About as angry as I've ever been.

No idea why.

The real me.

I just want to shop all the time. I used to have this brilliant (brilliant!) idea that if I had as much money as Madonna, I would hire a team to buy me one of every single piece of women's clothing made in my size, in every color, excluding obvious crimes such as swishy pant suits and any and all varieties of terry/velour sweats which I feel have their place in a former life I no longer lead. I would then simply try on everything, with a stylist on hand, keeping what worked and donating what did not. I have the hardest time shopping for clothing (although the end result is always worth the trouble) and I felt like this would be the end-all, be-all solution.

Why not just hire the stylist and let him/her bring you what they think will work best... you ask? Because I have to know all my options, lest the sky fall down upon my head and the ground below sink into the sea. Duh, pssht.

I'm in school (and the good Lord knows how much I love it) and thanks to having the single most supportive husband ever stitched together by The Big Man Upstairs, I'm also not working. That means extra money usually goes to filling the gas tank and buying the very best deep conditioner I can afford. If you'd like to hire me to fold your laundry that'd be awesome. I don't shop much, but when I do I focus on making it a quality piece. Something (hopefully) well made with a special embellishment or "depanner" if you will, something to tide me over until spare change arrives for the next mini-investment. I also shop with the future paycheck in mind. I'll fill an online shopping cart to the brim, seek out discount codes, maybe even think of reaching for my credit card... but in the end, I close out, click the "X" and send my would be wardrobe into virtual slumber.

Oh but the days of being back in the black are soon at hand. Friday starts a new year, and with that the landslide until graduation on August 13th. Between then and now are a superabundance of outlines, flashcards, exams, clinicals, trials, errors, and hopefully a few victories, but come this time next year I should be several months into my new career, heartily in love with a new handbag and cheerfully blowing kisses to the ATM as I pass. Until then comrades, a few would-be selections...

Appropriately, the La La Love Dress from Lulu's, $33 (approx one tank of gas)

Why hello husband, I got your dinner. I got your dinner right here.

Galassi Draped sweater, also Lulu's, $78

This is so smooshy-wooshy and romantic. Over textured tights with a gauzy tunic and bib necklace, whaaaaat?! Next windfall, this is mine.

Bugle Boy dress from Shabby Apple, $98

Stupid cute. Wouldn't change a thing about how it's styled. Would change myself to wear it.

Faux Leather Jacket from Tulle, $85

This over the Bugle Boy. Then I run out to pick up the dry cleaning looking effortlessly fabulous and financially solvent. I used to daydream about Brad Pitt, sans goatee. My how things have changed...

A hallowed, yet whimsical, aura of love.

Does anybody watch Roseanne? I'm hooked on the reruns and I've recently discovered that there is never a time between the East Coast hours of midnight and about 8 or 9 in the morning when this show is not on. It's amazing. I've even honed in to which channel will be showing the season I'm most interested in catching up on. For instance, I didn't know Darlene got pregnant in Disney World - could there be anything more out of character than Darlene and David getting together in the magic kingdom? Maybe when Jackie started dating that guy who played the hillbilly redneck Ernest in a slew of Budweiser beer ads disguised as "movies". These are two separate seasons, but if you toggle between channel 244 and 196 during the hours of 2-5am, all shall be revealed. DVR allows you to blend seamlessly, but I appreciate a challenge.

I study late - or early depending how you call it. Watching this show where some seriously regular folks had to pull themselves up by the secondhand boot straps week after week after week is as good a motivation as any. The title of this post is a little gem from Grandmother Harris, Roseanne and Jackie's bat-shit-crazy mother. She's planning Darlene and David's shotgun wedding, with plans to drape battenburg lace over the pews, achieving said aura. I'm guessing that around 3am she's going to be on channel 256 announcing that she's gay. The theory of universal wavefunction is never so fully realized as it is in syndication.

Deceitful, two-faced she-woman.

That's kinda how I feel pledging to start a blog prompted by my good friend's encouragement, starting said blog, and then leaving it to lay dormant for so long that I had to skim through three or four pages of Facebook links to find the darned thing.

I also love, like down down down down deep in my heart love, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and that it's been on TBS pretty much non-stop for the past week or so. I mean, The Wedding Planner, Singer, and Date are all swell flicks, but every once in a while I need cinema with some guts and a big fat bottom. Ulysses Everett McGill delivers in under 30 minutes with extra bread sticks you didn't pay for. Pass the sauce.

Here I am.

Several months ago, my best friend and instigator of practically all I have accomplished, told me that I should start a blog. Since we met, we have been in a state of constant competition, and even the gentle nudge of "should" carries with it the same breathless sensation as having been violently jerked from sleep by the angry gods of morning. It must be done, you might have done it, but I can wait no longer.

It's a wonderful friendship; the kind that exists simply because it was created. Neither the occasional acrimony nor digital communication device incompetency can oppress its light to shine. It propels me forward when complacency offers a welcome seat to recline and achingly reminds me that together we are an awful sweetness - nowhere to hide, no one to be better against, entirely equal and entirely different. We have separated several times, but we will never divorce.

So I dedicate this blog to you, dear friend. And now it will never be good enough.

From love, Kristen