Tear Strips... Rip It Up!

No Duh

I found this piece of writing online, and I wanted to share it with you all, because we all feel this way sometimes!

This weekend I was told a story which, although I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, because holy crap is it ever obvious, is kind of blowing my mind.

A friend of a friend won a free consultation with Clinton Kelly of What Not To Wear, and she was very excited, because she has a plus-size body, and wanted some tips on how to make the most of her wardrobe in a fashion culture which deliberately puts her body at a disadvantage.

Her first question for him was this: how do celebrities make a plain white t-shirt and a pair of weekend jeans look chic?  She always assumed it was because so many celebrities have, by nature or by design, very slender frames, and because they can afford very expensive clothing.  But when she watched What Not To Wear, she noticed that women of all sizes ended up in cute clothes that really fit their bodies and looked great.  She had tried to apply some guidelines from the show into her own wardrobe, but with only mixed success.  So - what gives?

His answer was that everything you will ever see on a celebrity’s body, including their outfits when they’re out and about and they just get caught by a paparazzo, has been tailored, and the same goes for everything on What Not To Wear.  Jeans, blazers, dresses - everything right down to plain t-shirts and camisoles.  He pointed out that historically, up until the last few generations, the vast majority of people either made their own clothing or had their clothing made by tailors and seamstresses.  You had your clothing made to accommodate the measurements of your individual body, and then you moved the fuck on.  Nothing on the show or in Peoplemagazine is off the rack and unaltered.  He said that what they do is ignore the actual size numbers on the tags, find something that fits an individual’s widest place, and then have it completely altered to fit.  That’s how celebrities have jeans that magically fit them all over, and the rest of us chumps can’t ever find a pair that doesn’t gape here or ride up or slouch down or have about four yards of extra fabric here and there.

I knew that having dresses and blazers altered was probably something they were doing, but to me, having alterations done generally means having my jeans hemmed and then simply living with the fact that I will always be adjusting my clothing while I’m wearing it because I have curves from here to ya-ya, some things don’t fit right, and the world is just unfair that way.  I didn’t think that having everything tailored was something that people did. 

It’s so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t know this.  But no one ever told me.  I was told about bikini season and dieting and targeting your “problem areas” and avoiding horizontal stripes.  No one told me that Jennifer Aniston is out there wearing a bigger size of Ralph Lauren t-shirt and having it altered to fit her.

I sat there after I was told this story, and I really thought about how hard I have worked not to care about the number or the letter on the tag of my clothes, how hard I have tried to just love my body the way it is, and where I’ve succeeded and failed.  I thought about all the times I’ve stood in a fitting room and stared up at the lights and bit my lip so hard it bled, just to keep myself from crying about how nothing fits the way it’s supposed to. No one told me that it wasn’t supposed to.  I guess I just didn’t know.  I was too busy thinking that I was the one that didn’t fit.

I thought about that, and about all the other girls and women out there whose proportions are “wrong,” who can’t find a good pair of work trousers, who can’t fill a sweater, who feel excluded and freakish and sad and frustrated because they have to go up a size, when really the size doesn’t mean anything and it never, ever did, and this is just another thing thrown in your path to make you feel crappy about yourself.

I thought about all of that, and then I thought that in elementary school, there should be a class for girls where they sit you down and tell you this stuff before you waste years of your life feeling like someone put you together wrong.

So, I have to take that and sit with it for a while.  But in the meantime, I thought perhaps I should post this, because maybe my friend, her friend, and I are the only clueless people who did not realise this, but maybe we’re not.  Maybe some of you have tried to embrace the arbitrary size you are, but still couldn’t find a cute pair of jeans, and didn’t know why.

Intro Pages

This is the cover page of my Wreck This Journal. It has since been edited some, and gotten destroyed in the process of destroying other pages. 

I added to it,and it also has water damage, which will be explained later. Some of the drawings on the back of the page bleed through.

This is the back of the page. The drawing with the stars and moon is the one that bled through onto the introduction page.

And this is the back of the other page, which also bleed through onto the back. I really like these pages. The water damage made it look tie-dyed, and it had a really cool effect. 

The Dark Knight Rises Shooting

My heart is heavy today.

Early this morning, during the premier of The Dark Knight Rises, a gunman entered a theater in Colorado, and killed twelve people and injured fifty- nine others. It's the deadliest shooting since the Fort Hood massacre in 2009. 

The gunman, identified as James Egan Holmes, entered the theater, and threw in a smoke bomb, and began to shoot when the moviegoers began to run.

Witnesses have said that at first, they assumed that it was part of the special effects, as the shooting happened during a scene with gunfire. He had kicked down an emergency door and entered the theater, carrying a shotgun and a rifle.  Holmes had apparently painted his hair red, and said he was "The Joker."

According to James Wilburn, a man who had been sitting in the second row of the affected theater, the shooter was dressed all in black, wearing a flack jacket and a gas mask. Wilburn and his friends dropped to the floor when they realized what was going on. “The shooter was only five or six feet away,” he says.

Once the shotgun was empty, Holmes calmly dropped it to the floor and started shooting with the riffle.

Naya Thompson, who was seeing the movie with her boyfriend, were running for their lives. She says that the gas spread quickly, and the gunman must have had a lot of it. "It was like a tear gas," Thompson told the newspaper. "I was coughing and choking and I couldn't breathe."

Jordan told the paper that one girl was struck in cheek, others in stomach including a girl who looked to be around 9-years-old. The youngest victim was about six years old. Jordan said it sounded like firecrackers until someone began yelling, "They're shooting out here!"

President Obama said he is "shocked and saddened" by the mass shooting and urged the nation to "come together as one American family." He said his administration will do everything it can to support the people of Aurora, Colo.

"As we do when confronted by moments of darkness and challenge, we must now come together as one American family," Obama said in a statement. "All of us must have the people of Aurora in our thoughts and prayers as they confront the loss of family, friends, and neighbors."

The police have released a statement from the family of the shooter, saying, "Our hearts go out to those who were involved in this tragedy and to the families and friends of those involved."

(Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/07/20/deadly-shooting-colorado-movie-theater-dark-knight-rises/#ixzz21CCPovgZ)

I can’t imagine what the victims, witnesses and families are going through. I’m in shock. My heart is heavy, and I’m praying for them.

This sounds cliché, but this just reminds me that tomorrow is never guaranteed. These people went to see a movie, and some of them aren’t coming out. I’ve messaged all my friends, telling them how much they mean to me. I can’t imagine what I would do if I got the call, telling me that any one of them had died.

It’s such a tragedy, and I will be keeping everyone in my prayers.

Xx, Nell

Take Two

Hello everyone!
Day 2 of Wreck This Journal. This is the cover of my journal now. I warned you. I said it didn't look anything like the first picture anymore.  I've drawn all over it in white- out, with song lyrics and doodles.

To Create is to Destroy

Hey guys! I got a Wreck This Journal a couple months back, and it's my summer goal to finish it. For those of you who don't know, the theme of the journal is to become creative by destroying the book. You do things such as take it in the shower, throw it from a high place, crack the spine,  spill coffee on it, write one word over and over, and  make a sudden, unpredictable movement with the journal. I've been working on it all summer, and it's a lot of fun.
I'm going to be posting my progress, showing pictures of different pages and telling what I did to them.
This picture to the left is my Wreck This Journal when it was brand spanking new.
I'm warning you... it doesn't look like this any more.

Scholarship Opportunisties

Hey ya’ll! So I’m filling out scholarship applications, and there’s a scholarship, where you get entered for every time someone registers on the website through you. For example, if three people register through me, I get three entries.

So if you can, click on this link, and register through there, You never even have to use the website again, just register, for me. :)

Here’s the link: http://www.fastweb.com/referral/nellawafer

And make sure you use that link to register, or it doesn’t count for me.

Thanks, lovlies! :)