If you know me you'll know that I like to talk about myself a lot, hence me being on here devoting an entire space of the web to that pasttime. And I like to wallow and blow things out of proportion and generally drag my current states of emotion into the spotlight. But sometimes, it's actually other people's life changes that make you feel things. Seeing your friends mourn, for instance, is one of the strangest experiences of that kind and definitely on the worse side. Or watching them go through break-ups, seeing it coming, witnessing the aftermath. And see, now we're back at my point of view and my own baggage that's only waiting to be triggered by such an unwelcome echo of extra-bubbly-texting-to-check-in-conversation and late-night phone calls with heartwrenching tears on one end and desperately-searching-for-something-soothing-to-say-silence on the other. I remind myself that no part I play in this is going to earn me time-traveling points. That my focus this time is that of an innocent bystander providing first aid, that I'm not stuck in the burning wreck. But still, there's the same sense of sadness and hovering smoke in the air and my fingers are getting itchy again, still holding my phone.

Ha, I bet you're thinking that I'm doing something really stupid now, but before you get mad, let me explain. I told someone I'm probably not gonna see anytime soon, if there's no incredible coincidence, what the time I spent with them made me feel like. In a non-romantic way. I paid them a compliment, like you would in a thank-you-note. It doesn't matter if they're not gonna reply, it doesn't matter if they didn't have the same experience. It doesn't matter that they're highly unlikely to whisk me away and solve all my outstanding life decisions for me, because truthfully, that was highly unlikely before as well. But maybe they're gonna be flattered, or glad that their presence had that effect on me, or relieved because they weren't the only ones feeling some type of way. And I think anyone would like to hear something like that, so why not tell them? It's not gonna change anything in retrospective, neither in a good nor in a bad way. There's no shame in having had a nice time with someone.

So if you ever feel a bit sad and delusional and helpless, tell them. Tell your friend that you are thankful to have them in your life. Tell you parents you love them. Tell a stranger you like their dress. Write a letter to your favorite author, they might read it. Tell me to shut up with the emotional outbreaks already, but also tell me if you liked them.

Love,

Rosy Smith

What does she think I gather from this information? An impulse to take it down? To start a conversation about "these pictures"? What, apart from stirring uncertainty about my choice, could this message possibly bring into my life? I am honestly so baffled. Am I supposed to debate with her now? To advocate my picture? To say thank you for your feedback, like I'm sampling a hair color and not my face?

Okay this might have sounded a little too mad to be festive, but seriously.

Love.

Rosy Smith

(everybody now!) BUT I'M FEELING 22!

Well, lovelies, every age has its advantages, and one of this' is certainly the opportunity to shout out that Taylor Swift bop all. year. long! It has a line for every occasion, doesn't it?

I've spent last night ringing in my birthday with some of my bestest friends (those who aren't in Europe right now - which is, by the way, a fun thing I have planned to be doing soon!), eating pizza and drinking cosmos ( I know someone who didn't know what those were and I am still recovering from my sheer bafflement. Satc wasn't a thing for them, either. Like, you gotta know that to understand half of what I'm saying) and serving a mud cake that, if I do say so myself, is chocolate heaven (but you should refrain from eating anything else for two hours to let your body rest). I got the recipe from a blog called  Sweetest Menu if you wanna experience the rush!

Oh my, I just had a coughing fit from eating a chocolate foam thingie.

Anyways, I got a few more hours of being a birthday gal and having the prerogative to be surrounded by balloons and presents so I'm gonna proceed to shake my flapper dress now!

Love,

Rosy Smith

....doesn't make you stronger.


(I just listened to Sara Bareilles' "Brave" and it inspired me. I feel like this song is the perfect excuse for anyone who's already on the verge of sending a risky text.)

If it doesn't kill you, and by "it" I mean great emotional distress, well, that just means one is obviously incapable of physically dying of a broken heart, and that's not even a medical miracle, because it happens rather rarely these days. All those romantic characters from Bronte (I don't know how to do these double dots above the e) stories who kicked the bucket probably weren't in such a good health condition to begin with. You know, pneunomia and all that jazz that comes with living near a moor while dressing in musselin.

One is not stronger. If one was, it wouldn't feel like it's killing them. If one was, they wouldn't have to think about cheesy phrases like that. They would just shine on in their newfound strongness and belt out Kelly Clarkson songs. But they're not, are they? I think it should be "what doesn't kill you shows you how weak you can actually be if you reaally try". Or "what doesn't kill you makes you witness your lowest point, heaving over the toilet because you cried yourself sick, in full consciousness".

Now said Kelly Clarkson song came on in my Spotify mix. That is one cruel coincidence. Well played. I still hate it.

Love,

Rosy Smith

PS: I love most other Kelly Clarkson songs, though. Her new album is great, for instance.

PPS: I got a weird pronoun thing going on here. I tried to be objective. 

I'm pretty sure I have declared myself to have hit rock bottom before but it turns out, there are lots and lots of bottoms left to crash through. How nice.

This time, it was me googling the "normal" time span people usually feel like shit for after a break-up and if that isn't enough of a downfall, I ended up on a psychology site that listed different stages of awful feelings, which just made me feel some more of them right away.

I just hit my head on my bedframe. That's what you get for sitting on it in the middle of the day.

Anyways, I find that these supposedly helpful tips either make you sad all over again because they formulate the sickness you feel, or they make you feel bad because they keep on telling you that you'll get over it and that all the things you wish you'd gather the courage up to do, like writing a letter or just calling him up, would not change anything. I'm sorry, but do they know anything about anyone's relationship, at all? When you're desperate enough to rely on the internet to feel better, it is totally not helping to be chastised by may-or-may-not-have-a-degree psychologists on top of it all. Stuff like "Stop this", "don't do that", "that's not relevant" is so not what we tormented souls need to hear. What I want is to be pet on the back and told that my point of view is the only valid thing in the world, being:

It's okay to hold on to your pyjama's like they're a security blanket.

It's okay to not be hungry, just as it is okay to try and fill the emptiness with Chinese food and chocolate. Just, like, don't starve.

It's okay to spend days at a time on the couch watching hours of sitcoms from beginning to end.

It's okay to complain about not doing anything with your life besides watching hours of sitcoms from beginning to end.

It's okay to feel unable to do anything to distract yourself even though you want to.

It's okay to enjoy things that distract you.

It's okay to switch from enjoying those things to being sad again.

It's okay to crave company.

It's okay to bring up that same topic to your company again and again even though there's nothing new to add and you end up being sad.

It's okay to cry. In the middle of the day, in the middle of the night, right after you wake up, when your noodles fall of your spoon, when something reminds you of them, when you wash your hair, when you're alone, when you're with a friend.

It's okay to miss them.

It's okay to make up dramatic metaphors about how your whole body feels raw and bruised and every move hurts.

It's okay to take breaks from thinking about it.

It's okay to feel like you're never gonna be okay again. I'm not even gonna tell you that you will be, eventually, because personally, hearing that makes me wanna throw up, and I think that's okay as well.

The list goes on.

Love,

Rosy Smith

....and I had it on in the store and I have been walking around in it and it feels amazing and comfortable and it looks smokin' good and I am hopelessly in love with that shoe. But now, the shoe starts talking and says "Take me off, you'll get blisters if you walk in me any longer, and I will get damaged" but I don't feel any pain and I don't see any blood, not even redness, and the shoe is so unbelievably pretty and exactly what I wanted. But it started talking so loudly and wiggling to get off my foot that I couldn't possibly get it to stay on, and now I'm crying in the store because I can't understand why I should leave these beautiful shoes that bring me so much joy. And people keep telling me that there are other shoes that are just as nice and waiting for me to give them the time of a day, but I don't want to see them, because my perfect match is right in front of me and it's still shiny and intact and I can't just leave them there.


Does this work for you or does it just make sense to metaphor-obsessed shoe fanatics like me?

Love,

Rosy Smith

So, I'm not too informed on how other people handle this, but I feel like in a relationship, there have to be two kinds of occasions to meet the other person. On the one hand, it's the nights in with a movie or some board game (can't you just feel my youthful spirit) where you just talk and make out and stuff and eat pizza on the floor. Those nights are pretty great, don't get me wrong. In fact, I went out all day yesterday with my oldest friend and her crowd and by the end of the day I was really wishing I'd been having one of those pizza nights instead of standing around all day in flat shoes and still getting back pain from it.

However, the other kind of thing is as important as those: Real dates. As in "taking someone out for it".  Obviously, you have to think these ones through a bit more, and I find that especially hard (I like to be the one who gets taken out rather than the taker), but I've come up with some ideas to make it easier, so here we go:

Make sure that transportation is taken care of. There's nothing worse than having to figure out logistics for what's supposed to be a romantic adventure, so don't even suggest me taking the train to meet you somewhere. I'm a big defender of the old value of a man picking up a girl in his car. If you don't have one, or can only break out your family's old station wagon, don't give up: Just rent one! There's a peer-to-peer car rental company called Turo that allows you to choose from lots of different types of cars (even race cars, if you like it fast) without having to deal with a big rental company. I looked up available cars in New York just now, and even for little money you can get some pretty cool rides, no matter if you just want something to flash your date with when showing up at her doorstep or if you plan on making the car the attraction and head off to a week-long road trip. Check out their website!

Choose a place that feels like a date. I'm talking restaurants with dimmed lights and discreet waiters who appear by your side with a ghostly swoosh; jazz cafés with low chairs and a twenties-feel to them where it's not weird to start dancing tightly intertwined; old-school movie theatres with plushy seats, cocktail service and classic Hollywood flicks on the program. Not your local steak house with an all-you-can-eat salad buffet and screaming kids in the next booth. Give me something to dress up for, won't you?

Or choose a place that you feel your date would like. Obviously you can screw all of the above if you know that your special company would die for the Mac n Cheese at the Red Lobster (I've never been there, thinking about it, but who knows) but no one ever goes with her 'cause her friends hate seafood (whatever). Or if she is a Disney freak who'll gladly be joined by a mob of middle school girls on their class trip to the newest installment of Frozen (will there be installments? I should do my research more thoroughly). Anything that makes someone happy will make for a good date, so it doesn't need to be featured in the ten pm newsflash to go well.

Don't give anything away. I am so into being taken out, my vision of a perfect plan is a plain "Be ready at seven" eg. the fact that I don't have to plan a thing. Call me unfeminist, but I have no problem at all with not knowing how it's about to go down - I trust him with knowing enough about my idea of fun to not make me jump off a building or something else that will ruin my hair. Also, it's so much more like a sweep-me-off-my-feet movie scene where the hero just grabs the heroine's hand and shows her the beauty of the city/the fun of being a streetcat (AristoCats is the joy of my existence)/basically a good time.

Have fun, too. I am aware that I mostly talk about the took-outs part of the deal, but you see: A date is, essentially, simply something to do while you're spending time with someone you like, and who wants to spend time with a cranky human who doesn't like what you're doing at all? Right, so the point is that whatever you're doing, both of you should enjoy. Mood is everything, ain't it so?

Love,

Rosy Smith

So I'm back home after a few days of vacación on the island of Mallorca, Spain, full of the usual motivational spirit that always overcomes me when I'm away. It just seems so easy to make the ultimate plans to score an internship when you're dreamily staring into the sunset and your biggest problem is to take a picture of the single sailboat swimming there without getting it too bright, you know?

Also, one should ask beforehand if the shrimps you're ordering are prepared in any way. Because I didn't and I got them the way God made them, complete with legs and tentacles and whatnot. It was nasty to look at (yes I am one of those people who refuse to eat things when they look too alive) but there were about ten giant sea animals on my plate and I couldn't possibly leave them all uneaten, so I grabbed fork and knife and hoped I wouldn't slide off and send pieces of fish organs all over the place. I managed, but it took quite a while of concentrated surgeon work. The bread table looked like a cemetery afterwards. But the meat was good, if that's still of any interest!

Coast town streets are narrow as hell. I would have freaked out if I had to drive there, but my dad confidently steered us through what felt like every single population of the island. I really like the beige/reddish stones (I don't know the special term for that kind of stone but enlighten me if you can) most of these towns are made of; stone buildings are always so much prettier than steel, aren't they? Ever picture would look great here if it weren't for the lines and lines of parked cars practically everywhere. How anyone ever parks out without crashing at least two other cars is a complete mystery to me.

Palmtrees and a seaview don't automatically mean that it's nice and hot outside. If you, like me, refuse to bring your coats because you simply won't accept that you'd need coats in Spain, you might end up wearing three layers and looking like you gained twenty pounds all day. If you, moreover, don't figure out how to use the heating system in the hotel room, you might also wear a fleece jacket and use another one as a second blanket at night.

But that's okay, because at home, there will be snow, so clearly this is the better end of the straw.

On the bright side, I actually got plans for Valentine's Day that don't involve an Anti-Valentine's Day party - look at me evolving and trying new things. Oh, and I gifted my questionable silver box and got no complaints, so mission accomplished, I'd say.

Ready to do more of that.

Love,

Rosy Smith

A useful tip for everyone who's ever typed "meaningful gifts boyfriend" into the google search bar: Any idea you get from that won't be meaningful anymore 'cause you didn't think of it on your own. However, *she said as she was happily noticing the beforementioned tab had finally loaded*, I have accepted a long time ago that I am just not that person who can read their loved one's beautiful mind. Except sometimes in conversation and stuff. But I guess that's not enough of a meaningful gift, either.

Is it smelling like catfood in here? Ew. So, I might have thought of something romantic that wouldn't make me wanna puke right away - but as I'm notoriously running late I'm not sure I'll find it in time while aimlessly roaming the city. Now it's the age-old battle between accepting the fair-but-expensive-sounding amazon price and the shipping fees or hoping to find the same thing as a bargain at some weird little store. The latter could go completely wrong and I'd have to pay even more/not find it at all, but the amazon thing is time-bound and I'd have to decide quickly and I hate to do that.

Okay, so I want to get him a tiny silver box with a quote from "The Little Prince" engraved, namely "Puisque c'est ma rose" meaning "Because it's my rose", referring to the little prince saying that his own rose is different from the other roses in the world because of the special bond they share together, and put a petal of the first rose he gave me in there. Does that make you sick? I'm kinda feeling it (while you're at it, please tell me why I talked like a Kardashian just now).

Just realized in striking horror that our one-year-anniversary is coming up - I'm not that terrified by the fact that it's been so long but rather by the fear of having to make yet another present up out of thin air. Do people give each other gifts for that occasion? Does only the guy do it? Can't we just go out to dinner, please?

No way am I gonna acknowledge Valentine's Day, that much I know.

Maybe I should hold back on the romantic, useless gifts until the anniversary, though, just in case. Gotta be prepared for him doing something cute. If he doesn't, I'll just keep it around until next Christmas.

So now I was finally getting ready to get serious and order the box on amazon for whatever occasion as well as the material part, a golf ball monogram thing, when I made the fatal mistake of reading its reviews. 6 out of 10 people are pretty mad about it, it seems. So either way everyone's doing it totally wrong or it's impossible to handle. Great! Now I can't buy it anymore with a clear conscious. I mean, I wouldn't use it but I'd feel bad about knowingly getting him junk (NOT intended). Also, about the waste of my money.

Let's see, now I'm only sure that I want to get that box, but probably not for his birthday, and probably not get that golf ball thingie at all, so that leaves me with, oh, yeah, the sweet gift of nothing for now.

That went astonishingly well.

Plan C: I'll hit the city every day starting on friday until I find something. Oh dear. 

UPDATE: It's five days later and I hit the city once and realized that I will only get more confused if I spend hours running from one random store to another contemplating whether he might like Pottery Barn sheets WHO AM I KIDDING nobody wants sheets for their birthday, do they? Now I can only hope amazon's delivery time will be accurate and no one of my family will make stupid comments about why I am getting a tiny silver box because I will definitely freak out if someone dares to question my choice of gift. I'm that bad at it.


Love,

Rosy Smith

I found a pair of berry colored velvet shoes that I find really pretty everytime I brush by them when I'm at the train station and go into my happy place (aka the shoe store) to keep warm. They are on sale in that very store and I got all excited and contemplated to purchase them as a gift to myself after I finished my last exam, but I couldn't be that spontaneous and now, I miss the enthusiasm I had for these boots . You know, sleepless nights, telephoning around, sending family members outside in the pouring rain in order to get them onto my feet. So I ask myself, should I be looking for something that makes my heart ache that way instead of just buying them for the hell of it? Help a girl out here.

I just researched vitamin b6 which I'm obviously lacking 'cause my hair is like, gone (I'm not balding but it's still bad) and supposedly the symptoms of a shortage only show up after four to five years, so I'm mad at my past self for not consuming enough fish and avocado (I love avocado but they go rotten so easily) when I was 15.

So I was at this party saturday night where all the guys wore bows and were serious about playing a grand poker tournament and since I love every reason to wear a twirling dress that's exactly the kind of place I like to be. Some guests were doing inappropriate things in the kitchen, though - I had to look twice until I realized that that one couple was not only fondling each other but also another guy and gal who weren't each other. Um. I was hissing "Look at that! Are they doing what I think they're doing?" at my friend who really didn't want to look at that, because I was so freaked out by how no one else was freaking out - maybe it's a reoccuring situation among that crowd. A lot of orchestra musicians, and someone told me they were often playing each other's instruments, you know, so maybe I just got to see an open rehearsal.

Advice for guys: Play poker. It can look pretty hot, sitting back all concentrated and then shuffling the cards and leaning forward, throwing the chips onto the table and announcing stuff like "Check" in that matter-of-factly voice. Also, if you gift me a red rose while getting down on one knee, I will be likely to get very fond of you. I'll also be losing the game pretty fast (I had bad hands all the time! I swear!) but sit back smiling because well, I got given flowers that match my dress while the others might have gotten some plastic chips.


Even though the game stretched out until 6am (okay, so after about eight hours, it can get a bit boring to watch, no matter how hot a guy), everybody was still chipper when they left - the swinging couple (oh gosh I'm so blowing this out of proportion here) was practicing some interesting contemporary moves in the middle of the room, for instance. After everyone left, me and him sunk onto the couch and took in the situation. It was a balanced mess: Wine was spilled, chips (plastic and edible alike) were scattered everywhere, glasses and bottles in multiple states of emptiness were left on all horizontal surfaces, but at least no one puked or lost other body fluids in weird places, neither was anything broken. "That's what it should look like after a good bash", I told him. Of course, I wasn't the one of us who had to clean up the next day, but it was supposed to be a compliment, I swear.

Hope you had a fabulous party, too.

Love,

Rosy Smith