The door is always open

Once in a while I can feel a person's energy when I walk into a room. I feel them and I learn about them with considerable ease through split-second flashes that my brain gives me - pictures of the way they live or the way I might experience life with them. Blue and white stripes, a breeze on a balcony overlooking red and brown rooftops, pajama pants, a drink in my right hand, and music playing while he works. The feeling is so real that sometimes I question whether there are two separate halves of me: one half venturing off to experience that moment while the other sits calmly, waiting for the report.

I'm in the strangest state of mind. I fall in love so deeply and so effortlessly and so fleetingly. I'm in love with 2 or 3 people at a time because I can't help it. I fall in love with places, times, words. I feel everything at once and then it's gone. Infatuation looks good on me.

I have trouble looking at love as an everlasting state of union although I suppose it's everlasting in that I still feel warmth and gratitude from it after it's gone. It's not that I don't believe in being with someone forever, but I tend to see love as a set of individual moments in time where I experience pure bliss. These moments are selfless and sweet, and they're all I think about.

(the photos above are from arrestedmotion.com)

I left Gary Baseman's show at the Skirball last night feeling so thankful and inspired that today I actually feel lightweight, like a block of worry has been released from my head. In order to translate the intense love that I sometimes feel, I absolutely must let go of anything holding me back. I will be thankful to Baseman forever for helping me see that.

If people don't like what I do, I won't let myself give them another thought. I've made a promise to myself to finally communicate all the love that I have to give, and it's honestly the most important thing I've ever done. If I've gotten this far in my life with all my worries and judgement, I cannot wait to see where I go now that I'm free from it.

--

If you like what you see, consider following me on Twitter and Instagram or liking Excelsior Lady on Facebook!

The wallpaper (sein und zeit), the theory, the Baseman

I've been meaning to start doing this for a while but keep forgetting. Downloads! Desktop and iPhone!

"Sein Und Zeit" means "Being and Time." It's the title of a book by Martin Heidegger, who was a German philosopher. You can get the general idea of it here. It's aaalllllssssssooo the title of an X-Files episode (you know me...). Enjoy! Share and use as you like, just please link back to this post if you do.

Download Sein Und Zeit: Desktop or iPhone.

Saturday morning I met Kim at a cafe and we talked about Boy Meets World and Tamagotchis and small town upbringings and how things tend to fall into place when we're doing something we're meant to do, because other people are subconsciously drawn to authentic passion and excitement. And we drank Bloody Marys. A successful breakfast "meeting" if you ask me, especially since we had never met in person before (we started to talk through Instagram)! I left feeling inspired and ready to create something great, both for myself and for freelance clients.

my "theory"

I know I've written before about my theory that things fall into place when we trust our intuition and only do what feels right, but I feel the need to reiterate because so many new opportunities have come my way in the past couple months.

Just...never forget that if you put heart and excitement into something, it will come back to you. It's been proven to me again and again and again. It took a while for me to fall into a groove of something I truly love doing, but now that I'm there I'll never look back. I never thought I would have a career that lets me look at color palettes and fonts during day and draw things that people want to buy at night. It's all so exciting, even after doing it for a long time :)

I can't stop listening to the new Justin Timberlake album. Do you have any idea how rare it is for me to love not just a pop song, but an entire album? Reeeeeal rare, that's how rare. Also I don't know why it took him so long to get rid of that curly hair but he is about 100,000x more bangable than he ever was before.

Have you ever heard of Gary Baseman? He's an artist here in LA that I adore, and he's having a party at the Skirball (near the Getty) to kick off his exhibition there that runs through August. Here are some of my favorites:

(1, 2, 3)

Needless to say I'm REALLY excited for this show.

--

If you like what you see, consider following me on Twitter and Instagram or liking Excelsior Lady on Facebook!

Another human interest story

I love this Niagara Detroit giclee.

The music I listen to is different lately. I never got into punk and I always hated The Pretenders (maybe I just hated I'll Stand By You? The chord progressions in that song make me GAG), but I suddenly started listening to them and fell in love with this song, among others. I started listening to Butthole Surfers and a song called Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues by Fight Like Apes. I started listening the The Velvet Underground and Patti Smith and more Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and I feel really grateful for music that isn't constantly about love and sunshine and rainbows because it's so much more interesting. Melodies are more complex, chords are more dissonant. I love that kinda stuff even when it has nothing to do with my mindset. I want to be impressed and wonder how they thought of such complex stuff in a song.

The concept of always being decently happy is fucking weird, you guys. Why shouldn't we want to feel everything that there is to feel? I might get pissed off or annoyed or sad, and I might be pretty hard to deal with when I am feeling those things, but let me be very clear: when I am happy I am GLOWING from it because I genuinely appreciate it. I am noticing the tiniest things and seeing everything with rose colored glasses and smiling to myself on the bus and feeling so much love while I watch a homeless man and an elderly man talk about philosophy and marbles and guitars (all in one conversation!) and I feel weightless. If you can feel that same sense of euphoria all the time, more power to you. I'm sincerely jealous. Buuuuut when I think about the people that are "happy all the time" as they put it, they usually just seem boring and desensitized, and I don't believe them. Boring isn't happy. Boring is boring.

I will always want to be fascinated, no matter how emotional I have to get and how hard I have to work to experience it.

I think I've finally met my quarter-life crisis? Haha except within me it has become something resembling a personal renaissance. Feels just fine, I must say.

Oooooooookkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk, give me your opinions because I'm sure everyone has some.

Uganda, NYC, Feeeeelings

I'm a big fan of Pope Saint Victor's illustration work, but I think I may have fallen even more in love with the photos from his trip to Uganda. I'm posting some of my favorites below. I've always loved the steamy, lush look of photos taken in Africa and South America.

I feel blah lately. I think it's just a case of the Octobers - I always feel down in the fall. It used to happen because summer would end and I'd be going back to school (and for Buffalo it usually meant the first snow), but even here in LA with no school/blizzards to be tortured with, the feeling is still there. There's a lot of stuff happening in my life that I can't discuss out of respect for others (learned that lesson the hard way! woooooooo), even though I know so many of you beautiful people would have valuable advice and ideas. I'm just a bit weighed down with other people's thangs.

I still find myself editing what I write because of the awful people at my first full-time job. I couldn't say anything that was less than happy - and I STILL find myself thinking that they're going to read this and think, "Hanna is pouting," so I purposely put a positive spin on my life, even when I'm not really feeling it. I can't freaking believe I still do that without thinking. What's even funnier is that I do almost always feel happy and enthusiastic about life! But when I don't, writing about it is something that I'm allowed to do. There are so many things that people do in this world that are detrimental to others or just totally fucking stupid. Writing, tactfully of course, is neither of those. Me expressing a negative feeling in a healthy way like writing is nowhere near as detrimental as me being obligated to surpress every emotion that isn't positive. Honesty about emotion is rare. I intend to speak honestly here in my own little space. If I can't do that, what's the point of writing at all? Silly me for spinning my own life. It doesn't align with my personal brand lol.

Please promise me that you'll always be honest with yourselves, my loves. And I mean really fucking honest. It's critical to your own well-being no matter how scary it is. Your life will be so much richer because of it. At the end of my life, I'm going to be proud of myself for always wearing my heart on my sleeve, even when people don't like it. Even when I don't like it! My life is the only thing I've got and I want to feel everything - even the sad stuff.

Brady and I are flying to NY tonight to see my cousin Audrey get MARRIED this weekend! The last time I saw her was at my Grandma's funeral, so it will be MOST wonderful to hug her under much happier circumstances. She told me wayyy back in 2008 that it was the Real Deal and I believed her; I could just see it in her eyes. I'm excited to be in NYC again too! There is nothing like New York City in the fall :) Or in the winter. Or in the summer. Or in the spring...

Anyway, photos! Photos, Hanna.

View all the pics here, and go like Pope Saint Victor on Facebook!

New Designers.MX playlist comin' atcha in the next post :)

Mario Testino's (unfuckingbelievable) home

I first saw this in February but for some reason never blogged about it (probably because I was too busy drooling). If I could sum up my taste for interiors with one person's home...

All images via Vogue.

This is all extra relevant to me because I'm working on my living room now that I've got my bedroom to a point where I feel content with it. And the great thing about Testino's home is that it's actually pretty easy to pull from because a lot of this style can be found in places like Ikea and West Elm and thrift stores (and I do love me a good home bargain...the UCLA thrift store made my jaw drop and I can't wait to go back!). Needless to say I'm inspired.

I post a lot of interior photos on Pinterest, if your style is similar to mine and you want to join in on the inspiration!

Happy Saturday!

Mazel Tov, Bitches

It has been the most enjoyable long weekend so far, yes it has.

If you know me, you know how quickly I become overwhelmed by people. After all of you amazing people showed up for my birthday party and I had so much to do the following week, I ended up feeling a little frantic, so I spent my birthday alone until dinner - it felt so good to walk around Santa Monica by myself and catch up with my own thoughts. Chaos be gone! Since then I've felt wonderful. BV and I wandered around Ikea yesterday being grumpy and buying lamps and making each other laugh, he built a fort for the cats out of Ikea boxes LOL, and I have a thousand people to thank for being so sweet on my birthday.

Mike and Jemal put their minds together to get me this print as a gift - remember it from this post?! I'm going to hang it after I post this, and I know it's going to look amazing. Font nerd!!

I forgot to mention the strange wrestling match that Cindy and I attended last weekend (while I was so hungover I could barely move, might I add). There was a death metal band, someone got lit on fire, and they had a fog machine. We will obviously be going back next time. And we will probably be donning lucha libre masks. I should also mention that we went there directly from Ian's semi-classy birthday lunch at The Churchill. Total opposites. I freaking love LA.

I was in Urban Outfitters on my birthday and heard this: Washed Out remix of My Morning Jacket's "Outta My System" ...it was love at first listen. I love everything MMJ and Washed Out do, so pairing them is like heaven.



One last thing: this cracks me up. It's a heat map displaying where/when people are tweeting the phrase "fuck you." Of course it's flaming red over LA.

BANG

I'm not sure how to communicate HOW MUCH I LOVE THIS. BangBang is a Montreal-based studio that created alllllllllll of this branding (and this is only a portion) to demonstrate to their clients the broad range of things they can do. Holy. Fucking. Impressive.

(all images from their website)

I spent a portion of last night talking to a very caffeinated friend (just kidding, you weren't that caffeinated, you just talked for 40 years without taking a breath LOL) about jobs and life changes and dead bunnies and blahh blah blah. I have the most wonderful friends no matter where I go. They are motivated, interesting, hilarious people and I'm lucky to be included in their worlds.

I would update everyone on my birthday party, but it seems as though I blacked out for about 2.5 hours and therefore missed a majority of it hahaha. WOOPS! I leave you with the only real photo that was taken, I think (I of course do not remember it being taken at all):