It is with a really really really heavy heart that I write this entry. Due to professional reasons, this will be my last public thank you. Ugh, I want to shed a tear just writing that.
Wednesday I start a new job and as a lot of media companies have rules about personal blogs now, I will no longer be writing Naked Thanks publicly. I will of course continue to write my thank yous everyday, but I will have to do so in private for the last three months of our journey.
I can’t begin to explain how much I have loved writing this blog with Stacey and I’m not exaggerating when I say that writing my Naked Thanks every night is the best part of my day. Even when I’m exhausted and nodding off between paragraphs or in a horrid state of mind and in no mood to thank, putting pen to paper and thinking about who or what has made my day better has really changed the way I think.
It is easier to be pessimistic. Being thankful sometimes takes a little more work, but what a difference it makes. For me, the changes I have noticed thanks to writing Naked Thanks are that I really appreciate people more and am thankful to be loved. I think I’m also sweating the small stuff less and am more thankful for the little things. It’s those everyday niceties that change the tenor of my day.
Writing Naked Thanks has become as much a part of my day as eating dinner. And I love chatting with my friends and colleagues about my entries and hope that it has made them laugh a little and be thankful about the positive things in their lives. But of course, this is a journey to become a more thankful, happier person and I suppose having others read my thank yous should not be what makes me more thankful. But heck, it was part of the fun.
Stacey, thank you for being my Naked partner in crime. I couldn’t have embarked on this journey with anyone but you. Your vivacious positive attitude is always something I’ve admired and I know few people who can light up a room (or a webpage) like you. You’re also funny as hell and are really good at applying self-tanner.
To all of you who have read Naked Thanks over the last nine months, thank you all for following Stacey and I on this amazing journey. I know Stacey is hilarious enough to carry the site for the both of us for the last three months. She has always made me laugh till I fear wrinkles, which is exactly why I knew I would love writing NT with her.
Know that I’m still thanking everyday and will continue to do so in one way or another for the rest of my life. It’s been incredible, and I’m thankful thankful thankful to Stacey for keeping the ride going. NT4ever. Sniff.
Wow, this photo shoot seems like so long ago! Now we are 270 letters in and definitely more thankful for the little things.
Today was my last day of work at Washington Life. It’s amazing to think that it’s been just shy of two years and today I put all my stuff in boxes and gave Kelly my emergency flashlight and stash of odd perfume. I will be starting a new job on Wednesday, which I’m thrilled about, but it is tough to say goodbye to the people who you spend more time with than your own family. Kelly and Ali are my work family (and probably legal spouses considering how close we sit) and I am going to miss them terribly.
I don’t know who in the journalism world declared it fine for everyone to sit on each other. Have you ever seen the newsroom of a major paper? You’re lucky enough to get a cubicle and even then, your neighbor is just a piece of plexiglass away. Well, Kelly, Ali and I were short a few pieces of plexiglass. We really should have just shared a chair and worked from one communal brain.
And that’s just part of the reason why I’m going to miss them so much. Today Ali told me that I should watch Jersey Shore to stay relevant and so that people don’t think I’m old. I grimaced at her when she said it, but it was probably some pretty good advice. I have been wondering why everyone is so intrigued by that pudgy girl in booty shorts who tans herself the color of a Halloween pumpkin.
Kelly is always reminding me to be a good human and loves to solve every single problem in the office. She probably sits around and rewires the place after work, that tech savvy gal, but when she’s there during the day, she really works her butt off.
The three of us started a fake sorority together. It’s called KAK (clever I know), and our symbol is the dove. We have bonded over bread binges, nights where we actually slept at the office, and bad theme parties. When I go out of town or to a meeting, Kel and Ali like to print enormous embarrassing pictures from my past and hide them in my drawers. The little dears. WIll anyone publicly humiliate me in such an adorable way at my next gig? I don’t know. But I do know that it has been amazing working with Kelly and Ali over the years and I know I will see them all the time. That’s why god invented happy hour after all.
Kelly and I at a black tie shenanigan. How I will miss basically sharing a chair with Kelly in our tiny office.
Ali was my intern for a year before she joined the squad and I was so lucky to have her! She is one of the only people on earth who can read my "I'm doing an interview" handwriting.
As my colleague Kelly Fisher said after I sent her the site younghouselove.com, “they have single-handedly inspired me to take better care of my living room. I now know that things are better when they’re neat!” Sherry and John, the stars of the site, met and fell in love in New York and then bought a small house in Richmond, which they completely flipped. Kelly is also from Richmond, so she feels like she’s BFF’s with them even though they’re strangers.
But I understand where she’s coming from. It’s hard not to adore Sherry and John and their story, which they spell out for you in detail. We know how they met, what they do, where they got married, how much their wedding cost, and every single step, price, nuisance and joy of flipping their house.
When I read their blog my confidence in my handy(wo)man skills shoots through the roof. Of course I can retile a floor, paint an entire house, do some stonework, and jack hammer through a wall. And then I try, start crying, have to call my Dad and it all begins again.
But still, I want to do it and even TLC and all their home repair shows couldn’t give me the confidence that John and Sherry have.
DIY here I come! I already feel one step closer to my dream claw foot bathtub.
Today, the day that felt like we live in a pot of boiling water, was rather slow at the office. So what do you do when you work at a luxury magazine and there isn’t too much to be done? You read the green book.
For those of you who don’t need to know the who’s who of Washington for your j.o.b., the green book might just sound like a book that is green. And a-ha! It is. But it is also fuzzy and green, like snooty astroturf, and contains all sorts of information needed for established families to contact one another, for social climbers who want to do some scrambling up, or for stalkers who would like to track down the wealthy.
It has all the numbers for every senate and congressional office, The White House, the Department of the Navy (good if you’re drowing), the national holiday of every single country (Lesotho, Oct. 4th, FYI), the address of every embassy in Washington (if you need a visa for Micronesia you will want to head to N street), and then of course there is the social list.
The green book has been produced in Washington for 80 years. Back in the 30s, if you weren’t included “you were simply in Social Siberia. Quelle horreur! Death by shrimp fork.” And of course once you were on, you definitely weren’t always on. If you killed your lover, you would be removed (this actually happened).
Do people still care about the green book? Well, probably the people in it and not that many others. But it’s fun to read it aloud in the office in a pinched nasal British voice and chant about how pesky your race horses are being this time of year.
Ali holding a stack of green fuzzy society bibles!
1. We, the women of the Washington Life editorial team, just drank an absurd amount of pink champagne right next to Jennifer Garner at the Jefferson Hotel. She was wearing glasses, her hair back, and minimal makeup, so it took us a little while to identify her. But Ali, our editorial assistant, brought it to our attention that we were drunkenly babbling next to JenGar.
2. When we realized that we were next to her and her mysterious blonde friend in a sundress, we did not hold back on doing Center Stage dance moves or speaking in non-indoor voices. We may have in fact offended her when we were screaming like lemurs about how we are the three musketeers and can never work without each other. But she kept chomping on her salad, checking her blackberry, and consuming some sort of three layer shot in a test tube.
3. Before chilaxing with Jen G, we were painting our souls out at our colleague Michael Clements’ brainchild, ArtJamz, held for the first time at the Corcoran Museum. We came up with some pretty interesting expressions of our inner chi, all that will hang at the Corcoran for a few days. Michael’s idea is a sure fire hit, considering it’s fun as hell, held in a major museum, and has free flowing booze. I thought Kelly might actually burst when she started furiously painting a green bush of her homeland, Maine.
Here are some photos of Jennifer Garner’s besties (that would be us) getting artsy: love it!
Ali knighting Michael with her magical paintbrush.
Ali painting my nose with magical paint. I am now of a higher power.
Kelly dodging paintbrush baptism. It's probably her moose t-shirt that gave her the power.
Well, we’re still not officially in our new house. So first I need to thank Grey’s wonderful and very generous mom and dad who have assumed the role of our host — and on demand babysitters. Yay Rick and Louise!! The second person I need to thank is Grey, because he’s been working like a dog.
The hold-up in our move’s been the fact that we’ve been doing home improvement tasks like painting and spackling before we move in — which we figure is waaaay easier to do now rather than when we’re actually living there. Hopefully, we’ll finish all the projects in the next few days and be unpacking in our new abode later this weekend. The thing is, when I say we I mean, Grey. He’s been slaving away (in a house with no AC — that gets turned on Friday) and in 100 degree temperatures. Working in the house is literally like doing DIY in a sweatbox. If you want to understand what Grey’s been doing, just put on a snowsuit and hop into your oven with a paintbrush and nail gun — that should give you a good idea.
The poor guy’s been toiling away in the heat and having an indecisive pregnant lady picking out things like paint colors isn’t helping. For example, for our hallway and the kitchen, Grey has already slathered on six coats of paint — not because it needed that much, but because I kept changing my mind about the color. Four cans of yellow paint later — I’ve finally decided Hawthorne Yellow brightened by 25% is the one!!
Lucky for me, too. If I brought home one more can of butter-hued laquer, I bet the walls would have been covered in goat’s blood because Grey would have turned into Satan. Gotta love home improvement!
It’s amazing how dependent Stacey and I have become on WiFi with our blog. Since we started, we have never not had our posts up by the wee hours of the morning and part of me always fears my WiFi exploding at 2 a.m. and having to post later in the day. Luckily, like the tech savvy girl I am not, I scouted out all the places in my house where I can pick up someone else’s signal and at what time.
I know that between the hours of midnight and four a.m. I can randomly get on one of my neighbor’s signals from the edge of my dining room or near the back window in my bedroom. Sometimes it just seems easier to drive around the neighborhood at midnight until I can pick up a signal or just sneak into my neighbor’s yard in my pyjamas and blog from their hedges than calling for help.
So I really have to hand it to Stacey for being able to blog on time and so wittily from her life on the road. When Stacey and I first worked together at Bisnow on Business, I was always so impressed by what a doer she was. She could write five articles a day, photograph power-hungry realtors, be a great wife and a fabulous friend all while nine months pregnant. So what’s a little blogging from the side of the road every now and again?
Thanks to Stacey for keeping the dream alive while in house limbo. I’m so sad that she’s leaving DC, but of course thrilled for her new life of beach living and nautical-inspired ensembles. Bon voyage!
Here we are at Gold Cup this year. I'm going to miss Stacey soooo much! Waaaaah!
Ahhh, the WiFi steal. It has definitely saved me a few times when my WiFi was down and I just couldn't stomach a call to India at 3 a.m.
Ahhhhhhhh. FINALLY. Since Monday, I have been without a computer. Not that you would have noticed, because I kept my pledge to post daily, but behind the scenes, all was NOT well. Ollie chucked my laptop off the bed and then bodyslammed it old school WWF style. He landed on my poor ‘puter like Andre the Giant crushing a mechanical ant. Luckily, the only thing that broke was the power cord. Somehow, in the commotion, it was ripped out and frayed. So then, in addition to my keyboard looking like a typewriter for a blind person (it’s like braille due to the fact Ollie’s ripped off half the keys and I have to type by memory now), my cherished quasi-ghetto-looking laptop was dead as a doornail.
Of course I immediately went to Best Buy, thinking a new power cord would be a cinch to get, but the only one that would work was almost 200 bucks! As tempted as I was just to buy it on the spot, I knew a little patience would save me a bundle of money, I went back to our home-of-the day (thanks to my nomad status) and ordered a cord from Amazon. So thanks to the seller E-Z-N Smart, I can now finally use my trusty laptop once again!
Because really, to say last week was frustrating is an understatement. It showed me how dependent I have become on technology. I mean, remember the days of dial-up? If someone picked up the phone while the “modem” was running you’d be booted offline and everything would fall to hell. It took about 30 minutes to load a page and you could spend hours on the web looking at only two sites. Now, a few hours online and you can send 10,000 messages to all 500 of your closest friends on Facebook, buy a new wardrobe, catch up with current events, and play 15 games of Harbor Master. Without the ability to do those things, we feel despondent, cut off from society, and depressed — or at least I do!
I loved inventing things as a kid. It usually led to a small kitchen fire, but you know, a child’s imagination should never be quelled! The invention I had the most faith in was “Karin’s perfect pancake maker.” Here’s what I did: I made perfect little round pouches out of tinfoil, filled them with Bisquick (and rainbow sprinkles for good measure), put the whole kit and caboodle in a frying pan, heated it up till the outside burned, and tah-dah! A perfectly inedible pile of carbohydrate mush. There were still a few kinks to workout, but I thought it was a sure fire hit. No batter to spill, no pesky utensils to clean – perfect for a modern day mom on the go.
Since my days of burning down the kitchen, the inventions I would most like to create are books. Books fueled by the adventures I could have if I quit my job and pogosticked across America naked. Every Friday during the summer, I get so close to just giving my two weeks and heading for the hills. There is just something in me that craves wacky adventures so I can write about the good ‘ol life. But then I chicken out and keep on tap dancing for the man.
But not my friend Lee Brenner. Though I like to rub it in his face that I sang college a cappella andhe didn’t, my boasting really stops there. Lee was an editorial producer for CNN (mainly the wolf man blitzer), director of political programming for MySpace, founded an accessories company, and is now starting a website that is basically an orgy of HufPo, CurrentTV, The Daily Beast, and The Daily Show for 18-35 year-olds with content created by 18-35 year-olds too. It’s called HyperVocal.com and launches this summer. I advised Mr. Brenner to use some punchy headlines like Cosmo does (77 Positions in 77 days = genius!), and he seemed receptive, so it will be a sure-fire hit.
Of course when Lee talks about his projects it’s with the stress level of a tween on vacation. It’s like he’s telling you about his latest haircut. No stress, no worry, just calm calm calm. And that’s what’s great about it. I feel like we all have an idea or a dream that we have kicking around and want to just say “damn the man” and give it a whirl. But it’s so much easier said than done. Stacey and I certainly were rather intimidated with the 365-days in a row aspect of Naked Thanks, but now more than six months into the project, it’s the most satisfying part of my day. And all this entrepreneurship, the dreams and then taking the risks, is probably my favorite thing about America. A place where you really can quit your day job and give it the old college try. Don’t worry Dad, I don’t plan on doing it soon, but one of these days…
This is how Lee roles. You know, just a little chitchat with the Prez. What probably intrigues me the most is that they are the exact same height. Why? I don't know. But it fascinates me.
My new summer interns just started at Washington Life and already I think they could ID half the socialites in the city. What an amazing (pointlees) skill to have! We have really been lucky at WL with our interns and I count so many of them as friends who I really enjoy watching leave the college nest and storm the real world. I have no doubt this new crop – Kate, Lauren, and Macey – will prove to be just as fabulous.
Growing up in DC, I had a heck of a lot of internships. I once had one where my boss brought me a sponge and asked me to clean out the mold from the office fridge. I swear I could have created a 100 doses of penicillin with all the spores in that refrigerator. I should have been handed a lawn mower instead of a sponge to whack through it all. I also once had to put together a 100 page PowerPoint presentation on the sewer systems in Belgium. To this day I remember nothing except that I used the colors black and yellow for my theme. Maybe it’s those incidents that really makes me appreciate my interns. It’s good we all have a little pain sometimes then we can try to remember not to inflict it on others.
So welcome Kate, Macey, and Lauren. We promise to appreciate the hell out of you (since we are paying you in bylines and celeb meet and greets) and throw ridiculous costume parties. My advice to you: learn the difference between an em dash and an en dash and stay away from Adrian Grenier, he’s a perv.
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