Feminine and Floral

Outfit Details:

- Blouse: Forever21

- Skirt: H&M

- Boots: Forever21

- Tights: Target

- Socks: Kohls

- Earrings: Anthropologie

Chambray Tribal

Outfit Details:

Chambray Top: Old Navy

Undershirt: Forever21

Pants: Forever21

Ballet Flats: Forever21

Earrings: H&M

So Fellini chewed through my computer cord and thus I am laptopless until August. Bear with me until then as I will be blogging using my phone for the time being.

You can also follow me on instagram: wonderlust1127

Starting Over Yet Again

Hello? Is anyone there? Oh hey! I didn't see you there. I hope you weren't waiting too long. I've only been gone for about a year. I decided to use my travel/random thoughts Blogger as the platform for my fashion blog. I considered resuscitating Just Call Me Joan, but it's riddled with posts about my ex and I figured this would be much cleaner. It's funny how much can happen in a year. I was such a different person back then. ANYWHO let's ease our way back into this fashion blog. Long story short, one year ago I was a different person with a different (Allow me to repeat the word 'different' once again) sense of style and much less self-confidence.

These days, I'm incredibly more blunt and daring and this attitude is reflected in my current sense of style. I may still be a basket case, but now I embrace it. I'm too tired from working multiple jobs and raising a puppy (Fellini makes a cameo below) to write anything too quippy in this first-ish post. The photo quality and composition is poor, too, but I promise that both will get better.

You'll also see that silver infinity ring in every post. I bought it for myself last August when I was being put through the ringer of anxiety and depression. That ring is a promise to myself to take care of my mental health before anything or anyone else (except Fellini of course).

Outfit Details:

- Lace Top: Forever21

- TieDye Dress: Forever21

- Blue Tank Top: Forever21

- Leggings: Old Navy

- Boots: Target

- Earrings: Anthropologie

- Silver Ring: Kohls

- Brass Ring: Revival (Thrift store in Iowa City)

- Nail Polish: Pure Ice 

Summer Reading

This summer has been the most relaxing one I can remember having since before I started playing softball over a decade ago. While Boyfriend is at work during the day, I've been spending my time reading either in one of the various coffeeshops in town or at home. So far, I've been through four excellent books and have many more on my bookcase. Here they are:

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

"Jonathan Franzen's third novel, The Corrections, is a great work of art and a grandly entertaining overture to our new century: a bold, comic, tragic, deeply moving family drama that stretches from the Midwest at mid-century to Wall Street and Eastern Europe in the age of greed and globalism. Franzen brings an old-time America of freight trains and civic duty, of Cub Scouts and Christmas cookies and sexual inhibitions, into brilliant collision with the modern absurdities of brain science, home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and the anti-gravity New Economy. With The Corrections, Franzen emerges as one of our premier interpreters of American society and the American soul."

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

"From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage--and a life, in good times and bad--that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child."

Strokes of Genius: Federer, Nadal, and the Greatest Match Ever Played by Jon Wertheim

"In the 2008 Wimbledon men’s final, Centre Court was a stage set worthy of Shakespearean drama. Five-time champion Roger Federer was on track to take his rightful place as the most dominant player in the history of the game. He just needed to cling to his trajectory. So in the last few moments of daylight, Centre Court witnessed a coronation. Only it wasn’t a crowning for the Swiss heir apparent but for a swashbuckling Spaniard. Twenty-two-year-old Rafael Nadal prevailed, in five sets, in what was, according to the author, "essentially a four-hour, forty-eight-minute infomercial for everything that is right about tennis—a festival of skill, accuracy, grace, strength, speed, endurance, determination, and sportsmanship." It was also the encapsulation of a fascinating rivalry, hard fought and of historic proportions.

In the tradition of John McPhee’s classic Levels of the Game, Strokes of Genius deconstructs this defining moment in sport, using that match as the backbone of a provocative, thoughtful, and entertaining look at the science, art, psychology, technology, strategy, and personality that go into a single tennis match.With vivid, intimate detail, Wertheim re-creates this epic battle in a book that is both a study of the mechanics and art of the game and the portrait of a rivalry as dramatic as that of Ali–Frazier, Palmer–Nicklaus, and McEnroe–Borg."

You've been on my mind, I grow fonder every day
Lose myself in time just thinking of your face
God only knows why it's taken me so long to let my doubts go
You're the only one that I want

I don't know why I'm scared, I've been here before
Every feeling, every word, I've imagined it all
You'll never know if you never try
To forget your past and simply be mine

I dare you to let me be your, your one and only
Promise I'm worthy to hold in your arms
So come on and give me a chance
To prove I am the one who can walk that mile
Until the end starts

If I've been on your mind, you hang on every word I say
Lose yourself in time at the mention of my name
Will I ever know how it feels to hold you close
And have you tell me whichever road I choose you'll go

I don't know why I'm scared 'cause I've been here before
Every feeling, every word, I've imagined it all
You'll never know if you never try
To forget your past and simply be mine

I dare you to let me be your, your one and only
Promise I'm worthy to hold in your arms
So come on and give me a chance
To prove I am the one who can walk that mile
Until the end starts

I know it ain't easy giving up your heart
I know it ain't easy giving up your heart

Nobody's perfect
(I know it ain't easy giving up your heart)
Trust me, I've learned it
Nobody's perfect
(I know it ain't easy giving up your heart)
Trust me, I've learned it

Nobody's perfect
(I know it ain't easy giving up your heart)
Trust me, I've learned it
Nobody's perfect
(I know it ain't easy giving up your heart)
Trust me I've learned it

So I dare you to let me be your, your one and only
I promise I'm worthy to hold in your arms
So come on and give me a chance
To prove I am the one who can walk that mile
Until the end starts

Come on and give me a chance
To prove I am the one who can walk that mile
Until the end starts

“The Heart is the Capital of the Mind— 

The Mind is a single State— 

The Heart and the Mind together make 

A single Continent— 

One—is the Population— 

Numerous enough— 

This ecstatic Nation 

Seek—it is Yourself.”

 - Emily Dickinson

"I understand feeling as small and as insignificant as humanly possible. And how it can actually ache in places you didn't know you had inside you. And it doesn't matter how many new haircuts you get, or gyms you join, or how many glasses of chardonnay you drink with your girlfriends... you still go to bed every night going over every detail and wonder what you did wrong or how you could have misunderstood. And how in the hell for that brief moment you could think that you were that happy. And sometimes you can even convince yourself that he'll see the light and show up at your door. And after all that, however long all that may be, you'll go somewhere new. And you'll meet people who make you feel worthwhile again. And little pieces of your soul will finally come back. And all that fuzzy stuff, those years of your life that you wasted, that will eventually begin to fade." - The Holiday