edit: APRIL (2020)
hey there,
Just finished my quarantine / LA on pause left-overs dinner. Even with plenty of fancy cookbooks around, I ate yesterday’s food. This reminds me of my childhood, when Lithuania was still part of a country that doesn’t exist anymore, and we were short on everything. Food, jeans, curtains, hot water, you name it. Not implying that right now, in Los Angeles - I am deprived of hot water for my eucalyptus epsom salts bath. Though today while preparing my fennel - I was super careful of cutting too much of the green part. As my dad would say, you can make your axe soup from whatever you have, & that’s exactly what I am going to do tomorrow: make a soup from those green cuts as Amazon Foods is not giving any delivery options till Easter. And I know I am being resourceful. Everyone is. Especially in spring 2020.
This spring will definitely enter the history books. However, not because of bingeing our shopping for food online and hunting for toilet paper, but due to the fact that our civilization has been electrocuted (I recall experiencing it when I was 4: I took a fancy hairpin and plugged it into a socket. Wow, right?).
Lost track of time. Usually I am the happiest person when working from home. But even for me this world - wide quarantine is a bit too much. It should be Friday, but it’s Saturday and it feels like Monday. Or am I just hallucinating? Every morning I cross out a day in my Mac calendar printout taped on the wall.
We used to have these conversations on how social media and digitalism alienate people. I rolled my eyes once while reading FT interview with AI Weivei where he said that FaceTime was better than real time. Whereas now I am so grateful for it. So happy for electricity, water and internet. When my connection was crashing the other day (LA County e-schooling program went online) I had such a panic attack. If I loose my internet, then I will be left only with my other uncertainty cooping tool - dishwashing. Would I like to be left with dishwashing only? Not really. I’d still like to know what’s happening. Even if I hadn’t any control over it. I want to talk to people, ESPECIALLY when I can’t touch them.
JUNE NINETEEN (JUNETHINGS now) was my perfect hideout, my hangout, I made it up as a metaphor for a perfect summer day, when you are with your loved ones, sun is shinning and we all are sitting in a backyard with apple trees, peonies, and cushions on the grass (old mattress in case of my childhood) and we are drinking rosé, talking, swirling in flower print dresses. Is all that gone forever?
NO, it’s not. It will be back. It will be back soon. Though we won’t take it for granted. We will make the most of it. We will celebrate and we will work as hard as we never did. This will make us stronger. I remember my grandparents, born right into the WW2 - their grit and resilience was matchless. Their ability to rebound, those words that ‘only health matters’. I’ve only started to understand them with the age. I guess, getting older is also an advantage, not only a better chance to join the C19 risk group and worries about wrinkles. Will we ever get back to the life we had before this virus? I think we need to reframe the question. How creative can we be now - living in these once-in-a-century-times? How exciting it is. How anxious and uncertain is to wake up in the morning, but that’s how this real life is. We have been hibernating until this happened. Raw real life, real values, all the masks dropped, everyone so vulnerable and we all need to stop and listen to these feelings. Your own and of people around you. Someone in China or Italy. Psychologists say that the difference between anxiety and excitement depends on your choice: the core of those two emotions is the same, they begin in a similar way, therefore you can transform them and flip the fearful uncertainty into new beginnings and your new self.
This will make us stronger. This will make so much of scientific breakthroughs. This will make so much of art that will help us to look back one day and reflect on it. It’s giving all the humanity a new way to connect. It challenges our governments and perhaps will make politicians a prestigious profession again. We are so infinitely grateful to all medical staff. Meanwhile something as straightforward as education is so fragile right now.
Probably we will walk the walk with minimalism. Instead of just preaching it and making Youtube videos about it, we will understand that we don’t really need much. Maybe flying to surf for a long weekend and going to fancy conferences is not really the lifestyle we aspire to. We need to invest into public health and cure cancer, and fund science. And find ways to hug each other, never consume so much again, live that raw and real life instead of free-falling in our instagramable hamster wheel.
It’s a good time to relax, think about what me and you want in our life. Do something you’ve always dreamt of, reinvent industries, innovate. But it’s also the time take responsibility, to step-in and do it. To help others that are shattered more than you. Share with your friends, family, with your country, with people you don’t know. To work on your judgmental point of view. To adopt one furry creature from the rescue. To talk about your anger with someone you would not think you could share your feelings with in a million years. To make your bed in the morning and go to sleep a bit earlier in the evening.
Goodnight. x
// April 2020
Last summer in Paris, at musée Rodin. In PENSEUR mode but not at all ready for this. Not ready for upside down weeks of anxiety and unknown. Having fun, eating meat with salade at the brasseries in quartier Latin + enjoying Rodin. Breathtaking and so contemporary.
my soothing list:
1) Dishwashing. No, really, NO DISH LEFT UNTURNED. Nothing in your sink. Ever! Especially before sleep. This way you get up in the morning with a sense of calmness.
2) Talking to my family, friends and people I don’t know.
3) Practicing my North Node traits - basically becoming Virgo instead of a Gemini. My OCD thrives.
4) Making meals everyday. I am a big fan of Carla Music. Just love her.
5) Doing calming Moonlight chamomile face treatment from Amber Beauty that smells like summer. You can support women-led small business and a new mama by getting one. I am pretty sure you would be in love with it.
6) Reading everything in a row from my 236 piles “to read”.
7) Growing my gray hair and making peace with it (“so Céline”. Billy said 3 weeks ago).
8) Painting all my work space in white (a couple of elements that were left from the last painting session). OCD, too - but, hell, YES.
9) Sleeping on my new pillow from Parachute.
10) Wearing JN Penis / Key ring even when washing my hands every five minutes. It’s my F* You Virus Mantra.
+ my visual board:
Nicholas Ghesquière scuba dress. From essentials series + comfortable + chic. Add a face mask and nitrile gloves and of you go! // Photo credits: Iceberg FW 2014, Vogue.com
Not that I am a big fan of him (more of Jimmy Kimmel), but this WFH (working from home) look is just on point. // Photo credits: SRPP Backgrid
Browsing through a photo base of Lithuanian passports from 1915-1945. Was mesmerized with some of the faces. So beautiful. Mystical. Maybe she had got her passport today? BUT a hundred years ago.
Add sweatpants and you have an elegant conferencing at home set. ALSO, see - you can skip washing your head for a couple days! //
Glossier founder Emily Weiss wearing JUNETHINGS serpent hoops (almost visible) in The Guardian. Wrong credits, but we are happy: one step forward, one step backwards but we are moving. I think it was a harsh Mercury retrograde just before C19 Wuhan phase. // Styled by: Carolina Orrico // photo: Grant Cornett / The Observer
Los Angeles in self-isolation: highways are empty, so quiet, birds chirping. What’s in it for us tomorrow? No-one knows. // Photo credits: San Jose, Mercury News
“I surround myself with images for their emotional qualities, says Phoebe (...) I get an energy from their tenderness, strength and glamour that I am very responsive to” > Phoebe Philo for the Gentlewoman. Probably the most important womenswear designer of last twenty years who completely changed the landscape and invented what empowering, sophisticated & in her words, almost invisible wardrobe of working woman.
