Today, more than any day, I need courage.
Good people of the internet, I call on your collective sweetness to send good vibes my way.
Fortitude is not my strong suit and I need all the help I can get.
P.S. Female matadors slay me with their grace and ferocity. Let us leave aside for the moment the fraught issue of animal cruelty and dwell instead on how incredibly fearless and foxy these women are. See more of the toreras captured by Gina LeVay here.
Now here is something astonishing.
Dissatisfied by a "fractured and fragmentary history of paying work" and armed with insatiable curiosity, Stephanie from even*cleveland decided to rethink and remake her profession.
Enter the School of One - the diary of one woman's new career as an autodidact:
The world is full of wonders and I am greedy for them. So with this weird unconstructed space that is my adult life, I am going to attempt to make a form. I will mold a career of my own. I don’t have funds to travel, but I have a library card and I happen to live in a city with amazing cultural artifacts. I have time. I have a roof overhead and a tolerance for very little cash in hand. I also have an unshakeable belief that knowledge is worth having. So this space will be a map of my attempts at self-education, a documentation of the things I am reading and seeing and doing in an effort to mold the raw matter of my mind into something a little better.
Get a load of the Fall Syllabus.
Stephanie, you rock my world so hard. (And I love the custom stationary you made me). I am daydreaming about what my Fall semester might look like:
What do you still want to learn/revisit/reread?
For a woman who said, "Elegance is refusal", Diana Vreeland obviously favored excess in her Billy Baldwin-decorated sitting room, which she called her "garden in hell".
As drawn as I am to the serenity of neutral palettes and highly edited interiors, I find the vitality of color and pattern and texture so appealing. This is a devilishly exciting room - it invites exploration, conversation and stimulation. (Preferably over cocktails.)
I also love this illustration of Vreeland's New York City apartment by Jeremiah Goodman. Check out his other portraits of great rooms.
Second photo via Bohemian Hellhole. Jeremiah illustration via Architectural Digest.
