WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU STILL DOING HERE?

It's been over a year since I've posted at love always, clara. If you think I've gone silent though, you clearly don't know me well enough. Keep up with me at my new(ish) blog, That Girl Magazine.

www.thatgirlmag.com

Love always,
Clara

shadowfax

I realized today that the reason I've been avoiding the blog is that I've run out of creative ways to apologize for my absence of late. To hell with apologies though. I've been busy.

Today I realized almost everyone in my english class was at some point in their lives really into Lord of the Rings.

Russom: What was the name of Gandalf's horse?
Class, in unison: Shadowfax.

This was relevant to something involving Old English and the conversion of the heathen Anglo-folks to Christianity. St Gregory and whatnot. The usual.

I never got into Lord of the Rings. I'd say maybe the fans were too fanatical for me, but I was definitely into Harry Potter for a long time there. Hell, I've read every Twilight book. I like bandwagons.
Maybe it was because LOTR wasn't about humans, specifically. Wizards and vampires and whatnot all at least existed in a world with regular humans walking around too, in a world that looked familiar to me.  Middle Earth was too far removed from the daily trials of fourth-grade Clara.

Speaking of fourth grade, maybe I was just too young and had too short an attention span for a series of books that screamed "FOR BOYS" to me. It was all swords and fire and people riding around on horses. Harry Potter had enough middle-school drama unrelated to saving the world to keep me entertained.

Because, of course, saving the world does not interest me nearly as much as whom Ron has a crush on these days.

Love always,
Clara

playlists for crying

SNL was great this week, apparently. I just found this clip on Jezebel (I have so much love for Jezebel), and the comments section inspired me to make an entire spotify playlist of songs that make me want to cry, which I will never ever ever listen to straight through, because... seriously. Who wants to just sit down and cry? It's already a grey november day, and while nothing in particular is going wrong, I'm wearing sweatpants and listening to Konstantine by Something Corporate (which Daphna put on a mix CD for me the summer before I moved), and already feeling teary for no reason whatsoever.

Although, you know, my parakeets have been fighting a lot lately...

Love always,
Clara

P.S. if you have spotify and are feeling masochistic, have at it.

radio silence

I don't really know what those two words are supposed to mean when they're next to each other like that.

Hey, so two elephants were sitting in a bathtub. And the one elephant says to the other, "hey, could you pass the soap?"
The second elephant says, "No soap radio!"

I used to listen to the radio a lot in high school, but every time I go home it becomes more and more insufferable. Maybe Brown is turning me into a hipster who has no choice but to reject pop culture (either for being lame or for trying to pretend not to be lame). Maybe this happens to everyone though, and is a necessary component of getting older.

That can't be right. There are married people who still listen to the Kane show on HOT 99.5. Married people.

Love always,
Clara

hello children, please chill out

Why is it that I find myself reading things that make me frustrated with the world? And with such frequency. I should be ashamed of myself.

The thing is, I wind up feeling like girls my age are condescended to. (I do not think there is a readable way to make that sentence not end in a preposition, but fuck prescriptive grammarians anyway). The advice we get is flawed fundamentally, because it's always prefaced with, "I know! The world is so scary, right?!"

It's worth mentioning that guys don't seem to get this advice. Don't ask me to back this up with evidence, because I'm too lazy to find any, but it seems to me that the college advice targeted at guys is prefaced with "grunt Beer grunt Girls grunt No Parents grunt Sex... College!"

Of course, the advice-giving media has a vested interest in our continued need for advice. If the world is as big and scary as they say it is, and they're the ones with the answers, we're going to keep coming back. In real life, the best college advice I can think of is, "It's easier than you think."

• If you had any friends in high school, you'll have friends in college. If you didn't have any friends in high school, you'll probably still have friends in college, because college is bigger.
• If activities call out to you, you'll join them. If you find yourself having not joined any clubs or anything, either none of them have called out to you (which is fine), or you'll probably keep your eyes open for new stuff to join.
• Parties are fun and generally not scary.
• Classes in college are harder than classes in high school, but you're ready for them.
• You'll be so fine.

I hope that just one person frantically googling "How to transition to college" or "college freshman advice" or some nonsense like that (that I totally googled myself back in the day) happens upon me here and takes a deep breath and calms the hell down.

Love always,
Clara

cupcake ipsum

Caroline copy-edits for Post- now, so she and I hang out sometimes while I'm over there doing my chief-layout-editor thing.

Tonight, an article hadn't come in, but the two other pieces of that page were ready for the second round of copy editing, so I filled the empty box with placeholder text.
This was not ordinary placeholder text, of course. I read about something called Cupcake Ipsum a little while ago, and thought it would be more fun than the normal quasi-Latin gibberish. The section of the magazine usually reserved for our wonderful advice column read something like this:

Cupcake ipsum dolor. Sit amet pastry liquorice danish. Tiramisu sweet chupa chups. Cupcake gummi bears faworki. Tart jujubes pastry cupcake candy I love carrot cake ice cream. Icing powder gummies cotton candy wafer jelly toffee bonbon. Chocolate bar faworki macaroon croissant tiramisu halvah sweet gummies. Cotton candy lollipop caramels brownie. Biscuit croissant ice cream. Oat cake sweet fruitcake. Oat cake gummi bears muffin dragée pastry tootsie roll dragée I love. Candy canes ice cream oat cake. Faworki macaroon chocolate cake cookie I love chocolate bar. Powder topping carrot cake. Faworki jujubes danish jelly marzipan tiramisu candy canes croissant biscuit. I love lollipop sweet roll cupcake cotton candy chocolate bar cake brownie. Cupcake bear claw I love pie dessert cake. Gummi bears dragée caramels jujubes. Muffin pudding I love chocolate cake I love powder I love brownie. Jelly-o lemon drops gingerbread powder. Cookie jelly-o apple pie tootsie roll bear claw jujubes pie. Chocolate bar sesame snaps icing pie macaroon. Danish I love tiramisu chocolate bar jujubes brownie topping. Macaroon cookie gummi bears chupa chups chupa chups cheesecake tootsie roll oat cake sesame snaps. Danish danish candy canes cookie. Candy canes sweet donut. Caramels gingerbread pie sesame snaps. Jelly beans macaroon jelly-o tart I love danish. Gummi bears I love sweet roll marzipan tiramisu jujubes marshmallow. Topping I love muffin caramels cheesecake ice cream apple pie powder tiramisu. Marshmallow pastry pie I love jelly-o candy candy canes. Chocolate bar tootsie roll halvah gummi bears. Dragée lollipop carrot cake dessert cotton candy wafer. Biscuit topping tootsie roll chocolate cake halvah gummi bears. Tart jujubes icing gingerbread brownie dragée jelly beans. Chocolate bar bear claw I love marshmallow cupcake icing tootsie roll sweet. Caramels gummies marshmallow fruitcake jelly beans. Lemon drops gummi bears pie oat cake apple pie chupa chups. Soufflé marshmallow bear claw fruitcake caramels halvah. I love I love brownie soufflé liquorice tiramisu muffin cotton candy. Wafer tart powder cheesecake bear claw I love oat cake pastry sugar plum. I love tiramisu chocolate cake wafer tootsie roll cupcake biscuit topping muffin. Caramels chocolate bar tootsie roll jelly I love pudding I love. Cotton candy chocolate bar cotton candy caramels sugar plum. Gummi bears fruitcake marzipan wafer tart tiramisu.

I assumed this would all go over without incident and went back to my duties (read: Angry Birds). The following conversations went on behind me.

Caroline: I don't think I get this article.
Alexa: Jenny, are you aware that Emily Post- right now is just a list of things?
Jenny: Um, the real article isn't finished yet.
Alexa: Okay.
Caroline: This still doesn't make sense.
Me: OH! Ignore that! That's cupcake ipsum!

Caroline was checking its spelling. I really should make these things more clear. But someday I do want to publish an article like this in Post-. Then we'll be more avant-garde than the Indy.
That is my new aspiration.

Love always,
Clara

sup, bumblebee

So I was a bumblebee for halloween on Saturday. (On Friday, with plans of attending a Too-Soon party, I dressed up as "sexy Tamsen Donner" of 1846).
Apparently I made some kind of impression.

John has threatened to use "bumblebee" as a nickname. I've warned him that I will retaliate. I do not take well to condescension.

Today, though, I discovered John wasn't the only one who enjoyed my costume (which, not that it matters, was pretty damn conservative. I was wearing more clothes than a lot of people). I was standing in the Ratty by the omelette station, and I'd been in someone's way I suppose.

Me: Oh, sorry.
Stranger: Sup, bumblebee?

Maybe it's the prosopagnosia, and I really did meet this person and talk with him at some length (It also might be the a-a-a-a-a-a-alcohol, although I'd be shocked if I'd actually forgotten anything from that night completely). I have no recollection of any of this, though.

Un po' strano.

Love always,
Clara