re: Lessons from ALT

I just got back to SF after a lovely 10 days in Utah, spending time at ALT Design Summit, volunteering at the Sundance Film Festival, and seeing a lot of faces that I don't get to see often enough.

I really enjoyed my time at ALT, and came away feeling simultaneously inspired and overwhelmed about projects I've been either working on or dreaming about. I feel like there are so many things that I want to start and do, but I have a hard time thinking about going out on my own (entrepreneur-ily speaking) and I'm not always sure where to focus my energies.

One of our keynote speakers was Ben Silbermann, founder of Pinterest, and he showed this slide to illustrate what it felt like to be involved in a start-up:


This was my biggest takeaway from the conference - that "chasing your dreams" doesn't always feel safe, but that the rewards of working on projects that you're genuinely excited about are priceless. It was especially poignant because I was there, surrounded by talented, accomplished folks who were out there really making things happen. Ben's story about how he quit being an accountant to start Pinterest instead was the kick in the pants I needed to remind myself to stop THINKING about things I want and to go DO something about them instead.

It was also reconfirmed that I don't post enough on this blog. I think part of my "2 posts a month" MO is me not always having a clear idea of what to post here...so I'm going to try to just start posting more often and you'll have to tell me what you actually like seeing here and what makes you wish that you had a time machine to give you the minutes you spent reading back.

I'll tell you what I DO know belongs on this blog - photos of me with my famous new best friend Anya (you know, from Project Runway), seen here on the left telling me that the dress design that I submitted during ALT was "on trend" and on the right, standing close enough to totally show me up in the hair department.



That's right, Anya generously called my scribble of a dress "on trend." Maybe this encouragement will be all I need to move "fashion designer" to the top of my project list.

re: Resolved

I know we're already more than two weeks into 2012, but I still thought I'd talk a little about my New Year's resolutions. I have a big ol' list of things to improve in my life, as always, but I thought that this year maybe I'd pick 12 things and every month focus on making just one of them happen.

So, for January's goal, I decided to DO MY HAIR.


Don't pretend to be disappointed in my for not saying something about world peace.

Lately I've realized that my hair has gotten long. Like, loooonnnnggg. Longer than it had even been in highschool, when it was requisite to have enough hair to prove that you were a girl because the baggy men's flannels and shapeless jeans we were all wearing didn't do our girlish figures any favors, and the Kurt Cobains of the world were giving us a shaggy run for our money.

The thing is, no matter what the length, I have never really done much with my hair. I blame too many years of reading Seventeen magazine, taking quizzes on how high-maintenance I was and reading about how boys don't like girls that take too long to do their hair. Somehow I never realized that that doesn't mean you don't do anything with your hair, but maybe you just don't cry when you have to go camping and don't have a place to plug in your curling iron.

So, here I am. A full head of hair, and I've been wearing it down and stringy or in a pony tail for years, staring at photos of pretty girls with shiny bangs and cute styles, and thinking all along that they somehow must have "better" hair than I do, as if they had the luck to have been born with a milkmaid style french braid on their heads. Since I never practiced doing much with my hair, when I actually wanted something different up top, I'd have no idea how to execute it (which is why the only way that you would have known that I was at prom is that I was wearing a velvet dress. My hair looks just like it did every other day of the week).

Well, I say, NO MORE.

My goal isn't even going to be to do something daring every day, but to reacquaint myself with my round brush and give a few non-ponytail styles a try so that I have a few more go-to looks in my arsenal besides "I just woke up". That way when I have some place to go where I actually want my hair to look nice, maybe I'll know what to do with it instead of fumbling around like it is my first time touching a straightening iron.

There are so many tutorials out there on doing hair these days that there is officially no excuse. I've already watched six different girls on youtube trying to teach me how to to make a modern beehive using just a poky comb, a gallon of hairspray and 64 bobby pins.


Part of the reason that I started my year with this goal is because all this perfectly good hair getting pony-tailed every day seems like a metaphor for a lot of things in life. We often have all the materials at the ready, but we don't reach our full potential because we don't take the time or make the effort to achieve a little more.

Hows that for a little motivation in 2012?