My mom's gingerbread house

Eve

Here are some of our best tree ornaments: plush dreidel man (not sure where his wife went), my hospital bracelet from my lung collapse, and a delicate family of penguins.

Life is juicy juicy

• Recently visited Richard's beloved Metropolis Cafe. At least I think he's praised it before.

• I found this article via Alicia Keys' Twitter. It's interesting to hear the background story of her latest album, "The Element of Freedom." Here's a little snippet of an interview with recording engineer, album coordinator, and studio designer Ann Mincieli:
  

What do you think Alicia got out of expanding her palette with so many new and different synths? Was that inspiring for her as a songwriter?

Yes! It allowed her to paint a picture. We have class before every album. On this album, we decided that instead of trying to learn the synths while we’re on sessions, like we did on As I Am, we spent two months with the manuals, figuring out how everything worked — and by doing that, it unlocked all these sounds, and inspired her to write certain things she would have never come up with.

Two months in Alicia's custom studio "The Oven" just playing around with instruments that come with manuals! Sounds like heaven. Also, I like Alicia's hair here--it looks so fresh and clean. I think I might mimic it next Wednesday. My hair is long, but horribly damaged.

• Thanks to my "Legacy" status in Honey B. Fly, Mariah Carey's fanclub (I think it just means my membership has been renewed automatically for at least 3 consecutive years), I was able to acquire decent tickets at an indecent price to Mariah Carey's concert in February for the "Angels Advocate" tour. I almost hesitated, almost, but...I'M A LAMB FOR LIFE. And I'm making Mordecai escort me. I went to a Skinny Puppy concert once. He hasn't seen Mariah with me. Therefore, he must escort me before she starts a family. QED.
  

• The kotatsu is back, so I nest in the living room, nurturing a paper, my progress in Assassin's Creed 2, nailpolish, and some baseball cards. I got a couple of 2009 redemptions from Topps (not 2008 Stadium Club): Gordon Beckham and Andrew McCutchen red hot rookies. Finest redemptions are supposedly going to be shipped soon, so hopefully Dexter Fowler's autographed patch comes soon. No photo of the kotatsu right now; the nest is too much of a hot mess.
  

• On repeat in my head: Lea Michele's/Rachel Berry's rendition of "Don't Rain On My Parade" from the fall finale of Glee. I can't watch "Sectionals" without getting all choked up! I've been meaning to go over Kurt's wardrobe but...I have until the start of next season in April. I must see Lea Michele perform live once before I die.
  

PINKY: December 2009

On Wednesday Mituswa had their big discount day (20% off grocery subtotals). All the displaced Japanese housewives were going nuts, hunting shopping carts down in the parking lot, scooping up mochi rice, Japanese burdock root (as opposed to the Taiwan counterpart), and then a bunch of things no one really needs. The rest of Mitsuwa was not 20% off, but I always leave their bookstore with a magazine. I also picked up volume 21 of NANA. I really need to go over what happened in volume 20; in fact, it's entirely possible I've lost track of NANA so badly that I don't even have volume 20. My mom and I also noticed some other comic books we're clearly missing out on, like Keshikasu-Kun, a manga about an ERASER. He looks angry.

Anyway, I veered from normalcy by avoiding ViVi and buying the December issue of PINKY. It came with a small, cute PINKY x L'Occitane carrying case/pouch. I most definitely picked the December issue over the November issue because of this particular bonus gift, and not so much because November is the dusty past in the fast-paced world of fashion.

I'm not sure I'd buy another issue of PINKY unless Amuro Namie is on the cover because I feel like I get more bang for buck with ViVi (i.e., more pages). Although, I noticed that because there are so many spreads, ads made to looks like spreads, and features, ViVi seems forced to re-feature the same item multiple times throughout one issue. So in the November issue, a Japanese knock-off of the Balenciaga ankle boot appeared like, four times. I found that to be disappointing, but what can you do? It was a good copy at a reasonable price--I would definitely go hunt for it if I were in Japan right now. PINKY feels a little like Diet ViVi, but there are some decent spreads that I'll feature here. You can find scans of the entire issue (and other magazines if you look around the site) here. The following crude scans are my own.

This feature is all about the "AmeKaji" style. "AmeKaji" is short for "American Casual." That is, if you want to look like a casually dressed American, here are a few pages on "HowTo" do it. Their inspiration seems to come from the fall presentation of DSquared--there's Chanel Iman walking that runway in this style on the left page. Unrelated: I wondered what Suzuki Emi was up to these days having graduated from Japanese Seventeen. The answer is that she's plastered all over PINKY, rocking the ubiquitous Kato Miliyah babydoll bangs.

I find the title of this style to be funny, partially because I really do wear flannel, jeans, not-quite-cowboy-but-close-enough Frye boots, and I even recently dug up a slightly baggy blue and white vertically striped shirt from my parents' basement last month (see the very bottom of the left page above). Many of my daily read fashion bloggers based in the States also layer simple tshirts with flannel and pair that with denim and boots of some sort. Maybe if I curl my hair, wear funny hats, and bare my thighs in the freezing Chicago cold, I'll look more like a displaced Japanese girl trying to pull off the "American Casual" look.

I'm just throwing this one in here because I like the black sparkly sweater dress on the second girl from the left. I never got into distressed jeans, but I saw Beni layering some holy pants with lace tights underneath. I can get down with layering. And sparkly sweater dresses in the winter.

What is so frustrating is that these magazines will tell you where you can acquire the featured clothes. I recognize many of the stores, and totally know how to get there. Many of the prices are not totally outrageous. The problem is that I'm HERE in freezing Chicago........and with many papers to write and grade [T_T]