Take notes, people.
“Project Runway” host Heidi Klum is known for having some of the most incredible Halloween costumes, but this year’s metamorphosis is second to none. On Friday, Klum took on New York in an intricate butterfly costume complete with wings. She captured her transformation in an Instagram video that is seriously mesmerizing, so make sure to clear your schedule.
Here’s the finished product:
And that’s how you become a social butterfly, ladies and gentlemen.
The marriage is over. You could fill all the black holes in the universe with the time you’ve spent wondering how you got to this place. You certainly never wanted to be a member of this divorce club and you’re hurt and angry. Your spouse wanted out and you didn’t. And, despite all the pleading, negotiating, and reasoning, you couldn’t change your spouse’s mind.
Some time has passed and now you’re gently being told to move on. People make it sound so simple as if it’s like running to Whole Foods for a gallon of milk. But you know they’re right. Especially if your anger is taking that vinegar-y turn toward bitterness. You may have found the wherewithal to start a new exercise program or join the PTA (and I commend you!) but, despite your external life looking relatively functional, internally and emotionally you’re still a hot mess.
Divorce is a huge transition and that’s why the TRANSIT Technique (Talk, Realize, Acknowledge, Nurture, Salvage, Identify, Toss) offers seven ways you can shift away from what is keeping you from your healing journey — and move you toward a stronger, healthier you.
1. Talk a new game. You’ve told the story of your divorce so many times, you could recite it in your sleep. But what if there’s another story to tell about the marriage and the divorce? One that ends with your empowerment? I have no doubt your spouse was a callous cad who took advantage of your trust and kindness. But there’s no growth without self-reflection. This isn’t about self-blame but, rather, clarity. And that clarity is invaluable in opening up possibilities for positive change and healthier relationships.
2. Realize your ex did you a favor. Think about it: Did you really want to spend your life married to someone who didn’t want to be married to you or no longer loved you? Um, heck no. What kind of satisfying life would that be? Being married for the sake of being married is Nowheresville — and no way to live.
3. Acknowledge your ex’s new life isn’t perfect. So stop assuming that it is. Whether he or she has repartnered or won the lottery, it doesn’t matter. Life is full of struggles that aren’t circumventing your ex.
4. Nurture your kids. No matter their age, kids need a healthy divorce legacy. “My mom really fell apart after the divorce. In fact, she never really recovered. It was hard to watch her sink into that abyss.” Does that sound like the way you want your kids to remember your divorce experience? Surely not. If you’re having trouble getting your post-divorce life together for you, do it for your kids. Give your kids a divorce legacy that will leave them admiring you for your strength and resilience.
5. Salvage your dreams. We all make compromises in marriage. But when those compromises are out of whack with our hopes and visions, things get wonky. Think about the compromises you made and whether they were in keeping with your life’s ambitions or holding you back. This is a perfect juncture in life to revisit your dreams and passions and make them a reality.
6. Identify your false notions. Your divorced neighbor who just scaled Mount Everest? Your divorced coworker who just wrote a novel? They just seem so, well, good. It may not appear so, but folks who seem happier after divorce are no different from you. You can’t imagine taking your divorce in stride the way they have. Hold up. Do you think they just coasted effortlessly and painlessly through their divorces? Well, they didn’t. No one does. They’ve just made the healthy decision not to allow their divorces to be the focal point of their lives — or prevent them from moving forward.
7. Toss out the old. That BFF you thought would support you through thick and thin? Well, she left the building when your marriage hit the skids. That neighborhood your spouse insisted you live in despite the high crime rate? You’re free to go. If there’s any beauty in divorce, it’s the opportunity it affords you to reassess and restructure. And sometimes, as with the BFF, this restructuring can be challenging. Take this time to let the tide go out and see what’s left on the beach. The things and people that stick are the ones worth your continued focus — but it’s time you say a healthy, self-loving goodbye to what no longer serves you well.
Kim Kardashian loves her Halloween costumes, and she did not disappoint this year. After tweeting on Thursday that she had four costumes to choose from, the reality star revealed two of the four costumes on her Instagram account Friday.
First, the 34-year-old posted a photo of her spooky skeleton costume:
Kardashian then posted a photo of her second costume, this time dressed as Anna Wintour. It’s no surprise that Kardashian went as the Vogue editor this year, considering she and husband Kanye West landed the coveted Vogue cover back in March. Kardashian totally pulled off Wintour’s signature look, rocking a bob wig and shades. She also had the help of North West, dressed as editor Andre Leon Talley, Kardashian’s friend Joyce Bonelli as Vogue’s creative director Grace Coddington, and Bonelli’s son as Karl Lagerfeld.
Imagine if Ebola scientists worked the way the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) do. If you didn’t look like you had Ebola, if you didn’t admit to having Ebola, if you weren’t in the same room with the doctors when they were talking about Ebola – GOOD NEWS – you don’t have Ebola.
Well, good news until you start hemorrhaging out of places most of us prefer to keep water tight – and really bad news for the people who live around you, especially the children who are gravely impacted by your condition.
Let me put it another way. I’m pretty sure HUD administrators don’t tell the riddle, “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound.” Because they don’t think it’s a riddle. At HUD, it’s protocol. If nobody’s there to hear it, it – of course – didn’t make a sound, and furthermore it probably didn’t fall at all. Frankly, the way HUD counts homelessness; they’d be relatively certain there wasn’t a tree to begin with and likely no forest either.
The latest report released by the agency says that homelessness is down 2 percent, but what it doesn’t say is that shelters can’t call a person homeless anymore unless the person can prove they were homeless. That’s a tall order, proving a negative.
It also doesn’t tell you that savvy homeless folks don’t admit to being homeless. Why would they? There’s nothing to gain from it. There’s no available government assistance for housing. The Section 8 Housing Voucher Program is what the experts call “oversubscribed.” That means there are huge waiting lists, many folks will wait years to get a voucher. Many parents fear losing their children if they go to a shelter or admit to authorities that they are living in their car, storage shed, or the woods.
This past week the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth (NAEHCY) met in Kansas City, Missouri. Get this, according to HUD’s numbers, there were more people attending the conference to help homeless kids learn, then there are homeless people in Kansas City!
According to the U.S. Department of Education, in 2011 there were 569 homeless school children In Kansas City, and yeah, that number beats the number of attendees at the conference. Furthermore, if you asked anyone of those homeless liaisons if their numbers have gone down since 2011, they’d give you an unequivocal “no.” And the Dept. of Ed. would back them up.
See, these guys at the Dept. of Ed., they’re more like the Ebola scientists we hope are working on the problem. They sift through the system, testing for homelessness, and treating those afflicted. They don’t use limiting definitions or expect people to prove a negative. Consequently they get a much more accurate picture of the problem. And still they fall short. Because many parents live in fear of being judged unfit because they are too poor to provide a home for themselves and their children.
And while the folks at NAEHCY are all about the kids, the problem doesn’t stop there.
Last week, before my colleague, Diane Nilan, and I landed at the NAECHY conference we were journeying around the country assessing the plight of the economically disadvantaged. We do this fairly regularly and attach cute names to our travels in order to grab the attention of the local media. We think with media attention we can remind folks that there is a forest, it has trees, they do fall, and – in fact – the sound is deafening.
So during our “Homeless on the Range” tour of the northern mountain states we stopped in Williston, North Dakota. You can’t throw a rocky mountain oyster in Williston without hitting an oil well, a fracking rig, or a desperate person from away, hoping to find a job.
In the local Wal*Mart butter can go for $5 a pound and a studio apartment’s $1100 a month. The signs advertising a place to park your camper – not a mobile home lot – offered the 30 x 10 foot spaces for $800 a month.
And what about the people who can’t afford these prices? There’s no shelter in Williston to surrender their numbers to HUD. Some concerned citizens have started renting 10 beds for homeless men from one of the “man camps” started by the fuel companies. These fuel industry folks smartly provide housing to many of their workers, because as Kristin Oxendahl, Community Engagement Director for the Williston Salvation Army, put it, “most folks don’t make the six figures necessary to rent a place around here.”
And have the homeless numbers gone down? According to Oxendahl, they’ve quadrupled. But you don’t have to take her word for it. In 2013 The Salvation Army of Williston’s budget for hotels for the homeless was $1,477.50. This year? $14,006.45. That’s not a 2% decrease that’s a 10 fold increase.
And the number that’s most staggering? The Williston Salvation Army buys bus tickets for folks who fled their hometowns in a desperate search for work, but found they lack the skillsets necessary to work on an oil patch. This year, during this 21st century “Grapes of Wrath” style desperation migration, the Williston Salvation Army has spent $17,983.55 on bus tickets home – assuming there is a home when the evictees get there.
Worst of all, Oxendahl says, “It can really hurt the elderly. A lot of senior citizens have been living in trailer parks and their lot rent has skyrocketed. A lot are doubling-up or leaving town. They’re moving away from their support community to find a place they can afford to live.”
Not counting homeless people unless they can prove it. Not counting those afraid to be counted. Not counting the people who are crammed in, three families to an apartment. Not counting the elderly who are forced to abandon their independence and seek refuge away from their life long communities. Shame on you HUD, if you were Ebola scientists, 10 percent of us would be bleeding from our eyes by now.
My kids are eating all of their Halloween candy right now.
Don’t worry — it’s not like that.
I’ll tell you how it goes down around here for Halloween in a minute. But first, I need to give you a little bit of history.
I hate Halloween. I’ve always hated Halloween. Now that I have kids who get amped about getting dressed up, I’d probably demote the word “hate” to “indifferent” — I’m indifferent about Halloween.
I’m not the mother who even considers making costumes. Until this year, I instructed my kids to go up to the dress-up bin and pick something out 20 minutes before it was time to head out onto the streets to mine for treats. They were completely fine with this arrangement. This year though, at six- and four-years-old, the jig was up; they had opinions — they had costume needs. And so the Amazon Prime Angels delivered Elsa and an Astronaut to our door (though, it should be noted, not on the same day which created very, very big feelings for the kid who needed to wait a day. Thanks a lot, Amazon.)
Growing up, I think I was a punk every year — I don’t remember ever wanting to be anything else. What I do remember is getting all gussied up, looking in the mirror, and deciding that I looked absolutely absurd, and being certain that every person who saw me like that would laugh in my face. And so I usually bailed on trick-or-treating completely.
But having kids forces you out of your own story and into their largely innocent, joy-filled stories, and so I’ve hopped aboard the Halloween train. By “hopped aboard the Halloween train” I simply mean that I happily go trick-or-treating with them. I still refuse to dress in costumes (this includes “theme dressing” — I avoid green and red on Christmas, and am unwilling to don pink or red on Valentine’s Day. I’ve decided this is okay if for no other reason than I want to maintain a certain level of rebelliousness at all times.)
As we all know, however, trick-or-treating produces a Candy Situation. My kids aren’t strangers to treats, but the onslaught of Kid Crack was overwhelming to me the first year we went out collecting loot.
So somehow, in a moment of divine grace, I thought up The Great Switcheroo. It works like this: the kids can eat candy as they trick-or-treat. It seems ridiculous — because I have inordinately strong-willed offspring — to try and manage that. So they gather candy, eat some of it, and squeal like little balls of happy as we frolic down the sidewalks. The next morning, they dump their candy out and pick five pieces that they want to keep. They are in charge of those five pieces, and get to decide when they eat them. Which means immediately, obviously. The rest of the candy gets stashed away for Tim and I to scour through late at night while watching The Blacklist or Transparent — again, obviously. In exchange for their candy, each kid gets a dollar — one whole dollar — to spend at the dollar store. They think this arrangement is incredible. Their very own dollar! To buy anything they want! We go to the dollar store where everything actually costs a dollar, which means they have roughly 33,000 items from which to choose. We go the day after Halloween, and I usually carve out at least an hour — it’s very hard to decide how to spend a dollar when you’re small-ish. I swear to God, they get as excited about The Great Switcheroo as they do about trick-or-treating.
You’re welcome.
Now that I’ve told you my clever secrets, I’m going to go get dressed and load my sugared-up kids into the car, a dollar in each of their hands.
You can find the original post here, where it contains copious amounts of (well-placed) swearing. You can also get new posts from Emily (which, similarly, often contain well-placed swearing) in your inbox by clicking here.
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This week on “The Simpsons,” Lisa Simpson (friend of planet Earth!) recruits Assemblywoman Maxine Lombard (voiced by activist/actress Jane Fonda!) to thwart Mr. Burns’ fracking racket. Not surprisingly, passions run hot on this divisive issue. But as Burns and Lombard discover, so does romance.
A “Made In China” sticker on my new Cadillac SRX? It’s more likely than you think, or at least it will be in 2015 when the Shanghai-GM joint venture company begins manufacturing the popular luxury mid-size crossover SUV in a brand new factory outside Shanghai.
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Brikk, the luxury brand known for offering the iPhone and other smartphones covered in gold and platinum, has announced the release of a special edition Nikon Df camera kit finished in 24 karat pure gold. For an incredible $41,395, buyers will get one of 77 limited edition models, which includes the camera body, a Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 lens, and accessories, … Continue reading
The number of smartwatches on the market is growing by leaps and bounds, but we’re still waiting to see just how many clever integrations our wrist-borne companions will net. It seems we can add Sonos to the list, for one.
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