beege and the city

a new york week

briannel — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:03:43 +0000

Well, here I am. One week and counting in NYC. I had all these naive visions of me blogging away all my first experiences here, while I uploaded mobile photos and made fun anecdotes about my new residence. Alas…I have been way too exhausted to do any of that!

Do not be confused, I absolutely I love it here. However, my feet and body do not. My head hits the pillow each night because I am definitely not used to a 45-minute commute without a car. However, I have experienced some pretty interesting things while on foot here.

Key findings so far:

Delis: I love these things. They’re open until who knows how late, they contain ATM machines, countless variants of gum, magazines, candy, fattening carbs…fabulous! I discovered one near my house today that sells fresh-squeezed guava juice for like $1. Yay!
The E Train: I loathe with my entire being. Can I call it the EW train? Never has anything in the entire universe been so squeaky and stinky and hot and dirty. And more frequent than the V train which runs on the same track, which I must catch to go to/from work and transfer to the 6 train. So it invariably drives me crazy because it’s not the train I want. I also once mistook the F train for the “E” train in my helpless attempt to just jump on ANY train since the V was nowhere in sight. I almost ended up at Roosevelt Island. Anyways, moral of the story is everything about life gets a little bit worse on the E train. I now avoid at all costs.
Fifth-Floor Walkups: Let’s talk about walking up five flights of stairs to get to your front door. I’m not saying it is impossible, because I’m definitely getting used to it already, but that’s only because I’m hoping it turns my ass into steel. Take that, bagel and lox!
Let’s Hope There is Such a Thing as a Free Lunch: Because, holy checking account, I am going to be broke here. I’ve adopted the Dorky Office Girl assignment by bringing lunch, but I really don’t think there’s anything I can do to spend less than $20 per day here. It’s inevitable.
Flip-flops: Apparently they’re more than okay in the city! I was ready to be made an outcast by wearing my Rainbow sandals. I’ve come to find out no one really wears their sassy heels while commuting. So I have joined the ranks. Button-up + black skirt + Rainbows + coffee… + commuter bag + huge purse + iPod + Blackjack + Metrocard = Beege. Beege with a backache.

I’m not going to lie, there are ups and downs of getting used to this city. There are times when I just want to buy some milk and I don’t really want it to be a production or….an “adventure” as I like to refer to them. But I think that’s part of the appeal of this city. Since nothing is easy, everything has a big return on investment. For standing on your own two feet all day, you’re rewarded with a city that has a lot to offer if you take advantage. Here is what I have found so far while bouncing around the city….

Macy's...largest store in the country, oooh consumerism!

Red balloon floating away from Madison Square Park

Times Square - recruiting new Xanax users since 1904!

$2 hot dogs, a little sketchy, but within my budget

summer of love

briannel — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:10:56 +0000

The threat of stifling humidity and t-storms is no match for my anticipations of this summer. Hopefully, my first few months living in the Big Apple will be spent lazing on a picnic blanket in Central Park, catching free concerts, frequenting farmer’s markets and enjoying the general summertime spirit around the city. Let’s just assume I’ll be able to be away from my cube enough to participate in such shenanigans.

Ah, this is such an idyllic phase I’m currently embracing. Right now, I’m pre-one-way-flight and my expectations and curiousity could not be more heightened. Couple this state with multiple and lengthy goodbyes over the past three weeks and you could say I’m about ready to burst. It’s so great to know I have so many people in California who love me and will miss me. I will definitely feel a void without my friends and family…and my Rainbow sandals. (Still deciding if I’ll be That Girl from California and sport them on the weekends anyways.)

In an effort to keep you all updated on the goings-on of my new Big Apple life, I’m going to try and post to this bloggy guy pretty often. I move Wednesday, July 2 and am looking forward to new beginnings. And a summer I’m going to hopefully love, even without my loved ones. Here’s a little taste of what I’m looking forward to: http://nymag.com/guides/summer/2008/47993/.

Nintendo: 1; Me: 0

briannel — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 05:07:00 +0000

I unceremoniously ditched my gray, boxy Game Boy as a little girl. The two games I tested, “Kirby’s Dream Land” and “The Little Mermaid,” proved to be much too difficult for me. Kirby just wouldn’t eat clouds fast enough and Ariel was unwieldy and hard to navigate. So, at 25 years of age, I’m a little surprised that the Nintendo DS™ would catch my eye.

My surprise continues, as I’ve realized I’m just as succeptible to a marketer’s whim as the next Jane Doe. I’m a little late on this one, as Jezebel talked about this weeks ago, but I definitely priced the metallic rose model today at $129.99 and thought, hmm, not that bad!

I think this campaign was aimed at the likes of me. America Ferrera, Carrie Underwood and Liv Tyler joined the ad campaign for Nintendo DS, to say to women – “look, video games are fun!” The same women who previously had no interest in gaming, or have had to sit through countless hours of watching guys play Halo, NCAA Football, FIFA or GTA (I’m speaking from experience), and think the gaming realm is an annoyance, not a diversion.

I’m excited to learn through Nintendo DS, I can become fluent in Spanish, play with doggies, and learn new Yoga positions! However, I think I should wait on this purchase. I’m already weighing down my Michael Kors bag with a Canon Elph, iPod and Samsung Blackjack…I think I’ve already exceeded my personal electronic devices per handbag. Better to wait until I can afford the game/mp3/cell phone/PDA hybrid.

Carrie’s Brownstone, v.2.0

briannel — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 05:11:00 +0000

There were a few audible gasps in the movie theater during Sex and the City: The Movie. Relax, I’m not giving anything away for the four of you who read my blog and haven’t seen the flick yet. I’m talking about the response to Carrie’s apartment remodel.

The audience, 99 percent female, lived through six seasons of “I had to wonder”-thoughts and watched her type them out on her Macbook in that apartment. (BTW – have fun on Carrie’s Macbook Pro here. I’m already addicted.) But in the movie, the gray neutrals and mismatched bohemian pieces gave way to brights and grown-up clean lines.

Casa Sugar interviewed the set designer Jeremy Conway about his vision for the room, and will have more details tomorrow….I’m so hoping they give some insight on Carrie’s 70s-inspired mural, which totally caught my eye. I think it says “LOVE” but I only saw the movie twice in a 24-hour period, so who can really be sure? Ha.

Thanks to Casa Sugar we do know that the walls were painted a custom blend very similar to Benjamin Moore’s Electric Blue. The Chicago Tribune says the paint, Benjamin Moore’s No. 2061-40, is about $45 a gallon. It completely makes me rethink blue, which I previously relegated to little boy rooms and cheesy nautical-themed living spaces.

The coffee table the gals gather around for a shower – how vague of me – comes from the always-intense ABC Carpet & Home. (My two trips to ABC Carpet & Home went like this: the first time, I had no idea there was more than one floor and thought it was full of only chandeliers and Indian-inspired rugs and on the second trip, the elevator was broken and I called it a day at the floor with the overpriced Frette linens.)

Check out the old skool Carrie suite here, where there’s also some scans of the Traditional Home issue that covers the apartment remodel. I like their suggestion to find a rug similar to the one at the foot of her bed, especially since it looks more of an eggplant than black and white on second glance. Love these Thomas Paul rugs!

All in all, a great redesign, but I had to wonder…where did her kitchen go? I mean, I know she uses the stove to store sweaters, but a culinary appliance is nowhere to be found!

All I Really Need to Know I Learned from The Baby-sitters Club

briannel — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 04:12:00 +0000

Oh. My. Gawd. Pardon my randomness, but there is a microcosm of my childhood floating around on the Internet. Apparently there are people in this world that revere The Baby-sitters Club by Ann M. Martin as the holy grail of girlydom, just as myself.

As I am known to do, I was able to click-click-click my way into discovering a whole little online world devoted to the BSC that I never knew existed. I’ve discovered a blog solely devoted to character Claudia Kishi’s off-the-wall attire (I also learned a new word, Whatthefuckery, but I digress) as described in this series of pre-teen fun. There’s also BSC Wikipedia, Claudia’s Room, BSC Stamped and Stoneybrookite, a blog dedicated to the “best friends you’ll never have.”
Wow. If I ever felt I am a reader of niche sites on the Internet, I do now. But I love that communities have grown to support the BSC books, as they basically half raised me. And look how good I turned out! I don’t know about you, but every BSC book I ever purchased was the best $3.50 in the world. When a Super Special came out, it was like my birthday. Sigh. I miss the days when “boyfriends and babysitting don’t mix!” spoke to me.

But in all seriousness, I think we love the Baby-sitters Club because the girls were real characters. Mallory rode horses and had, like, 18 brothers and sisters, Dawn was a “vegetarian” from “California” and wore white linen pants, Mary Anne had that boyfriend, and Claudia was artsy and painted Native American prints on her rain slicker. How weird were they?!

And yet it was okay to like them, and they were liked in the books. What a good lesson! And by another token, each book was narrated by a different babysitter. A true lesson in seeing the world for all its valid opinions. I think the entire BSC series should be mandatory reading at the elementary level. Not a believer? Let me just end with this. A book in which a girl can wear this outfit, and still have friends at the end of the day, is an open-minded, worldly book indeed:

(Claudia was wearing): “a big yellow shirt with red x-shaped buttons,
enormously baggy white pants, and big red Doc Martens double-laced with black
and yellow shoelaces. Her long straight black hair was pulled upon top of her
head with more black and yellow shoelaces braided together. Her earrings said
‘stop’ and ‘go’ – ‘stop’ in her left ear and ‘go’ in her right.”

Google turned off the "light"

briannel — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 18:17:00 +0000

Can I just say I love Google? Being the festive person I am, I love when they recognize holidays Google-style. However, it’s great when they can leverage their visibility to draw attention to something greater.

Today, Google put the “lights out” on their home page in order to encourage people around the world to celebrate Earth Hour. According to Google, on Saturday, March 29, Earth Hour invites people around the world to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00 to 9:00 p.m. in their local time zone. Created by the World Wildlife Fund, cities around the world will be participating in Earth Hour to acknowledge their commitment to energy conservation. The U.S. cities leading the charge are Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix and San Francisco.

The first major landmark to go dark was the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge in Australia last night. Sydney followed Fiji and New Zealand who kicked off the blackout, and an estimated 20 other major cities and 300 smaller towns will follow suit. Sydney inspired this worldwide movement as they launched this annual “lights out” hour last year, says the Sydney Morning Herald.

So what’s the affect of all this darkness on the environment? The impact this year will make is unknown, but the launch in Sydney last year involved 2.2 million people and more than 2,000 businesses who shut off lights and appliances, resulting in a 10.2 percent reduction in carbon emissions during that hour.

So, I’ll think I’ll participate. I have one million candles lying around the house, anyway. And I like the idea of being part of something bigger.

No idea what to do for one hour in the dark? That’s pathetic.

Hell hath no fury like a gossip blogger spammed

briannel — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 05:21:00 +0000

You might want to think twice before you leave that comment about free ringtones on perezhilton.com. Gossip bloggers aren’t taking spam lightly.

In the latest development in the public relations world, “grassroots marketing” means posing as an uneducated tween and blasting horribly misspelled comments on various gossip blogs. I do not envy those in internship positions at the moment who are having to come up with new and fun ways to spell “freaking” (freakn) and “genius” (genies) or analyzing the extent to which they should forget all grammar rules learned in college to moonlight as overly excitable evangelist fans.

It seems E!’s new Ashton Kutcher show, “Pop Fiction,” has been spamming gossip blogs via the Cashmere Agency. Cashmere cites promotional tactics with quantifiable results. Well, they sure got E! some results at Celebitchy. The gossip blog analyzed IP addresses to find out multiple comments parading as those made by fans were posted by Cashmere Agency on behalf of several E! programs…and even Snoop Dogg.

One of the offending comments left on Celebitchy made by “gena”:

“Hahaha!! It was all a prank on the paparazzi!! Its that new show on E! Pop Fiction. Its freakn awsome. The celebrities play pranks on the pap. What a genies idea. Paris Hiltons one was great all the paparazzi bit right into it. Shes not religious come on people. I love this show. Heres the link you wanted. Tell me what you think.”

Celebitchy wrote in an email to Cashmere Agency that more than 20 spam comments a day were attributed to their IP address. I don’t blame them for their “celebitchiness” toward the agency – by the same token, can you imagine having to sift through 20 junk emails per day from the very same email address? Maybe some of the gossip blog fury has to do with the fact that Ashton’s show aims to beat paparazzi and celebrity blogs at their own game – even though the show’s jig is officially up.

As of 3/22, no one had returned a call to the blog or responded via e-mail. Yikes! There’s a nice USAToday piece on “Pop Fiction,” but two unflattering Jossip pieces are just as visible in a Google News search. Don’t discount the bloggers.

New(-ish) footage from SATC: The Movie

briannel — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 05:08:00 +0000

Ladies, get ready! Sex and the City: The Movie debuts in just a mere 94 days!

Apologies. I have truly been off my game reporting on this cultural event set for May 30, 2008. Without further adieu, it’s incumbent upon me to share with you the extended trailer for the movie.

Aaaand…I’m a little sad to report that it seems like this movie will be serving us endless fairy tales gone bad. I know certain die-hard SATC fans would get pissed, but weren’t all the girls supposed to end up happy in the end? We can’t have watched six seasons of Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda go through gut-wrenching breakups just to see them ultimately fail in love altogether.

It’s open to interpretation, but it seems like everyone but Charlotte is getting the raw end of the deal. Review the trailer and let me know what you think. And check out some stills from Jezebel if this YouTube video gets taken down. By the way, I feel like the movie is really showing its cards on this trailer – let’s hope Darren Star and Michael Patrick King have something up their sleeves. (I just unknowingly made a ton of cliches related to poker. Deal? Cards? Sleeve? Horrible.)

May is really proving to be battle of the dorky movie camp out, since the boys get Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and the girls get SATC: The Movie. Do you think people will go all out, a la Star Wars or LOTR? If not, I will be in line, alone. Scaring small children.

Dwell Studio lands at Tarjay

briannel — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 06:39:00 +0000

So, I have one more reason to love Target, or shall I say Tar-jay. Not good news, since I consider it a small act of God if I get out of there under $50. Anyway, they’ve just recently started to carry Dwell Studio bedding, baby bedroom gear and kitchen stuff! There’s not too much fanfare on Target’s site, but a few bloggies are liking the goods. I’ve kind of always associated Dwell with hipster modern mommies with good taste and the Target line doesn’t seem to sway too far away from that.

I really like the table linens since they look sturdy enough for every day use (they’re 100% cotton) and they’re not that expensive. They also have reversible placemats for only $4. That’s the cost of one grande skinny vanilla latte at Starbucks! If I wasn’t on a self imposed home decor buying freeze, I’d definitely pick up the taupe and cream kitchen towels ($5) you see below here.

I have a mild obsession with chocolate brown + baby pink, so the crib set below ($80) is definitely adorable to me. I like that it’s girly but not overly saccharine sweet like a lot of baby girl bedding can be. Not like I’ve been shopping for that or anything…just a random observation!

I also think the Dwell Studio bedding looks pretty cool. Even just the accent pillows and shams might be cool to mix up your bedding you already have, like with this guy or this guy. I noticed that the original Dwell bedding is actually very similar to the Tarjay line. Check out the original Dwell bedding called “Talon” below (left) in comparison to the Target version called “Baroque” (right.) They’re a little bit different, but the execution is still the same. (Ah, side note – is this baroque/damask thing not out of style yet? Good, because I like it and my dishes don’t need to be passe.)

Let’s all move to Stockton, Calif.!

briannel — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 05:21:00 +0000

Yes, let’s do it. According to cheap-apts.com, a Stockton two-bedroom apartment can go for $675 a month. What! I think that’s what I spend in shopping per month…okay, hopefully not.

But I am excited I found this little gem of a site through Apartment Therapy (of course) that finds “inexpensive rents in expensive places.” Supposedly, these places are supposed to be full of charm and originality, too.

Well, I don’t know if Stockton foots that bill, but I think they did a pretty good job scouring for places in San Diego. While I wouldn’t even touch “Albert’s College Apartments” off 55th when I was a sophomore at San Diego State (I once went to a party there that was broken up by more than 30 cop cars and four helicopters), The Bluffs II and Ballpark Place seem nice enough and aren’t in bad areas.

So if you’re thinking of moving anytime soon, you might want to use this site. Looks like they post around five to six apartments per day, so check back often. They’ll even send you personalized listings within 24 hours if you email info@cheap-apts.com the city, number of bedrooms and maximum rent you want to spend. Just for a good laugh, I went ahead and emailed them to search for LA three bedrooms under $1,500…I’ll let you know how that one goes. Ha!