MOVING MEGA BLOG PT. 1

a chic nyc hotel stay, apartment hunting, friend catch-ups, suburban malaise, & a breakup

Hello friends!!! welcome to my blog, which I will be updating regularly with my opinions on what’s IN versus OUT (if you read lemony snicket as a child you know the namesake of my blog), as well as life updates.

my most recent life update is: I MOVED BACK TO NYC. yes i am one of those fake new yorker bitches who left during the start of the plandemic and have only returned once rent prices have skyrocketed, SUE ME. I had a blissful year and a half-ish in northern california with my mother and new baby (adopted rottweiler-pitbull named Miley Cyrus).

however, with some patience and hella corporate relocation perk, i was able to find my way back to the city I love most. Except this time, it’s for real life not liberal arts school, meaning I get paid a salary, don’t have homework, and can live downtown. Life truly does get better, people!!!

I am mostly settled into my new apartment after throwing a housewarming party (more on that laterr). Miley has been her typical resilient self and has learned to pee on the slope where the sidewalk meets the street (no grass to be found around here), barks dutifully at any strange delivery man who arrives at our doorstep, and has asserted herself as the alpha female at both Tompkins and Washington Square park dog runs (she doesn’t let rando dogs hump her). She also takes dumps in front of the line of hypebeast couples waiting at Kith AND the line of straight males waiting outside Aime Leon Dore. There’s nothing that puppy can’t do. I’ve had to practice picking up dog poop gracefully while wearing cute outfits, sometimes involving skirts, and it’s much harder than it looks, especially while holding an iced coffee. sigh, #firstworldproblems.

Anyway, enjoy the moving timeline below, in which i chronicle my journey home to NY and my latest antics.

June: sweaty NYC summer excursion

Doing a quick throwback to the beginning of my moving journey: a short trip I took at the end of June to do some apartment hunting and remind my East Coast friends that I exist. I holed up at a verry bougie hotel in the LES and committed some blunders as I re-assimilated to city life, such as: stepping in a bike lane and almost getting killed, mistaking an express train for a local, and wearing birkenstocks to a rooftop party.

#viewz

Bathroom was sick, naturally I took 100000 moody mirror selfies and stole all the soaps. and the bath linens were margiela!

exhausted after looking at shithole apartments. finally found The One on renthop.com, the most underrated website.

me and Cat went to Lucien and I swear to god I saw Kaitlin Phillips, who was sitting outside, give me the up and down and lean over to her friend to shit talk my outfit (I was wearing iamgia so I deserved it)

Cafe Forgot in LES. they recreated the Clueless closet—the clothing rack rotates with press of a button.

bought this Pretties Venice slip dress at cafe forgot but still haven’t had ballz to wear in public. will style with oversized blazer + knee high boots for fall

my friends’ beautifullll rooftop in hell’s kitchen

cute pic of Cat outside Fig 19

Over the course of my five-day trip, I developed 7 blisters, sweated through 2+ outfits/day, toured 2 nice apartments and about 5 shitty ones, and spent more money on drinks than I did in all of 2020 (sourced 90% of my covid alcohol from my mom’s wine stash).

July-August: bumming around in the suburbs

Had a gap between my SF and NYC leases, so I moved back to my mom’s place south of SF for a bit. My vibe when I’m living out there is: work (online), walk the dog, drive to philz with my mom, rinse, and repeat. The uniform is aritzia sweatpants and crocs every single day. When I’m living at home, I inevitably fall into a depressive hole after about 2 weeks, despite the home cooked food and material comforts of living near family and saving money. Those comforts, while lovely, are what make me lazy and complacent. Without seeing hot young people hustling around being successful, and without friends to make me leave my house, my motivation to be the best girlboss I can be deteriorates and I start getting cynical and listening to far too much Red Scare pod.

I think I instinctively over-listen to red scare when I’m in the bay because it’s an escapist reaction to feeling frustrated and trapped in the silicon valley monoculture, where there is no critical thinking and no gritty city glamour, no reemerging indie sleazebag aesthetic, not enough degeneracy, and no GOSSIP, about anyone I care about anyway. everyone my age (low to mid twenties) working in tech seems so… content and complacent. there’s not enough angst for me.

maybe I’m just not a chill enough person to survive in bay area suburbia for long periods of time. anyway, last summer, I swapped hate-scrolling tech twitter for entertaining anna and dasha’s deranged takes. It was definitely not the best mental place to be in. (To clarify, not wanting to be a girlboss and being wary of AOC’s and everyone else’s antics is extremely healthy. Constantly hearing anna and dasha talking about being skinny gets old pretty quickly.)

But, we should normalize being able to listen to content we disagree with. Just because someone listens to a podcast doesn’t mean they agree with everything that’s said, which, believe it or not is not a given these days. My issue was that I was exclusively listening to anna and dasha and not sprinkling in the occasional..idk…Binchtopia episode for example, to keep myself in check.

my grandparents’ freezer. literally always stocked like this :’)

my crocs before they got dusty. embellishments by pillow sob

a rare day when i actually put on an outfit to walk the dog and immediately regretted my shoe choice. shirt idk, skirt iamgia, clogs are old madewell.

said goodbye to my mansion of an SF apartment. California square footage is not to be taken for granted, despite being ridiculously overpriced

Last summer, I was also staring down the clock at an impending, partially moving-induced breakup with my ex (we can nickname him X for the blog). My remaining days in the bay were numbered, and we distracted ourselves by driving down to half moon bay and stopping for artichoke bread in pescadero.

Eating artichoke bread on a tree stump outside of an antique shop the way God intended.

big little lies vibes

I also spent a good chunk of quality time with Saba. Our ritual was taking a Rumble boxing class, followed by Joe and the Juice (lol). When in palo alto, you have to just assimilate to the the rich mom lifestyle, otherwise you’ll shrivel up and die.

Saba and me at garden of eden. taken by zoë

Went to Pasha in Redwood City for one last hookah sesh. I’m obsessed with this place; it is definitely one of my favorite Bay Area haunts. The girls here actually dress up a bit (by Bay Area standards), so if you want to go somewhere with a group and wear cute outfits while smoking hookah and/or drinking, this place is for you. Personally I loved coming here with just X and people watching while hookah-ing and drinking tea.

Crowd here is a bit older than the other hookah spot in downtown RWC (mid-late twenties instead of teenz) and much less white, if that matters to you.

September: getting the f out of the bay area!!!!

The moving process was a lot of dealing with boring but stressful logistics in order to move myself, my dog, and all my shit across the country. Won’t bore you with the details but enjoy the pics.

packing

Miley unknowingly saying goodbye to her dear friend Keely

Had to say some hard goodbyes upon leaving the bay… but c’est la vie. Find out what happened when I actually got back to the city in my next blog. Some things to look forward to: running into one of my idols, dodging a few creeps, getting back into the swing of things outfit-wise, and an update on my post-breakup chaotic era.

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I’ll leave you with the first ever IN versus OUT list. Disclaimer: this is just my opinion, don’t come for me.

IN

• ballet flats but you already knew that

• uggs (i will die on this hill)

• olive green, black, any earth tones in simple silhouettes (think the Dune/Rick Owens aesthetic)

• ^in that vein, tall, leather boots with no heel or very low heel (I’ve been eyeing these)

• berets

• posting earnestly on main (think christian girl autumn vibes, the Nymphet Alumni girls just came out with a great episode about this)

• poetry (a genre made for fall)

• eBay

• wearing lingerie under layers and layers of loungewear and oversized outerwear and trench coats. Tis the season for stepping into someone’s apartment and immediately shedding all of your layers

• anything in the color camel. see examples here and here

OUT

• cropped leather jackets

• cropped puffer jackets (long dead)

• light wash denim

• anything with an overly y2k aesthetic

• tiny bags

• overly colorful nail art

• Telfar bags (i’m sry I just don’t like them unless it’s the Ugg collab)

• autofiction

• being part of a “scene”—do not be fooled by that one The Cut column despite how entertaining it can be!!

• depop

• ANY PLAID THAT IS NOT THE BURBERRY PLAID