Jessup & Tandoori

Falafel and calamansi juice at Tandoori, a Persian restaurant.

Top - thrifted

Trousers - thrifted

Shoes - Linea Italia

Bag - gift

Last Friday & Vanille

Vanille, a pastry shop in Ayala-Cebu, is not my favorite pastry shop. There are better shops, and there are better pastries. But I love Vanille because it's almost always deserted (maybe because it's not just me who thinks their pastries/cakes/food are so-so).

Outfit:

Top - thrifted

Skirt - deconstructed, from a pair of shorts

Shoes - gift from aunt

Bag - Metro Ayala, gift from mama

Black, White & Pink, and Lace

Black, white and pink

In between, there's lace, silk, dots, flowers, and paisley

Almost everything is vintage, and can rarely be found anywhere.

Two Favorites

Scott Schuman (thesartorialist.blogspot.com) and Garance Doré (garancedore.fr) are fashion bloggers, and they are very much in love.

Last fall, they moved into a big, long apartment in the Village, the kind with one wall of exposed brick and two adjacent bedrooms in the back, one of which is for Schuman’s two young daughters from the marriage that ended not long before Doré began to appear on his website.

The first big thing the couple bought together was a Chesterfield sofa—brown leather, with lots of buttons—and they were sitting on it one afternoon, describing how they met at Paris Fashion Week. It was, Schuman says, four years ago.

“Can I tell the story?” Doré says. She is wearing a denim work shirt (his), navy-blue pants (“We bought them at Céline in Rome,” he says. “They look really great”), and ballet flats with a leopard print.

Read the complete article here

Argao Church

I almost forgot to post these photos my boyfriend took (I compel my boyfriend to take photos of me, but I don't use threats or coercion, promise) of me at Argao's St. Michael's parish church. The plaza in the church and the municipal hall is one, if not, the cleanest plaza I have ever been to. The grass is very green, the place is well-lighted, the Spanish structures have been reinforced, cleaned and intact, and people actually hang out in their plaza. There's music, and free Wifi! Beat that! That's why I love going back to Argao because of their plaza, their food, (also of course because that's where one of my closest friends live.)

Shirt - thrifted

Skirt - thrifted

Belt - thrifted

Shoes - Janilyn

Hat - cousin's

Earrings (used as hat clip ons) -- gift from grand aunt

The Uniform

I can't just wear anything to school, and after seven (?) months I still abhor that I can't wear just about anything to school. For one, I can't wear sleeveless dresses/tops, shorts or short skirts (though they'll allow a decent short skirt to pass through), slippers, cut-off jeans, etc. So, everytime I go to school, I always think of the appropriate thing to wear, and chances are, the appropriate things are not what I want to wear. Because you know, we wear what's in our hearts. (huh!)

The picture above is one of my favorite "uniforms." The dress is black, lined but lightweight, doesn't wrinkle, with sleeves, and with the right hemline. It doesn't hurt that the dress only cost me P40. The shoes are flat -- wearing heels is unbearable when I only commute to school and lugging heavy books. (boring)

Dress - thrifted

Flats - thrifted

Bag - from sister

Belt - thrifted

Style Inspire: Magazine Scans

Some scans from magazines of past seasons that I want to channel this summer, or year, or forever:

It's the healthy hair with the sparkly color, and the bright smile. It's the positive attitude.

The swinging and below the knee skirt.

The matching of unlikely matches: red and black & white. It's the comfort.

The long skirt is a classic.

The neck-tie blouse is vintage and an all-time sexy top.

The fresh, and non-complicated colorful life.

Trend: Hi Panda

Move over, Hello Kitty.
Read Wall Street Journal article here

How Do I Love Thee?

My classmates, my boyfriend and I had dinner at STK, a local restaurant in Cebu. The place was packed, it was Valentine's Day, and we had to be seated at the farthest corner of the place. Valentine's Day was good, my boyfriend brought me pan de sal and peanut butter early in the morning while I was still sleeping.

Dress - reworked vintage
Shoes - gift from grand-aunt

P.S. I think I needed to wear a belt with the dress. I think the dress had a matching belt, but I was running late for school and could not remember where I placed that belt.

Sunday Picnic

We had a picnic at a public park yesterday to celebrate my grandfather and my two of great-grandparents' birthday. We had the usual Filipino picnic fare: pork and chicken barbecue, rice (the hanging type), friend lumpiang shanghai, pancit, and Coca-Cola.

The picnic was planned about three weeks ago. My outfit was planned also three weeks ago. I was really hoping February would signal the weather's transition to spring/summer, but Sunday was all rainy. Our floral/summery outfits sort of did not jive with the weather, but what the heck. My mood was already summer. :P

Top - Nafnaf
Skirt - vintage
Belt - gift from aunt
Sandals - department store, P199

Happy birthday, Grandpere!

Of course, I was preparing a birthday blog (in my head) last night. But naturally, I forgot what I wanted to say. Today's my grandfather's birthday. When I was younger and he had his first stroke, I feared he would die, I cried all the time while being beside him all the time. When he underwent radiation, we were all beside him to attend to his whims and caprices -- I to find him the ripest and most delicious papaya, it's his favorite. He's always disappointed, and hot-heated, and lost a lot of weight. Then he was diagnosed of cancer, and it was something I could not believe would happen to him -- after all, I refuse to believe grandparents die. I believed grandparents will always be there. When he died, I did not fear of losing him. I was relieved he was free from physical, earthly pain. But I feared that he would be alone, and I -- together with my siblings and cousins -- would not be there to cheer him up. Until now, the thought of him physically gone is still unbelievable because it is as if he never left. We still talk of him as if he's just in Bio-os where he once had an office. And we still make sumbong whenever one of us do something naughty. Or my mother still constantly reminds us to be good so that we won't disappoint him, or our grandmother. Happy birthday, lo. I miss you.

“You Should Date An Illiterate Girl”

By Charles Warnke (Jan. 19, 2011)

Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.

Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common ground like sushi, and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale, or the evenings get long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn’t fucking collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice.

Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn’t, smile all the same.

Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail, frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return, or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn’t read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love.

Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent as a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, god damnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.

Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.

Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.

Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so god damned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. I hate you. I really, really, really hate you.

Northern Weekend Film Photos

film photos from a weekend trip my boyfriend and i took up north sometime last year.

related blogpost Up North Weekend

I don't want to be cool

I don't want to be cool

I want to be fashion!

- Anna Dello Russo

Study Day Sunday

It took me long to post these outfit photos because I think I look funny in the white shorts. The pair is actually a vintage pair that is 1 size big for me, and I stored it for the shop because I don't know how to stylishly wear it. But I wore it because I found it comfortable -- elastic waistband, pockets, wide leg/thigh room. I don't know what to think about it, but my sister was shocked saying I looked like a tomboy. Writing about this makes me want to wear the pair of shorts over and over again, because they are very comfortable and if only to displease my sister.

top - vintage

shorts - vintage

trinkets - gifts from grandaunt

sandals - grendha

bag - from sister