Last year this time Lowe and I were desperately looking for places to eat in NY, shamefully unaware that it was in fact American Thanksgiving (should have realized from the awesome deal we got on our hotel….)  Regardless, we had a beautiful time experiencing what it would be like if no one actually lived in the city that apparently DOES sleep – if only on special occasions.  Very I Am Legend, minus Will Smith, plus The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills marathons.

(We luckily -eventually- stumbled upon Balthazar. And Mimosas…)

HAPPY THANKSGIVING American lovers!!!  Hope you have a relaxing and delicious day.

xo,

coco & lowe

p.s. doesn’t that top image of a make-shift Thanksgiving picnic look fun and remarkably stress free!!

.

When I was frustratingly trudging through grade twelve French, trying to master a language in which I was not submerged, my teacher sensed  not only mine, but the collective frustration of the class and brilliantly brought in a poem that reminded us how fortunate we were that we weren’t (at that stage in our lives) trying to master the English language.

WHY ENGLISH IS SO HARD  
We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.

If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn’t the plural of pan be called pen?
If I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn’t the plural of booth be called beeth?

Then one may be that, and three would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim!

Let’s face it – English is a crazy language.
There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger;
neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
English muffins weren’t invented in England.
We take English for granted, but if we explore its paradoxes, we find
that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square, and a guinea
pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

And why is it that writers write but fingers don’t fing, grocers don’t
groce and hammers don’t ham?

Doesn’t it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend.If
you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do
you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?

Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English should be
committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.

In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital?
We ship by truck but send cargo by ship.
We have noses that run and feet that smell.
We park in a driveway and drive in a parkway.
And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise
man and a wise guy are opposites?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your
house can burn up as it burns
down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out,
and in which an alarm goes off by going on.

And, in closing, if Father is Pop, how come Mother’s not Mop?

That’s all for now.

This instantly eased our frustrations and forever stayed with me.  It is the reason why today I can’t stand people who make fun of others who are trying their hardest to learn this ridiculously confusing language of ours.

I bring all of this up because I saw this video on A Cup Of Jo and I thought it was really cool to be reminded again about how weird English would sound if you didn’t understand it.

xo,

coco

I know you’ve probably already seen this, but someone sent it to me and I swear it made my week! Beyond cute!

The original:

On Ellen

I love how the blonde is really just trying to keep up.

beyond….

xx,
coco

At dinner with some girlfriends a couple weeks back all of them agreed with something one of them said that made me reflect on not only my life and the way I do things, but of the women who surround me.

“I just feel like I try so hard to be perfect and somehow my need for perfection always gets in the way.”

I was reminded of this conversation after reading a story about one of my favorite fashion people these days, Jenna Lyons, Creative Director and President of J Crew.  After reading about her rise to success and her hand in saving the dying brand in the early ’00′s the piece ended by saying:

So many of us -myself included- waste so much time and energy in getting everything exactly right that we give up, flail out or stress over things that most in the end wouldn’t even notice anyway.  Take this post for example, when I had the dinner eureka moment with my girlfriends -realizing that being perfect wasn’t what was important- I should have went home to write this post immediately.  Instead, I’ve started and stopped writing 4 times it because 1, I couldn’t find the exact picture to attribute to the ideal of perfection and 2, because I wanted the post to be well…  Perfect.

The fact is, done is better than perfect -every time.  Just because you don’t think you’ve got it right down to the minuscule minutia doesn’t mean you shouldn’t press forward.  9.5 times out of 10 most people won’t even notice anyway, and if you’ve worked as hard as you can on it, then your efforts will be dully noted.

As I battle with myself to get out of my own way, I encourage you to do so as well.

Besides, perfection, as beauty, is subjectively held in the eye of the beholder.

xo,

coco