The Latest & Greatest: SUNO

New York Fashion Week newcomer, Suno, has had its cherry "popped". For the first time the line for Fall 2010 was shown on the catwalk this February. The collection is really fun and full of personality and color. Bright zig-zags and ikat prints combine to make some really neat outfits!

I'm not a huge fan of the hair and hats... but I guess you can't always get it right the first time, can you?

Deadline: Tomorrow 2PM perhaps?

So I'm sitting at a little table at Panera bread right now... wishing I was pretty much anywhere else. I have a research paper due for my "Theories of Family Development" class tomorrow afternoon... morning... I have no clue. I only just decided what I would write about: Children who have Famous Parents and how it affects them... Am I creative, or what? Everyone else I've talked to is writing about adoption or divorce... so hopefully I'll get some credit for thinking outside of the box. Well anyways, I'm sitting here wearing an extra large sweatshirt from Macados, and I'm feeling super nostalgic. I love Macados. This week they'll be having a huge St. Patty's Day celebration (like they do every year)... I definitely have commemorative glasses from several parties there... Anyways, every time I went to visit my grandparents they would take me there because it's like my favorite place, ever. I always tried to buy myself a t-shirt, but they never had my size... so one year for Christmas my grandfather, RD, bought me this sweatshirt even though it doesn't fit me, and never will. I need to get myself to Blacksburg, VA. Maybe if I don't find a super awesome job by the time I graduate, I can just fly up there this summer and hang out at VA Tech. If you get the chance, go to Macados! And get a brownie covered in vanilla ice cream and hot fudge.... so yummy!

Old school.

Last night, I sat across from a young man on a bus who could sing the theme song from "Reading Rainbow" in its entirety. I was impressed... but I don't think his girlfriend was.

We All Peepoo

Yesterday I caught an article in the NY Times about yet another innovation from Sweden; the Peepoo bag. This bag is no ordinary plastic bag. While some places around the world are trying to abolish the plastic bag, there is still a huge use for it in Africa. Africa has had it pretty tough. There are so many misconceptions about the world's second largest continent. I once heard a very ignorant ninth grader comment, "we should just send everyone with AIDS to Africa"... (Adam Bracken, anyone?)

Well anyways, sanitation and plumbing are both very primitive systems in most African countries. When it is time to relieve one's self in Africa, most people "pee or poo" in a plastic bag, knot it, and go outside and throw it. Throw it where? I don't know. In the ditch, across the road, in a patch of grass, maybe it gets thrown near someone's water supply. This waste gets into the water supply and makes people seriously ill. Diarrhoeal diseases are one of the top causes of death in the elderly and infants in Africa. It's terrible, because these deaths could be better prevented... and there is a little bit of hope- all because of a concerned Swede.


Well, the Peepoo bag has been created to help nourish the African land, and to help give people a better quality of life. The bag is able to break down the contents of the bag to a fertilizer that is safe to be exposed to. It is being priced competitively... at $.02 or $.03 per bag... a small price to pay for such a great product!

Well, sometime after I read this article, I went to yoga, and during the last ten minutes of class (where we focus on "conscious relaxation") I fell asleep... and while taking my little cat nap, I had a little dream. I guess it was more like a "flash" or a "blip", however. Well, a picture of my best friend, Jenn Nguyen, popped into my head, and she was squinting her eyes and holding a Peepoo bag! I laughed outloud... and then realized I was still in yoga.

At least I didn't snore!

Disappointment in MILAN

Just as the Olympics wrapped up this weekend, so did the Milan fashion shows. Cathy Horyn, from the New York Times, was severely disappointed, and said that the weekend was "an eternity of bad clothes"... So bad, she said that editors were silently screaming "Help, I need a drink!". Maybe, she said, we should stop having such high expectations for Italy, and maybe "this is as good as it gets".

But like Italy's performance in the Winter Games, Fashion week(end?) showed one little glimpse of gold with Aquilano.Rimondi's show. Designers Roberto Rimondi and Tommaso Aquilano pulled in the reins on their normally embellished aesthetic to appeal more to the spirit of the times. They sent beautiful tweeds and furs down the runway in combinations that were definitely gold medal-worthy.

And now for the losers' bracket. Check it out... is this really fashionable? Milan is supposed to be a fashion capitol... but of what exactly? Surrealist nightmares?

Versus
Marni
yuk yuk yuk

Jil Sander
What's Italian for cameltoe?

Thinspiration Kills

Oh my gosh.

Thinspo is totally blowing my mind today.

Never had I ever heard about this type of thing until we watched a movie in my trends class today (thanks Dr. D!)... And if you have never heard about "thinspo"... here's the gist of it. "Thinspo" (short for thinspiration) is a pro-anorexia media movement that is all over youtube, and I suspect elsewhere... I really haven't done that much looking into it other than on youtube. Basically, there are people out there who compile pictures of thin girls (some with eating disorders) and put them with music and then post them on the internet to inspire others to continue their disorder... like "oh I know it's hard-but it's totally worth it... look at these super skinny girls and know that if you only eat a cube of cheese and a cup of grapes today, you can have collarbones that look like drawer pulls and a hollowed out face too!"

I found this "thinspiration. Real girls." on youtube today, and since September 3, 2007 it's had 26,823 hits. So it's been up there for the world to see for about 880 days. That's about 30 views a day. The user who put it up on youtube is called "DailyThinspo", and she had a goal to upload a video every day... but it looks like she only has four videos... one has had 223,231 views... that's about 254 views a day. It totally blows my mind. 254 girls/maybe guys are looking at her video to be "thinspired"... it's crazy. I just can't really wrap my mind around it. There is a whole community out there devoted to helping each others fall deeper into their eating disorders.

This video makes me so sad! Half of the pictures look like

they were found on teenage girls' myspaces. You know...

the pictures where girls are standing in the mirror with

their camera? It's so sad.

This one is the one we actually watched in class...

While showing pictures of girls measuring their waists and sitting

at the toilet, it actually asks "Is it worth it?" Followed by a very

chilling "YES." It's so sad.

This video, however made me feel like the world isn't going to find itself dug in the ground... it's a video trying

to sway people from the effects of "thinspiration"

Her Anti-Ana video has had 309,213 views since June 2007...

hopefully she is inspiring hope and educating some young girls

who are lost.

Looking at all of these videos today has made me totally sick. I had

to eat a brownie to make sure I wasn't affected.

It was pretty yummy.

Man of the Moment: Peter Sarsgaard

I recently saw An Education starring Carey Mulligan (from Pride and Prejudice) and Peter Sarsgaard. I had been interested in seeing it... but my best friend, Brennwyn, had already seen it, so one afternoon I kind of kidnapped my mom and took her to the Angelika in Dallas. (Love you mom!) Well the movie itself was great... I recommend it. It was funny, thought-provoking, and very colorful. (Oh and the clothes were fabulous as well!)

Well anyways, Sarsgaard was amazing. He was so good at being charming and a little chemically unbalanced and detached, and you couldn't decide whether to love him or hate him or pity him. Well, he was great... very smart.

Not even two weeks later I was "working on homework" and watching Garden State... a movie I'm not sure if I even like that much... (I've seen it at least five times, and never really enjoy it... I like the special features more than I like the actual film.) But anyways, sitting in "his" living room doing ecstasy and smoking from a homemade bong is Peter Sarsgaard, as Zach Braff's old high school buddy. I was totally weird-ed out, but knowing it was actually him made the movie slightly more entertaining for me.


Well anyways, I just think he's super adorable and talented and charming... and he just got married and had a baby! Congrats to him! He's married to the über-fabulous Maggie Gyllenhaal (it's cute... they both have surnames with a double vowel...) but anyways... they're a nice match. Here's a little clip from David Letterman where she kind of talks about him... it's more funny than a testament about his wonderful charisma... if you have the time, watch it... it's almost slightly awkward... the "kid's mother" and "kid's father" bit is great.



Okay and then I find this interview between him and Carey Mulligan absolutely hysterical! It's kind of terrible and all inside jokey until about a minute in when he says that his biggest qualm about playing his character in An Education was that he didn't know how to act Jewish... he's a thinker, that one.



Oh but what makes it even better is that when he's talking about "what does it mean to be Jewish?" the guy interviewing him is making those understanding noises like "mm hmm" and "yeah"... it's not like Sarsgaard has come up with some huge philosophical thing here... I dunno... I found it quite entertaining... until they stopped talking about "what it means to be Jewish". Oh well. He's a good actor, and that's really the whole point to the story.

He has a nice smirk, doesn't he?