This is what I can do:

You know what I love? I love “yes”. I love “yes” so much, and so hard, and  also its more boisterous adjutants “hell yes” and “fuck yes”.

This year, watching the Tour de France on TV, I heard one of the announcers say, “There’s the beautiful sunflower field” and it made me happy that, given all the manful muscling in the pelotonic tumult, he thought to mention that quiet golden place. Since then the words”There is the beautiful sunflower” have lodged themselves in my imagination in the inexplicable way certain words and phrases do from time to time, becoming something like a prayer or an offering or a streamer of solace unfurled the way a strand of birch bark can be freed from the tree.

Also?

Butcher’s charts take it all apart.

Sewing patterns put it all together.

The sundering and the reconciling … they interest me, both. I maybe love taxidermy because it requires both; I should maybe love the jigsaw puzzle more than I do, for the same reason.

I think I think too much about clothes — mine, yours, his, hers, theirs, whoever’s. Because really? I think an awful lot about them. Like, an AWRFUL lot. Thing is, when the world is being beautiful, I don’t want to be a blight on it and when the world is being unbeautiful, I don’t want to add to the ick, so I end up thinking a lot about my clothes. And in my thinking, I also think this: I think style is an act of generosity. I think fashion is just merchandising. I think one is qualitatively superior to the other, by a lot, and in my mind it’s clear that the superior one is style.

Yellow! I don’t really like it, most of the time, and yet my favourite shoes in the whole wide world are yellow and I love it when a cool-toned garden is warmed by splashes of yellow and I think lemons are not only delightfully delicious  as foodstuffs but delightfully delectable in every aesthetic aspect and I like looking at my bookshelves and seeing the yellow spines of Upside Down and Cheap Chic and A Prick Up Your Ears and What It Is and maybe now that I think of it I do like yellow, not as the object or the subject, mostly, but in small illuminating punctuatory doses.

You know, I’m not really a big fan of birds (the Byrds, yes, birds, no). Okay, truth be told, I find them horrible and creepy, more than is strictly reasonable — if in fact there’s a degree of finding-birds-horrible-and-creepy that could be characterised as “reasonable”. Mostly, of course, my distaste for birds doesn’t matter, doesn’t have an impact on my life — except when preparing a whole chicken for consumption. Yow. Now that is the stuff nightmares are made of. Mostly, however, I don’t think about birds or worry about birds.

“Mother” … now there’s a big topic for you. I’ve been thinking about this post and trying to fashion this post and I’ve been uncharacteristically lacking synaptic activity or volubility. Sometimes when this happens, I hurl myself off the precipice into the unknown of the internet and find words by finding pictures. But the problem with the pictures you find when you Google “mother” or “mom” or variations on that theme, is how reductive they are: it’s nearly all glowing pregnant ladies or beaming ladies cradling babies or high-heel-and-pearl-clad June Cleavers doing housewifely things, and there is so much more to motherhood than changing diapers and running the vac.

The world spins on its axis, on and on and on, no matter who comes here or leaves here, no matter how happy or sad you are, no matter, no matter.

How to catch an octopus
by Patrick Widdess

If you take away my periodic PMS madness and my 92%-of-the-time short fuse, I’m a pretty fun gal.

Okay, so there’s this Canadian clothing designer, Natalie Purschwitz, who runs a small and very interesting operation, Hunt & Gather, out of Vancouver. A few months ago she got the genius idea to wear only clothes she has made herself, for a whole year, in a project she calls Makeshift. Makeshift, I find, is a very nifty notion, if not also a little daunting. (But of course most things worth doing are a little daunting.)

When colour isn’t present to advance the story, form and texture are what keep the narrative moving.

Do you wanna know a thing I really like? A thing I really like is when people who make things make things that mess with form or boundary, or our expectations. Needless to say, then, I am smited with smittenness for Scott Hove’s Cakeland project, not only because boys who sculpt a million jillion foofy pink cakes are boys I wanna know and go out for drinkies with, but also because hey! hello! domestic-arts-fucking-around-with, right there, woo-hoo!

Three is a delicious number. De.Li.Cious. In general, I would say that odd numbers are far nummier than evens (and all numbers — every last mother’s son of ‘em — are better than four, which is an evil number of death and brussels sprouts and clowns that come for you in the night).

You know, I could get all screechy here and give you an earful about the harditudes of womanhood, lay a big screed on you about having

Okay, this is just the loveliest thing, this project by Nathalia Ponomareva. I wish we lived in a world where all the daily objects of life could be similarly delightful.

Here is an immensely moving thing: The Waste Not installation by Song Dong, currently showing at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

by guest blogger rachel cheetham douglas

i went bra shopping the other week. i have a small collection of racerback tops that just sit there in my closet, year after year, because i don’t have any racerback bras to wear underneath. well, that’s not true. i have two racerback bras, but i can’t wear them because they’re itchy and hateful and itchy and they ride up and did i mention they’re itchy? itchy is a funny word. say it. you almost feel a little japanese. or maybe i’m overcaffeinated today. whatever, the point is that goddamn i hate those bras.

Leo Tolstory rocks my world, man.

To be honest, it took me ages to write this piece on the work of Toronto-based sculptor Lynn Jackson. I keep structuring the damn thing to be a tidy, polite, well-behaved little enterprise. I finally realised that that couldn’t be the form it took because Jackson’s work makes me shiver and shudder, it makes me gasp and flinch, it makes me want to be held in your arms.

The backbone of the backbone.