ring king

I've never been way into jewelry unless it's permanentally implanted, but I am when it is yellow and/or has a little meaning to it. So the other night my mom gave me this ring:

The topaz/gold glory belonged to my great-grandfather and my dad used to like to wear it on dress-up occassions. And now it belongs to me, and I will wear it for all occasions. I do love me some men's jewelry.

sheena

aristotle

This is the beginning.
Almost anything can happen.
This is where you find
the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,
the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page.
Think of an egg, the letter A,
a woman ironing on a bare stage as the heavy curtain rises.
This is the very beginning.
The first-person narrator introduces himself,
tells us about his lineage.
The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings.
Here the climbers are studying a map
or pulling on their long woolen socks.
This is early on, years before the Ark, dawn.
The profile of an animal is being smeared
on the wall of a cave,
and you have not yet learned to crawl.
This is the opening, the gambit,
a pawn moving forward an inch.
This is your first night with her, your first night without her.
This is the first part
where the wheels begin to turn,
where the elevator begins its ascent,
before the doors lurch apart.

This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.
Cities have sprouted up along the rivers
teeming with people at cross-purposes –
a million schemes, a million wild looks.
Disappointment unsolders his knapsack
here and pitches his ragged tent.
This is the sticky part where the plot congeals,
where the action suddenly reverses
or swerves off in an outrageous direction.
Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph
to why Miriam does not want Edward's child.
Someone hides a letter under a pillow.
Here the aria rises to a pitch,
a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.
And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge
halfway up the mountain.
This is the bridge, the painful modulation.
This is the thick of things.
So much is crowded into the middle –
the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,
Russian uniforms, noisy parties,
lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall
too much to name, too much to think about.


And this is the end,
the car running out of road,
the river losing its name in an ocean,
the long nose of the photographed horse
touching the white electronic line.
This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade,
the empty wheelchair, and pigeons floating down in the evening.
Here the stage is littered with bodies,
the narrator leads the characters to their cells,
and the climbers are in their graves.
It is me hitting the period
and you closing the book.
It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen
and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck.
This is the final bit
thinning away to nothing.
This is the end, according to Aristotle,
what we have all been waiting for,
what everything comes down to,
the destination we cannot help imagining,
a streak of light in the sky,
a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.

Billy Collins

Mox.ie Cou.ture NYC

My beautiful friend Jenna from New York has started a business selling stunning, vintage-style feather hair-pieces. It would be in your best interest to purchase the pretty now.

Examples

my wedding dress

i love christian siriano.

julian beever

I've always loved chalk drawings because it seems so cool for someone to put so much effort into something that they know will just get washed away. Julian Beever does these chalk drawings that look 3D if you see them at a certain angle, so he gets my props for the day.

dreamboat

what did you do, ben?

bronze

Project Runway disappointed me. I feel that Bravo had the bronze winner walk away with the gold in hopes of angering the faithful viewers enough that they will not follow the show to Lifetime. Mission accomplished.

If I were the guest judge instead of Tim Gunn...

the bronze medal goes to:


silver goes to:


gold medal goes to:

i was born.

and katie holmes said happy birthday.