From a crispy spam burger at The Kon-Tiki to a pork laab burger at Jo's Modern Thai, there are five mouth-watering takes on the classic burger waiting for you this week. Collect a stamp for each on your burger passport and you'll get a special invite to an end-of-tour party.
Also this week: our ultimate guide to Fourth of July parades, fireworks, and live music; the opening of SF's buzziest new restaurant, Dalida; Dirtybird's Claude VonStroke's bday party; Ratatouille live at the SF Symphony; the Petaluma Art & Garden Festival, and much more.
Have a good one!
The biggest kabooms will go off once again over San Francisco Bay, but there are also plenty of ways to feel the sparkle all over the Bay Area. Find out where you can wave your flag for the red, white, and blue on Monday and Tuesday with our guide to Fourth of July fireworks and events in the Bay Area.
Pick up your Oakland Burger Tour passport then take a bite out of the five burgers being served up at Low Bar, The Kon-Tiki, Jo’s Modern Thai, Telegraph Beer Garden, and Lovely’s. Wash them all down with a special burger tour cocktail at each stop, too. Collect a stamp at each restaurant and you’ll be invited to the end-of-tour wrap party; Wednesday, through September 4th. // Details at lowbaroakland.com
Hear the people sing when Les Misérables takes the stage; Wednesday, through Sunday, July 23rd. // Orpheum Theatre, 1192 Market St. (Civic Center); tickets at broadwaysf.com
Dine on elevated Mediterranean food in the Presidio. The highly anticipated opening of Dalida comes from married chefs Laura and Sayat Ozyilmaz, formerly of the popular pop-up Istanbul Modern (plus stints at Saison, Mourad, and Eleven Madison Park); Wednesday to Sundays, 5pm to 9pm. // Dalida, 101 Montgomery St. Suite 100 (Presidio); reservations at dalidasf.com
Wouldn’t It Be Nice to see The Beach Boys? Well, you can; Thursday at 7:30pm. // Mountain Winery, 14831 Pierce Rd. (Saratoga); tickets at ticketmaster.com
The start of a new month means Oakland First Friday is on. The blocks-long party features food and art vendors, live music, bar specials, and a fresh theme. Celebrate Independent Business Month by highlighting the very best of the Bay; Friday, 5pm to 9pm. // Telegraph Ave. between W. Grand and 27th St. (Oakland); details at oaklandfirstfridays.org
Experience a very California farm-to-table outdoor feast followed by an open-air performance from Julia Adams and her elite ballet troupe; Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at 5:30pm. // Tara Firma Farms, 3796 I St. Exit (Petaluma); tickets at juliaadamdance.com
Pair mini golf with unlimited Fieldwork Brewing beers. Every Friday, a different local brewery takes over the tap and, for $29, you get unlimited beer and golf. Get swingin’; Friday, 4pm to 7pm. // Tipsy Putt, 5690 Bay St. (Emeryville); details at facebook.com
Dance until you can’t anymore with deep beats provided by Dirtybird’s Claude VonStroke at the DJ's official birthday party; Friday at 9pm. // The Midway, 900 Marin St. (Bayview); tickets at tixr.com
Delight your senses with a five-course culinary journey at Gloria Ferrer. A deliciously curated meal is paired with a selection of Sonoma-grown sparkling and still wines. Featuring ingredients sourced from the estate gardens, this is a fresh, fun way to discover Sonoma Wine Country. // 23555 Arnold Dr. (Sonoma); for reservations, go to gloriaferrer.com.
Thank you to our partners at Gloria Ferrer.
Take a trip to Isla Nublar at the Jurassic World Live Tour. The family-friendly arena production is complete with larger-than-life dinosaurs and includes a special pre-show adventure with fun photo ops and more; Friday at 7pm, Saturday at 11am, and Sunday at 3pm and 7pm. // SAP Center at San Jose, 525 W Santa Clara St. (San Jose); tickets at ticketmaster.com
Have a low-key hang at Sausalito’s Jazz and Blues on the Bay. You’ll find free music on the waterfront, in walking distance to the Sausalito ferry. BYO picnic and drinks, or purchase from local community groups on site; Fridays, 6:30pm to 8pm. // Gabrielson Park, Anchor St. & Humboldt Ave. (Sausalito); details at destinationsausalito.com
Watch Remy the rat cook food better than you when the San Francisco Symphony performs the score live to Disney Pixar’s Ratatouille; Saturday at 3pm and Sunday at 2pm. // Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave. (Civic Center); tickets at sfsymphony.org
Join Daybreaker—the favorite sober daytime dance party—for its first-ever event at the Asian Art Museum. Come dressed in gold for this gilded soiree that begins with yoga and continues on with dancing and NA cocktails; Sunday, 10am to 1pm. // Tickets at eventbrite.com
Stop to smell the roses and sip some wine at the Petaluma Art & Garden Festival. Held in the historic downtown, the annual event features Sonoma County beverages, food from local restaurants, live music; and more than 100 booths stocked with creative décor, jewelry, art, and sustainability ideas; Sunday, 11am to 5pm. // 4th and B Streets (Petaluma); details at eventbrite.com
Take in 360-degree views at Fiesta en el Parque, a family-friendly party featuring Aztec dancing, Latin music, performances, and pop-up food and beverage vendors; Sunday, 1pm to 5pm. // Presidio Tunnel Tops, 210 Lincoln Blvd. (Presidio); details at presidio.gov
Follow your nose to the Napa Valley Beer Battle and BBQ. The annual fundraising event for the Napa Valley Education Foundation serves up live music, barbecue, local craft beers, and a live auction; Sunday, 3pm to 6pm. // Tre Posti, 641 Main St. (St. Helena); tickets at nvef.org
Get up close with hawks, owls, and other wildlife at Talons & Friends. The family-friendly event includes close encounters of the animal kind, educational activities, delicious vegetarian food, and live music; Sunday, 11am to 2:30pm. // Cavallo Point Lodge, 601 Murray Cir. (Sausalito); tickets at cavallopoint.com
Kick off Martini Week with Junipero Gin. During the second annual event—which benefits the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence—dozens of bars in San Francisco will offer creative martini recipes featuring Junipero Gin's bold unfiltered expression; Sunday, through July 15th. // Find participating bars and more details at juniperogin.com.
Thank you to our partners at Junipero Gin.
]]>When you think of hiking clothing, do you think about puffies, fleece, pants, and maybe socks? But what about hiking underwear? While you can definitely just wear your normal underwear when hiking – and many of us do, as you’ll find out below – you can also choose from a whole range of hiking underwear for women that is designed to be comfortable and convenient on the trail.
Everyone is going to have a different opinion on the absolute “perfect” pair of hiking underwear, but here we will share the recommendations that came up the most among our She Dreams of Alpine team, Backpacking Badass students, and social media audience.
As with many pieces of hiking gear, the best hiking underwear for women is what feels best for you. We all have different preferences on cut, fabric, and price that work for our bodies and our budgets.
So here is the most recommended hiking underwear for women among our community – with pros and cons of each, so you can figure out the best hiking underwear for you.
(Note: This post may contain affiliate links.)
And one of our Backpacking Badass students declares, “BRANWYN. 100%. My go to undies for all of life. They're Merino...so spendy, but man, oh, man! I have bikinis and thongs, I day use thongs and use bikinis overnight. They dry so fast and resist odor, perfect for the trail.”
Pros:
Merino wool
Quick-drying
Odor-resistant
Cons:
Pricey
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As a close friend of She Dreams of Alpine says, “ExOfficio is my favorite because it’s really, really quick-drying, so even on long hikes, it always feels perfectly dry and clean…It’s worth the extra penny because every other undie I’ve tried that claims similar benefits doesn’t add up at all.”
And a Backpacking Badass student really put them to the test and was impressed: “I brought 3 pairs to Nepal for a month-long trek and that was all I had. They held up great with a good rinse as best you can in between wears. No chafing, and they just don’t seem to hold the sweat smell if you at least rinse them.”
Pros:
Anti-chafing seams & waistband
Quick-drying & odor-resistant
Less expensive
Cons:
Inconsistent sizing
Elastic issues in new versions
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Pros:
Merino wool
Helps regulate body temp
Cons:
Pricey
If some of these other options are giving you sticker shock, REI Active hiking underwear for women is lighter on the wallet (especially if you have an REI membership and get a dividend). REI also has a merino wool hiking underwear line, but those are twice as expensive as the polyester pairs.
Pros:
Moisture-wicking
Antimicrobial
Cheaper than some of the other options
Cons:
Not very durable
Smartwool hiking underwear for women seems to be hit or miss – some people love it, and some people hate it. One of our Backpacking Badass students explains, “Smartwool ones seem to run small, but they hold up well, don't chafe, and don't hold odors.”
The cut of the Smartwool bikini bottoms doesn’t work for every body, so ideally, try these on if you can before committing to them.
Pros:
Super soft
Breathable
Cooling fabric
Cons:
Skimpy cut that tends to ride up
Not quick-drying
Pricey
Patagonia designs their garments to last a very long time, and their hiking underwear is no exception. But because of this, some people have noticed that the newer versions of Patagonia’s hiking underwear might fit slightly differently than their old styles.
Pros:
Lasts for years
Breathable & moisture-wicking
Stays put & doesn’t ride up
Cons:
Some people say style has changed
Tag is annoying & needs to be cut out
Aerie is a bit of a surprise on this list of hiking underwear for women, since it’s not specifically an outdoor or athletic brand. But several of our Backpacking Badass students shared their love for Aerie underwear.
As one student said, “I like Aerie underwear. The ones I have are made of modal. They breathe well and never stick to me when I'm sweaty.” And another echoed, “I’ve really liked the stuff from Aerie. The modal is nice.”
While the super soft modal material is extremely lightweight, Aerie underwear is not designed to be quick-drying or odor-resistant like other hiking underwear. But these are by far the cheapest of any women’s hiking underwear that were highly recommended.
Pros:
Cheap
Lightweight & comfy
Cons:
Not specifically designed for hiking/active women
While you might know Bombas for their super comfy socks, they also make underwear, too! As one of our Backpacking Badass students raves, “Bombas makes real soft & comfy seamless undies. Literally feels like wearing nothing.”
The synthetic blend fabric of Bombas underwear is breathable and quick-drying to keep you cool and not feeling sweaty. A special feature of Bombas underwear is the “Stay Put Flex Tech,” which is a special grippy but velvety pattern along the inside of the panty to keep them in place while you move.
Pros:
Stay Put Flex Tech keeps the underwear in place
Somewhat cheaper than other hiking underwear
For every pair bought, a pair is donated to homeless shelters
Cons:
Run small & snug
Waist is prone to rolling since there’s no band
The cool thing about Duluth Armachillos is that they are literally cool, thanks to microscopic jade embedded in the fabric. This makes the underwear feel cool to the touch, which is super nice when you’re sweaty from hiking. Duluth women’s hiking underwear is also moisture-wicking and odor resistant, so you feel extra fresh on the trail and at camp.
Duluth Armachillos are available in a boxer briefs style if you prefer more coverage – however, they don’t come in a thong, if that’s your go-to.
Pros:
Special cooling fabric
Odor-resistant & moisture wicking
Slightly cheaper than some & often on sale
Cons:
Sizing can be inconsistent
No thong style, if that’s what you prefer
An interesting option for women’s hiking underwear is period panties! As a Backpacking Badass student explains, “I like period panties to wick away sweat from activity, and they are easy to wash, dry and repeat.”
She prefers Victoria's Secret, which “has a great boy short style period panty that I love. I barely feel it and sweat does not become a problem there with this tactic – the boy short style aides to ward off chafe also.”
She Dreams of Alpine Content Manager Kate wore a pair of Bambody period panties when she hiked the Grand Canyon Rim-to-Rim in a day and became a convert. She “found them surprisingly comfortable, especially on such a long hike. Even while wearing a menstrual cup, it was great not to have to worry about leaks, and they absorbed sweat, too – which was crucial, since it was ridiculously hot!”And She Dreams of Alpine Community Manager Kellie likes June period undies. As she explains, “They don't have any harmful chemicals and can be worn for up to 12 hours. When backpacking on my period I like to use my period panties at night or to just free bleed to avoid messing with hygiene products with dirtbag hands. I can rinse and hand wash them at camp and hang to dry like any other pair of undies. Keeps me dry, is odorless, and comfortable!”
Pros:
Super absorbent for sweat
Easy to rinse and clean
Cons:
On the pricier side
Can feel a bit bulky
While all the options mentioned above are great, you truly don’t need any kind of special underwear to go hiking or backpacking. Hiking underwear is not something I tend to stress about, so I say use what you have and don't let not having the “right undies" keep you from getting started on the trail!
As She Dreams of Alpine Client Success Manager Katie says, “Getting special hiking underwear is just really low on my gear priority list. One day, I'll be Miss Fancy Underpants, but in the meantime, one fresh pair a day does the job just fine.”
So that you can hit the trails with peace of mind knowing that you didn’t leave anything essential behind!
When choosing the best women’s hiking underwear, there are several important factors to consider. Here’s what to pay attention to as you’re shopping for hiking underwear for women.
When choosing hiking underwear for women, you want fabric that breathes well, dries quickly, and doesn’t retain odor. Learn more about the following fabric options for women’s hiking underwear:
Merino Wool - One of the best fabrics for hiking underwear, merino wool is soft and comfortable, as well as naturally moisture-wicking and odor-resistant. These great attributes make it expensive though.
Synthetic - Synthetics (including nylon, polyester, and spandex) are stretchy, breathable, and quick-drying, but they tend to get a little smellier than wool. However, they also are usually cheaper than merino wool.
Cotton - Not usually the best choice for hiking underwear (or hiking clothing in general). Cotton absorbs moisture – like sweat – and does NOT dry quickly, so things can get uncomfortable fast. Cotton is really only a good choice for hanging around camp or sleeping.
The style or cut is a key consideration when choosing hiking underwear for women, but it’s also a very personal choice. Some people prefer as little fabric as possible and go with a thong, while others might find thongs super uncomfortable and prefer the fuller coverage of a boy short. Bikini cut panties are a good middle ground for some women, but it also depends a lot on body shape.
Basically, there’s no right or wrong answer for everyone here, so go with what you like and what feels most comfortable to you.
Comfort is key, and that means more than just a soft fabric. You don’t want to constantly be tugging on your hiking underwear to keep it in place, and no one likes a wedgie on the trail. So look for hiking underwear that fits you well and is designed to stay put.
Quick-drying is also crucial in hiking underwear. Not only will you be sweating on the trail, but if you’re backpacking and spending multiple days outdoors, you’ll want to rinse out your underwear in camp at night. You don’t want to wake up in the morning and have it still be wet!
While a variety of styles and options can work great on the trail, there are a few things to avoid when choosing women’s hiking underwear.
Embellishments – such as lace, rhinestones, and ruffles – can be itchy and irritating on the trail, so it’s generally best to keep things simple. Some stretchy lace might actually be comfortable, but it’s probably a good idea to test underwear like that on a short day hike before heading out on a backpacking trip.
Also, avoid thick seams, which can cause chafing in uncomfortable places when you’re hiking. And don’t wear underwear that’s too loose or too tight, both of which can also cause more irritation.
The most important part of caring for women’s hiking underwear on the trail is to keep it dry. So if you plan to rewear pairs while you’re backpacking, a great strategy is to rinse them out and hang them out to dry at camp. This is where quick-drying fabric is extra convenient.
Also, a little tip to keep feeling fresh down there and able to wear a pair for multiple days is to use pantiliners. Just be sure to pack them out with your trash!
>>> For more tips for keeping clean(ish) on the trail, check out our post all about Essential Backpacking Hygiene Tips & Feminine Care in the Outdoors.
Hope this post helps you find the perfect women’s hiking underwear to feel comfy and fresh on the trail! And if you already have a pair of your favorite hiking underwear, share your recommendation in the comments!
Check out these other hiking and backpacking gear posts!
Cheers,
Allison - She Dreams of Alpine
[TAG14]Let's face it, custom closet systems may seem like a luxury, but they're a necessity for anyone who wants to keep their clothing and personal belongings in tip-top shape. A messy closet can lead to clutter and stress, which are two things no one needs more of in their life. While most people think they know the basics of closet organization, there are a few little-known hacks that can make a big impact.
Here are some handy secrets to help you maximize your closet space and keep everything organized and tidy:
Read on to discover the best little-known organization secrets that can transform your closet space.
One of the most overlooked areas in a closet is the door. By using the back of your closet door, you can add a shoe organizer or some hooks to maximize your storage space. This is especially useful for small closets where every inch counts. You can use the shoe organizer to store shoes, or even smaller items like hats, gloves, and scarves. Hooks can be used for purses, belts, or other miscellaneous items.
Ironing boards can take up a lot of space, and let's be honest, they're not the most attractive item in a closet. A shelf-mounted or side-mounted ironing board is a great alternative to a traditional ironing board. These boards can be easily mounted to the side or underside of a shelf, and they fold down when not in use, freeing up valuable closet space.
Are you still folding your clothes as you put them away? There are other options, and while some of those involve complicated and possibly intimidating folding techniques, at least one is fairly simple. According to House Beautiful , you should roll your clothes instead of folding them. Not only does this save space, but it also makes it easier to find the item you need without having to dig through a pile of clothing.
If you’re making the most of your custom closet storage space, you’re likely storing some items up high and out of reach. Keeping a stepladder handy can help you quickly and easily store sweaters, boxes, or blankets away, rather than leaving them in a heap on the floor. Put a small step ladder in a corner of the closet or on a hook on the wall so you can easily reach the highest shelves without straining your arms or neck.
Folded pants take up some valuable real estate in your custom closet system—and the process of folding is time-consuming, too. A pant rack is a great alternative that allows you to hang your pants vertically, maximizing closet space and making it easy to find the pair you need. Plus, your pants stay wrinkle-free and tidy.
Dividers are an often-overlooked addition to shelves and drawers that can make a world of difference in how much storage space you’re able to use effectively. By using dividers, you’re able to keep each individual stack in its own space, eliminating the problem of disturbing one stack as you reach for something in another. Not only does this keep things neater, but it also limits how much your items are able to move around, keeping them safe and secure.
Waterfall hooks are handy hooks that attach to the top of your closet rod and cascade down, creating multiple levels of hanging space for your clothes and accessories. Not only do they maximize your storage space, but they also make it easier to see and access all of your items—and they couldn’t be easier to install. As a bonus, waterfall hooks are also a great solution for organizing those hard-to-store items like scarves, belts, and purses.
A custom closet system is a great investment, especially if you take the time to maximize the space and keep everything organized. By following the secret tips above, you can make the most of your closet space. With a little effort and creativity, you can turn your closet into a beautiful and functional space that makes your life easier and less stressful.
Notes:
Roll up your socks and stuff them in your sneakers.
Underwear and the tie gets rolled up and goes in the chukkas.
Proof it all fits. Bag Shown is the Samsonite Freeform 21-inch Carry-On – $139.99 ($199)
(There’s a flap that folds over to separate each section, but…
pack your dress shirt deeper than shown above so the shoes don’t smash into it.)
Notes:
Tip: When you jump in the shower after your workout, bring your workout clothes in with you. Don’t let your stuff just marinate in your sweat in a ball on the floor. Showers are like washing machines for people. Might as well use it to its full potential (and do some laundry) while you’re in there.
And that’s just the start. Clearly there’s more combinations than that, especially if you’re able to keep up on your nightly laundry. You could easily live for a week or significantly more out of that bag, assuming access to laundry facilities for your dress shirt & when your pants need a wash, as well as any necessary dry cleaning for your suit jacket and trousers (only dry clean a suit if you’ve sweated hard in it/or it needs to be freshened up after a significant number of wears).
Permethrin-treated clothing—designed to kill or disable bugs upon contact—has been available to the public since 2003.
By Catherine Roberts
Updated by Justin Krajeski
To keep bug bites at bay, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends treating your clothing with a pesticide called permethrin—pesticides kill or disable bugs on contact, while repellents help keep bugs away. Using bug spray is another important strategy, as is keeping your yard unfriendly to mosquitoes and ticks.
Permethrin-treated clothing, first developed by the military a few decades ago, has been available to consumers since 2003, and there are a few ways to use it.
• You can buy pretreated clothing from various manufacturers, especially those that specialize in outdoor gear.
• At least one company, Insect Shield, will treat your clothes with permethrin for you, if you mail them in.
• You can do it yourself: Permethrin spray is available for consumers to buy and apply to their own clothing and gear.
“If it’s used correctly, it works really well,” says Thomas Mather, PhD, director of the University of Rhode Island’s Center for Vector-Borne Disease, of treating clothing with permethrin yourself. But the key, he says, is to use it correctly, which not everyone does.
While professionally treating your clothes with permethrin means the permethrin on your garments will last longer and will coat your clothes more thoroughly, you can still treat your clothes with permethrin yourself to protect against ticks and mosquitoes if you follow the tips we’ve laid out for you below.
A number of studies have found that permethrin-treated clothing can help protect against mosquito bites, though results may differ depending on a variety of factors, such as the species of mosquito, the way the clothing is treated and laundered, and the level of pesticide-resistance among the mosquitoes.
Consumer Reports has also tested several brands of clothing pretreated with permethrin to find out how well they worked at stopping mosquitoes from biting. Two types we tested in 2016 kept mosquitoes from biting, but two didn’t. A shirt we sprayed with a deet-based repellent, meanwhile, kept mosquitoes from biting and kept them from even landing, something none of the permethrin-treated clothing items did.
Permethrin is “very irritating to [the mosquitoes],” says Joe Conlon, a former Navy entomologist and former technical adviser to the American Mosquito Control Association. “It’s like they landed on an electric grid.”
The permethrin-treated clothing also resulted in “knockdowns,” meaning mosquitoes were incapacitated or killed after contact with the clothing. The shirts we sprayed with deet didn’t cause any knockdowns, however, because no bugs ever landed on them.
And what about ticks? Consumer Reports’ testing hasn’t evaluated how well permethrin-treated clothing works against ticks. But other research shows permethrin can be effective against ticks. In one 2020 study of outdoor workers in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, there were a total of 60 tick bites over two years among the 40 workers who used permethrin-treated clothing, compared with 166 tick bites among the 42 workers who didn’t use treated clothing.
Manufacturers of permethrin spray for clothing note that because the spray is meant only for fabric and not for skin, for full protection people also need to use an insect repellent on their exposed skin. Consumer Reports’ experts agree.
The most important thing to remember when spraying your clothing with permethrin is that you must follow the instructions on the product label. If you don’t, you could be violating federal law, Conlon says. (Because permethrin is a pesticide, the Environmental Protection Agency regulates its use.)
It’s also important to follow the instructions on the label to ensure you’re using the pesticide as safely as possible, says Michael Hansen, PhD, a senior scientist at Consumer Reports. “It’s an endocrine-disrupting compound," he says. That means “if it gets into your system, there can be effects on the hormonal system."
The CDC notes that permethrin and related chemical compounds can cause serious health problems in people exposed to high doses. “You don’t want to be inhaling it or getting it directly on your skin," Hansen says. Hansen also says that some recent studies suggest permethrin and other synthetic pyrethoids may be linked to adverse effects at lower doses, too.
If you follow the directions on the label, however, the dose of permethrin you receive by wearing treated clothing is considered safe, even for pregnant women. (Higher concentrations of permethrin are used in medications for treating both head lice and scabies.)
Spray only your clothing. We said it before, but it’s worth repeating: Permethrin spray is only for your clothes and gear. Don’t apply it to your skin. And when treating clothes, stick to outerwear. The Environmental Protection Agency says that you shouldn’t treat underwear with permethrin.
Spray while the clothes are off your body. Hang them on hangers outside, and spray them down while they hang. Don’t apply permethrin to your clothes while you’re wearing them, and don’t apply permethrin indoors, where you could risk inhaling it.
Never spray around cats. Keep your feline friends away from the area while you’re treating your clothes because permethrin is highly toxic to cats. According to Sawyer, which makes permethrin products, treated clothing is not dangerous to cats once it has dried.
Spray enough, but not too much. Mather says he often sees people making the mistake of giving their clothes a quick spritz of permethrin, even while wearing the clothing. But it takes a slightly heavier hand for full protection. Mather says you should spray enough for your clothes to become damp (they should look a little darker in color) and not spray the clothing you’re wearing. You don’t need to drench them—to where they’ll drip if you wring them out—but they do need a thorough coat.
The product labels can help give you a good idea of how much to use. For example, the label on Sawyer’s permethrin aerosol spray says that a 4.5-ounce bottle will treat a shirt, a pair of pants, and a pair of socks.
Let the clothes dry completely. Before you wear them, they should be totally dry. That should take a few hours, depending on the humidity of the day.
Re-treat when necessary. Manufacturers of pretreated clothing say their products are still effective after many washes. But the clothes you treat yourself need to be re-treated much more often. Sawyer says you need to re-treat after six weeks or six washings, for example. Even clothes or gear you don’t wash need re-treating; Mather says he sprays his own and his family’s shoes monthly.
Actually wear them. Mather says some people say they’re saving their permethrin-treated clothing for heavy-duty camping or hiking. But ticks don’t live just in the deep woods. If you live in an area where ticks are common, he recommends wearing your treated garments even during casual activities, like gardening or taking your dog for a walk.
Consider treating other gear. Conlon says that camping gear like tents, backpacks, and hiking boots are also good candidates for treating with permethrin.
Wash treated clothing separately. Sawyer recommends hand-washing and air-drying, or using the gentle cycle on your washer and dryer to best preserve the protection.
Only use permethrin approved for clothing. That will be indicated on the label. You may be tempted to purchase permethrin pesticide (or related chemicals) meant for agricultural uses and dilute it down to a concentration of 0.52 percent, the industry standard for clothing. That is not only illegal but also risky, because you could make a mistake and end up with the wrong concentration. And there’s no guarantee it will work as well, Mather says, because the permethrin products meant for clothes are formulated with ingredients that help it stick to fabric. The agricultural products may not have those ingredients.
Don’t rely on permethrin alone. Using permethrin-treated clothing is one useful step to take for preventing bites. But it’s not the only one. Because permethrin goes only on clothes, if you rely on it alone, you may still be leaving plenty of skin exposed and vulnerable to a bug’s bite (if, say, you’re wearing shorts and short sleeves instead of long pants and long sleeves). To protect your exposed skin, use an effective insect repellent, such as one that contains 25 to 30 percent deet, 20 percent picaridin, or 30 percent oil of lemon eucalyptus. Make sure you apply it right, and remember you can use repellent on your clothing as well if you’d rather skip the permethrin.
Consumer Reports is an independent, nonprofit organization that works side by side with consumers to create a fairer, safer, and healthier world. CR does not endorse products or services, and does not accept advertising. Copyright © 2023, Consumer Reports, Inc.
]]>This month I partnered with Madewell on an Instagram video, and had so many successful petite-friendly finds I wanted to review them in more detail on the blog! I am loving the concept of their modular collection which features rompers and dresses that can separate into two pieces for versatility.
To achieve a similar jumpsuit look using two separates, another find I absolutely adore but haven’t taken pics of yet is the Katrina crop vest, which coordinates with the Neale linen shorts that have a more tailored look (flat front, elastic back waist). I was scouring the internet for an on-trend linen vest that isn’t too long, and this one was a winner purchase. Size 00 is a casual fit on me, and I’ll try shrinking a tad in the dryer.
On sale – very petite friendly and both pieces can be mixed and matched. The bust on this runs a little small and the buttons may gap if you have a bigger chest. The shorts measure 11.75″ across waist when un-stretched and have a fully elastic waist. As with most unlined white linen, these are slightly sheer but fine for me with skin-toned undergarments. I don’t love the little loops that hang out from the top after you disconnect the pieces, but you can kind of tuck them in.
Comfy casual summer pants that have quickly become one of my most worn additions from Madewell this year, after my clean pull-on shorts! The material and fit is super breezy for hot days, travel and weekends. The petite length works well on me with flats (I’m 5’ tall). I’ve machine washed these and air dried several times already and they hold up well.
Incredibly flattering jeans that are a little different from my usual slim straight. These come in 4 different washes and have great reviews. When lying flat, the 24 petite measures: 12.3” across the waist, 10” rise, 24” inseam.
This is a sturdy weight yet ventilated 100% cotton sweater that’s ideal for tossing on in cooler summer evenings. The fit is oversized and slouchy in style with drop shoulders.
These are one of Madewell’s most popular pants, and I wasn’t sure what to expect before trying them on! The fabric is a lyocell / linen blend with a chino-like feel (lighter weight than actual chinos), more on the casual side, and the cut is a true wide leg looser fit. The waist fits big on me and would need alterations, but runs consistently with Ann Taylor sizing: 00 petite measures 13″ across the waist, with an 11″ rise and 27.5″ inseam.
See the fit on me full length, and with the hems folded up. These have been selling quickly, but if you’re able to find your size, I was so impressed by the flattering fit of these (go 1 size down at the waist). Petite wasn’t available when I ordered so I grabbed these in 23 regular thinking I’d cut the hems as a raw hem style. In the meantime while I’m deciding whether or not I’ll cut them, I’ve been using my DIY hack to temporarily shorten them.
This one fits loose at my waist, with size 00 measuring 13″ across when un-stretched (again, consistent with sizing at brands like Ann Taylor). It would need to be altered for someone similarly sized. What I do like is how super lightweight and breezy it is to stay cool in the summer, and the fabric doesn’t cling like satin slip skirts do. The waist is fully elastic all around and pull-on style.
Happy Sunday, everyone. We are starting this week’s link up a little differently this week. This was our wonderful Ryann’s final week at EHD. We couldn’t send her off without giving her A TON of love. We’ll let Em kick-off why we love Ryann so much.
From Emily: Today I have very very bittersweet news that our beloved Ryann will be moving on to pursue new career adventures. It’s been five years, FIVE YEARS!!! of wonderful editorial ideas, opinions, writing, design help and so much fun and love from Ryann. She started as a temp (literally to help us do a bunch of spreadsheet work as we turned the site more into a resource) and we couldn’t let go of her. We just really, really liked having her around and I personally benefitted from so much of her wisdom. Her role grew and grew as we shifted into more of a publishing platform and design resource. What a gift she was. But now as the blog returns to a more personal blog and we shift our business, things started to not make sense and her job here wasn’t lining up with her own personal pursuits. So through really open and honest conversations and brainstorming we both feel like this is the right move – despite our pits in our stomach and occasional nausea. But the good news is she is an EHD alum which means this won’t be the last you’ll hear from her. She of course will be going after her goals but she will always have a place here to pop in and write every now and then if she wants to. We love her, you love her, she speaks our EHD language and you simply can’t just replace 5 years of a full-time relationship. You just can’t. It’s such lasting value – both personal and professional. All of it makes me so happy (moving on to better things) and sad (it’s always sad to make big shifts like this). So thank you Ryann for your years of hard work, great attitude, FUN, wisdom, creativity, work ethic, and humor.
Ryann came into this job with zero background in interior design (she just applied for the temp admin position) and in case you missed it, three years later revealed her living room makeover takeover which blew us all away. Check it out HERE. It’s been such a wild ride here at EHD – boom and bust, big staff, then scaling back, me moving to another state after two years of lockdown, and lots of shifts due to social media and huge cultural changes. I can’t tell you enough how much having a supportive, understanding team has been to keeping us still in the game and moving forward (again, both professionally and personally). Thank you Ryann for being here, in all the important ways. We will miss you very, very, very much.
From Jess: To know Ryann, is to love Ryann. We both really grew up together these last five years and it has been a pleasure getting to work with her every one of those days. She’s talented, hardworking, and has always been there as the sounding board I trust when I was unsure about something. My second gut check if you will 🙂 She also kept me in check when I missed something too! Then on top of all those things, you won’t find a better hang. Ryann is SO fun, is always up for a soulful conversation (and encourages them), and has such a beautiful heart. While EHD won’t be the same without her, I am so excited to see her thrive in her next adventure. This job was just the beginning. I know it’s wildly cliche but the sky really is the limit when it comes to our Ryann. I know this isn’t goodbye but a we’ll see you soon. She is joining a pretty remarkable group of EHD alums that have also never been able to fully escape us 🙂 Can’t wait to read that novel one day!!!
From Mallory: Ryann is one of the most thoughtful, creative, and talented people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. She’s the edgiest gal with the sweetest heart. A true baddie. As a fellow 7 (for my enneagram-obsessed friends), she has an incredible ability to make seemingly mundane work extremely fun while also having mastered the art of efficiency and writing skill. No seriously, her writing is some of the best I’ve ever read!!! Ry has been such an asset to this team and while we’re all gonna miss her so much, I can’t wait to see her spread her lil wings and fly!! GO CRUSH IT OUT THERE RY. LOVE YOU!!!!
From Caitlin: OH MY GOD YOU CAN’T MAKE ME WRITE THIS??? I tried to tell Ryann how much I love and appreciate her when we got team drinks on Wednesday and immediately started crying, so you can imagine that I am a teary-eyed baby while writing this. I know that you guys see Ryann’s incredible work on the blog – I still think about the thoughtful piece she wrote on body image – but SHE’S EVEN BETTER IN REAL LIFE. She’s thoughtful and smart and a total blast, but I most appreciate her bravery and this innate sense of fairness she has – she has an incredible talent for speaking truth to power (woof, I know that phrase is corny, but it’s true!) and I so admire how she’s able to navigate her relationships with folks while pushing people to do the right thing. I’m so lucky to have worked alongside her and I hope I picked up a few of her traits over the past few years – she’s one of the good ones! RYANN, I LOVE YOU SO MUCH!!!
From Ryann’s INCREDIBLE MOTO…
And her first hair transformation in 2018: the chicest bob!
Who could forget her second hair transformation in 2022: The cool girl perm!
She married her soulmate<3
And got to spend time with all of you at The Mountain House Reader Event!
There were lots of after-hours hangs, too 🙂
And a few adventures our team will never forget! (Like our trip to Portland :))
Did we mention she’s a natural model? Her beauty and talent know no bounds.
Words just can’t express how much we love and will miss our Ryann. Please go shower her with more love in the comments, and then if you want to come back we have our regularly scheduled Link Up below:
This week’s house tour is both incredibly well-design and unbelievably charming, with the coziest, lived-in feel. Designer, Sara Charlesworth and her husband bought his family home from his father and carefully brought it back to life while maintaining those important family memories. We don’t want to say too much more because you really need to just go look at it. Enjoy!
From Emily: I won’t call myself an expert in many things, but when it comes to self-tanner I can proudly (??) say I’m a professional. I have tried them all and while many work totally fine I have two that are EXCEPTIONAL. My normal overnight one is St. Tropez (you have to use a mitt) but I have a new better/faster hack. This one does the job in TWO HOURS. I’m not kidding. The other day I had forgotten to put on the foam the night before so I woke up at 7 am and put on this two-hour ultra-dark tan. My team came over around 8 and I told them what I had done. We then proceeded to watch it develop LIVE and sure enough by the time I needed to be in my short shorts on camera I was totally tan. Now it says you are supposed to rinse off at 8 hours, but I don’t. I just keep it on for the whole day and I can’t believe how great it looks. I know that I’ve been professing self-tanner for years but it’s because I am so fair and really can’t get any natural color (and have stopped trying). This makes me look/feel better instantly. I know people are nervous to try it but the worst that can happen is that you go a little too dark and then rinse it off (don’t try this first time for a wedding or anything). Now the 2-hour one doesn’t last as many days, so what I’ve been doing is the St. Tropez as my base, then every morning if I’m going to be in shorts or a swimsuit, I just throw the 2-hour one on my legs almost like daily lotion. I hope you have enjoyed this one-woman spray tan show (I really should shoot a new reel about it – it’s just so highly effective and makes a huge difference in my life).
From Mallory: I tried on this dress a few months ago and realized the other day that I regretted not buying it. BUT sometimes waiting is in fact in your favor because it’s now on a hot sale!!! I snagged it finally — if you’re in the market too it would make a great wedding guest dress or just a fun dinner dress 🙂
From Ryann: I completely forgot about this dress, probably because it was left in my suitcase that I still haven’t fully unpacked from Japan:) I pulled it out yesterday and basically haven’t taken it off since (I’m wearing it now!). It is a smock-style dress so it is extremely comfortable but the neckline is low and it has a cinched waist so it is still, dare I say, flattering and form fitting. I have it in black and love that it feels totally appropriate to wear at night to dinner but it is still casual enough that you could wear it to a BBQ. It comes in a cute blue pattern too. This dress will be in rotation all summer.
From Arlyn: If I told pre-mom Arlyn that she’d gladly be spending $34 on baby pajamas, she would have laughed in my face. It’s literally inches of fabric, how can it cost $34? BUT LET ME TELL YOU. TAKE MY MONEY because Little Sleepies makes the greatest baby and toddler pajamas of all time and I’d probably spend $50 each on them. For starters, they are made of super soft bamboo that helps regulate body temperature, they wash VERY well, the zippers are of incredible quality, open from the top and the bottom, have hand and foot cuffs you can leave opened or close up, and the sizing lasts FOREVER. Case in point: We put Evelyn in size 3-6 months the other night because we needed to do her laundry…and they fit (with the feet uncuffed). I could spend $10 on pajamas that will fit her for a few months if they even last that long through the wash, or I could spend $34 on pajamas she’ll use for a year+. Win, win, baby! If you know someone who is expecting, or even if you have littles of your own, look no further. (Oh, and they have matching adult PJs, too….)
From Caitlin: I know we’re a little heavy-handed on the shorts recommendations this week, but there’s one more from me! If you have bigger thighs, wider hips, or a larger butt (or all 3! Hey, twin!) then I cannot recommend Abercrombie’s entire Curve Love line enough. I’ve always struggled to get that nice flare out that Em talks about because the jeans that fit my waist are just a little too tight on these big ol’ thighs of mine! (The same thing happens with boyfriend jeans, too – they all fit me like skinny jeans because I have wider hips.) ANYWAY – the Curve Love line is specifically designed to have your standard waist size, but they’ve added extra inches in hip and leg so they ACTUALLY fit like the cute shorts that all you folks with narrower bottom halves rock every summer!! I grab mine in a 14 and they’re the perfect fit, but you can also try a size up and pair with a belt if you’re looking for an even looser fit in the leg and butt. I SWEAR by the Mom jean style – after years of wearing shorts that were just right around my entire leg, it is SO AWESOME to have some pairs that are comfortable and breezy and that make my legs look so cute!!! (Like. These shorts GAVE me higher self-esteem? They’re a dream, I swear!)
From Jess: Last weekend I got to spend a magical two days celebrating one of my close friend’s birthday in Ojai and Santa Barbara. It was my first time in Ojai and it was as magical as I had hoped it would be! With wine tasting and eating the most delicious wings I’ve ever had from SAMA SAMA, came a tiny bit of shopping. I restrained myself and only bought one thing…this candle. It’s a great summer candle and the throw is so good! It’s both fresh, floral, and earthy. This brand truly has so many incredible scents to choose from.
Also From Jess: Then in Santa Barbara the next day we popped into Anthropologie and my friend bought these pants and they looked incredible on her (FYI she is on the taller side). She loved how comfortable they were and the little “v” cut in the front which is subtle but so flattering. And the best part is they are on sale:) She got the dark green which makes them really wearable all year long!
Hope you have a great rest of Sunday and get to spend some time outside. Share some love for Ryann below and we’ll see y’all tomorrow! xx
Opening Image Credits: Photo by Kaitlin Green | From: Farmhouse Backyard Update: Our Split Rail Fence Choice And Why It’s My Favorite (And Most Affordable)
The post The Link Up: Em’s NEW Favorite Self Tanner, Two Cute Dresses, Jess’ Summer Candle, And A Bittersweet Announcement appeared first on Emily Henderson.
]]>Another thing is that it is unlikely that a tape will fall into my hands, so the skill that I possess almost flawlessly has long and confidently been moved into the category of useless and obsolete. As well as several dozen other similar habits and skills that netizens listed in this viral Reddit thread.
More info: Reddit
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Indeed, almost each generation in recent history has a certain set of habits and skills that they have honed over the years, often associated with everyday things and devices natural for their time. And as soon as this or that object goes down in history, then the skills of using it become unclaimed, moving into the category of "weird habits".
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For example, do you know that at one time, about twenty years ago, there were even competitions in speed texting on push-button phones? Winners were determined, hefty prize money was paid, world records were set... and the competitions continue to be held, but now on the virtual keyboards of smartphones. And if you could blindly type a message while holding your phone in your pocket - and this was possible, back when just knowing the order of keystrokes is enough - then today this is nothing more than a funny fad. For example, to amuse your kids, if, while sorting through old things, you somehow find an old Nokia 3310...
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"The issue is the mechanism of learning and adaptation, which for most people still remains very high, no matter what anyone says," explains Vladimir Nemertsalov, a school principal and teacher from Ukraine, to whom Bored Panda reached out for a comment here. "Any skill, like the object associated with it, has its own life cycle. First, a certain device appears, then people try to adapt existing skills to it. Sometimes this goes well enough, but most often not."
"And then the culture of using a new device begins to acquire new habits. Someone comes up with hacks to improve it all, make it faster and more convenient to use. This is how skills are formed. And then, when the device 'walks off into the sunset', the ability to use it goes the same way. It's another matter that in the modern world it happens much faster. For example, the skill of riding was incredibly relevant for several millennia, but the ability to use a rotary phone has come to naught in about half a century. But such is the contemporary world, and such is progress," Vladimir says.
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Sometimes outdated skills develop into a kind of hobby or even a subculture - as happened, for example, with film photography or vinyl records. Regarding the latter, the level of sales, after three decades of oblivion, began to grow again around 2010, and has now returned to almost 1988 levels. Perhaps this will happen with tapes - and then I will again appear in all my splendor with the skill of rewinding one with a pencil. In the meantime, please feel free to scroll this selection to the very end and maybe add some more obsolete and weird-looking skills from the past... and I'll go practice. Where is my pencil, anyway?
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]]>Kids start building life skills and coping strategies pretty much from birth, with each new developmental milestone laying the foundation for the next, as they learn how to relate to others and to problem-solve in evermore complex ways. As they get older and start school, kids learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. But what are the other essential life skills to teach kids?
There are all sorts of life skills for kids — some basic, some fairly complex — that require mastery in order to have the sort of social, emotional and practical wherewithal to be good at life. According to child development experts, career planners, and business leaders, here’s where to start to ensure your kids are well-prepared for whatever (and whoever) the world throws at them.
Spatial awareness isn’t just a key part of STEM education. It also prevents us from getting lost. Start by teaching your kids how to mentally map their neighborhood, school, or favorite playground. Then break out the old-fashioned map and compass and go on a hike in the woods, challenge your kid to navigate your drive to school one morning. Although every kid should be able to function navigationally without the use of a device, it’s a good idea to also have them learn to follow navigational directions on phones, a critical modern skill.
Here’s a troubling statistic: More than half of teens today use texting to regularly communicate with friends, versus only a third who consistently talk face to face. That’s a problem, because kids need to know how to carry on a one-on-one conversation not just to ace college and job interviews, but also to develop lasting, honest relationships. Help them out by banning devices from the dinner table.
Shake hands, make eye contact, listen attentively and don’t cut people off — these are skills that are more important than ever, given our many screens’ attention-grabbing abilities. Why? They instill confidence, earn trust, and are a solid foundation for a healthy social life. Start by teaching them an old-fashioned hand shake:
If a kid can’t hang with their own thoughts, alone, without friends or family, they will have serious anxiety when they are left to their own devices. Given the stratification of work and family, this is bound to happen. To change this dynamic, why not devote a nook in your house to a “quiet corner,” featuring a comfortable chair, a small work table, and a few calming toys and activities. While they’re enjoying alone time, you’ll get a break, too.
While toddler swimming classes are all the rage, the American Academy of Pediatrics doesn’t recommend swim classes for kids under 4, since there’s little evidence such programs decrease the likelihood of drowning and could lead parents to develop a false sense of security. After your kid’s 4th birthday, get them in the pool.
Caring for a pet — and keeping it alive — helps kids learn to be empathetic, one of the most important skills they can develop. If you’re not ready to give in to their pleas for a family dog, there are easier options: hermit crabs, a goldfish, butterflies, or even a house plant.
Kids don’t just have to know how to avoid dangerous content and individuals online. They also need to learn how to be sensible web consumers and creators, especially given the troubling rise of fake facts and misinformation. One recent study found that less than half of kids ages 10 to 18 say they can tell fake stories from the real deal, which is likely why only one in four of them have a lot of trust in journalistic organizations. To help your kids navigate the confusion, focus on reading comprehension and critical thinking skills. One way to do this outside of actual reading together is to play “spot the mistakes” with a Wikipedia entry or online article, then launch a family blog.
Since we yet don’t complete all of our purchases using our smartphones, kids still have to know their way around quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. Run some practice transactions by them, with an added incentive: Every time they give you the correct coins back, they get to put the change in their piggy bank.
Saving money is hard for the best of us, so it’s important to start early with your kid’s weekly allowance. At first, allow them to spend half on anything they want, then put the rest into a piggy bank. Once they have enough saved up — say, $150 — go to the bank and start a savings account. Be sure to log into the account online, show them how to manage their money via browser, and help them build out a long-term savings plan.
Kids shouldn’t be overstimulated all the time — or feel like they need to be. Studies have shown that mindfulness practices can help kids become more attentive, respectful, and focused, while reducing stress and hyperactive behaviors. To get your kid into meditation, start easy: Ask them to sit still, relax, and focus on the process of breathing. It’s a useful education on the important art of sitting still.
Cleaning teaches kids how to value their possessions and organize their space. Let them experiment with sweeping, mopping, and dusting, but more importantly, make sure they understand how to organize their room on their own — and then to declutter.
In the era of emojis and selfies, kids’ written communication skills are in danger of atrophying. They need to know to compose a formal letter (heading, greeting, body, closing, and signature), and should learn that an e-mail, and even a text, can be written formally.
This knowledge could pay off years later at an all-important lunch or dinner job interview. Kids need to know how to navigate the dining room table: Napkin goes in their lap and then on their chair if they need to be excused. No reaching for food, no interrupting, no chewing with their mouth open. Plus they should be able to set the table: From left to right, it should go fork, plate, knife, and then spoon, with the water glass above the knife.
The days of finishing schools have come and gone, but that doesn’t mean we should be raising uncivilized bores. Start by modeling proper etiquette yourself and focus on the six most important phrases in civil dialogue:
We’re not talking about how to put on shirts and pants. We’re referring to helping kids learn how to dress nicely: picking out weather-appropriate options, mixing and matching colors, pairing prints with solids. It’s a great way to help your kid express themselves, create their own style, make decisions, and feel confident.
For safety reasons, kids should have their home address and phone number memorized. A 10-year-old should also know relevant email addresses and cell numbers. Work the information into a song, use rhyming games, or post the information prominently around the house — whatever it takes to make this information stick.
Laughter is incredibly helpful to a person’s life, and someone who can tell at least one good clean joke, really well, will never want for something to say, or lack the ability to break the ice. Here’s a favorite joke requires their full story-telling capacity:
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson went camping. They pitched their tent under the stars and went to sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night Holmes woke Watson up.
Holmes said: “Watson, look up at the stars, and tell me what you see.”
Watson replied: “I see millions and millions of stars.”
Holmes said: “And what do you deduce from that?”
Watson replied: “Well, if there are millions of stars, and if even a few of those have planets, it’s quite likely there are some planets like Earth out there. And if there are a few planets like Earth out there, there might also be life.”
And Holmes said: “Watson, you idiot, it means that somebody stole our tent.”
Your kid doesn’t have to become MacGyver, but they should have a handle on essential first aid skills that will help them in an emergency:
Learning to cook offers all sorts of benefits: It teaches kids how to be creative, how employ real-world math, how to use sharp objects safely, and how to appreciate nutritious foods. Just make sure the first recipes they try will earn them something delicious. Here’s how to walk them through cooking a scrambled egg.
Always supervise them (there is a stove involved), but gradually allow them to take over the process until they can do it from start to finish.
We can nag our kids all we want to brush their teeth and take a bath, but if we want these concepts to stick, kids have to learn to embrace them on their own. One way to do that is to turn skin care, oral hygiene, and bathing into something fun. The shampoo Mohawk never gets old.
Being able to make up a story and imagine something impossible will be key in future endeavors. Creativity is becoming one of the top skills CEOs are looking for at major companies. There are many ways to foster this — games like “what’s in the box?”, setting aside time for drawing and creative writing, and being sure to have a free-flowing storytelling time every night before bed.
Learning to ride a bike is one of the best things kids can do. It keeps them physically fit, improves their balance and coordination, has been shown to improve mental focus, and as they get older it’s a great, environmentally-friendly way for them to get around their world. To help them learn, forget about those training wheels we all used. The best way to turn your kid into a biker is to invest in a balance bike (or remove the pedals from a regular small bike), then have them learn to balance in an area that’s flat, paved and traffic-free.
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Vendor: MH
Type: Set
Price:
45.00
Note from the team: Amy is 5'4, 32D, 130 lbs, size 5 in denim and wears a small.
We all know and appreciate the magic that summer cardigans can do, however, when cardigans seem like the only defense against warmth or jiggly arms, these valuable summer cardigans can also sometimes feel like monotonous security blankets—not to mention like afterthoughts— during those times when you create a great look sans-cardigan but find you need to carry one along just in case.
There has been a recent surge in interest in crisp, relaxed button-up shirts. As someone who has gone headfirst into this trend, I’m completely here for it. A pop of the collar, a relaxed tuck, or not, and I feel pulled together with ease. I’ve worn these easy styles under blazers, on their own with jeans and loafers, under sweaters, and more. Once I found styles that didn’t stress the bust buttons to the point where they could be used as deadly weapons if they popped off from the pressure, I was in.
Now that it is summer, I’ve leaned into the trend of wearing my crisp, relaxed button-up shirts as a layering piece. I’m still pro-cardigan but have been leaning more toward this solution as a third layer. At a gathering of friends Memorial Day weekend, I wore my Frank & Eileen Joedy shirt tied over an inexpensive Old Navy camel-colored tank with my J.Crew factory cotton linen pants. I wore this look with my Birkenstock Gizeh sandals in patent alloy and a paperclip necklace I bought on Etsy. Those pants were almost on the chopping block because I always felt like they were too relaxed, but now with the tailored touch of the shirt, the pants have gotten a new life.
I have also worn this Quince jumpsuit with their striped linen button-down, have put my oversized crisp button-ups over tees, and even wear an old chambray button-down over my workout clothes when heading to my local studio. In fact, last Saturday, when a fellow member and I were getting ready to leave, I noticed she also layered a chambray shirt over her workout clothes. We looked like twins.
You can choose to wear the shirt completely open over another top, can partially tuck, and simply tie. There is no right way to use your button-up shirts in lieu of a cardigan— the look just needs to look casual and carefree, like you just threw it on. If you are looking for inspiration, I have put five looks together using a relaxed button-up shirt as a third layer.
This look is similar to the Quince outfit I mentioned earlier, I styled this Theory jumpsuit with a striped button-up shirt from Alex Mill. I tied my shirt at the waist but also just let it hang open. In my look, I wore my patent alloy Birkenstocks but would also wear it with a pair of sneakers, as I did with this Adidas pair. I finished the outfit with gold hoops and a navy nylon crossbody.
If you’re a shorts-wearer, a relaxed chambray shirt over a white tee or tank creates an easy yet tailored look. I styled this Rails button-up over J.Crews vintage v-neck tee and pleated navy shorts from Boden. I finished the outfit with a cognac braided belt, cognac flat sandals from Margaux, a link necklace, and an orange Longchamp crossbody.
I love Everlane’s silky cotton relaxed shirt. It has shape while still being relaxed and the collar pops beautifully. I styled the shirt over a black and white striped tank from Kule, paired with MM. Lafleur’s better than denim Milo jeans which have an adjustable hem, and finished the look with M.Gemi platform sandals, gold and black hoop earrings, a black leather belt from COS, and Demellier crossbody.
Tuck this shirt from Reiss in or tie it at the waist, a collared shirt adds a lovely finish to a midi or maxi, like this pleated style from J.Crew. I styled this relaxed cap sleeve tee under the shirt and finished the look with black platform espadrille sandals, a white crossbody, and a statement necklace from Etsy.
In this last look, I layered a white linen Alex Mill shirt over an easy olive dress from Mango. To add shape at the waist, the shirt can be tied closed, or for a more relaxed look, left open. You could also put a belt over the shirt and dress, or just the dress. You have several options. I finished the look with Nisola flat sandals, a woven leather crossbody in cognac, and a chunky gold layering necklace.
Cardigans are wonderful, have their place, and truly serve a purpose, but if you are looking for an alternative for summer coverage, break out a crisp, relaxed button-up shirt. You may be surprised by how useful they are and chic they look.
The post BUTTON-UP SHIRTS IN LIEU OF SUMMER CARDIGANS: HOW TO CREATE THIS LOOK appeared first on Bridgette Raes Style Group.
]]>Spencer Smith used to be an attorney. Well, he still is. He spends a few hours a week toiling his way through the legal profession, but it’s now more like his side hustle. And, frankly, it’s still a good backup plan for him if he ever needs to reverse course and return to what he trained for while in law school.
These days, Smith has taken a different path in his life. He’s now a professional poker player, and for the last 16 months, he’s been a force on the green felt. Since February 2022, he’s been on a huge roll, winning four World Series of Poker Circuit titles in a 16-month span (beating out a combined 7,500 players in those events) and driving up his career poker winnings to more than $410,000 ($360,000 since he began his Circuit-winning exploits).
Smith is a good buddy of mine from college, and his success in his new vocation has been a great story for him (and for all of our friends who used to play poker together on Sunday nights while in school).
I chatted with Smith earlier this month (a few weeks after he won back-to-back tournaments in the span of four days that earned him about $150,000), and he was preparing to head to Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker (WSOP).
This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed.
Josh Katzowitz: How much has your life changed in the last 16 months? Winning four circuit tournaments? I mean, most poker players won’t win that many high-level tournaments in their entire careers.
Spencer Smith: Hmm, how has my life changed?
JK: Has it not?
SS: I quit my last full-time legal job in September 2021. I decided I was going to invest in myself as a poker player. I got some coaching. I did things I hadn’t done in the past when I was trying to play professionally or semi-professionally. This time, I had pretty immediate results. Once I had the results, that allowed me to keep investing in myself as a player and as a person.
JK: Were you ever burned out with the legal profession?
SS: I was never burned out. I quit the law twice. The first time I left to run a nonprofit. The second time, I left because I knew I wanted to play poker.
JK: We played a pretty good amount of poker in college. I don’t remember you being this good. What happened?
SS: I am not a naturally gifted player. I don’t believe there are naturally gifted players, at least not at the level where you can succeed these days. Right after college, I didn’t know much about the game. I was playing with some friends, and I lost enough money one night that I had to get a second job. I would say I was playing professionally in the sense that I had to get more work to keep playing. I am not a naturally good poker player. I lost a bunch. I would go online and lose a bunch. Thankfully, I didn’t have much money to my name.
There was one time I got stuck at the casino outside of San Francisco. They had a shuttle from the casino that would take you to the subway, but it didn’t run from 11pm-6am. At 1am, I didn’t have any money left, and I didn’t have money to get a cab. I had to stay awake until 6am. Then, I got on the shuttle, and I saw a bunch of degenerate gamblers who were just getting to the casino. Then, I didn’t even have enough change to get back on the subway. I literally had to ask a guy in the subway for 37 cents. That was a pretty low point.
After that, I bought some poker books. Back then in 2003, if you knew about the game, you were going to make a lot of money. Then, the Chris Moneymaker thing happened [an amateur player named Chris Moneymaker won the WSOP Main Event in 2003 and made $2.5 million, which then started a huge poker boom]. Then, it was the easiest thing you could do. If you knew the basic rules and you knew starting hands, you were going to make money. I got better and developed some things. During law school, I paid for most of my expenses through poker. It probably would have been a better investment if I studied more.
After my first year of law school, I did an internship in Detroit at the prosecutor’s office. It was across the street from the casino. We’d usually get done at 1 and, then I’d go across the street to play. I was getting close to doing the Character and Fitness Test, and I was playing a lot of underground clubs in Atlanta, which was shady. One night, I won a bunch of money, but everybody at the table was playing on credit so I didn’t actually get the money. The club couldn’t pay me either. That’s when I decided to get out of the game. I pretty much gave up playing.
JK: You kind of sound like Mike McDermott from Rounders. Going to law school and playing in shady clubs and then giving it up temporarily.
SS: Yeah, I definitely drove the truck.
JK: It’s so funny you’re talking about the degenerate gambling thing in San Francisco. When I lived in Cincinnati, a buddy and I were covering a Cincinnati Reds game. Afterward, at about 11 or 11:30pm, we went to a casino across the state line in Indiana. I was down a few hundred bucks in blackjack. That was a lot of money to me at the time. I had to grind all night long just to get back to even. By the time it was done, it was like 7am, and the sunlight was blinding when we went outside the casino. It was like we were vampires. We were driving back home and people were outside jogging for exercise, and I felt so disgusting and nauseous.
SS: Poker probably saved me. If you got me near a casino and I had $300, it was going on the blackjack table. Poker taught me the importance of bankroll management and never overextending yourself. Mike McDermont went broke in Rounders because he had bad bankroll management.
[Smith graduated from law school in 2008 and practiced law for the next five years. He left to run a nonprofit before getting into politics and running a Congressional campaign in suburban Atlanta in 2018 and then another campaign in 2020. In between, he moved to Asheville, North Carolina and played poker professionally for a year. He married his second wife in 2022, after he got back into poker with a new vigor.]
JK: Now, you’ve left law and joined this volatile community where you can make a tremendous amount of money but where you can also lose a bunch of money. How did you wrap your head around leaving law and going to play poker full-time?
SS: I would not say it’s a volatile community. It doesn’t have to be. If you practice bankroll management, if you work on your game, if you’re willing to do the work, there are ways to make it work. I had a little bit of financial cushion to give me enough time to give it a go. To be frank, it didn’t work the first time in North Carolina. I broke even for the year, but my living expenses added up to where I needed to get some work. But I always know now if poker doesn’t work, I have something else I can fall back on. That’s really important. I know I can feed my family if things go south with poker.
We are halfway through the @HarrahsCherokee Circuit, with Rush Smith being the player of the series so far!
The Atlanta native took down Event #2 for a $104,177 payday and won his second ring just two days later!
Full Recap: https://t.co/gNpio8H23c pic.twitter.com/AEoPuiFsGB
— WSOP – World Series of Poker (@WSOP) May 10, 2023
JK: I’m not a risk-taker. It just seems that the swings would be hard for me. How did you make the leap of faith?
SS: My worst-case scenario was always going to go back to being a lawyer. To me, it was riskier not to do this. I never would have been happy if I hadn’t tried. I learned so much about myself. One thing poker does is expose every flaw and strength you have. People play the game and don’t see how that can be possible. But when you play so much, you really have to understand yourself and understand why you’re making certain decisions. If you’re making those from an emotional standpoint, if you’re not managing your bankroll because you’re tired, if you’re just trying to prove yourself among the other players, none of those are based in logic. They’re based in emotion. It will eat you alive.
There’s plenty of room for slackers in poker. But they’re not going to make any money. Finding out how I can improve, that always drew me to the game once I started to care. The fact I broke even after my first year pissed me off. I wanted another bite at it. That’s the thing I’m carrying over to other parts of my life. I want to invest in all the things that can give my wife and me the ability to be successful. My health, the adventures of life. That’s what I want to invest in. Not doing those things is more risky to me than doing them.
JK: How do you not get burned out being at the poker table so much? It seems like such a grind.
SS: First of all, I love it. But there’s certainly burnout. In addition to loving the game, I love the freedom it gives me. If I want to take a hike or take a two-week vacation, I don’t have to ask anybody. But like any job, I have to be disciplined. I have to put in the hours. I have to do all the things I laid out in a plan. But I play a lot online. I can’t spend too much time at the casino, man. Being at a table with nine gambling-addict dudes, it’s not my ideal day.
JK: Did you actually write the plan down or is it in your head?
SS: When I started playing at least quasi-professionally, I did say, “Here are things I need to do. I need to have dedicated study time. I need to have coaching. I need to get all the new software that helps me analyze my game.” I don’t have a written plan. I didn’t go into it in 2019 with a plan of what it takes to be successful. I probably should. But I am working on a plan that will lay out my entire strategy of playing poker.
JK: What about the future? Are you putting away money for retirement? It seems to me that the stereotypical poker player is going to go by the seat of their pants and live from tournament to tournament. Sometimes, they’re rich, and sometimes, they’re broke.
SS: First off, you sound like my dad. But yes, I have taken chunks of my recent wins and put them toward retirement. I’ve got a SEP IRA, and I’ve got a Roth IRA. That’s definitely on my mind. When you play tournament poker, when it rains it pours. You have these huge paydays. But even the best players can not make money for months. You have to put money toward your bankroll, toward your living expenses, and toward your retirement.
JK: How much do you think you could be making if you were still in the legal system full time? Do you have a range?
SS: I’m not entirely sure in this post-inflation environment. I’m going to guess the floor is around $300,000 per year. I could be making more money practicing law than playing poker. Let’s not ever get that twisted.
JK: Unless you win the WSOP Main Event.
SS: When I win the Main Event. But also I’ve been around a lot of lawyers, and a lot of them are very unhappy people. I love what I do.
JK: What do you tell people when they ask what you do for a living? Are you a degenerate poker player, or are you a respectable attorney?
SS: Josh, if you call me a degenerate one more time, I’ll hang up the phone. I just tell people that I'm studying game theory and applying it in a multi-faceted environment, or I tell them how it takes discipline to do what I do. The answer has changed depending on who I’m talking to. I’ve come to tell people I’m a poker player. Some people think I’m going to lose it in a drunken night, Leaving Las Vegas style, but nothing could be further from the truth. They might be concerned about me or whatever, but then I tell them how much money I’ve made the past two years, and that usually shuts them up (laughs).
Poker has brought me a level of discipline I didn’t have in my life. It really makes me be self-critical. It makes me think through every thought process I have. It can bring a lot of different lessons to a lot of different fields. Those thought processes are important, not just in poker. Poker makes you think more about life than people think. Or I could just be like you and drink beer and wait for pocket aces.
JK: I don’t get pocket aces. I’m always card dead.
Sadly, it’s time to say a fond farewell to Tina Turner, who died on May 24 but whose music will live on for as long as people simply need to know who the best is and if they're actually better than all the rest.
In 1978, Turner released “Viva La Money,” some of the first music she had recorded since her divorce from Ike Turner. I didn’t know this song until just now, but it’s got a pretty sweet 1970s disco soul vibe with some horns and that bow-chicka-wow-wow groove.
It’s also got some fairly elementary lyrics about what money can do for you. They’re basic, but Tina Turner also isn’t wrong when she sings,
“It can make you feel good/But it can make you feel bad/It can make you happy/But it can make you sad.
It can make you do right/But it can make you do wrong/But it'll still be around/When you’re dead and gone.”
What the song lacks in lyrical sophistication is made up for with Turner’s voice and stage presence. I didn’t know Turner’s work until she exploded in the 1980s (the opening 19 seconds of “What’s Love Got to Do with It” always brings me right back to playing with my friends at the pool in summertime), but it’s easy to see why she was a star the moment she emerged into the spotlight in the early 1960s.
Check her out singing “Viva La Money” on this variety show that, strangely enough, features the backup dancers riding some sort of in-studio fake rollercoaster before the tune begins.
Turner suffered tremendous abuse during her life, and yet she rose above it to give millions of people such joy. She is somebody who should be celebrated.
As she said in a 2021 interview with the Harvard Business Review, “When I started as a solo artist, I was a female Black singer in my 40s with no money and few prospects for gigs. Still, I kept a ‘never give up’ spirit. I understood that although many people might have a limited view of me, I could help open their minds. Through hard work and determination, I showed all the naysayers that maybe their preconceived doubts were wrong. Part of my spiritual practice is to ‘change poison into medicine,’ to take negative situations or roadblocks and transform or remove them through positivity. The force of my positivity pushed all the discriminatory ‘isms’ standing in my way right out the window.”
Yes, but how do you know when enough is enough?
The idea of having “enough” might look like conservatism, leaving opportunity and potential on the table.
I don’t think that’s right.
“Enough” is realizing that the opposite – an insatiable appetite for more – will push you to the point of regret.
— Jeremy Walter (@jeremywalter) June 5, 2023
[Editor's Note: For comments, complaints, suggestions, or plaudits, email Josh Katzowitz at content@whitecoatinvestor.com.]
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]]>We were sixteen, twenty-six, and then, somehow, forty-six. I wasn’t sure where thirty-six had gone, and on bad days, I thought about it more than I knew to be healthy. Thirty-six seemed to me the ideal age: the drunken confusion and missteps of your twenties far enough behind you as to almost seem to have happened to someone else, but the soundness of your thirty-something body still permitted you to spring out of bed in the morning, if you had that sort of temperament. At 8 a.m., unlike at 8 p.m., you still believed you would clean the entire house and do every scrap of laundry and answer a hundred emails and not eat the rest of the sheet cake left over from the family reunion.
By the time we turned thirty-six, Greeley, my closest friend, had been married twice and given birth to two children. At forty-six, she was still married to her second husband, albeit barely. I’d never married, nor did I have any children. (As a woman, you knew these things absolutely, whereas a man could get by claiming ignorance, a child or two of his possibly floating around in the world, waiting to ambush him with accusations or requests for love and attention, possibly all of the above. I suppose this condition colored the lives of some men with a kind of suspense, and hope too, perhaps.)
It helped to be rich if you intended to marry, let alone divorce. Any indignities you might suffer would be attenuated by new cars and good views and well-equipped kitchens. Greeley wasn’t rich but she was brave, and I suppose in most circumstances bravery was as useful as money, if not more so.
Her husband, Hart, was often sickly. He was also depressed and obsessive about timepieces. I thought the two conditions were related, but for years Greeley scoffed at this, until she started agreeing with me, after he stopped being able to get out of bed before noon and began to lose one job after another.
Hart was a tall, bowlegged man with evasive, watery blue eyes and pale hair that grew in tufts on his head and the backs of his hands. He walked around the house in two pairs of socks, regardless of the season, and wore watches on both wrists. I knew from Greeley that he slept with his watches on, only taking them off when he bathed. His mother had raised him on her own and never told him who his father was. Greeley assumed the watches were an attempt at control after a childhood full of uncertainty. She was patient and kind, one reason why she put up with Hart, and with me.
Every room in their house, including the three bathrooms and the closet in the master bedroom, had at least one wall clock, often more. Many of these clocks didn’t work, Hart having let the batteries run down, and no one—not Hart nor Greeley nor their son or daughter—ever bothering to replace them. I didn’t go over to their house very often, but the year Greeley and I both turned forty-six, I was lovesick and desperately unhappy and began to go wherever someone familiar would let me in and permit me to talk about the man who was at the root of my misery. More often than not, it was Greeley and Hart’s house I went to, fleeing my apartment with its dying houseplants and rattling, leaky windows.
I should have moved out years ago but hadn’t yet been able to bring myself to do it. The ceiling appeared to have developed new cracks in the last few months, and I had new neighbors below me whose arguments I could hear through the floorboards most nights. On the four-lane road our building faced, ambulances shrieked by at all hours. Dogs barked disconsolately from behind the locked gate of the building across the alley, and irate loudmouths often shouted at each other by the dumpsters that were emptied by lumbering trucks before first light on Tuesdays and Fridays. Whenever I was home, and not preoccupied with cleaning or cooking or sleeping, I’d be seized by the ruinous urge to call the home of the man I was in love with and tell his other girlfriend, the one he took around in public, that he was a liar and a fraud, and she should know their relationship was doomed.
Hart and Greeley’s children, Liza and Matt, affably tolerated me when I showed up at their house, which was fourteen miles through city traffic from where I lived. Hart usually hid in the basement during my visits, watching old movies and playing online Scrabble. Greeley was planning to divorce him but hadn’t yet told anyone other than her widowed mother and me. She was waiting for both their kids to finish high school, she said, which was still a few years away.
One Saturday in mid-November, when the sky was hurling down dingy clumps of snow and Greeley was late returning home from taking her mother, who lived a few miles away, to the library, I found myself alone at her house with Hart. He answered my knock and after a moment’s indecision let me inside, and to my annoyance, he announced his intention to keep me company until Greeley’s return. I’d been the maid of honor at their wedding nineteen years earlier. Hart and I had liked each other for a long time, but somewhere in our early forties, our mutual goodwill had turned to apathy on his end, chafing forbearance on mine. Respect, sympathy, curiosity—whatever it was that governed our relationship—had apparently been exhausted. It was similar to how for years I’d found the Peter Sellers movie Being There hilarious, but then unaccountably, it began to seem tragic.
I sat down on their pumpkin-colored velvet sofa, with one of their two cats, the white one named Natasha, curled up on the cushion next to mine. Her green eyes opened halfway as she felt my weight settling near her. Hart sat in a matching armchair across from me, and I smiled at him tentatively, wondering what had gotten into him. It was possible Greeley had ordered him to keep me company while she finished the errand with her mother.
“So,” he said.
I peered at him, anxious and tired. I had no idea what he would come up with next. “Yes?” I said.
“So.” He laughed self-consciously.
We looked at each other some more. Natasha yawned, her throat emitting a tiny squeak.
“Did you know there are literally thousands of strains of the cold virus circulating among us every year?” he said.
“I don’t know if I did.”
“That’s why there’s no shot for the common cold. There are fewer flu viruses, and it’s easier for immunologists to guess which ones will cause the most trouble.”
“Interesting,” I said. This trivia did interest me. For one, I didn’t like colds, but I couldn’t think of anyone who did. “Do you get a flu shot every year?”
“No.”
“I do,” I said. “But not yet this year.”
He looked at one of his watches. He had two on his right wrist today, one on his left. His and Greeley’s son looked like him—blond, tall, and blue-eyed, but Matt didn’t share his father’s obsession with clocks. Nor did he appear to be depressed. He was sixteen and good-looking and girls called him at all hours; Greeley had started to take away his phone after 10 p.m. His sister Liza, fifteen and less popular, took after Greeley; she was petite and dark-haired. She wasn’t interested in timepieces either, which Greeley was relieved about.
“I wonder what’s keeping them,” said Hart. “My mother-in-law must have wanted to go to the grocery store.”
“It’s okay,” I said too brightly. “You don’t have to keep me company. I brought something to read.” Matt and Liza were out with friends. The house was quiet.
Hart had a crumb at the corner of his mouth. I wanted to tell him but worried it would embarrass him. I hoped it would fall off on its own without either of us having to do anything about it.
“I don’t mind,” he said. He looked at one of his other watches, pretending to adjust it, or maybe he actually was adjusting it. If it was the kind you had to wind, he’d probably let it run down.
He hadn’t worked in over a year. Greeley was paying all the bills and resented this enormously. I’d told her the other day that I wished I could take us to the South of France for a month, where we might meet beautiful young Frenchmen who would sponge off us unapologetically while we used them for sex. “I can’t leave my mother for a whole month,” she’d said, thinking I was serious. “Hart could probably take care of the kids, but Mom needs me.”
Hart and I sat in silence, me petting the cat, who was now purring loudly, Hart glancing from his watches to the windows that overlooked the street. Greeley’s real name was Bethany, but she had always disliked it and as a joke had renamed herself after the novelist and Catholic priest Andrew M. Greeley, whose books had almost no sex in them despite their provocative covers, as we’d discovered, to our serious disappointment, when we’d read them in high school. The nickname stuck, but her mother continued to call her Bethany and her father did too, until he died two years ago from a heart attack at the dentist’s office. He was in the waiting room, looking at an old issue of People when he died, not in the chair with the drill whirring in his ear. He had gone quickly, the receptionist later assured Greeley and her mother. He’d stood up suddenly before falling down and dying, a look of terrible surprise on his face, as I imagined it.
“Greeley told me about the guy,” said Hart, his gaze lit by mischief. “The one you’ve been writing poems for.”
A truck rumbled by in the street, but it took me a moment to sort out where the sound was coming from. I should have known Greeley would tell him. Why wouldn’t she? They weren’t divorced yet and continued to sleep in the same bed, probably having sex in it too, once in a while.
I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“It’s good you let him know how you feel,” said Hart. “As they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
Who says this? I thought, suppressing the impulse to roll my eyes. A second later, I felt like breaking into tears, but I suppressed that too.
“You could always ask him to marry you,” he said. “I bet that would throw him for a loop. And who knows, maybe he’d say yes.”
“That would not be a good idea,” I said, incredulous. “I don’t want to marry him.”
He tilted his chin at me. “That’s what you say.”
“And that’s what I mean.”
We were each taking the measure of the other, he having decided when he let me in, I suppose, that he had something to prove to me, that he was on an upswing or at least was frozen mid-decline. The crumb was still by his mouth.
I felt my own mouth twitch, sending an inadvertent signal that Hart failed to read. The man I was in love with was named Dawoud. He was extremely good-looking, morally protean, generous in bed, and promiscuous with promises. He was ten years older than I was, but still behaved like a college boy, with his cargo pants and blithe cheating and impromptu camping trips. This had been going on for over a year. I had never suffered so much in my life.
I had to make it stop. It was also feasible his girlfriend would murder one of us when she found out what we were doing, mostly on Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings when Dawoud would sneak over to my apartment while this public girlfriend was in a water yoga class at the gym we all belonged to.
She had a silky blond ponytail and was purportedly only a few years younger than Dawoud, although she looked my age. She had much larger breasts than I did—I’d seen them in the locker room and tried not to gawk. I was excruciatingly jealous, but also thinner than she was. And I had thunderous orgasms, which Dawoud was very proud of, sometimes speechless over, as was I. We spent most of our time at my place naked and panting and laughing together. I hated when he left, never really sure if he would come back. He might get hit by a train or choke on a piece of apple or his girlfriend really would murder him before she came for me. He might change his mind about me and find someone else.
“But what if he proposed to you?” asked Hart. “Would you say no?”
I sensed something in Hart then that I probably hadn’t ever sensed before in anyone. What it was was this: he had once been a tree—most of the molecules in his body, I strongly felt, had belonged to a conifer in another, very distant age. I felt a wave of compassion for him and smiled tentatively, seeing him differently, more appreciatively. Did he have any idea what he’d once been? I doubted it. “I would say no,” I said.
Greeley came in the door a few seconds later, pausing when she saw us together in the front room. I went over to her and hugged her. She smelled like lavender soap and her cheeks were cold. Hart stayed in the chair. Natasha leapt down from the sofa and ran into the kitchen where her food and water bowls were waiting to be kicked over by the next clumsy human, often me.
“I want Trish to read us one of her love poems,” said Hart. “For that guy. You know, Dawoud.” He pronounced his name da-wad.
Greeley stared at him, appalled.
“Dawoud,” I said.
“Ignore him,” said Greeley. “I’m sorry, Trish.”
“It’s okay. I don’t have any of those poems with me anyway,” I said, trying to keep the peace.
Greeley was shaking her head. She took off her coat and hung it in the closet by the front door. “Have you had lunch yet?’ she asked.
“I haven’t,” said Hart.
“I wasn’t asking you,” she said.
“I haven’t either,” I admitted.
“You need to eat,” she said sternly. “I’m ordering a pizza.”
“No, no, don’t do that,” I said.
“I’d eat some,” said Hart.
She ordered a pizza—spinach and mushroom—along with a dozen garlic breadsticks. She knew this was my favorite order, especially the breadsticks. I wanted to move in with her. It was like this every time I came over. I had known her since we were nine years old, when she had enormous eyeglasses and so did I. The first summer I knew her, we’d put water balloons in the fronts of our bathing suits and stood in the backyard, her mother taking our picture, all of us laughing. Neither Greeley nor I had big boobs, though she did for a time when she was pregnant and she lorded it over me then, but not very seriously.
The pizza was delivered a half hour later. The delivery boy was a man in his seventies. I wanted to ask if he was doing this because he was bored with retirement. I hoped it wasn’t because he needed the money, but I had a feeling it was. I tipped him eight dollars and paid for the order, ignoring Greeley’s protests. I had more money than she did and much lower overhead. It was all a fluke, really. My father had left me some money when he died, the year before her father died. He and my mother had been divorced for years and I was his sole heir. He’d left money to PETA too, although he wasn’t even a vegetarian, and to the public library in the central Wisconsin farming town where he’d spent the last fourteen years of his life. He’d never remarried, but had gone on elderly singles’ cruises a few times a year; he’d said he didn’t want the “hassle” of commitment after he and my mother divorced.
Going through his papers after he died, I’d discovered he’d had relations with women who were probably sex workers. I wasn’t scandalized, but I did think about it fairly often. It was like knowing too much about your neighbors’ sexual habits, except, like it or not, I would never again have to look upon my father burdened with this knowledge.
While we were eating the pizza, my phone started ringing. When I took it out of my bag to investigate, I saw with a stab of alarm and desire that it was Dawoud. If he was calling to say he wanted to come over, I would feel both bereft and angry. Sometimes he did this—call out of nowhere and ask if I was free, always expecting that I would be, but sometimes I wasn’t, and he would hang up abruptly after saying, “It’s fine, Trish. It’s fine! Talk to you later.” It would take me a day to recover from this exchange, mostly due to my fear that he would never call again.
Greeley recognized this as the response of a woman with no self-esteem. And what exactly did I think having an affair meant? She’d say, “Why do you let him have so much power over you?” I’d tell her I didn’t let him, per se—it was just what happened when you were in love with someone who was trying to hide you from everyone else in his life.
I let his call go to voice mail. Greeley patted my hand when I put the phone back in my bag. “Good girl,” she said.
Hart perked up. “Was that him? The guy you write poems for?”
Greeley frowned at him.
“Yes,” I said wretchedly.
“You should have let me talk to him,” he said.
Greeley shook her head. “No,” she said. “Not funny.”
He looked at us, hurt. “What? It could have been a man-to-man conversation. I could ask him the kinds of questions Trish probably never has the courage to.”
I noticed the crumb was finally gone from the corner of his mouth, but he had a small smear of pizza sauce on his chin now. He looked like a giant baby—his face pink-skinned, his thinning, tufted blond hair nearly as delicate as an infant’s fluff.
I smiled at him and shook my head. “Dawoud isn’t big on revealing his hand. But it’s nice of you to suggest this.”
“Do you want to call him back?” asked Hart.
“No.”
“It might have been important,” he said.
“It wasn’t important,” snapped Greeley. “He’s a selfish asshole. He’s only using Trish for sex.”
Her vehemence startled me a little. Even if what she’d said was probably accurate, I didn’t want to hear her say it aloud, especially in front of her unraveling husband who, the other day, had washed his blue jeans with Greeley’s new white bras and turned them all a grubby blue-gray. He had also run over a pile of rocks while mowing the lawn last month and ruined the blades. Their oven had so much food crusted on the bottom that every time Greeley turned it on, the smoke alarm went off, but she refused to clean it herself because Hart had promised to do it, and she was waiting for him to keep his word and swore she would keep waiting until he did.
I was afraid that, like Dawoud’s public girlfriend, Greeley had murder in her heart and would snap in some violent, irrevocable way if Hart kept bumbling along and ruining their expensive household appliances.
“How do you know that for sure? Have you met him?” Hart asked Greeley.
“Hart, honestly. Go away and let Trish and me talk by ourselves,” she said.
I really wanted him to leave us alone too, but I felt bad when he took his plate and went down to the basement without another word.
She squeezed my arm. “If you want to call him back, go ahead,” she said.
I shook my head. “No, it’s okay. Hart said I should ask Dawoud to marry me.”
She looked at me, her face grim. “He’s getting worse, Trish. I don’t know what to do. Yesterday I caught him in a chat room for labradoodle owners. We don’t own a labradoodle, as you know. But he was acting like we did.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I assumed he was either bored or delusional. I hoped it was the former. Greeley was crying now, her face suddenly wet with tears. I reached over and hugged her and soon we were both crying.
When we stopped, I shared with her what Hart had told me about the common cold. “He does know a lot of trivia,” she said glumly, wiping her eyes. “I’ll give him that.”
A second or two later, she whispered, “I have to divorce him. I’m not sure what will happen to him after I do, and it’s going to upset the kids very much, but I have to do it. I can’t wait much longer.”
I took her hand and we sat in silence, listening to the drone of the TV in the basement. “He seemed less depressed than the last time I saw him, at least,” I finally said.
She nodded. “Yes. But it’s unpredictable. He’ll be okay for a week but then without warning he’ll stop showering and picking up after himself and talking to me or the kids. He won’t exercise, even though on the rare occasions he does, he always feels better.”
“What about antidepressants?”
“He won’t take them,” she said. “Not regularly. Whatever you do, don’t ask Dawoud to marry you.”
“No, of course not. It’s never even crossed my mind.”
“Because if you did marry him, he’d cheat on you too.”
“I know.”
She put her face in her hands. “But I envy you,” she said, her voice muffled. “You have not chosen to marry the wrong man.”
“For a while he was the right man, wasn’t he?” I said softly.
She put her hands in her lap and looked down. I had a picture in my mind right then of her and Hart at Halloween six or seven years ago. He was dressed as a zucchini, she as a chef’s knife. I’d come over to help them hand out chocolate bars to all the kids in the neighborhood, dozens and dozens of them, red-faced and grinning and manic on sugar. One little girl who reminded me of me pointed at Hart and asked Greeley, “Will he get to be the knife next year?” And Greeley replied, “You’re a sharp one, aren’t you.” The girl blinked, not getting the pun, but Hart and I laughed. “I hope this woman will always be my knife,” he said to the little girl, his arm around Greeley’s shoulders. “And that I can always be her vegetable.” Greeley made a comical face. I could see she was very happy.
“Yes, he was the right man for a while,” she said. “But now he isn’t.”
Driving home later, I thought about Hart in the basement and Greeley on the first floor with the crusted-over oven and her ruined bras upstairs in the bedroom and the damaged lawn mower in the garage and all the other frustrations of her long marriage to Hart. I knew he deserved some compassion too—he wasn’t evil, just beaten down and sick and weaker than she was. They’d had some good years, and their kids weren’t jerks. Greeley liked her house too, but right now I knew it wasn’t much comfort when she thought of the failings of the husband she shared it with, a man who was not looking for a new job and had slipped into midlife depression and might not be able to pull himself back together anytime soon, if ever.
And at forty-six, what did I have? I’d tried to keep it simple, as Greeley purported to envy. I’d held myself back from binding attachments when they were offered—I’d turned down two marriage proposals, the first in my twenties, the second in my thirties. Both men had gone on to marry other women and have children. I didn’t regret this, though. You took your chances no matter what you did.
I believed I had been a tree once too. I had lived outside in all seasons, witnessing the comings and goings of birds and rabbits and wolves and people who were always arguing or feeling put-upon or who knew what—maybe not much of anything. I was responsible for the care and upkeep of my own bras and had no lawn to mow. To be honest, this was a relief.
Just before I’d left Greeley and Hart’s place, Hart had emerged from the basement to say goodbye. He must have heard us talking or else simply guessed I was ready to go home. Greeley didn’t care anymore if he heard her saying unflattering things about him. He was like a cement wall now, she said, nothing penetrated him.
He came up from downstairs and stood in the doorway, studying us for a second before he said, “Keep writing poems, Trish, and be sure to wash your hands with soap and hot water. You need to guard against the common cold. It’s almost winter now.”
“I will,” I said, smiling at him as kindly as I could.
I didn’t return Dawoud’s call that night after I got home. When he called again the next morning to confirm our usual X-rated Sunday gymnastics, I didn’t answer. I went out instead and stayed away all day. He called again. Again, I didn’t answer. It’s over, I typed into our ongoing text thread, though I couldn’t bring myself to hit send. I was going to sell my depressing apartment, I realized. I was going to take a leave of absence from work and travel for a while. It was something I’d been intending to do for many years.
The next morning, Greeley texted me a picture of her espresso machine with the caption, The latest casualty of my marriage. I sent back a frowning face, adding I’m sorry, G.
It’s over, I typed again, and this time I hit send. It wouldn’t be enough, but it was a start. I looked out the window, down into the alley, where a man in gray sweats was foraging in the recycling bins for aluminum cans, his bike basket already teeming with his finds. I watched him, drinking my morning cup of strong black coffee, ignoring the urge to check my phone. After the coffee was gone, I got ready for work and the drive to the high school where I was the assistant principal. It was Monday, after all. I was good at this job, despite the chaos of my private life, and liked most of the students and teachers, and my boss, Principal Brynne, who had the same birthday and hairstyle as my mother. At school I was organized and punctual and people came to me when they needed things, which I wanted them to do.
During lunch, I ordered a new espresso machine for Greeley. I didn’t include a gift message. She would quickly figure out who’d sent it, but I wanted it, at least for a little while, to be a surprise.
__________________________________
From Direct Sunlight by Christine Sneed. Copyright © 2023 by Christine Sneed. Published 2023 by TriQuarterly Books /Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved. Originally appeared in The Literary Review.
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Vendor: EE
Type: Bottoms
Price:
55.00
The RHONJ reunion ended just as vitriolic as it started. The accusations about Bo Dietl’s digging remained at the center of the conversation, even though fans were left with far more questions than answers. One at the top of my list is, what in the world was John Fuda hiding in that manila folder? If you’re going to bring receipts to the reunion, USE THEM PLEASE. Or at least show us them being used! Anyway, here are five of the main takeaways from the final episode of the RHONJ Season 13 reunion.
The tension was thicker than Tre’s wedding weave once the husbands entered the reunion stage for Part 3. Andy was stressing out over keeping every hot-headed member of Jersey’s cast in their seats while they were duking it out. It was interesting that Joe Gorga almost echoed his sister when answering his first question about the reunion by commenting on how fast his heart was beating. Andy initially broke the silence by asking Bill Aydin if he needed Botox. Bill kindly said it was a personal decision, but Tre didn’t hesitate to tell her boss to get rid of those wrinkles. She weakened her own argument by using Luis’ frightening face as an advertisement for the cosmetic procedure.
The real start of the reunion was Andy talking about Luis wearing Nonno’s pajamas to sleep. The host simply asked Luis, “What does that mean?” What an impactful question. Truly, Luis’ statement kept me up at night long before Bo Dietl became the demon of my RHONJ-fueled nightmares. Unfortunately, Luis wasn’t giving us A SINGLE good answer at the reunion.
Luis explained that he mixed up his words. He confirmed the pajama pants were never worn by Nonno, and he was attempting to be “endearing” toward his new family. OK, that still doesn’t explain the “safe and loving” of it all. He ended up switching the conversation about Joe Gorga’s refusal to “connect” with him as a brother-in-law. Well, maybe because he saw the long list of red flags, including the pajama comment, and rightfully wanted to keep his distance. Zero points for Luis here.
There was so much talk about private investigators and the FBI in this episode but somehow, it wasn’t that juicy. One comical moment was when Andy brought up Tre’s ludicrous theory that the Gorgas were partially responsible for sending her to jail. Luckily, Frank Catania was on the case.
Frank went into the episode on #TeamGorga. Dolores was keeping her distance, ready to go Patterson on anyone who tried to bring up her son working with Luis to justify their side of the argument. Frank, on the other hand, accused Luis of instructing Bo Dietl to run a smear campaign about him, so he was ready to defend himself and his former client (Tarzan).
Frank hilariously made Joe Gorga give up “attorney-client privilege” as Frank was the Gorga’s lawyer at the time. He admitted that Joe Gorga was contacted by the FBI to answer questions about Joe Giudice, not Teresa. Still, he didn’t show up to say a word. “I know he would never try to hurt me,” Tre said, although she still seems to believe the theories that Jacqueline Laurita put in her head. As Andy put it, it was the “joke of the century” to see Teresa use Jacqueline as her defense. Thankfully, he got production to roll footage to exemplify just why that is.
There were almost too many eerie moments involving Luis at the reunion to rehash. John Fuda tried to confront him about reaching out to his ex-wife in jail, but Luis denied it all. Additionally, Luis confirmed his cell phone number as the one that allegedly was used to call and threaten Margaret Josephs’ son at work. But his response was to back-peddle by claiming he never actually hired Bo Dietl. Like, at all, even though he said it on camera on two separate occasions.
Luis claimed his throwing accusations about a private investigator were all “misstated out of anger.” This man has a lot of strange behavior he attributes to “anger” that Tre should be wary of. Meanwhile, in the next scene, Luis confirmed that Bo Dietl “sent” a security guard to the reunion to protect him from death threats. His story is more convoluted than Tre’s wedding hair, and I promise that’s the last time (this season) that I’ll make that joke.
Luis kept the subtle threats coming. He would say ominous statements like “Let’s play” or “Be careful” that even had me worried while I was safe at home. Joe Gorga hit it right on the money when he said that Luis looked like the Joker, and he sort of acts like him too. Tarzan went as far as to call Luis a “woman abuser” and verbalize that he wished his sister had picked a better guy. Somehow, Luis and Joe Gorga shook hands before parting ways. They agreed to forget about one another and that’s it. There were plenty of reasons to be sad watching this reunion, but every scene that centered around Luis’ villainous behavior gave me chills down my spine.
The Gorga siblings had to take a moment to fight about the Melissa cheating rumors. Each party gave their side of the story that didn’t add up and no one agreed, surprise surprise. They discussed the comment Gia Giudice allegedly made to her uncle about the fact that he could “do better” than Melissa. Tre called Gia on the phone on the reunion stage, who denied ever making the statement. She clarified that she had called her Zio Joe to beg him to come to the wedding but didn’t discuss the gossip. “It’s sad, Zio Joe, that you’re trying to call me a liar,” Gia said via speakerphone.
Melissa and Joe think that Tre made Gia lie and it sent Tre over the edge. She stormed off the stage and screamed for her brother not to follow her, even squeezing out a few tears. She called Gia sobbing to console her, which was uncomfortable to watch the parentification dynamic continue. Like, Gia was at Coachella, she did not want to be dealing with her family drama. Andy Cohen was dying to trade places with Gia and hang out at a resort, so that girl should’ve put her phone on “Do Not Disturb” while this chaos was being filmed.
There was nothing but negative momentum when it comes to Tre and Joe’s relationship following this reunion. Tre approached the day, and even verbalized so, as the last day she’d ever be speaking to her brother. Joe, meanwhile, admitted that he “regret[s] it every day” that his relationship with Teresa turned out this way, but didn’t take any blame. It’s just a sad dissolution of a family that’s not fun to watch on TV.
In his final goodbye to Teresa, Joe revealed that he would “never say never” on rekindling a relationship since she is his only sister. “I will always love you. If you got in a car accident tomorrow, I’m running by your side in that hospital,” Joe said. Tre was angry that Joe would say he’d show up when she was dead, not alive, which is apparently a saying from Nonno. Tre’s sentiment, both in Italian and English, was that her heart was broken.
Melissa even left her least-favorite sister-in-law with some thoughtful parting words. She admitted that she’ll always go with what “the family” AKA Tarzan decides to do in the future about her. “I definitely feel the hate, right, you see it,” Melissa said. “I do love you no matter what you think.” Tre didn’t return the sentiment, but at least she’s not one to fake her feelings. This is one season of Real Housewives that leaves me feeling icky and confused. Who knows where we’ll go from here, but it absolutely needs to be far away from the demonic merry-go-round that is the Gorga siblings’ relationship.
TELL US – WHAT DID YOU THINK OF THE FINALE OF THE RHONJ REUNION? ARE YOU SIDING WITH TERESA OR JOE AT THE END OF THE SEASON?
The post Real Housewives of New Jersey Season 13 Reunion Part 3 Recap: A Not-So-Happy Ending for Teresa Giudice and Joe Gorga appeared first on Reality Tea.
]]>We know our little captains enjoy their fish fingers, so let’s get them hooked on Salmon. This fish finger recipe is SO easy! It’s packed full of healthy omega-3 so no wonder its known as the brain food. It also a really great source of protein for growing bodies, so let’s look at how we can introduce some fin-tastic new flavours as part of your baby led weaning meal plan.
Delicious slow cooked chicken with the best chicken with satay sauce ever! The BEST creamy peanut sauce you will ever try!!! Served with a zingy cucumber salad and a little squeeze of lime. This is an amazing finger food for toddlers and great as a picky eater dinner idea too! Ain’t no one going to be picky with this one.Find the Recipe Here
This Easy Empanada Recipe is the perfect finger food for babies 6 months plus! They are ready in 30 minutes and can be used for dinner with a side of salad, lunch with a dollop of hummus or added to your little ones’ lunchbox for the BEST school lunch EVER (as my child told me!). The possibilities for this recipe are endless. You could make the empanada dough, shape it, and fill it with anything you want. Experimenting is key to finding your favorite flavor combinations!
These Easy Veggie Nuggets with Cheese and Herbs are the perfect finger food for baby led weaning. My kids absolutely love these either warm or cold! They take less than 15 minutes to prepare, 25 minutes to cook and are amazing to stock up your freezer with quick weaning foods. These Veggie Nuggets are made using the best of fresh vegetables, herbs, cheddar cheese and are bound together with egg and wholemeal bread. Healthy nuggets couldn’t be made any better!
A comforting, nutrient-dense Buddah bowl recipe is a great meal for busy parents because you need to take care of yourselves too! Think of a Buddha Bowl as a calm friend in your life. You will be filled with a feeling of satisfaction, coming away lighter, embracing the demands of family life, work and the wrath of winter weather!
This easy baby led weaning friendly family dinner idea has a bonus leftover recipe for lunch! Cowboy chilli baked bean pie is always a winner with kids of all ages from babies right up to Mums and Dads.
This easy Shrimp Fajitas recipe is one of the quickest meals you will ever make! AND the most delicious! We crave a good Mexican dinner every single week but normally we opt for a kid-friendly chilli so these fajitas made a yummy change.
The weather has been absolute pants here in Ireland and there is nothing better than a good homemade curry to warm your bones! This kid-friendly curry recipe is so easy to make and works for the entire family too.
Over the past 3 years, I have been cooking more and more vegetarian food for my family since my husband and 12 year old son are both non-meat-eaters. It’s slowly crept into my own life and I realised about a month ago that I haven’t eaten any meat now in almost 3 months!
I’ve got two words for you that may change your baby led weaning life (if they haven’t already): Slow Cooker (aka crock-pot). I know a lot of people who associate slow cookers with “mushy” food, but it’s not the cookers fault!!! Just like when you cook in the oven, you have to keep an eye on your food (just a little). The crock-pot has a more wiggle room with time, but you have to get the hang of YOUR cookers temperature.
I have been cooking so many egg-free and dairy-free recipe for kids and I have really loved the challenge. The best though has to be these dairy-free lasagne which literally took me 6 disasters BUT you will be happy to hear these work! AND they are amazing!
When you’re planning a party or BBQ and have babies and toddlers, it’s not always easy to create a menu that pleases everyone. It’s also not practical to make different food for everyone (not to mention time consuming). I like to think about how I can take typical recipe and make them baby friendly. This recipe for example, is basically chicken and veggies packaged into a neat, baby friendly, easy to eat burger that I would also eat!
Summer is upon us, and when you’re looking for kid friendly bbq food, it’s not always easy to find something that kids like and is easy for them to eat. While we grownups quite like the taste of charred meat (it wouldn’t be a bbq without it), kids aren’t the biggest fans and can find it quite off-putting. Kids want fun food, and we want recipe that are quick, easy and healthy. These Kid-Friendly Tacos with Coleslaw make for the perfect kids’ party food and are a great way to add spice to your little one’s diet.
Babies deserve FLAVOUR too! You know that craving you get for Chinese food? That distinct flavour that nothing else can satisfy? Yeah, me too. But as I’m sure you already know, many of the dishes you get from local Chinese food shops are loaded with sugar, salt and often cooked in animal fats. My oldest son prefers to eat a vegetarian or vegan diet, so I came up with this healthy cauliflower recipe that I could also feed baby Oscar.
Salmon lovers! This is the recipe for you! As well as being absolutely delicious, Salmon is jam packed with health benefits for kids and grownups alike. If you’re looking for a healthy appetizer or to find new BBQ Ideas, then give these salmon skewers a try and let me know what you think.
Thinking of quick, easy and healthy dinners ideas to satisfy even fussy eaters isn’t easy. It helps to have some go-to recipe, ready to pull out of the bag when you need them. This healthy pizza is delicious and can be veggie-loaded, easy dinner that the whole family can enjoy. Even, the picky eaters!
If you’re interested in baby led weaning then one of the most successful ways to do this is to focus on making baby-friendly family food so that the whole family can eat together and enjoy the same food. Nutritious finger foods are the best thing to start with, and if you include your baby at mealtimes, then the enjoyment of eating will come from the shared family experience just as much as the food itself. Fun food is also an excellent idea, and as kids love dipping, these chicken strips are perfect. Kids love using their fingers and these chicken strips and super soft when cooked and a great way to serve chicken as a finger food.
Ok hands up who has a problem with fussy children eating their veggies? YOU ARE NOT ALONE! Did you know that in Ireland, the UK and the US, only 1 in 4 children eat the right amounts of vegetables every day! Just to put that into perspective in Ireland there are 880,000 children under the age of 12 which means 660,000 children don’t eat the right amount of vegetables every day. See, I told you that you are not alone! The upside is, vegetable recipe are super easy once you get used to making them.
When it comes to comfort food, there is no better belly cuddler than a good creamy pasta recipe. Luckily, I found a fantastic 3-for-2 deal on Dunnes Stores Seafood Mix and frozen veggies and created this delicious, easy family dinner idea that is a deal baby led weaning meal. I’ve been so excited to share this one! It’s inexpensive, loaded with vegetables and Omega 3s, and it’s freezer friendly. A complete, easy family recipe that everyone in the house adores makes for a very happy chef!
There is actually nothing more tasty in my opinion than a potato (can you tell I’m Irish?) and it is a perfect food to first give your little one. A baby potato makes a great finger food and is easy for them to hold. When filled with vegetables, it becomes a perfect little meal. I have served these for both dinner with some diced chicken, spiced baked beans or as a tea-time snack just as they are.
The post 20 Baby Led Weaning Dinner Recipe Ideas babies 6 months + appeared first on Baby Led Feeding.
]]>I don’t have a lot of success with clothes on Amazon, so I’ve been shocked at just how much I’m loving these two finds! This bodysuit is incredibly soft against the skin, and these trousers are one of the best fitting options I’ve found, especially at this price point. Scroll down to also see how this combo looks switched up with a blazer or a sweater.
If you’re looking for an alternative to my beloved crepe Sloane pants or Farah pants (read below for how those compare), I’m truly impressed by these Amazon pants for the price! I’ve worn them for girls night with a crop top and to meetings with a blazer, and they’ve been easy to care for with a machine wash and hang dry. A few things to consider if ordering:
Compared to my crepe AF Sloane pants (currently on sale + an extra 15% off with my code AFJEAN), the Sloane crepe fabric is noticeably thicker, and feels a little more elevated than the Amazon pants. The Sloane “short” length is longer, the waist fits smaller, and is available in a broader size range. While the crepe Sloane remains a top favorite, I’m really liking the Amazon pants for a lighter weight, easy-care option that works with lower shoes.
Compared to my Z Supply Farah pants (see on me), the Farah is made of a completely different fabric (textured, breezy linen rayon blend) which feels more summery casual and laid back. The Farah has a wider cut leg throughout, and comes in one length which is floor length on me but cropped for someone taller. The Farah XS fits similar at the waist and length to the Amazon pants in XS Short.
I had also ordered the “viral” Amazon pants with 15,000 reviews but they did not work for me. These were more like palazzo pants, and the Short felt a little too short given how wide they were.
The Thursday Handfuls are great, but what if Monday (or Tuesday) rolls around and there are a few sales that can’t wait until the weekend? You’ll find three of the best, with a few picks from each, to start the week below.
!!!!! Hang on now. Check your email and your spam folder/promos tab. Here’s a screenshot of the email explaining how it works. It’s a click-through thingy where you’ll be prompted to sign in, and then when you do, a promo code should automatically be applied for 25% off men’s stuff at checkout. So you need that email for it to work. Exclusions are minimal: “all bags and We Made Too Much aren’t included.” Runs clear through Sunday. This seems like a paradigm shift for lululemon. Can’t recall them doing this before (but maybe they did last Father’s Day? Don’t remember that…) Selection is all over the place depending on color, inseam, and whether or not you’re going for slim or classic fit. Review of the Commission pants can be found here.
NOTE: It looks like lululemon might be changing the name of the Commission Pants to the ABC Trouser. Probably to lean on that “ABC” branding that has worked so well for them. Those ABC Trousers sure appear to be commission pants. From the description: “These slim-fit trousers feature our ABC gusset for do-anything comfort with elevated details like welt pockets and wrinkle-resistant fabric.”
Figured Target was gonna do something for Father’s day. Did not figure it would include their arguably best in show All in Motion Jersey Performance Polos. See the review in Polopalooza over here. It’s not all of their tops and shorts, but instead a select items sale.
This sale is weirdly clothing heavy, but there are still some pretty great looking sneakers in there. It’s a select item sale, and not all colors for each model are on sale. Anything tagged as “limited time markdown” (like the golf pants) may expire after this Saturday, 6/17.
Expires today. Full details here in case you missed it over the weekend. Remember that J. Crew sells their suits as separates, so you need to add both the jacket and the trousers to your cart (assuming you’re buying the whole suit.)
Obligatory reminder that Father’s Day is this upcoming Sunday, and to help out, Allen Edmonds is offering free 2 day shipping with that FREE2DAY code at checkout. Which is awfully nice of them. Anyone who has shipped anything recently knows that that’s gotta be a hefty cost for them to pick up.
Boy Amazon got weird these last few years, didn’t it? And this “summer savings event” is further proof of their move from the “everything” store to the internet’s “no limit EXTREEEEME dollar store.” Clearly Amazon’s not a dollar store, but the inventory they carry feels like dollar store weirdness/clutter/crazy-town, no matter the price.
Yet there are still, sometimes, pretty sharp needles in that haystack.
Some notes on the Tissot:
Got all that?
And yes, that’s a blown up image of the Tissot’s Swiss automatic movement at the top right of that image. Do not be mistaken. Don’t let your eyes deceive you into thinking it’s actually a robotic vacuum cleaner.
(**Schwarzenegger voice**) IT’S NOT A ROOMBAAH.
Although weirdly enough, those are on sale too.
Speaking of Arnold, this sales tripod has gone off the rails faster than his Twins co-star’s movie Throw Mama from the Train, which is not to be confused with the Stallone classic STOP! Or my Mom will shoot.
A curious netizen wanted to hear from people who went to school with celebrities, and the internet delivered. Some seem designed for greatness and others were downright unremarkable. So scroll through and upvote your favorites and be sure to comment your own experiences if you have them.
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Regardless of what they were like, one advantage many of these stars had is that they can still claim to start out like “regular” people. These days, a common refrain when it comes to new actors or musicians is that they are simply just “nepo babies,” meaning they only achieved fame through nepotism. Take a new, “indie” artist you have found and go to their Wikipedia page. See if their parents’ names are blue.
Obviously, insider connections are generally always good, but there is a silver lining to having humble beginnings, as it might mean a person is more grounded and less likely to absolutely lose their mind when they become rich. Nicholas Cage, if you haven’t noticed, has been on an acting tear lately, due to his massive tax debt. He reportedly owed the IRS over $14 million dollars, which he paid off by taking on every role anyone would give him.
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Fortunately, most of the people on this list actually went to high school and didn’t spend their time acting. Child stars are particularly at risk, suddenly working and subject to all sorts of attention. The result tends to be addiction later in life, as well as a feeling of estrangement from the adults who nominally should be protecting them. All too often, parents push their kids to be stars, with disastrous results.
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While historically, certain people have enjoyed an elevated status, national heroes, athletes, and so on, the idea of a celebrity is quite recent, in fact, many sociologists believe it’s really only been around for the last century. Mass media and the general spread of images around the world allow certain people to now be recognized across multiple continents, even in cases where people do not speak the same language or even consume their creative endeavors.
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These days, we combine fame and fortune, though in the past a person could be well-known, while still relatively poor. Despite this, celebrities are relatively modest compared to “real” wealth, for example, the Forbes top 100 cumulatively have a net worth of “just” $4.5 billion in 2010. This still puts them squarely ahead of the vast majority of the world, but fame perhaps isn’t the only road to riches.
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Of course, the downside is that many celebrities often face various risks. First of all, the aforementioned addictions, but stalking and celebrity worship, are still quite common, making it hard for some stars to have any semi-balance of a normal life. The statistics speak for themselves, as stars actually tend to die younger than the majority of the population. So at least they got a “normal” high school experience. If you want to hear more about celebs before they were famous, click here, and here.
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"This razor gave me the silkiest, smoothest shave I've ever had! I never get any cuts or scrapes, even on those hard-to-shave places."
Interior design is both a skill and an art form, and it’s easy to make mistakes when you’re trying to put all the pieces together. Luckily, some of the most common interior design mistakes are easily fixable—as long as you know how to recognize them.
Although there are lots of factors that go into creating a beautiful space, a single wrong element can significantly affect the overall look and feel. Read on for some of the interior design mistakes you might not even realize you’re making, as well as tips on how to avoid them.
Source: @jennasuedesign
This is one of those design faux pas that’s glaringly obvious as soon as you walk in the room. Full-length curtains should either pool slightly along the bottom or just barely brush the floor. Any higher and it’ll give a similar effect as high-water pants—not a good look. You’ll also want to make sure your curtain rod is mounted a few inches above the window casing to avoid crowding your window and making it look smaller. Mounting the rod even higher (a few inches below the ceiling) can help make the whole room appear larger.
If you’ve heard that trending sound on TikTok, you know what I’m talking about. But if not, let me break it down for you. “The big light” refers to any type of overhead lighting (like chandeliers or flush-mount fixtures) that directs brightness downward. This works great for task lighting, but when you’re trying to unwind in the evenings, it can feel too harsh and intense. Relying solely on overhead lighting is a super common interior design mistake, but one that’s easy to remedy by varying your light sources. Table lamps, floor lamps, wall sconces, string lights, and natural lighting are all great alternatives that offer more diffuse ambient lighting and a more relaxing feel.
Artwork is another one of those things that’s easy to get wrong—and it’s pretty obvious when you do. Fortunately, there are a few interior design tips that’ll take the guesswork out of it. First, your artwork needs to be right-sized for the space you’re trying to fill. If you’re hanging art above a sofa, headboard, or another furniture piece, the art should take up about three-fourths of the available wall space. That means you may need to hang several pieces together if your space is large. Then when you go to hang artwork, aim to position the center of the piece at eye level (approximately 60 inches off the floor). If you’re hanging a whole gallery wall of frames, the center of the grouping should be at eye level.
Source: Studio McGee
A small room overstuffed with big furniture is obviously not ideal. Likewise, furniture that’s too small will get lost in a large space. To find that happy medium, you need to align the size of your furniture to the scale of the room. The same concept applies to the relationship between pieces within a room. If you have a large sofa, you need a sizable coffee table to match. A narrow side table requires a slim table lamp, not a bulky one.
It makes sense that small rooms would need small rugs, but going too small can make your space feel awkward and disjointed. Whatever the dimensions of your room, refer to your furniture arrangement to determine the best rug size. For living rooms or bedrooms, use this rule of thumb: Make sure at least the front two legs of all your furniture pieces can rest on top of the rug. If all your furniture can fit completely on the rug with a few inches to spare, that’s even better. For rugs that go under a dining table, you should be able to pull out each chair fully without going off the rug or catching on the edge.
If your living space feels crowded or too busy, clutter is likely to blame. To get some of that space back, start by putting things back where they belong. For items that don’t really have a place, consider whether they should live in a different room or if you’re better off getting rid of them. For stuff you’re not willing to give up, opt for closed storage where possible. Instead of keeping things out in the open, tuck them away inside cabinets, baskets, or bins for a more streamlined look.
Source: @leclairdecor
Especially when you’re working with a small space, finding the right furniture arrangement and orientation can be a challenge. But if the back of a sofa or an accent table is blocking access into or around the space, you know there’s a problem. Think through how people will enter and move around the room, then make sure that all of those pathways are wide enough and not blocked in any way. In general, you need about 30 inches of space between furniture that you need to walk around. Between seating and accent furniture, leave about 18 inches so you can easily reach your drink on the coffee table from the sofa.
This interior design mistake can be trickier to spot, and it might take some time to train your eye in this way. When a room is unbalanced, it can appear lopsided or simply “off.” The key is to make sure the visual weight of the space is balanced from side to side and from top to bottom. As you look at a room, consider whether there are any spots that feel empty or unfinished compared to the other areas of the room. What could you add or rearrange to fill that space?
There’s a reason why a horizontal painting won’t look right on a tall, narrow stretch of wall space. Or why that curved desk looks funky set against a flat wall. When an object’s shape isn’t in harmony with the space around it, something just feels off. As you’re placing furniture and decor throughout a room, consider whether the shape of the object matches the shape of the area you want to put it. If not, consider finding a new home for it.
Do you love it because it suits your style and personality—or just because it’s all over your FYP? It can be tricky to tell the difference, especially when our social media feeds are flooded with new fads constantly. Interior design trends can be a fun way to breathe new life into your space or add a new twist to your living room decor ideas, but it’s possible to overdo it. Be selective about the trends you embrace, and remember that it’s OK to forego trends completely in favor of more timeless pieces you know you’ll still love a year from now.
It shouldn’t feel like you’re walking into a whole new place every time you go between rooms. As you’re outfitting your home, try not to think of each room as a separate entity and instead consider the different spaces holistically. Although having each room match exactly would be tedious, they should relate to each other in color, finishes, and style so each space feels like it’s connected to the whole.
This is perhaps the biggest mistake of all—and the one most often overlooked. After all, you’re designing your home for you, not for a panel of judges or a bunch of strangers on the internet to critique. Your home should reflect who you are and what you love, and if some of that isn’t exactly picture-perfect, that’s more than OK.
The post 12 Interior Design Mistakes You Might Not Realize You’re Making appeared first on The Everygirl.
]]>"This razor gave me the silkiest, smoothest shave I've ever had! I never get any cuts or scrapes, even on those hard-to-shave places."
There are countless reasons to create your own capsule wardrobe, most notably that a capsule wardrobe can help you cut down on clutter, save money by investing in a handful of pieces (versus dozens), and make coordinating outfits infinitely easier—not to mention that it’s a much more sustainable way of shopping. Building a capsule wardrobe can also be an enjoyable and rewarding task. Rather than stress shopping to keep up with the latest trends, you’re taking a very proactive role in your personal styling.
A best-kept secret to capsule wardrobes is that they can be created to serve different purposes. One such purpose? They can be the solution to I-don’t-know-what-to-wear-today mornings when getting ready for your 9-to-5. If you personally dread putting outfits together for the office, a minimalist work capsule wardrobe can change that.
As you might have guessed, a minimalist work wardrobe is a no-fuss, straight-to-business collection of fashion items. Think refined work-wear staples that all play nicely together, such as trousers, blazers, button-downs, loafers, heels, and the like. With an emphasis on “minimal,” this wardrobe is free of the “extra” or overly trendy and thrives on the simplicity of owning a small handful of stylish things. It’s a highly-strategic, efficient way to approach dressing for the office.
While all capsule wardrobes follow a general theme, what makes a minimalist work wardrobe different is its dedication to professionalism and deference from the changing seasons. Unlike a seasonal capsule (such as this fall work capsule wardrobe), which is subtly influenced by colors, textures, and patterns associated with its designated season, your minimalist work capsule should remain generally agnostic. In other words, don’t run out to buy an orange blouse just because the calendar reads “October.” A minimalist work wardrobe is also generally elevated and chic. For instance, it strays away from the graphic tee and elastic waist bands that you might find in a work-from-home capsule wardrobe.
If you’re sold on the idea but are wondering how to build a capsule wardrobe, have no fear. While it does require some thought, time, and effort, you’ll find that the process is more than worth the commitment. Here are six easy steps for creating a minimalist work wardrobe.
Before you get started, there’s something to be said for taking a moment to visualize your perfect professional wardrobe. Some things you might want to consider:
All of these starter questions can help you start to visualize what your finished wardrobe will ultimately look like. Don’t be afraid to also jump on social media and scroll through for outfit inspiration.
You probably saw this one coming, but every fashion overhaul requires a good cleaning out. Using the vision you’ve set forth in step one, take a critical eye to your current wardrobe. Go through your closet and dresser drawers, removing all items that no longer bring you joy. Whether it doesn’t fit correctly or match your desired style, or has been sitting on its hanger untouched for the last three years—let it go. Don’t forget to give your shoe rack a once-over as well!
When considering items to keep for your minimalist work wardrobe, prioritize quality materials, chic silhouettes and styles, and neutral base layers (such as a pair of tan trousers or a white button-down shirt) that can act as foundations to build upon.
When you’re finished purging, consider donating items that are still in good condition to jumpstart your new commitment to sustainable living.
Once you’re done clearing the clutter from your closet, take a moment to recoup and assess what’s left. To do this most efficiently, consider grouping items together by clothing categories. In other words, hang your dresses together, consolidate your pants to one section of your closet, keep short-sleeve tops together, and so forth.
Looking at your different clothing categories, take stock of which items or general categories are lacking. Do you have at least three pairs of shoes you can wear to the office? If not, jot it down. And I do mean literally write it down. It’s much easier to be strategic and stick to a specific plan if you commit it to paper.
When assessing wardrobe gaps, keep your vision top of mind, referring again to your personal style, your employer’s dress code, and the weather of your geographic location. While a minimalist work wardrobe may vary slightly from person-to-person (based on the factors mentioned) some items you might consider filling your collection with include:
Of course, the best part: shopping. When investing in new pieces, be sure to keep versatility in mind. Neutral colors are timeless and allow for more effortless styling. If your personal style tends to be a little more vivacious, consider adding pops of color to your wardrobe through accessories. As with any capsule wardrobe, quality is also key. Avoid purchasing fast-fashion items that will fall apart after a handful of wears and leave you unexcited to reach for them time after time. If investing in clothing is tricky based on your personal budget, enjoy the journey by setting aside a small fund each pay period and saving up for items you truly love. Take the pressure off of yourself by knowing that your minimalist work wardrobe doesn’t have to manifest itself overnight.
As you continue to curate your wardrobe, have fun creating looks by mixing and matching the pieces in different combinations. As you get more comfortable in your curated collection, begin to also consider what kind of seasonal pieces you might want to throw into the mix to make your closet even more versatile. For instance, if you live in a colder climate, you might want to add a trench coat and posh scarf. In contrast, you might also consider adding a pair of quality sunglasses to your accessories drawer to protect your eyes on your commute.
1. shirt dress (plus)| 2. tote | 3. puff earrings | 4. ballet flats
Be it a warm summer day or a chilly fall one, a shirt dress always fits the bill for an office day. With a pair of ballet flats and your go-to tote bag (this one is our team’s favorite), it’s an easy outfit to throw on, but packs a major punch.
Workwear tops don’t have to feel stuffy, and this textured tee is proof of that. With a pair of linen trousers and loafers, it’s formal enough for the office, and can be worn on repeat with your arsenal of business-casual bottoms.
1. boatneck top | 2. trousers (plus) | 3. tote | 4. slingbacks
An all-black moment screams “professional,” so this is a great look to pull out on a day you have a big meeting or presentation. The structured details of the boatneck top add some power to your work, while the trousers and slingbacks tie it all together.
The post The Everygirl’s 2023 Workwear Capsule Wardrobe appeared first on The Everygirl.
]]>Because of their small size and hardiness, quails are an excellent choice for small homesteaders who may find even chickens to be too much.
Quail are small and plump, almost pudgy, with short wings and stout bodies. Due to their physical characteristics, many people wonder if these birds can fly. So, can quails fly?
Yes, quails can fly, but the duration and distance of their flights are limited. Quail can usually only stay in the air for a few minutes, and rarely travel more than a couple hundred yards away. Quail typically only fly when startled or frightened by a predator.
Quail are notably for being predominately ground-dwelling birds even though they have the ability to fly. They often prefer to run or hide rather than take flight.
But as far as their keepers are concerned, quail fly more than well enough to hop even a tall fence and make a run for it! You’ll need to account for this if you want to keep quail contained.
I will tell you more about quail and their flight tendencies below…
Compared to other birds, no. Most quail species, like the bobwhite quail, aren’t strong fliers and prefer to run along the ground as their primary means of locomotion and evasion.
But, quail can fly fast when they need to: quails are known for their short, frantic and rapid bursts of flight, which allows them to escape predators while moving through dense foliage.
However, quails are primarily ground-dwelling birds and are accordingly adapted more for running on the ground than for flying.
Quail start flying at just two weeks old, or maybe a few days earlier. However, just because they can fly at two weeks doesn’t mean they are independent yet; they will usually hang around home for a couple more weeks before leaving out on their own.
The distance that quails can fly varies among species and depends on several factors, such as their weight and overall physical condition.
Some species of quail, such as the Gambel’s quail and the California quail, are strong fliers but have low endurance, gliding back to the ground a hundred yards away after a frantic initial climb. Other species can fly a couple hundred yards in a pinch.
Few North American quail species can sustain the flight for more than a few minutes at a time, and so usually only fly as far as they nearest safe spot to escape danger or reach nearby perches or roosting spots.
Quails have a distinctive flight pattern that involves short, rapid bursts of flight, often close to the ground.
When forced to flight, their takeoff is startling, almost explosive: launching straight up, they rapidly beat their wings to gain altitude, then glide or flap continuously for short distances before landing again.
A quail’s wings are relatively small and rounded, allowing for quick and agile movements. They can also fly through dense foliage and brush by tucking their wings close to their body and darting through small openings, a common escape tactic.
During flight, quails often make distinct whistling, chattering, or chirping sounds, which can alert other quails to potential danger or help locate their mates or flock.
This sudden, explosive launch and immediate dash is what makes quail so appealing to bird hunters; the window of opportunity for engaging a quail is very short!
Yes! Quail are not like chickens in this regard. Aside from being able, fast fliers, quail don’t have a homing instinct that they associate with their coop or shelter.
Whereas chickens typically only go so far away and make an attempt to return to their home and flock, if a quail gets spooked or is just feeling adventurous they will fly away (or run away). If that happens, they will not come back.
Accordingly, you must take all reasonable precautions to keep that from happening if you raise quail.
Yes. Quail prefer to stay on the ground and run around, but they can and will fly when needed! If your quail want out, there is not fence that will contain them.
Compared to most other birds, quail are not good fliers. But compared to poultry like chickens and turkeys, quail are superb fliers!
Your quail can take off from the ground at will and quickly reach surprising heights, which makes it effectively impossible to truly contain them in any uncovered area.
That being said, there are ways to keep your quail contained: a higher fence with a soft covering is best. This will prevent quail from giving you the slip.
But, it is essential that any covering be soft and flexible to cushion the birds should they fly into it, yet strong enough to keep predators out. This issue is more complex than it sounds at first.
Concerning your quail, it is imperative that the covering be soft, flexible and at least 8 feet or so off the ground.
Why? Because quail, when startled, rocket straight up and do so instinctively. Fast, and hard. If they smash into anything that is too low, or that won’t absorb impact, they can get a head injury or even break their neck. Poor things!
This is why a typical chicken coop is a bad idea for quail; they need a structure with a taller roof to be safe!
The second factor is that damn near every predator out there likes to eat quail, eat quail eggs, and eat quail chicks. It is worse for them than chickens!
In fact, the single most rapacious predator of quail is actually the “domestic” cat. Whether or not they are pets out for some fun or feral felines that are just reverting to the law of the jungle, if cats have any chance of reaching your quail, they will and they will kill them.
So, keep them safe with a sturdy fence and cover that can’t be clawed or ripped open, climbed over, or snuck under.
In the end, it is possible to contain quail but you must take their quirks into account.
Yes, you can, and for many quail keepers, this is absolutely mandatory to keep their feathered friends contained and protected from injury.
However, it’s important to understand that this is a serious undertaking that requires knowledge and skill. It’s not something you can do by the seat of your pants or without adequate preparation.
The post So, Do Quails Fly? appeared first on The Homesteading Hippy.
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]]>Residencies are the best and worst when they cut you off from internet. This makes you more productive, sure, but it also prevents you from using the web for its main purpose, which as we all know is porn. It thus becomes inevitable that you (in this case, me) must find a suitable appendage attached to a warm and preferably fetching body with which to stab yourself for pleasure.
It’s only the first night but I must act fast since there are only eight of us. At dinner, I have my eye on Alfredo, a wing-tipped Argentinian who calls himself an “air artist,” which sounds hot, whatever it means. Over peach cobbler in a Georgia stone house surrounded by cabins and the river where Deliverance was shot, Alfredo claims to have never watched TV. I spot my opening.
“I can’t watch TV either,” I inform the table. “It’s just so much slower than reading.”
Alfredo nods with a scruffed chin. I smile; clueless men make the best prey. To bolster my point, I bring up the adaptation of the Quebecois literary sensation Salée Roonet’s Tête-à-têtes with Confidantes, which has proven that modern bodice-rippers can be award-winning when peppered with français. “I don’t know how people justify watching ten hours of TV when they can just read the novel in one sitting.”
“Books do get drawn out for no good reason,” adds Savage from Atlanta, a painter whose knitted cardigan and blonde highlights read suburban mom. I imagine a peewee soccer game in her neighborhood where all the middle-aged women have names like Petty, Vicious, and Bossy.
“Good for her that she got her book made into a show,” Tom interjects. He’s a Mississippi food writer who clearly doesn’t worship in the church of Roonet.
“She’s not hurting for cash,” I reply. I’d read a Guardian interview where she talked about her enormous wealth impinging on her socialist values, which made me want to pull out my pubes one by one. My popularity, such as it is, is confined to literary circles eager to embrace a token trans woman, especially since I’m albino Filipino and therefore triply tokenable.
“I do like how self-aware Roonet is about her fame,” says Elma, a poet-xylophonist, in a husky alto with bell-like harmonics. “My wife and I listened to a podcast where she said, ‘When I sit in front of my computer, I wonder whether I can possibly write the next novel by Salée Roonet.’ I felt sorry for her.”
That’s how I find myself focusing on Elma for the first time. I usually ignore whoever my competition is for Most Oppressed Identity at any given residency, and she’s a lesbian from Sri Lanka.
“I also loved it when she said, ‘As long as there’s sexual tension, people will keep reading,’” Elma continues. Her oversized pupils are like Charlize Theron’s, Ronnie for short, my rescue pit bull mama back home. I sneak a crotch grab and catch myself with a lady semi. Alfredo who? I excuse myself and sneak out the main house’s back door. I hold Elma in mind while I use my phone light to rush up the gravel path to my cabin. Her AmStaff eyes, those pouty lips, the waves of dark hair that remind me of the sea at night. Shit. I get lyrical when I’m horny; it’s a blessing. I’ve scrawled my best lines with a hand down my pants.
I enter the cabin and get into bed. I pull down my tights and rub, still frustrated after all these years that my glans is now my clit, my shaft now my vaginal cavity, everything harder to reach, friction more challenging to achieve.
I turn over, kiss Elma’s imagined mouth, lose my hands in her thick hair, sniff the nape of her neck to find lavender essence mixed with Indian Ocean. My hands try to grasp her waist but can’t. How wide is her waist? How big are her tits? She has Ronnie’s eyes though — maybe her swollen udders on Elma’s body, the shallow curve of Ronnie’s waist on Elma’s waist, and yes, yes, but no, but wait, not Ronnie, no wait, don’t, stop; Charlize Theron, though, hottie warrior from Mad Max, firm, Elma-Ronnie-Charlize in desert armor after a long battle, exhausted, long legs waiting for a tongue between them, ah, oh, oh, oh…
I collapse face down, then flop to my back when I can’t breathe. The shadow of a wooden beam; moonlight behind wispy clouds. Am I a not-in-a-good-way perv? Am I a Bad Trans Woman? A discredit to my community, a disgraced ambassador who besmirches my role as literary flag bearer? Will there be a tranny tribunal where my sins will be judged?
Calm down, I tell myself. Imagination can wander into murky territory, be it canine or Sapphic. I’ve never jerked off to a woman I’ve met in person, and I wouldn’t have done it if I weren’t here. It’s the residency’s fault.
I turn on my reading lamp and grab my Paris Hilton journal. The truth is that I desperately need residencies to maintain my literary reputation. A steady supply of sexual romps with clueless men lets me keep writing, but they’re tougher to arrange since I published my first collection and became Googleable. The great thing about residencies is that I can seduce men before they can look me up. Seeing them at dinner after I’ve slept with them allows me to take notes about their behavior — the eye shifting and the awkward gestures — that I use as specific, telling details in my stories.
Elma has introduced a new wrinkle, however. I blame it on the T, which I blame on the fact that I transitioned in the early aughts when keeping your junk wasn’t yet a thing. I ran off to Thailand as one does and returned with a safer if much more unwieldy genital infrastructure. Yet this also meant that my body produces zero natural testosterone, which bit me in the ass twenty years later when my doctor noticed signs of early osteoporosis and put me on a low-dose T regimen.
I was watching a straight bait video three months after starting injections. It’s my favorite porn subgenre, a blindfolded bro making out with a girl, only for another dude to take her place when it’s time for her to give him a blow job. This scenario floats all my boats — making fun of a clueless cishet while feeding my nostalgia for my halcyon days as a trashy twink. Except: when the dirty blonde in the video exited the frame, I found myself imagining my hand in a jar of Vaseline, which I first rubbed on the poor girl’s dry lips before I plunged my slippery fingers inside her manicured muff.
Though shocked!, shocked!, at this sudden shift in persuasion, I decided that pussy fantasies were a worthwhile tradeoff for avoiding brittle bones. The problem is that I can’t seem to fantasize about women without, ugh, thinking about their inner life, and what they want out of the experience of being with me. This is why my thing for women can only happen in fantasyland, because an IRL lesbo affair could ruin my marriage. I am not Elizabeth Gilbert. My story will not be Eat, Pray, Love Pussy.
And yes, everyone’s surprised that I’m married, but who else would take care of Ronnie in my absence if not for Joseph? It’s a miracle that someone was willing to put up with the a lotness of me: a high-maintenance high femme with a coddled man’s ego.
So that’s it then. I will avoid the real Elma. But this shouldn’t keep me from fondling myself while I fondle the Elma in my mind. I put away my pen and journal, turn off the light, then get back on my stomach and rub my clit like I’m starting a fire.
I put on my fake lashes and Gucci combat boots for the bonding hike the next afternoon. I’ve blown off many such activities in the past, but it’s a chance to see Elma again amid the bulbous mountains and half-naked trees of rural Georgia in March. I get to the meeting spot and everyone is there except for Savage, who has once again defied my expectations. Alfredo’s fingers twinkle at the sight of me, but my eyes no longer rest on him. At long last, I have a good look at Elma’s lower half. She’s in a color block sweater and high-waisted jeans, but I spot a swath of brown skin when she stretches her arms. I pull my black-and-white-striped tights to expose my belly button, a substitute for the hole I wish to lay bare before her.
This flirting by midriff soon ceases, however, when the staff member leading the hike walks us to the head of a trail pointing up a steep slope. I have made a grave miscalculation. Elma’s lesbionic legs have trained for such forays into the wilderness, while the most challenging climb I’ve tackled has been level seven on the elliptical. I’m forced to hang back while Elma stomps ahead.
“We can bring up the rear,” says a spiky-haired performance artist named Lor whom I’ve so far avoided. I refuse to be clocked until I’m good and ready; another trans person always risks putting the kibosh on my dramatic reveal. Lor’s squinty eyes squint even more.
“You look familiar,” they say.
Apart from my cult reputation, I am also the face of the trans makeup brand Floooide and a model for Trananarama Jeans. As well, I am often seen in the Instagram accounts of trans and trans-courting-for-social-justice-points celebrities. While I wish to remain unidentified, I’m also aghast that Lor doesn’t recognize me. My most authentic self is Convoluted Paradox.
“It might just be another albino,” I reply, and the implicit accusation elicits the precise look of contrition I wished to extract from Lor, which seems to throw them off my transgender scent.
Speaking of scents, I’m compelled to find out whether Elma’s real smell matches my imaginings. I see her hair bouncing up and down near the head of the pack like a perky rodent. I envision the hike as a literal human drag race, me clawing my way from the back and taking down everyone ahead of me along the way. I leave Lor behind and reach the next resident, then the next, making a bit of small talk with each so my goal wouldn’t be too obvious. My thighs are burning like I’ve been doing it doggie-style. When I finally find myself behind Elma, the trail takes a bend and we begin to head back down.
One might assume this is welcome news, but I was born without depth perception, which makes going downhill a hazardous prospect. Everyone else continues to chatter while we descend through loose dirt and brown leaves, but I can only focus on Elma’s footsteps, unexpected heaven since watching her feet fuses my lust with my desire for survival, especially when we reach a part of the descent that borders a huge drop. My eyes remain fixed on Elma’s shoes rather than what I am certain are graceful calves and an even more graceful rump between whose cheeks I am sure I would want to bury my face.
But no, just Elma’s feet. I wonder if she also spent much of her childhood barefoot, on an island surrounded by ocean, if she too had once been presumed an innocent village child, the likes of whom appear in ads for UNICEF. Those Westerners who sent funds to assuage their guilt were unaware of our gorgeous perversities, which only unfurled themselves once we arrived on their shores.
“Sorry, Matilda, I didn’t see you there,” Elma calls out with her husky bell of a voice. She stops to let me catch up. “Can you believe we’re here?”
For a moment, the part of me that wonders over my life asserts itself, before I swallow it down and reply, “Where else would we be?”
Elma parts her lips and grins sideways. “Is it too cliché to say home?”
“My stories are my home.”
“I can’t wait to hear your work at Saturday Share,” she says, before she starts walking again. After a few steps, she turns and tilts her head, an invitation to join her.
“I’m leaving this weekend,” she says.
I believe it was Georges Bataille who argued that sex is a kind of death, which is why the French word for orgasm is “petite mort.” There is no sexual thrill in poor vision, so what the hell, I start walking next to her on the side nearest the drop. If I were to die, it would be in a spectacular manner that would be worthy of a New York Times obituary.
She asks me about my day and I hear myself making sounds but don’t register their meaning. I can only focus on the smell of her. Lavender, sure, but also the vinegar that repulsed me in women until I smelled it in myself. I do not smell ocean in Elma, however, maybe because she, like me, is decades away from island life. But I bet the scent is still there in the crook of her neck, in those wrinkles that don’t show themselves until one works a day in the fields and the grime collects, the odor of earth and sea that will never go away no matter how much you wash. I turn my head to be closer to her neck, which is when I trip and fall sideways.
I arrive at Elma’s cabin in crutches and boot the next evening for Saturday Share. I only have a bad sprain and friction burns on both hands from grabbing onto a sapling. For a trans woman, I have a surprising instinct for self-preservation.
“Are you okay?” she asks when she opens the barn door. We haven’t seen each other since I went to the emergency room. I wave the other residents off when they stand to help me, while also making sure to wince every time I take a step. I take the divan Alfredo offers, if only to imagine myself as Estelle in No Exit, my crutches clacking to the ground while I spread my body across the fainting couch.
“I’m managing,” I say for sympathy points, but in truth, I have never been so prolific. While I waited for X-rays, I drafted my near-death experience on my phone. This new process will be a great talking point on my next press tour.
Everyone is here except for Savage, whom I idolize more every time she misses a required activity. Lor goes first with a piece called “The Giant Peter,” a rubber penis attached to their waist, so huge it touches the ground. They dance with the member while declaiming in Russian, the only sounds I recognize being “Ukraine,” “Putin,” and “Petersburg.” It’s hilarious to watch them struggle with the extra-large appendage; if only the whole “penis is war is patriarchy” thing weren’t so overdone.
The composer Gudda performs something called “Noratorio,” where he sings “No” over and over in the same pitch for much longer than necessary. Alfredo comes up and gestures like he’s showing us a painting even though there’s nothing there, which is apparently what he means by air art. We take a break before Tom reads a pedantic essay about food in the South and slavery, yadda yadda yadda.
Then Elma stands behind her xylophone with two sticks in each hand and plays a complex melody while reciting poetry in a language I don’t understand. Her tiny hands manage melodies that sound like both rings and booms. There are also invisible muscles performing nimble movements in her throat. I hear snatches of words I’ve left behind on my island like hari, “ruler,” and sana, “hope.” Yes, Elma, ruler of my hopes with your tiny hands, allow me to worship you. Yes, Elma, please use your strong fingers to enter my cavity until you’re inside me up to your wrist, even your elbow. I’ve seen trans women weep over not having a hole that could bring a child into the world, but I have not understood them until now, as tears stream down my face because my canal is too tight for Elma’s fist.
When it’s my turn to share, I do not read the draft of “Sexual Tension” on my phone. Instead, I begin to recall my upbringing in a distant Philippine province.
“They called me sun child, brown inside but white outside, just as I was a girl inside, but outside I was a boy.”
I describe our bamboo hut and dirt floors on which I squatted, helping the women cook and clean until my father ordered me to fish and climb trees with boys. But I burned in the sun when I tried to fish and fell from so high up a coconut tree that I broke a rib — Elma gasps after I say this — and so was allowed to do chores with the women again.
“My abnormalities kept me apart from others,” I continue, “but they made me who I am.” I tell them that once I got to America, I armored myself with glamour and wit to keep the bullies at bay and protect me from my true emotions, which I am only now discovering because our group is so special. I glance toward Elma so that she can read what I really mean, which is that she is special.
By the time I finish, I find that I have touched even me. Everyone says how wonderful I am, and I find myself not only responding that all of them are also wonderful, but meaning it. Then, I tell the others that I’m tired from my injuries and will nap for a moment. I turn toward the wall and close my eyes, intending to fake sleep until everyone else is gone, so I can catch Elma alone.
The next thing I know, the cabin is dark and I feel a subtle weight on my shoulders and back. I twist to find the outline of Elma’s head, her mess of loose curls like ocean waves.
“Sorry to wake you,” she says. Her hands touch my shoulders when she rests the blanket there. “I didn’t want you to get cold.”
I notice moonlight from the windows and my mind clears. Now that my conquest is within sight, I become unsure if I want to win her. I turn my back to face the wall, unable to allow the danger of being too close, but my body shifts forward to make room for Elma, my limbs expressing what my mind cannot.
To my surprise, Elma accepts my invitation, and soon her body is flush against my back, exerting no energy except warmth. Maybe this cuddle is a stalemate of sorts. When I shift around to find myself staring into her canine eyes, I forget who’s supposed to be conquering who.
“I have a wife,” she says.
“May I just smell your neck?”
She touches that place where her pulse is strongest, and the sight of her hand undoes my control. My nose pushes away her fingers and remains there while I keep my mouth closed, too aware of its role as the gateway organ for human love. Sure enough, there is still ocean in the lines of Elma’s neck, and I keep my lips sealed when I venture downward to the crook of her breasts under her thin top. My breathing shallows while my nose probes her crevices — those vinegar pits, that earthen belly button, those lower lips whose most complex odor is the true smell of home.
Date: May 8, 2023; 11:49 pm
From: Matilda (666matilda666@gmail.com)
To: Elma (elmaaaaaa@gmail.com)
Subject: Residency Story
Hi Elma.
I’ve wanted to email for a while but you know how it is. Can you believe it’s been more than a year since residency? We didn’t really get to talk before you left. I’ll confess that I was just pretending to be asleep, but you already know that.
I’m going to stop pussyfooting (lol) and tell you the more pressing reason for this message, which is that I’m about to publish a story based on our residency and I want to make sure you’re okay with it. It’s called “Sexual Tension.” I’ve never checked with anyone before publishing a story before, but I can’t help thinking about how your wife might read it and put things together. That I was worried about this is the reason why it was really the best idea that things only went as far as they did, which was far enough. If I could keep myself from being with you then maybe I can keep myself from being with a woman ever, because their (your? our?) softer flesh has the frustrating effect of softening my heart (barf).
Attached is a draft. I’ve fictionalized as much as I can while trying to keep the spirit of what happened between us intact. Let me know what you think. Guernica is publishing the story in three weeks (sorry, I’m a procrastinator!) so hope to hear back from you soon.
OxOxO
Matilda
Date: May 8, 2023; 11:50 pm
From: Elma (elmaaaaaa@gmail.com)
To: Matilda (666matilda666@gmail.com)
Subject: Away: Re: Residency Story
thank you so much for your message. i am at a residency for six weeks and will not be checking email until may 22. in the meantime, my wife Sima is monitoring my account and will inform me of any urgent requests. <3 elma
]]>Yet some customers are more keen on tipping than others; and celebrities are no exception. Redditors on the ‘Tales From Your Server’ subreddit shared stories about the time they encountered a famous person at work, covering how well they tipped. It started when one of the members asked the community what celebrities were a good or bad experience to deal with, and quite a few people were willing to share. Scroll down to find their answers on the list below.
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I started backpacking in 2005, and my first few backpacking trips did not go smoothly. My first time was near Mt. Rainier in Washington, and when we got to the trailhead, I realized I forgot my hiking boots. Not wanting to drive all the way home, I ended up hiking in Chacos the entire time. Needless to say, my feet were a bloody mess by the end of the trip. We also didn’t pack enough food, and I was starving the whole time.
Another time in 2007, my friends I took an early season trip in California’s Emigrant Wilderness. A couple miles in, we found the trail covered in snow, with all of the trail signs being broken in half. Despite not having a map or GPS, we haphazardly decided to carry on. We got completely off track and had no idea where we were. Twenty-four hours later after camping near some unknown lake, we were post-holing our way up a snowy hillside when we randomly stumbled back on the trail.
Despite these initial backpacking trips being full of (sometimes comical) mistakes, I still had a great time and learned a ton of valuable lessons to ensure safer and more enjoyable backpacking trips in the future.
Since that first backpacking trip, I’ve spent many more nights in the backcountry, including 22 nights on the John Muir Trail, and have gained a ton of valuable outdoor skills in the process. Below I share the most common beginner backpacking mistakes to empower you to hit the trails with confidence – and ensure you don’t make the same rookie errors as I did!
REI Co-op is our favorite outdoor gear retailer and a long-time supporter of our work here at Bearfoot Theory. We appreciate their 1-year return policy, their Member-only coupons, and the fact that REI Members receive 10% back on their purchases every year. We only recommend products we truly love and think you will love too.
Overpacking is a common beginner backpacking mistake that can – quite literally – weigh you down and diminish the overall enjoyment of your adventure. You’ll likely be carrying 20-30+ pounds on your back, which is tough enough without adding unnecessary gear.
While packing a physical book might be appealing, they add extra weight and bulk, and alternatives like e-readers or a book on your smartphone are more efficient. Leave the speaker at home which not only adds extra weight but distracts from the natural sounds of the outdoors.
Toiletries add up quickly in weight and you really don’t need much aside from biodegradable soap (we like Dr Bronners since you can use it for dishes and for yourself), bug spray, and sunscreen.
Tip: When packing for a backpacking trip, lay everything out including all your clothes and gear and see if there’s anything you can leave behind.
When it comes to what to wear backpacking, it’s easy to fall into the trap of packing too many clothes. I usually pack one outfit to hike in, one outfit to hang out at camp and sleep in, extra socks and underwear, and warm layers.
I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, but trust me – it’s all you need. You don’t want to be weighed down by extra clothes. Plus, if the weather’s warm enough and if you bring lightweight, quick dry clothing (which I highly recommend doing), you can rinse your hiking outfit when you change into your camp outfit and it’ll be dry by the time you’re ready to set off in the morning.
While car camping gear can be luxuriously comfortable, it’s not designed for carrying over long distances. I learned this the hard way on a solo backpacking trip in 2016 in New Zealand where I backpacked with my ultra-heavy car camping cookware – since it was all I had with me. The weight and bulk of these items drastically impacted my ability to move quickly and comfortably on the trail.
Investing in backpacking-specific gear can greatly reduce your pack weight and increase your enjoyment on the trail. Key gear pieces to focus on are your tent, sleeping bag, backpacking pack, sleeping pad, and cookware which contribute the most to your overall weight.
While these big gear items can be pricey, it’s worth it to invest in quality gear that’s lightweight and durable. High-quality gear will last you for years of adventures (we’ve had some of the same backpacking gear for 10+ years that we still use) and will make your time on the trail and at camp much more pleasant.
If you’re looking to save on some of these big ticket items, keep an eye out on sales at REI and check out REI’s Used Gear site for big discounts on lightly used gear, some of which is like new. You can learn more about the REI Used Gear program here.
Not ready to invest in backpacking gear? REI offers gear rentals for all your backpacking essentials like tents, sleeping bags, pads, bear canisters, and more.
Familiarizing yourself with your backpacking gear before you hit the trail allows you to understand how each piece functions, troubleshoot potential issues, and ensure that everything is in working order.
Imagine reaching your first campsite only to realize you’re unsure how to assemble your tent, or worse, discovering a malfunction in your backpacking stove when you’re ready to prepare a much-needed meal.
These situations can be easily avoided by taking the time to set up your tent in your backyard, testing your stove to make sure it works properly, or practicing using your water filter to ensure you know how it works.
By testing your gear ahead of time, you can embark on your backpacking trip with confidence, knowing that you’re well-equipped to handle any surprises that come your way.
On my first backpacking trip, my hiking partner was responsible for planning and packing our food and he grossly underestimated our appetites. We shared a small portion of pasta for dinner and went to bed with grumbling tummies.
When backpacking, you’re burning a significant amount of calories each day – much more than during your regular day-to-day activities or even day hiking. It’s important to look up the estimated calorie requirements for backpacking, which can range from 2,500 to 4,500 calories per day depending on factors like your weight, the difficulty of the trail, and the weather conditions.
To meet these high caloric needs without adding unnecessary weight to your pack, you should ensure your food is calorie-dense. Pack a variety of snacks (check out our favorite hiking snacks here!) because trust me – you’ll get tired of eating the same protein bar day after day.
As a beginner backpacker, sticking to pre-made backpacker meals is an easy way to portion out your food – bring one backpacker meal per person per dinner. Don’t be fooled by the “2 person” label found on most backpacker meal packages – I can easily eat a two-person backpacker meal by myself after a long day of hiking.
However, it’s equally important not to overpack food, as this adds extra weight to your pack (food is one of the heaviest things you’ll carry!) and can make your journey more strenuous. Before you leave on your trip, lay out your meals and snacks to get an idea of how much food you’re bringing.
Read next: Best Lightweight Vegan Backpacking Food
Failing to check the weather can lead to a totally miserable experience at best, or at worst, a potentially dangerous one. Always check the weather forecast before heading out on the trail, or better yet, call the closest ranger station to get the most up-to-date information.
It’s important to research your destination thoroughly and understand what weather and conditions you may encounter to ensure you pack appropriately and are prepared for a safe and enjoyable adventure.
Nothing can cut a trip short faster than painful, blistered feet. Wearing brand-new hiking boots on your trip without breaking them in first can lead to discomfort and blisters, so it’s essential to wear them on some hikes ahead of your trip.
During the break-in period, pay attention to any “hot spots” where your boot may be rubbing as this is where blisters are likely to form. Make sure to wear thick hiking socks (I’m partial to Darn Tough) and bring along some bandaids or moleskin to address these hot spots before they become an issue.
Read next: How To Prevent Blisters While Hiking
Wearing hiking boots or shoes that are too small is also a common beginner hiking mistake. Your feet swell when hiking, especially in warm weather, so you’ll want to make sure you have a little bit of extra space in those boots without having so much space that you slide around. I recommend trying on your hiking boots with a pair of thick hiking socks and making sure they don’t feel tight when you walk around.
I have been wearing Oboz hiking boots for years and they have never let me down – my favorite pair for backpacking are the Oboz Bridger B Dry Hiking Boots. They’re comfortable, supportive, and waterproof so I feel confident hiking in any terrain.
You should also opt for good quality hiking socks, like Darn Tough (which have a lifetime guarantee!), instead of cotton ones, as they wick away moisture and help prevent blisters.
After a long day of hiking, you’ll want to give your feet a break by switching to lightweight camp shoes like the Teva Trail Universal Sandal (which are also great for water crossings!). But avoid heavy sandals or shoes which add unnecessary weight to your pack.
A critical beginner backpacker mistake is not carrying sufficient water. Dehydration can be a serious issue while backpacking, leading to decreased energy, headaches, or in severe cases, heatstroke.
As a general guideline, I recommend carrying at least 2 liters of water. If you know you’ll be surrounded by water sources (and don’t mind stopping to fill up often), you can get away with less. If you’re backpacking in hot weather or climates where water isn’t easily accessible, plan to carry 3-4 liters.
I carry 2-3 of these lightweight 1L water bottles when backpacking. They’re perfect for carrying extra water for longer, drier stretches of the trail and they’re also great if you want to add electrolytes to your water. When you’re not using these water bottles, they easily roll up and take up almost no room in your pack.
You’ll also need a reliable method of water purification, and when possible, pick campsites that have a water source nearby so you can easily filter water for cooking too.
My favorite water filter is the Platypus GravityWorks Water Filter System because it’s so easy to use. Rather than pumping water and getting a bicep workout, you can sit back and relax, letting gravity do the work.
Trekking poles might seem unnecessary or even nerdy at first glance, but the utility they provide on the trail is substantial. Trekking poles reduce the impact on your knees and help evenly distribute your weight, especially during descents, which can help you reduce the impact on your joints and prevent injuries.
They also provide stability on the trail when crossing uneven terrain or navigating stream crossings, especially since you’re carrying a heavy load on your back that can easily knock you off balance. Once you try backpacking with trekking poles, you’ll never go back.
If you’re looking for a pair, these Black Diamond Trail Back trekking poles are a great pick – they’re lightweight, pack down small, and are adjustable so they’ll fit nearly any size, plus they’re budget-friendly to boot.
Read next: Best Trekking Poles for Hiking & Backpacking
Thoroughly understanding the trail you are about to tackle is an essential part of safe and successful backpacking – and one that is often overlooked by beginner backpackers.
First, be sure to look up permit requirements and any regulations for the area – many popular backpacking trails require permits that go on sale up to a year in advance. You’d hate to plan your trip and show up at the trailhead only to realize you need a permit! Learn more about how to plan a backpacking trip here.
Next, be sure to read up on current trail conditions and potential obstacles to ensure a safe backpacking trip. For example, there may still be snow on the trail (as I described in my story earlier) or hazards like fallen trees. To do this, look for recent reviews (you can use an app like AllTrails for this), and if there’s any uncertainty, call the local ranger station to get the most up-to-date information on trail status and safety concerns.
Get 30% off an AllTrails+ membership so you can save maps for offline use, get alerts for going off-trail, preview the hike in 3D, and more.
Knowing how to avoid getting lost is the most important safety tip for any backpacker. You should 1) always download an offline map of the trail using your favorite hiking app, 2) carry a paper map as a backup, and 3) consider investing in a navigation/communication device like a Garmin InReach Mini, especially if you’re heading into a remote area without cell service.
Read next: How to Read a Topographic Map
Imagine setting up camp the first night and realizing you forgot to charge your headlamp or swap out the batteries. Or hitting the trail and realizing you didn’t fully charge your phone or GPS device that you plan on using for navigation.
Make sure you charge all of your electronics including your headlamp, phone, GPS device (like the Garmin Mini inReach we use), camera, and any other devices you need to bring along.
This BioLite headlamp lasted us 6 days and 5 nights on a backpacking trip in Sequoia National Park on one charge.
If you think you’ll need more power, bring a small portable battery pack like this BioLite Charge 20 Power Bank.
Effective trip planning involves being realistic about your hiking abilities. Overestimating how far you can hike each day can lead to exhaustion, injury, or being stranded after dark.
It’s better to plan for a low-mileage, beginner-friendly trail for your first backpacking trip and treat it as a “shakedown” trip to get you prepared for harder and longer-mileage trips.
For your first trip, I suggest an overnight. Opting for a one-night trip is a sensible choice because it allows you to gauge your comfort level and abilities and test your gear without over-committing to a longer stint in the wilderness.
It also provides a manageable introduction to carrying your gear, setting up camp, and cooking outdoors without overwhelming you with too many logistics.
Looking for a beginner-friendly trail? Here are a few of our favorites:
Tip: Nervous about your first backpacking trip? REI offers guided backpacking trips which are perfect for getting your feet wet!
When it comes to backpacking, one common beginner backpacking mistake is failing to be properly bear and wildlife aware. Knowing the local wildlife is not only crucial for your own safety but also for the well-being of the animals you may encounter along the way.
In bear country, it’s essential to know the proper techniques for storing food. Most places require you to use a bear canister or bear bags to secure your food.
Remember, different regions may have specific requirements and guidelines, so it’s essential to do your homework and familiarize yourself with the wildlife regulations before your trip.
However, bears aren’t the only wildlife you should be aware of. Depending on the region you’re backpacking in, you may encounter other animals like rattlesnakes, marmots, or other critters.
It’s crucial to educate yourself about these local inhabitants and learn how to interact with them safely. For example, at Havasu Falls, a bear canister or hanging your food is now required because squirrels and other critters will chew through your tent and backpack to access food. That actually happened to us the first time we went to Havasu Falls. We put our packs down to go for a swim, only to come back to find a rodent had gotten into our lunch.
It’s important for ALL backpackers (not just beginners!) to brush up on the 7 Leave No Trace Principles before heading into the backcountry. These principles are a set of guidelines that encourage sustainable and respectful outdoor practices designed to minimize human impact on the natural environment.
They cover everything from properly pooping outdoors and respecting wildlife to how to choose a campsite. Ignorance or disregard of these principles can lead to littered trails, damaged vegetation, wildlife habituated to human food, and diminished experiences for future backpackers (or can even lead to trails getting shut down).
Not being aware of or failing to adhere to Leave No Trace can cause significant harm to the beautiful landscapes we all enjoy. Therefore, it is crucial for all backpackers, novice or experienced, to familiarize themselves with and commit to LNT principles before embarking on their adventures, to ensure that our wild places remain pristine for generations to come.
In the midst of the excitement of planning your first backpacking trip, don’t overlook an important component of your planning: packing emergency supplies and creating a safety plan.
When it comes to backpacking, carrying essential emergency supplies can be the difference between a temporary setback and a dangerous situation. One such must-have safety item is a lighter or waterproof matches.
Fire can serve multiple purposes on the trail, from providing warmth and cooking food to being a source of light and a signal for help if the need arises. It’s a small tool that can make a significant difference in challenging circumstances.
Next, let’s talk about navigation tools. Even in the era of GPS and smartphone apps, a traditional compass and physical map of your hiking area remain indispensable. They do not rely on battery life or signal strength and could be your lifeline in maintaining direction and reaching safety if you veer off the marked trails. It’s an old-school approach, yes, but one that has saved many seasoned hikers in the most unpredictable situations.
Finally, a well-stocked first aid kit should have its own special place in your backpack. Bandages, antiseptics, tweezers, and pain relievers are just the beginning. Remember, minor injuries can escalate quickly in the wilderness, and immediate care can prevent a manageable situation from turning into a complicated one.
Another critical step we strongly recommend is leaving your backpacking plans with a trusted friend or family member. Sharing details such as your intended route, potential campsites, and estimated return time can make a significant difference in ensuring your safety. This practice isn’t just for beginners—it applies to all backpackers. By doing so, you establish an additional layer of security and peace of mind, knowing that someone is aware of your whereabouts.
Don’t let these precautions daunt you, though! As you become more familiar with backpacking, you’ll find that these preparations become second nature. They will serve to enhance your experience, not detract from it.
Remember, the goal is to fully immerse yourself in the beauty of the outdoors, secure in the knowledge that you’re prepared for any eventuality. And trust me, with the right prep, you’re in for an absolutely unforgettable adventure!
READ NEXT
Here are some of our best backpacking resources on the blog:
What beginner backpacking mistakes do you have questions about? Are there any others you can think of? Leave us a comment below!
The post 15 Beginner Backpacking Mistakes to Avoid appeared first on Bearfoot Theory.
]]>Whether he’s an avid camper, a seasoned angler, or an enthusiastic hiker, these gifts are sure to put a smile on his face – no matter your budget.
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Staying hydrated is important no matter who you are, but if your dad is someone who drinks a lot of water, a Stanley Quencher may be the way to make sure he’s staying hydrated without using too many plastic water bottles. The best part, it’s cupholder friendly. The Stanley Quencher is also dishwasher safe and comes with a reusable straw.
A good pair of lightweight crew socks will come in handy whether dad is going on a hike, a run, or just lounging around the house. Made from a cotton, nylon, polyurethane blend these socks will provide long lasting comfort, no matter what activity dad wears them for.
This tin cloth and mesh cap is stylish, reliable and hard working. Who better than dad to wear it?
Made with 5-panel construction for a vintage feel, this hat will protect dad’s head and give him just a bit of nostalgia to go along with it. With a sturdy bill, this cotton-canvas hat is durable and promises to fit your head perfectly with its secure snapback.
Keep dad’s drinks warm whether he’s heading to the office or the campground. The mug keeps drinks warm and is dishwasher safe, because like they say on the YETI site, no one needs more work added to their to-do list. Do not put it over an open flame.
With UPF 50 protection, this hat will keep dad protected from the sun during a hike, a trip out on the lake, or any outdoor activity. The hat offers advanced repellent technology, allowing for it to beed off sweat, water, and stains. It even has a built in sweat-band.
Dads deserve a break after setting up camp. Hang up a Wise Owl hammock, and you’ll have the perfect place for a rest—maybe even a nap? It’s light, folds small, and comes with straps, making it an easy addition to your camping gear. For under $50, this is a home-run gift for outdoors-y dads.
Keep dad’s lunch dry and fresh, whether he’s heading to the office or hopping into the kayak. This lunch bag can hold up to six cans and keeps food from getting soggy, whether it’s a hoagie or fresh fruit. Easy to clean with a towel or sponge and can even be hosed down to remove the toughest stains.
We’ve all been there, a chilly morning excursion that becomes a sweltering afternoon and we are unprepared. Make sure that doesn’t happen again to dad by getting him a pair of convertible pants for his upcoming hiking or fishing trip. Made from 96 percent recycled nylon, these pants are made to be durable during his outdoor adventures.
If dad loves a good pair of slippers, but doesn’t want to destory his good pair from home, you’ll want to check out these waterproof camp booties from Teva. With a waterproof coding that will help the water beed off, made from 100% recycled materials, these comfortable slippers will make an excellent pair of camp slippers to keep dad cozy at the campsite.
Running and staying hydrated outdoors can be a challenge. Worrying about uneven sidewalks, or potholes, carrying a water bottle that’s going to stay cold, and keeping up your perfect running playlist, it can all be too much. Worry no more with a hydration vest making for easy carrying of your water to stay hydrated on your toughest runs.
For a snug, comfortable, and stylish fit, these slip-on boat shoes can go from the fishing boat to the dinner table. With a padded collar and soft insole, these shoes will make an excellent addition to dad’s wardrobe, no matter where he might wear them.
This cooler is designed to be there whenever a cold drink is a must-have – from the campsite to the beach. Spacious enough to accommodate a generous amount of drinks for your friends and family, it also has a bottle opener for your convenience. And it looks rad.
For dads who don’t want to compromise on their espresso, even when they’re camping, this portable espresso machine from WACACO is the perfect gift. It doesn’t require batteries or electricity, just the strength of your hands to craft that perfect shot. It’ll make lattés as good as the coffee shop (or better); perfect to enjoy in the outdoors.
This fully padded cot will keep dad comfortable throughout the night. Made to hold up to 300 pounds and an adjustable back, the three sets of legs with oversized feet will keep him steady on uneven ground. This comfortable and large cot will make a great gift for dad and anyone who may be sleeping in the same tent as him.
As the 5th generation of the Baitcast Reel, Abu Garcia continues to strive for excellence when it comes to their gear. Get dad a brand new reel and trick out his fishing pole.The reel is designed to be asymmetrical to keep it running smooth with optimized weight and ergonomics.
What says Father’s Day like getting dad into a pair of these classics. From the beach to picking up some granola at the market, these Birks provide tried and true summer comfort.
With the ability to fit up to 35 cans, 26 pounds of ice, or most wine bottles, this cooler will be great at the campsite or a backyard barbecue. Get dad a gift that keeps on giving by getting him a cooler that will keep all of the essentials cool, no matter where you might be heading.
If dad loves to run but has been looking to see some new sights when he’s out, get him a pair of trail shoes. Made with grippy MaxTrac outsoles, these trail runners are lightweight and will ensure that running is made easy and comfortable.
There’s just something about a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses. Keep dad’s eyes protected from the sun during all of his outdoor adventures, with a comfortable and fashionable pair of sunglasses that are meant to last. With 100% UV protection that helps control the sun glare, you’ll be safe and stylish all summer long.
This three-season tent has a large cabin to ensure that the family has enough room to sleep comfortably and hang out during a rainy night. The tent is freestanding with steel/fiberglass frames makes for easy set up, so that even one person can do it alone. Made from a polyester material, the tent will keep you and your family dry.
If Dad has been trying to get out on to the water more, give him the push he needs with a new kayak. This kayak can hold up to 275 pounds and has molded foot rests, storage space for all of your gear, and a bungee cord for your water bottle.
If dad is in need of a new utility knife, the Benchmade Immunity Knife is a great option. With it’s durable, steel blade and aluminum handle, this knife will be super useful whether your camping or just in need of a new knife for small outdoor tasks around the house. It even comes with a carrying clip.
Get dad an inflatable lounger for the pool or the lake. With the bottom of the float fully submerged and the top half out of the water, this new water accessory will be the talk of the pool club, or the lake.
You can’t beat tin cloth on a wet, cool day in the wild. And this one from Filson is a true classic.
Whether dad is getting ready for a hunting or fishing trip, these Simms waders offer three layers of waterproof protection from the elements. With fleece-lined, hand-warmer pockets, these waders have adjustable suspenders to ensure a snug and comfortable fit, no matter the activity.
If the dad in your life loves to shred trails, and you love to shred budgets, here’s the perfect match. It’s not an impulse buy, but the bike’s carbon frame and the Switch Infinity suspension makes this a light ride that takes the bumps like butter.
The post Father’s Day Gift Guide: 27 Great Outdoors Gifts For Dad appeared first on Outdoors with Bear Grylls.
]]>But in a world of flawless Instagram feeds and websites that were designed to be pieces of artwork, sometimes we need a palate cleanser in the form of unaesthetic pics. Below, you’ll find a selection of photos we’ve carefully curated from the 'Things That Are Not Aesthetic' Facebook page. I’ll warn you right now that you might hate these images, pandas, but we hope you’ll still be entertained by them! Enjoy scrolling through, and be sure to upvote the pics that have value other than beauty.
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
There’s so much pressure nowadays to have a great aesthetic online. Instagram users curate their feeds and use the same filter on every picture to create a cohesive photo album. TikTokers use filters and editing to portray their lives as more picturesque than an A24 film. We’re all so hyper fixated on things being beautiful and perfectly aligned that sometimes, unaesthetic pics are actually a breath of fresh air. This is something that the creators of Things That Are Not Aesthetic have certainly figured out, as their Facebook page has amassed an impressive 3.3 million followers in only 5 years online.
The account’s intro welcomes readers to “walk into [their] world and become one with the Internet's demise through an intricate mix of unaesthetic,” and clearly, many Facebook users have taken them up on the offer. The page has shared over 6,100 images over the years and serves as a constant reminder that just because an image isn’t beautiful doesn’t mean that it holds no value. The page shares hilarious memes, funny screenshots and even some wholesome pics that definitely bring joy to followers' lives, but wouldn’t necessarily end up on a highly curated aesthetic account.
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
Things That Are Not Aesthetic rebels against what the vast majority of the internet shows us. Sure, we all know that realistically we wake up with bedhead and might be guilty of taking our dogs outside to potty wearing Crocs and sweatpants (clearly, I’m talking about myself). But we’re human! We can’t ever be flawless, and there’s no point in pretending we are online.
That being said, there are valid reasons why so many of us value aesthetics. According to Jodie Locklear, the woman behind Simple Minded, there’s a connection between beauty and happiness. Gallup has found through their happiness surveys that living in an aesthetically pleasing city can actually boost residents’ happiness levels. We also tend to associate the same feelings with our perception of beauty that we do with happiness, such as calmness, appreciation, reflection and hope.
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
According to some experts, the connection between happiness and beauty actually comes down to economics and evolution. One study from Yale University found that being beautiful can actually add to a person’s overall life happiness by a ratio of about one to ten. The possible explanations cited for this were that attraction comes down to evolution, and if someone is beautiful they are likely to be healthy and therefore happy. And attractive people tend to earn more money, which provides them with more resources and makes it a bit easier for them to enjoy their lives and be happy.
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
Apparently, it’s also been scientifically proven that attractive things simply work better than unattractive things. In 1995, researchers Kurosu and Kashimura in Japan conducted a study where participants were faced with two different ATM interfaces, one that was aesthetically pleasing and one that was not. Overwhelmingly, participants found the more attractive option easier to use, despite the fact that the only difference between the interfaces was their appearance. Donald Norman suggests that this might be because of the positive impact beautiful things have on our brains. Without having the feel-good effects of looking at something pretty, our brains just can't figure out ugly things as easily.
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
As humans, we’re heavily impacted by aesthetics, likely more than we even realize. When it comes to online casinos, for example, using an attractive croupier can make a player more likely to stick around. They see a beautiful dealer as something that adds to the overall experience, and they’re “more likely to play longer and spend more money when they feel immersed in an attractive and engaging environment,” Paul Davies at Player explains. This ties into the same aesthetic-usability concept that the two different ATM interfaces addressed.
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
The aesthetics of anything can impact our emotions, including buildings and structures. In The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton compares how one might feel when entering a McDonalds with harsh lighting, plastic furniture and the bright red and yellow color scheme with how you might feel when entering the gorgeous Westminster Cathedral in London. “Although the Westminster Cathedral has the same principle elements of architecture as the McDonald’s—windows, doors, floors, ceilings, and seats—the cathedral helps people to relax and reflect, where the fast food restaurant causes one to feel stressed and hurried,” Cody C. Delistraty at The Atlantic explains.
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
While beautiful things and people aren’t always attainable, some believe that nice aesthetics do bring us hope and something to aspire to be or have. “Beauty manifests a hope that life would be better if the object of beauty were part of it,” writes Princeton philosopher Alexander Nehamas in Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art. And this doesn’t have to only speak to vanity. We can work on making our homes more beautiful, creating beautiful pieces of art to hang on the walls and aim to prepare our meals in the most gorgeous ways just for the fun of it! If seeing something stunning will bring us a bit more joy in our days, why shouldn’t we aim for the beautiful?
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
I can’t help but think that these unaesthetic images that audiences love are the equivalent of someone who has a wonderful personality but would not necessarily win any beauty pageants. We don’t care at all about the physical appearances of our friends and loved ones, we value them for their warmth, love, intelligence and the wonder they bring to the world. So why judge a meme or an image just by its cover? If it makes you chuckle or amuses you, its existence is worth it!
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
Are you feeling inspired to care less about your aesthetic, pandas? Or perhaps this list is having the opposite effect, and you suddenly feel like your aesthetic is extremely important? Regardless of where you’re at, we hope you’re enjoying these amusing, unaesthetic pics. Keep upvoting all of your favorites, and then if you’re interested in checking out Bored Panda’s previous articles featuring Things That Are Not Aesthetic, you can find them right here and here!
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Image credits: Things that are not aesthetic
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Dr NL,
Why are women so anti men nowadays?
I’ve heard women complain and chide any form of male attention as harassment, and they perceive the very notion of men having a sex drive as unsettling.
Oh he said hi to me, I’m not here to talk to other people.
Oh he tried to flirt with me, doesn’t he know I’m not here for that.
I should just wait for a woman to take initiative.
Wait no women don’t take initiative in a culture where men make the first move.
I should wait for women to send me some faint signals to make the first move.
No, she doesn’t go anywhere without 8 other friends, and so she’s not going to notice me.
She already has options so she’s not going to put in the effort to talk to someone new.
I should just force my way into a conversation.
No that’s not respectful of boundaries and her time.
I should just be empathetic and understand that women don’t want male attention and not approach her.
Wow I’ve been single for a while. How do I get out of this?
You should get to know her first as a friend and then ask her out.
Oops, now she’s creeped out because I was supposed to hit on her right away, and now she thinks I’ve been disingenuous about being her friend.
But if I’m upfront right away, I’m just one of a dozen other guys that harassed her today.
Nobody wants a single guy lurking about because he might ask somebody out, and that’s not an okay thing to do, because I didn’t get her consent to be attracted to her.
Even if I do make a move, there’s a 40% chance she’ll get offended and then tell everyone and now I have a bad reputation.
The outcome is “you guessed correctly that I like you and now we can go on a date”, or the more likely “I’m not comfortable talking to you anymore”. There’s no option for a simple rejection.
Why is dating or meeting women as a man just a catch 22?
I’m either single or a predator.
–Catch-22
Well it’s been a while since I’ve gotten one of these. I figured most of the usual sources had moved on to complaining that guys had to be built like Marvel heroes instead.
But hey since it’s been a while, I’m going to do you a favor and actually take your question seriously instead of just snarking on it for a thousand words. And the answer is: you’re not even wrong, you have a list of assumptions that’re based off other dudes’ assumptions and the transitive property of this means that they don’t even manage to fit into to an actual state of wrongness. That would require operating in what we know as “reality” and not the fever-swamps of various sub-Reddits and wackadoo YouTube channels.
The issue isn’t that women are “anti-men”, it’s that women’ve gotten fed up with assholes and dudes who can’t be bothered to act like women are people. And, I dunno if you’ve looked around recently but that attitude is very much a top-down sort of situation. When you’ve got state legislatures restricting basic health care for women and trying to legislate what women are allowed to wear, while also coming after no-fault divorce because prominent YouTubers complain that women are allowed to divorce their husbands “without his permission”… it’s hard to fault ‘em for it.
(And that’s before we even get into the folks trying to use cottagecore and hilariously misguided ideas about subsistence farming as backdoors into fascism and taking away women’s rights.)
But I digress. Let’s talk about some of the examples you mentioned.
I’m not gonna dig into every single one of them because a) many are redundant and b) this is gonna be long enough as it is, but we can at least poke some holes into the highlights.
We’ll start with “I’ve heard women complain and chide any form of male attention as harassment, and they perceive the very notion of men having a sex drive as unsettling.”
Cool story bro, cite me some actual sources that say those exact things. But since we’re in the world of r/thathappened, how about the fact that a whole lot of guys treat women happening to exist in physical proximity as an indication that they’re an object to be consumed and not a person with automony and agency and their own interests and goals. What they’re complaining about, if you actually listen, are guys who ignore their obvious disinterest or take their “no, thank you” as “please try harder”.
Women who complain about guys approaching them in public spaces don’t mean someone being polite or who takes “no thanks” with good grace, they are talking about trying to go through the world with the sexual equivalent of walking down a street lined with carnival barkers, clipboard holders asking for donations and signatures and dudes trying to get you to take their mixtape. Except all of them are hawking dick. And not even high-quality dick marketed to an interested audience in the market for it. Literally “you look like an appropriately shaped hole, let me tell you the good news about my dick.”
Now, one of the things that gets tricky about trying to get guys to understand what this would feel like frequently means relying on either homophobia, transphobia or otherwise spreading shitty ideas about age, size, ethnicity or what-not. Other metaphors rarely convey the same dynamic or otherwise don’t break through to the sense of empathy that’s really needed to understand why this is an unpleasant and alienating experience. Dudes frequently think that it’s awesome having strangers hitting on you when you’re not into it – and I can tell you from personal experience that no, not it is not. So all I can say is “imagine folks who you don’t find appealing demanding that you let them see your dick.” Constantly. Everywhere you go. Going for coffee? “eeeeeey, lemme see your dick”. Trying to get to class? “Come on sweetness, whip that sucker out I got my ruler right here”. Out having dinner with the family? “Come on baby, I can suck it better than them!”
Now imagine that’s your daily existence. Next!
“Oh he said hi to me, I’m not here to talk to other people.
Oh he tried to flirt with me, doesn’t he know I’m not here for that.”
First: if you can take “no” with grace, then this isn’t your problem.
Second: if you’re running into this, perhaps the issue is that you’re trying to hit on people in places where it’s not generally expected or appropriate to hit on folks.
Third: odds are also good that you’re not just choosing people who aren’t showing interest in you, but also you’re doing it badly. Work on your social calibration and learn how to read the room or else stick to places where it’s generally accepted that people are looking to talk to strangers and possibly get dates. NEXT!
“I should just wait for a woman to take initiative.
Wait no women don’t take initiative in a culture where men make the first move.”
Or women are just as shy and worried about talking to men they find attractive as men can be. OR – and stick with me here – because we have a culture that still insists men are supposed to make the first move, guys tend to react badly when women make the first move and either assume far more interest than she actually has or that this is some sort of trick and either she’s setting him up or a sex-worker looking for a client.
And hey wanna know who established and enforce the “men initiate, women receive” social order? Here’s a hint: it wasn’t women. NEXT!
“I should wait for women to send me some faint signals to make the first move. No, she doesn’t go anywhere without 8 other friends, and so she’s not going to notice me.”
My dude, being noticed is easy. Show up in a fuzzy top hat and a mesh shirt; everyone will notice you then. Wait, is that not the attention you were hoping for and you’re not a professional magician who tried to model his look on Criss Angel? Probably should work on being more noticeable in a positive fashion then. Because it turns out that women do notice guys they’re into, even when they’re with their friends.
If you’re able to see an attractive woman while you’re out with the boys, then it stands to reason that women are capable of doing the same. NEXT!
“She already has options so she’s not going to put in the effort to talk to someone new.”
Ah, we’ve reached the “making all sorts of unwarranted assumptions based on what a couple of Braincel subreddit regulars, who’ve never actually talked to a woman that didn’t involve placing an order at Arby’s, said on a podcast” portion of the rant.
This is an IMAX problem, because it’s just straight projection. It’s not real, it’s what a bunch of guys think is real because they have a lot of really weird ideas about how women think and operate that has no basis in reality. It’s the sort of thing you come up with when your only concept of how attractive women behave came from watching High-School Musical at too formative an age when you didn’t realize that Sharpay is a caricature and not an actual person.
(Insert whatever fictional Mean Girl is appropriate to your generation here, cultural osmosis will only carry me so far.)
NEXT!
“You should get to know her first as a friend and then ask her out. Oops, now she’s creeped out because I was supposed to hit on her right away, and now she thinks I’ve been disingenuous about being her friend.”
You might have a point if it weren’t for the sheer number of dudes who talk about being a Nice Guy and a woman’s friend but then get actively pissy because she didn’t reward his friendship with sex.
Now I’ve written fairly extensively about how to ask out a friend, but here’s what you can expect if you ask out a friend who isn’t interested when you’ve not only genuinely been her friend, but also didn’t act like a dickhead in the process: a little bit of awkwardness that you both eventually power through because you’re friends who understand each other and are also grown-ass adults who can see that just because someone wants to date you or doesn’t want to date you doesn’t mean that the friendship never existed.
OK this next one needs to be split up into two parts. First:
“Nobody wants a single guy lurking about because he might ask somebody out, and that’s not an okay thing to do,”
If the way you behave can be accurately described as “lurking”, then that would imply that you’re not actually part of that group and also behaving in ways that would already make people uncomfortable.
Now a more charitable read on this would be “guy who’s quiet/ on the fringes of the conversation or social gathering/ relatively new and doesn’t know many people yet.” At which point this falls apart because a) nobody would know if he were single unless he actively told them and b) his presence is rarely a problem unless he’s acting in a weird way that would make reasonable people uncomfortable. And just “listening to the conversation without actively participating because he doesn’t have anything to say” isn’t the sort of thing that makes people uncomfortable, especially in social situations where the context is groups of folks stand around talking – like a party. If you’re lingering around a private conversation or hovering around a group of friends at a bar, then yeah your behavior’s weird and off-putting. Because that’s not how folks join conversations with strangers at bars. There’re ways of doing this successfully but it requires understanding the social context and a willingness to talk to the group and not just focus your entire attention on a single person because you think they’re hot.
And once again: check my archives, check my YouTube channel and read my books. I have given extensive amounts of information about how to handle those situations.
But this next part here? This part’s a tell.
“…because I didn’t get her consent to be attracted to her.”
Ah, the disingenuous misunderstanding of consent. There are two possibilities here – either you literally believe that this is something that people think, in which case you need to get off Reddit, YouTube and whatever weird Manfluencer podcasts you’re listening to until the brain-poison drains away, or you’re mocking the idea of consent which is going to be why women don’t want to talk to you in the first place. Either way: THERE’S YOUR PROBLEM.
See, this sort of attitude tends to radiate out of folks like a cleanup crew at a particularly passive-aggressive nuclear spill. These are the sort of jokey-jokes that turn out to not actually be jokes; its’ the sort of “said in frustration but meant with sincerity” kind of situation that tells the people around you a lot that you may not have intended. It’s a sign that, at best, you’re the sort of person who says “but don’t you think #metoo/political correctness has gone too far?”, especially in conversations about how Andrew Tate was arrested for human trafficking or Harvey Weinstein getting sentenced.
But for education’s sake, let’s say that you actually believe this is true, without malice. Here’s the thing: nobody – and certainly nobody serious – cares about what’s going on in the privacy of your ears. If you run into somebody who actually, literally and sincerely believes that you need their consent to be attracted to them, then you have run into a deeply unserious person and I would love to know how they move through this world without constantly throwing fits at the unwary.
But the fact of the matter is that you can be attracted to somebody all you want and nobody is going to give a shit. The time anyone is going to care and be bothered by it is when you make it their problem. And no, “asked them out on a date, once” isn’t “making it their problem”. More often than not, what you’re likely to find is that it wasn’t “once”, it certainly wasn’t polite or respectful and usually also includes doing something that would make reasonable people say “um, what the fuck, Charlie?”
Now it’s certainly possible that you may run into some Mean Girl who reacts to your asking them out (politely!) with “ew”; it’s an infinite universe and that means it’s certainly possible to encounter someone who acts like they came out of a bad 80s teen boner jam. But that’s where you’re right back to “this is a deeply unserious person,” and you’re better off asking yourself why you’d want to date someone who acts like that in the first place.
But in the real world, the time you’re most likely to run into someone who has a problem with your being attracted to them, it’s almost always because you made your interest in them an issue that they can’t ignore or avoid. There’re a lot of folks who would consider themselves to be “supreme gentlemen” who act like entitled asshats and do end-runs around things like ”didn’t actually give you her contact information” and show up in her DMs or texts anyway. Which is not just presumptive as fuck but creepy as hell, because it indicates that he does think that her desire to not be bothered is less important than his desire to try to get into her pants.
“Even if I do make a move, there’s a 40% chance she’ll get offended and then tell everyone and now I have a bad reputation.”
A word of advice, Super Chief: if you’re trying to make a point, you should probably not frame it as having a 60% chance of working out. Those are some pretty good odds. But also I dunno if you noticed, but we recently saw a spousal abuser – someone who was found in court to have abused his wife – have his incredibly-well-documented behavior read out repeatedly, with the whole world watching, and the response of a distressingly large amount of the population was “I told you that bitch was lying!” Meanwhile he goes on to continue to work and get paid handsomely. People celebrated Bill Cosby getting out of jail, where he had been convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault, on a technicality. Shit, people still line up to work with Roman Polanski, who not only had the most open-and-shut rape case you can possibly find but who fled the country in order to avoid jail.
Those are men who committed literal, documented acts of violence against women and who many still see as the bee’s knees and the badger’s nadgers.
Asking someone out and being shot down isn’t going to destroy your reputation unless you’re in junior high. And that’s junior high. Just liking the wrong TV show or being bad at Fortnite will do that to you.
But now that we’ve demolished these bullshit ideas, how about some actual, practical advice that you can start implementing today?
First, get the hell off the Internet. Seriously, I can tell where you’ve been hanging out and who you’ve been listening to, and it’s given you brain worms. You don’t just need to go outside and touch grass, you desperately need to go and interact with people in person, without a keyboard or filtering your thoughts through social media. I’m not being snarky here: you legitimately need to go talk to people with your mouth and actually connect with people in person, especially women. On that note:
Second, make friends with women. Not “hang around women you’re hoping to date”, but make actual friends. Talk to them, get to know them and get some insight into what their lives are actually like instead of taking the word of a bunch of guys who hire sex workers to hang around them to try to trick social media into thinking that they’re successful with women. Getting to know women as people instead of acting like they’re your opponents will fix at least 50% of your problems here.
Third, have a life. Go out and do cool shit that you enjoy, in ways that bring you in contact with other people who enjoy that same shit. Make friends with them, build a social circle and celebrate a human connection of the sort you can only have in the flesh with other people. Some of them may even be attractive women! But wait, isn’t that a problem? No, not really because here’s the thing: if you get to know someone as a person and generally act like a decent human being who didn’t get all his talking points from the redpillteen subreddit, the more time you spend with someone, the more they like you. Part of the reason why most folks meet their partners through either mutual friends or shared interests and activities is because propinquity is one of the strongest and yet most under-appreciated forces in attraction and dating.
But also, fun thing: your female friends may not want to date you and that’s fine. But they have friends. And if women like you and think you’re a genuinely good guy, they’ll talk you up to those friends. But first you have to be their friend.
Fourth: focus way the hell less on trying to cold-approach women. It’s a nice skill to have, but not only is it varsity level difficult, but it’s inefficient as hell. Even the folks who are very good at cold approaches have to shotgun it to get results, which means that they’re still dealing with a success-to-rejection ratio that’s heavily tilted in the rejection side.
But it’s also a big part of why women get tense about guys coming up to talk to them while they’re out on about.
Once we account for overdeveloped senses of entitlement and a culture that taught men that women are just things to be consumed, the single biggest reason why guys make asses of themselves and drive women to complain about getting hit on are the dudes who are focused on cold approaches.
Too many guys think that the ultimate goal is to get a complete stranger to decide she wants to start a romantic or sexual relationship with him, never realizing that this is not how most people date. If those dudes did nothing else but slow their roll from a 10 to a 2, they’d have far better results.
They’d do even better than that if they took it at a 2 and didn’t make it clear through their behavior that what they’re looking for is a woman-shaped figure that just happens to have a hole for their dick. The dude hitting on women at the bus stop is making it clear that he’s not into her because she’s a specific person but because he’s trying to get laid and she’s the most immediate acceptable option. If it weren’t her, it’d be someone else, and let me tell you: even if you’re someone who is open to sex with someone you just met, you still aren’t going to just go with anyone who asks and especially someone who makes it clear that “you’ll do”. Nobody likes being treated like an ambulatory Real Doll. And the folks who do, like it with people they’ve already know and have a connection with.
And if your immediate response to this is to gripe about The Friend Zone, simps, cucks or betas… I refer you to step one. Because you’re still dealing with brain worms and you will never, ever find someone to willingly and consensually touch your penis until you get rid of them.
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This post was previously published on Doctornerdlove.com and is republished on Medium.
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