DEBORAH to NANCY
7 May 1944
I don’t appreciate the SHORT NOTES I have received from you, my frail fingers are well able to open a VERY LONG letter so kindly write one.
July 2009
JESSICA to DEBORAH
28 December 1937
We had the most heavenly Xmas you can image. Yr Hen had in her stocking: E. Arden bath salts & hand lotion, L. Philippe lipstick, Atkinson scent, Turkish delight, two boxes of chocolate, a book and 1s worth of cream which she drank down at one gulp. The poor Babe hung its sock but didn’t get a damn thing! Luckily it didn’t seem to notice.
Dear you can’t imagine how sweet it is, I long for you to come & see it. She hasn’t got any of the disadvantages of so many babes such as excessive redness & baldness & smelling of sick.
JESSICA to DEBORAH
31 May 1938
Dearest Hen,
Thank you so much for writing.*
We are going tomorrow morning, so I do hope you will write to yr hen. Please give my love to Muv, & thank her for her letter & for offering to help with the house, but as a matter of fact Esmond has already arranged for Peter Nevile to try & let it for us. If any of you hear of a likely person, would you let him know? They would have to keep Rose on at £1.13 a week (1/3d is insurance).
Love from Henderson
* Jessica and Esmond’s baby daughter, Julia, had just died from measles, aged five months. They had decided to go to Corsica for three months to try to recover.
“Anna Arkadyevna read and understood; but it was distasteful to her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She had too great a desire to live herself. If she read that the heroine of the novel was nursing a sick man, she longed to move with noiseless steps about the room of a sick man; if she read of a member of Parliament making a speech, she longed to be delivering the speech; if she read of how Lady Mary had ridden after the hounds, and had provoked her sister-in-law, and had surprised every one by her boldness, she too wished to be doing the same.”
—Anna Karenina
i think that, other than being fat, the Barefoot Contessa has a marvelous life.
riding around in her sports car, making huge meals to be consumed by friends (in her case, all gay men, but i assume you can arrange your own based or not based on sexual orientation), buying flowers, drinking vodka on the rocks at all hours without seeming like an alcoholic, loving her husband, smiling.
but maybe the secret to this is being fat, which would be a dilemma for me.
you see, on the one hand, i’d like to be someone so domestic, she was almost rural.
on the other, i’d like to pretend to not know how to boil water. i’d have champagne for breakfast and wear sequins to bed. i would not be thin- i’d be concave.
in the mean time, i play at being both.
i just switched to the simplest twitter lay-out (at least to me, visually).
how much do i live through my computer that this has actually made me feel significantly less weighted down?
random friday musings.
bqm:
I saw a guy walking in the rain today with a shower cap on to protect his precious hair. If he’s not single, I don’t know what girl is putting up with THAT.
Listen
vienna- billy joel
“Kitty looked into his face, which was so close to her own, and long afterwards- for several years after- that look, full of love, to which he made no response, cut her to the heart with an agony of shame.”
—Anna Karenina
Play
381. Walk it off.
(via rulesformyunbornson)
if i finally want a boyfriend- no, am ready for a boyfriend- why have i started sleeping in the center of my queen bed for the first time ever?
“Money really means nothing to me. Do you think I’d treat my parents house this way if it did?”
—Pretty in Pink
last text i got from a friend (1:14:32 PM)
I miss you I don’t have any friends here everyone is weird or just insignificant oh and about the monorail crash lol everyone IS scared to use them now but I still do because I believe in the magic of Disney also they have 2 freeways closed right now for the mjmemorial gag me !! I want to move to San Diego or Colorado ill call you when I get home
from now on
i am using my 21st century excuses to their fullest measure.
excuse 1: a la lilo- i was hacked.
anytime i imbibe chemicals or am just tweaking out the good old-fashioned way and write something- anything- anywhere that i wake up to regret, i will just say i was hacked. that 20 page blog on how i’m still in love with my ex? i was hacked. chaining texts on a hunt for valium? i was hacked. the tweet about how i started crying to miley’s ‘the climb’ on the radio the other day? i was hacked.
excuse 2: a la joaquin phoenix- a documentary
but any time i accidentally unload the crazy in person- or have a particularly imperious moment, let’s say- and it’s impossible that i was hacked, i can just say that i am making/researching a documentary. (a) people make documentaries about EVERYTHING (b) documentaries are largely considered both poetic and elusive.
ex:
“hey- the line starts over there!”
“yes, but this is for a documentary.”
a documentary on what? rage? social norms? the dmv? they probably won’t ask, but if pressed, you could answer with almost anything you’d like and then carry on.
