They're all bastards

Two days after Alexander McQueen killed himself, the Sartorialist was talking about McQueen's growing retail business and how Gucci group has spent millions of dollars on the line.

We are all fucked.

Alexander McQueen committed suicide this morning.

When I was really green, I thought that one day I would be able to own an Alexander McQueen creation. He didn't just make clothes. He made art. He was the most creative designer in the last decade- better than Martin Margiela, Rodarte, Balmain, Balenciaga, Dries Van Noten, Gareth Pugh combined. While these designers made me want to wear their clothes, it was Alexander McQueen who made me want to express myself through clothing.

This isn't the only place thats cold

Lately I have been very angry. I hate driving in Connecticut. Driving here is like playing tennis with a really really really bad opponent. Today, a lady was literally driving 20 mph on the highway. I thought to myself, you must be kidding.

Tomorrow morning, my stupid apartment will be turning off the hot water until Friday. They had to do this during a snow storm.

Yesterday, I read a really great article about how we mourn. It largely centers on the diagnosis and centralization of grief and how over time, mourning has become a personal pursuit instead of a group activity. "To lose someone was once to be swept into a flurry of rituals. In many nations -among them China and Greece- death was met with wailing and lamentation among family and neighbors. Some kind of viewing followed the cleaning of the body." At some point in our society, grief has become a disease rather than a natural reaction to the feeling of loss. I found this article especially interesting considering the many medical retractions and revisions that have been published in the past week- last week a British medical journal, The Lancet, retracted a 1998 paper that stated vaccines may be unsafe. This week, the psychiatry's encyclopedia of mental disorder was revised. We are a nation of disorder. Every emotion, ailment has a title, a syndrome, and a treatment. It is so strange that even mourning has become a psychological disorder. I think the privatization of grief has come from the population shift. We used to be a country of communities instead of individuals. In China, I always had a community, a body of family members close by but prosperity, while great, has caused us to separate. Individuals have lost the community and this shift has made us believe that our grief is at once singular and exclusive.

I wonder what anybody has to say about pre-grief. What do we do when we begin mourning the death of someone before it has happened? What do we do when we know for certain that someone will die in the immediate future?

Things are okay

When I was in college, all I wanted was to have Saturday's and Sunday's to myself. I wanted to wake up in the morning and read the newspaper and have a nice and calm breakfast. I wanted to take walks in the park and take strolls at night. I didn't want to do homework all weekend and hurry from place to place.

Now that I am out of college, I have the time to do these things. Greg bought me a subscription to the New Yorker and so now I get to wake up, make breakfast and read. I also get to listen to Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and I am happy because of this.

Things are okay. They're not great, but I can be thankful for what I have. I am not always grateful or happy. In fact, I am pitiful and depressed most of the time, but at certain moments, I realize that I am very lucky.

Shoes

I don't have any money, but I really want these