Thing of the Week: LJ's United Bamboo Fishtail Parka, Juliana Hatfield & Pizza by the Sea

LJ'S THING OF THE WEEK: My United Bamboo Fishtail Parka

I found out that United Bamboo fishtail parkas existed either three or four years ago and quickly became obsessed with needing to own one, but tragically had to hold off because truth be told they are expensive fucking parkas and I spent my entire twenties living below the poverty line until last April. This October, I was having that gross and depressing internal dialogue you have to have with yourself every October where you're like, "Okay, Laura [or whatever your name is], winter is coming, I know you can't believe it but, like death, it's actually going to happen, so what are you going to do about boots this year, what are you going to do about mittens," and realized I had unknowingly accomplished my lifelong dream of becoming rich enough to buy myself a United Bamboo fishtail parka. I was just trying to accomplish some other goals the whole time, and then it turned out that I'd killed a couple birds with one stone. That stone, man. It just ricocheted off the one bird's beak, straight into the other one's noggin. 

So, that's nice. Nice use of noggin. I bought myself a United Bamboo fishtail parka over the Internet and it arrived and it was GIGANTIC. I ended up having to send it back to the United Bamboo people and everything about that process was incredibly stressful for me. I wrote on a piece of paper that I'd like to exchange the medium for the extra-small (they're really weirdly-sized jackets) and enclosed it in the box with the coat I sent back, which made me anxious. I was like "Do words written on paper even count as a legitimate transaction in this day and age? Do I need to include a microchip?" and it was raining that day, it was literally Halloween. A few days later they sent me the XS and I had to pay an insane COD, I was at my wit's end at that point but then I tried it on and it fit perfectly and was so adorbs and then I forgot all about the money and felt vindicated. 

The picture of me up there kind of undersells how awesome my coat is because I'm sitting down and truthfully it could be any bland old coat. But it's my day off and I don't feel like participating in a photoshoot with myself, so this is what you get. There's white wine in it, and it shows off the Betty Draper-ness of my kitchen. And here is a model doing a better job of modelling my coat than I did: 

See, it's so cute, right? It's got a really nice A-line shape and the hood stretches out so far so it's like your head is living inside a cave. It's one of the coziest things I've ever owned, according to my cute boyfriend it makes me look like I'm "on the cutting edge of fashion!" and it breaks my heart to think about how by the time March comes I'm going to hate it as much as I've hated every winter coat I've ever had by the time March comes, when you've worn the same fucking jacket every day for the past hundred days, when it ceases to be a coat and instead becomes a damp, crappy emblem of the living fucking hell you've just endured. 

LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Watching Juliana Hatfield Sing "Out There," Pizza by the Sea

On Tuesday night I went to see Minor Alps, starring Juliana Hatfield. Minor Alps is her new band with Matthew Caws from Nada Surf, and their album Get There is an ideal album to fall in love with in November: it's very gray and sweet and cozily sad-making. After seeing them I've built up some deep affection for Matthew Caws, but at the end of the day: Juliana. I'm in it for Juliana. Juliana is all.
      For a good part of the show they went back and forth, playing their solo songs, and at some point Juliana sang "Out There" by Blake Babies. I'd been gunning for "Out There" and it happened and I saw it, but I really and truly have no memory of it. All I can figure is that the "Out There" video is so blue and green and yellow and white, and at the show Juliana was wearing a brown dress, and maybe the color confusion sent me into a fugue-like state. Yeah that's definitely what happened. They also sang "When Will I Be Loved" and I thought of the last scene in Cocktail and a nice warm liquid gold enveloped my heart and will stay there forever.



My other thing is this pizza place in Santa Monica called Wildflour Pizza. Look how cute and bright yellow it is. Last Saturday afternoon I went to Santa Monica because I like to drink hot coffee by the beach when I'm writing, and then after the writing/coffee-drinking I walked down Main Street and decided to give ol' Wildflour Pizza a whirl. I bought an angelically filled-to-the-brim $3 plastic cup of red wine and a piece of margherita pizza and sat at a table near a cute blonde family: a mom and a dad and a boy who was probably like four and a girl who was probably like six. They were talking about how eating vegetables is important and the girl asked, "What if you ate more vegetables than a hundred?" And the dad was all, "A hundred what? A hundred pounds? A hundred ounces?", which I found rather annoying and obtuse. But it was cool 'cause the daughter just blasé-ly ignored him and said, "You'd get very strong and big!", and she seemed pretty stoked on the prospect of that. She was so wise and chill. They were playing The Police on the oldies station and my pizza was perfectly olive-oily and dense and, like, soft, and I took a Post-It from my bag and wrote a couple sentences about a girl eating pizza with her dad and her dad getting all moony and cutely depressed about The Police being played on the oldies station. I'm very excited to write more sentences about all of that.