I hope you’ve enjoyed following along my west coast road trip these past few weeks, whether it was via Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube, or the blog. I think this is the most thorough coverage I’ve done for any of my trips. I posted twice a day every day on Instagram. I was as active on Snapchat as ever. I created a vlog for each city. I recapped each city in snapshots on my blog, and then went into it day-by-day in individual blog posts. I wanted to take this moment to do a recap because there’s a lot of content to digest, and there’s still more thoughts I have about everything.
A curated life, Kat Lee
Y’all know my love/hate relationship with Instagram and the curated life. Kat is here on the blog today to share some thoughts!
I don’t know many of the people reading this right now, but I care a lot about what you think of me. And I mean I care a lot about what you think of me. And I know you’re thinking: “Kat, everyone cares a lot about what others think of them, get over yourself.” And for a long time, I thought that too, that I was exaggerating the ways in which the opinions of others shaped the ways in which I viewed myself, that is, until this past fall semester. As part of an education course I was taking, we were required to take a personality test to determine the five foremost traits of our personalities (liberal arts education amiright?). Every trait of the twenty-five or so students in the class appeared more than once. Except one. That one being mine, which revealed that I care a shit ton about what others think of me.
How to Fall in Love with Anyone by Mandy Len Catron
– I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review. –
To be published by Simon & Schuster on 27 Jun 2017
Goodreads | Amazon
An insightful, charming, and absolutely fascinating memoir from the author of the popular New York Times essay, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This,” (one of the top five most popular New York Times pieces of 2015) explores the romantic myths we create and explains how they limit our ability to achieve and sustain intimacy.
What really makes love last? Does love ever work the way we say it does in movies and books and Facebook posts? Or does obsessing over those love stories hurt our real-life relationships? When her parents divorced after a twenty-eight year marriage and her own ten-year relationship ended, those were the questions that Mandy Len Catron wanted to answer.
In a series of candid, vulnerable, and wise essays that takes a closer look at what it means to love someone, be loved, and how we present our love to the world, Catron deconstructs her own personal canon of love stories. She delves all the way back to 1944, when her grandparents first met in a coal mining town in Appalachia, to her own dating life as a professor in Vancouver, drawing insights from her fascinating research into the universal psychology, biology, history, and literature of love. She uses biologists’ research into dopamine triggers to ask whether the need to love is an innate human drive. She uses literary theory to show why we prefer certain kinds of love stories. She urges us to question the unwritten scripts we follow in relationships and looks into where those scripts come from in the first place. And she tells the story of how she decided to test a psychology experiment that she’d read about—where the goal was to create intimacy between strangers using a list of thirty-six questions—and ended up in the surreal situation of having millions of people following her brand-new relationship.
In How to Fall in Love with Anyone Catron flips the script on love and offers a deeply personal, and universal, investigation.
4 days in Portland // summer break 2017
The final city of our west coast road trip! We spent the first two days at the beach and the last two days in the city. I Skyped Kristy whilst in Portland, and she was like, it feels like everyone is visiting Portland! What’s happening there? I didn’t realise that Portland was a hot destination! We had just chosen it because Kat’s parents had a beach house for us to stay at. But I’m not surprised that Portland is a hot destination; the nature scenes are gorgeous!
How I edit my photos
I’m really cautious about writing “how to” blog posts, because I never know what I’m doing so I don’t feel like I’m in any position to tell anyone how to do anything, but a “how to” on how I edit my photos has been requested, and I’ve noticed some of you ask questions about it in the comments as well. I don’t know how helpful this will be, but I hope you get something out of it!
3 days in Seattle // summer break 2017
My family and I visit Seattle almost annually, but this was the first time I had gone with just friends! Places I’ve hit up in the past were Snow Lake, Kerry Park, Cederberg Tea House, Cafe Cesura, Drive Thru Boba, Amore’ Coffee, Chihuly Garden and Glass, and Paramount Theatre for George Ezra’s concert. If you haven’t had enough of Seattle by the time you get through this blog post, feel free to click through those links!