Mission: ADORABLE by gingerhaze
Have you seen Ghost Protocol? You should see it if you like spy bros, Jeremy Renner, and Jeremy Renner’s butt.
Good morning. (Taken with instagram)
It’s (past) time for a trim over here. (Taken with instagram)
Making a lemon cake. Many lemons lost their skins. (Taken with instagram)
Yay for good hair all day. (Taken with instagram)
“It’s hard to have original ideas when you are surrounded by people who all have the same experiences as you.” —
– Jonathan Harris
[video]
Two russian blue brothers from the cat show. So pretty!
Wonderful new photographer find - Benjamin Bergh
“Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.” —
- John Cleese
5 Things I know at 25 - Carly of All This Grace and Charming
1.Keep Moving
The worst thing you can do after college is get into a routine that allows only for work, eating and sleeping…If you do this, you will probably get depressed. In the very least, you will get fat…
In real life, there is no built-in infrastructure with social opportunities and enriching experiences for you to partake in at your leisure. You have to create it. And, it’s work. (Gah, I know.)
You want to stop feeling like a boring, jerk-face? Volunteer somewhere…You will be amazed at how much less jerk-like you feel in just a few weeks. And, once you’re comfortable with the general logistics of volunteering, it will be easy to seek out a cause that you really dig…
If you are anything like me and have resume anxiety—also known as the chronic, mostly unfounded fear that, by not doing enough, you are ruining your future chances of advancing in your career (or reentering the workforce, should you decide to leave it to show your theoretical offspring what’s what)—volunteering is a great way to put a cork in it…
I would also suggest, especially if you are a creative type, that you commit to personal projects outside of your job. Do you paint? Great. Set a goal to complete one painting per month. Then, create a gallery site (or invest in having someone else create one for you) to show it off. This will make you feel like a more actualized, well-rounded person! And, it will give you something to talk about with your peers beyond your daily grind…
Obviously, there are a million and one things that you can do outside of slaving for the Man everyday. It’s less important what you do, so much as that you do something.
2. Don’t Overwork Yourself
The caveat to the first item is that you can’t reap the benefits of moving if you’re doing it too quickly. When you over-commit yourself, the only thing you feel—beyond, perhaps, blind panic—is resentment…
One of the perks of getting older is that you tend to grow more decisive. When the insane, chemical mess that occurs in your brain during the late teens and early twenties subsides, many folks, Yours Truly included, find that they have a clearer idea of who they are and what they want out of life. If you’re in your late twenties, use this new found confidence to say No to projects that you don’t want to commit to, or that you don’t have the time for. If you’re still drowning in weird hormones, try to blindly trust that you will not doom your career / life by occasionally turning down an opportunity.
3. Get Your Personal Life Right
There was a time when I dumped all of my Type A energy into laying the foundation for a successful career…Not only was I obnoxiously over-committed, but my personal life was shaping up into Lifetime movie material. The worse things got, the harder I worked. I was consciously focusing all of my energy on my work life because it was the only thing that I felt I had control over. And, you know what happened next? The economy bottomed out. So, the one thing that was going right in my life went wrong. And fast.
Sometime in between crying into a vodka, or six, and sending my last dollar off to Amex, it occurred to me that my priorities were wildly out of whack. I had to shift my focus from earning professional accolades to creating constructive relationships. I learned, in the hardest of ways, the very cliche and very truthful lesson that the relationships you maintain with those closest to you are what’s left when everything else goes to hell. If you aren’t satisfied with those relationships, or they aren’t positive or reliable, you have virtually no support system for weathering life’s myriad storms…
If you can possibly help it, don’t make stuff harder for yourself by filling your life with jerks. And, if you’re the jerk, go to therapy. You’re making yourself—and everyone else—miserable. Which brings me to my next point:
4. If You Need Help, Get Some
Amidst the aforementioned chemical mess occurring in the brain of the early twenty-something, is some hell-bent hormone that prevents one from admitting that they are a) fallible and b) have problems that they can’t solve by themselves.
Realizing that you have developed tendencies that are detrimental to the positive, forward momentum of your life and not going to therapy, or finding a support group, is like a woman not calling her gynecologist back after receiving word that her pap smear is abnormal…Those tendencies will fester, until they ultimately turn into cancer. Okay. Maybe not cancer. But the psychological equivalent…
The bottom line is, if you have some serious issues, becoming a functioning human being is likely to require the help of an objective party / parties, not entrenched in the cancer-y muck of the issues themselves…if you don’t man-or woman-up, admit to, and seek help for, your messed up head, you will find yourself in an infinite loop of dissatisfaction with yourself and your life. Inevitably.
5. There is No Finish Line
…Say you are passed your big issues, or never had any to begin with; the no finish line thing applies to you too. Don’t put off projects—or, to be horribly trite, your dreams—for a time when life “slows down.” We all know that life never slows down. As soon as one anxiety-producing thing exits our universe, it’s replaced by another one. (This is some kind of unwritten law, I’m convinced.)…
The truth is, you will never achieve anything that you remotely care about if you don’t start doing it, despite life’s never ending assembly line of hindrances.
A friend and I have been talking about this very thing…pretty much our whole relationship - but especially this past week. And finding this post is just a reinforcement of what we are trying to figure out and I was trying to contribute to the conversation. See the whole post here.
“Your responsibility at work is to help people achieve more than they know they are capable of.” —
- Simon Sinek during a CreativeMornings talk.
This is something I’ve just started to realize people should be doing, and am trying to do it myself.
“Don’t let your company culture become one where certain people are too good to do the jobs that need doing. Making shit work is everyone’s job.” —
Quote from this 37Signals Blog Post
Such a great point and something I’m dealing with in work and life lately.
One of my favorite views. (Taken with instagram)
HULK TIRED OF CATCH DUTY. AVENGERS NEED STOP FALLING OFF OF THINGS.
So I drew a ton of Avengers doodles in class tonight to keep myself sane. You’re probably gonna be seeing a lot of them.