If We Don't Go Here, Where Will We Go?

in Ijamsville, MD at our dear dear family friends' house...

the pond where i learned to fish
(kenar v-neck maxi dress - $39.99 at tj maxx!)

back and to the left -
the plot of land where i found my x-mas trees for years...

horses (a big passion)

k's beautiful zebra painting...
can you believe she learned how to paint only a couple of years ago?

Dear Olds

my friday night

maryland pride
dear olds (mostly)

Balmain Again and Again

[background] Balmain is a French fashion house founded by Pierre Balmain. In 1990s, the house was lead by Oscar de la Renta. Those two made Balmain famous for its classic and luxurious designs. Right now it is lead by Christopher Decarnin, whose vision for the house is modern & edgy - tres rock n roll chic.

Personally, I think that just because we're in a recession, it doesn't have to mean all our clothes/shoes/access. have to become severe & austere. If the world is going to fall apart...we might as well all go out looking fabulous. On to the shoes.

Balmain's Spring 2009 Covet-worthy Heels on Jen Connelly's fab legs

By now, every girl who loves fashion and isn't living under a - fairly big - rock in central middle of nowheresville has heard of Balmain's studded sparkly heels, and their exorbitant (maybe?) price. I love the shoe. LOVE. Sexy, rock n roll, delicious. Definitely a "get noticed" by the ladies shoe. But - I feel it's only something you can wear once. Like a really great surprise or listening to "Poker Face" again and again, the appeal will be diminished if you keep wearing it, right?

a copycat pair at the DSW in my hometown

So that's the closest I'll get to the Balmains - but take a gander at all these other *inspirations*...

Rumi @ Fashion Toast wearing Aldos
A pair from Zara at Electric Feel
Budget Balmains (ick) at ShoeWaWa
The Look for Less at FabSugar

Frederick Towne

Been home since Friday night...loads has been going on. So much, in fact, that it's been hard to keep up. Every time I come back, everything changes. Is that both comforting and threatening?

the new: frederick cellars

the old: a strawberry lemonade martini and a peartini at tasting room

Mini-Break

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Taking the weekend to go back to my quaint Southern town to play with old friends. These friends are very different, but much loved and treasured. It's almost like I lived a different life when I knew them, and even though we're running off at 100 mph in every direction, I love & cherish the times when we get to play together.

Til I post the photos...

Catie Dishes Flashback: Sixteen Again

So, I did something today that people only do when they are bored. I googled myself. Yes, google. I usually google "Catie Nastovici" but this time I used my (full) first name and...the findings were sublime. I discovered the web page I had designed for my then-boyfriend's spoof (maybe? It seems logical) rap group (funny, because he was probably the biggest Reel Big Fish fan ever) "7 Thugs and a Minivan". I won't post the website here (embarassing) but the photos are a precious time capsule of my sixteen year old self...I thought I knew everything...I now know I know nothing.

Sixteen-year-old me with then-boyfriend Jason
I believe I had pink hair and braces (that's why there's no smile on my part) at this point.

Friend Kedre with then-boyfriend Nick
On this night, we were running around the new Best Buy in our town (Frederick, MD)
while I took black and white pictures for my photography class.
Brian and Chris...probably ogling a DVD

Brian, Chris and Jason at Chris's house...I remember spending a lot of time in this dwelling

I think at some point I'm going to retroactively post pictures of myself in high school or post stories of myself in college...I need to find a scanner!

A Thought: One of these is not like the other...

Something reminiscent of Frederick, though transplanted to South Carolina.

More line dancing in Greenville, SC

Something reminiscent of living in Syracuse, though transplanted to New York City.

Insomnia Cookies on W. 4th...not Marshall St.

Home?

I’m laying in my bed. “my” bed. the one i slept in for six years. And not even a bed, but an overpriced silver-frame futon.

I arrived in Baltimore’s Penn Station this morning at 9:50 am after a 2hr train ride from - you guessed it - New York’s Penn Station. original.

Another leg of the journey takes me to oft-traveled highway 695 W to Frederick. It’s a lazy drive with hardly any cars on the road for distraction. A brownish grey Maserati GranTurismo 4.2 passes us - and it seems my two lives have just crossed over.

No rest for the weary - by 11:40 I’m sitting outside my restaurant with some fresh mozzarella sticks and - my favorite - cherry italian soda. Downtown Frederick is sleepy and cheerful and I’m just doing my part to help customers feel at home. Strike up a conversation about coffee mugs. Get more pages read of “The Geography of Love”. Enjoy the sunshine. Today’s the busiest day of the weekend - the day I think I feel like I never left New York. Hustling to a meeting with a financial advisor (please, tell me how i can retire by 40), doctor’s meeting (bad news), eventually, a much - needed facial at The Strand. The sun (84 degrees) is making everything too hot; like summer surprised me when I was looking for more hot cocoa and warm soup.

The clocktower in Baker Park, Frederick, MD

Even though I’ve made the switch from Southern Belle to Uptown Girl, it still feels like a part of me is irrefutably linked to this place. History was made here, even if it was so inconsequential that it didn’t affect anyone outside a 5 mile radius. Life was much smaller when 21701 and (301) were my only history - before I moved to 13210 and (315) or 10031 and (212). My first boyfriend, proms, endless school trips and “please stand for the pledge” and Field Day.

I really miss Field Day.

How often do people end up in their hometown for the rest of their lives. Close by, maybe, but not “in it”. Have your kids go to your schools, become the Mayor? A line gets crossed from “I gotta get the hell outta this town” and finding that you never left. I never wanted to stay in Maryland and I trade jokes with a colleague (originally from Upper Marlboro) about the “Fredneck” pride I have even now. I love County Fairs, In The Streets, Velvet Lounge, Pit Crew, La Paz chips and salsa, Mudd Puddle, Denny’s, Frederick Coffee Company, C. Burr Artz PL, The Bridge, Wonder Book and Video, Wa Wa’s, Sheetz MTO sammies, The Mall, Barber’s Darkroom, My Darkroom, Bob Evan’s (Rt. 40), Belles’, Teal Lane, and all the rest of my haunts (21+ - Firestone’s & Old Towne…never fails).

But I’m wondering, as I’m walking around the room I spent the past ten years living in, how do you know when your “room” isn’t yours anymore. When you can’t recognize anything. When it’s so stripped bare to create your new life that it’s rotten and empty…and you don’t even want to set foot inside it? I was 15 and had a vision. I was so over the pastel pink walls and tidy preppie furniture. I wasted no time signing up then-boyfriend (now married) to help me paint the room navy blue. It took a gallon of paint before I realized 1 gallon does not = one wall.

I let my friends write witty quotes in Sharpie all over my closet doors and I put up “Evil Dead” and “Trainspotting” posters on my walls to show off how cool I thought I was. I burned mixes of Dashboard Confessional, The Get Up Kids and Reel Big Fish for the boyfriend and chain-smoked cigarettes on the roof outside my window when my parents fell asleep in the room next door. I stayed up late chatting on the phone until said parents, weary from my contradictory combativeness and ambivalence, half-heartedly told me to shut up. And, let’s not forget my 15th birthday, where as my mom was singing me happy birthday with a homemade ladyfinger cake, a combustible mix of cliques were present - goth kids, druggies, photo nerds, skaters, Cool Juniors. I made home movies about interviewing famous, albeit, invisible, diplomats and Rwandan warlords (fancying myself a Eastern European Christiane Amanpour, I think). I set up a volleyball court in my backyard for my graduation party but ended up playing spades and drinking non-alcoholic beer. Spades was a theme that summer, but we quickly realized non-alcoholic beer was not.

Leaving my old room for a dorm wasn’t a change in scenery. There, I could always sneak out, sneak food, sneak boys and phone calls, and still keep a part of myself hidden and mysterious. My sophomore year in college, I came home to find the reliable silver futon had found new roommates: whitewashed desk/bureau set from the early 90s and a great big plasma TV. It all fit wonderfully, but now it’s empty. The shelves hold books I don’t want to bring to my apartment, scratched CDs I feel too nostalgic about to throw out, old yearbooks and high school photos, endless cables I have no use for, piles and piles of journals, VHS tapes (both commercial and homemade), discarded negatives and Mini-DV cassettes. The scrapyard of my life is in this room. Projects started but never completed-unopened acrylic paints from my “painter” phase. Gaelic and Russian language books and cassettes - though I did succeed in learning conversational Gaelic at one point…but the possibility of actually going to Ireland was depressing, and that was abandoned as well.

I’m in no hurry to clear it out. Where will it all go - all the things I simultaneous want to hoard and toss? My life, being packed into boxes, but also boxes I don’t want?

Until I went away to Syracuse, I hadn’t slept on a proper bed for four years. Bringing the Biologist (the going Boyfriend pseudonym) to F is met with groans and forgetting to pack ibuprofen (for backs made sore by aforementioned futon).

But we’re a lot more alike than he cares to think. Visiting Syracuse, we sleep, once more, on a futon.