’m ready to go back tonight (no really, instead of driving back to Virginia Beach for the 4th, I can just go straight to Dulles to catch the 21h50 flight to De Gaulle)!
Now, in my last note about the movie, I have to say that I read last year in the Daily Mailthat Mme. Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the prettiest spouse of a Head of State anywhere in the world, required thirty-five retakes before finally getting her scene right. I thought she did a great job playing a tour guide at the Rodin Museum, regardless of the number of takes that were required.
Moving back to reality, the pair of J Brand raw denim jeans I bought finally made it up here to Charlottesville, courtesy of Annie, just in time for Grace’s birthday bash. Now, maybe it was the heat that was messing with my brain, maybe it was the fact that I bought them very quickly (I tried them on because they had to be shortened), maybe it was because I had just had an interview, or because I had eight blisters with two more on the way because I was wearing my new pair of Tod’s, but these jeans are very slim-fitting!
Now, I’m not complaining because I love them and I wanted a pair of jeans that doesn’t have a label on my tuchus! I’ve gone nearly seven years with everyone knowing that I wear 7 for all Mankind or AG Jeans because you can tell by the logo. Even though my new jeans have a leather label on the back, my belt will hide the J Brand logo (I always wear a belt and I don’t understand why people don’t wear belts, especially if there are belt loops on their pants), so I have nothing to worry about now! Plus, I was talking with my favorite Rollins graduate/fellow French class survivor, Tasleem, and she said that she only wears J Brand because they’re “The only brand that fits me well.” That’s all I needed to hear, because as much as I loved that first pair of 7’s, these feel right.
Now, everyone who knows me now knows that I’m obsessed beyond all belief with Twitter after a few years of me refusing to accept Twitter as a normal social media tool. Now, I think it’s brilliant! Well, among the now seventy-five Twitter accounts I follow as of right now is Joshua Kushner, the younger brother of Ivanka Trump‘s husband, soon to be father and owner of the New York ObserverJared Kushner. Unlike Jared, Joshua Kushner actually tweets things and on June 28th, he tweeted this video, which I watched at about 3h30 because I couldn’t sleep and it rocked my world:
This has to be the neatest thing I’ve EVER seen in my life! I just can’t get over how amazing this is and I have to try this “liquid mountaineering.” Thank you, Joshua Kushner, and Twitter for this amazing moment that has captivated me for the last few days!
Finally today, I have a major announcement to make. After years of refusing to visit, I’m finally going to go somewhere I’ve never been before, even though I’ve had the chance to go so many times! That’s right, 2011 is the year that both the New York Times and I discover BROOKLYN! Andrew used to live and go to school in Brooklyn Heights, but I still never saw a reason to go across that bridge to see it. Well, that changes this summer because this time next week, I’ll be back in Virginia Beach packing to spend the last six weeks of this summer, my last as an undergraduate, in New York, interning at Departures Magazine, the American Express Platinum and Centurion card member only magazine! I’m so excited because it’s a magazine that I love to read and find to be not just entertaining, but interesting(Andrew says it’s his favorite magazine), and I just can’t wait to get there to start because all of the people there seem to actually enjoy their jobs! And as an added bonus, Andrew is working two blocks from where I’m working, so we can get lunch on a regular basis! Last summer, my lunch consisted of me in a Starbucks for thirty minutes. This summer, I have so many options that I won’t know where to begin! This might actually be the first time in my life that I genuinely love Midtown Manhattan, even though it’s full of tourists who walk at a glacial pace!
Getting back to talking about Brooklyn, I figured that with this being a year of trying new things (after all, I stood on an active volcano on the island of Sicily, toured vineyards in Bordeaux, went to a museum dedicated solely to medals given to the Republic of France, and managed to get wine back from Italy without changing the color of my clothing in the process), so I figured that if Brooklyn is good enough for the Times to re-discover, then it’s sure as hell good enough for me to see for the first time!
I’m going to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, see where Andrew went to school (oh yeah, Andrew, you’re going with me on this little journey to Brooklyn) and then that’s all I’ve got so far, but I am going to visit the Brooklyn Slate Company because I think their slate place mates are kind of neat (and can double as great shields during food fights). Well, that’s all for now, but I wish y’all a Happy Fourth of July and until next time…
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