Frumpy to Fabulous Book Review

Frumpy to Fabulous: Flaunting It. Your Ultimate Guide to Effortless Style by Natalie Jobity
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I know the author of this book, and in addition to her success in the fields of image consulting and marketing, she is thoughtful and compassionate, personable and fun. So when I found out she was a published author, I was excited to check out her book. While I don't know how much of the material I'll be incorporating into my own life and wardrobe, this guide is accessible, with a breezy style, and helpful for women who feel like they are stuck in an image rut or just want tips on advancing their self-presentation.

I'll be honest, I can be somewhat conflicted when it comes to fashion. My girly, artsy side competes with my uber-low-maintenance, reluctant to sacrifice comfort side. The side of me that eschews vanity conflicts with the side of me that knows, as noted in the book, that first impressions count, and that actually does care about what people think of me. What's good about this book is that in addition to offering tips to spark the reader's creativity when it comes to clothing and accessories, it also stresses the importance of presenting an authentic version of oneself, of making sure what people are seeing is what we want to convey to the world.

I used to watch "What Not to Wear" (not as much a fan of Stacy London's new show), and I was always struck by the fact that there were real self-esteem transformations going on on the show. Or cases where a woman would undergo life changes but have a style that hadn't caught up. Natalie's book deals with the same thing. In fact, she has an entire chapter entitled "Beauty from the Inside Out" that addresses the self-esteem hurdles that she has assisted some of her former clients with.

Other personal takeaways from the book:

Color/Warm and Cool Tones

Natalie doesn't address the four color seasons here, but she does give an overview of warm and cool skin tones and the colors best-suited for each. I'm still a little confused as to which I am, honestly, although she does say that some people are a mix. And while there are some colors that I get complimented on wearing, there are few colors I feel look honestly bad on me. Not to brag or anything, haha. I tend to buy clothing based on colors I like, and since I like color in general I have a pretty big variety of colors in my wardrobe. I'd still be curious about one day having my colors "done," especially if it were broken down by season.

Body Type

Natalie goes into the basic body types (e.g. pear, hourglass, etc.) and discusses styles best suited for each. Here is another area where I've never felt I fit into a "mold." Thankfully she addresses "blended" body types too. I know I'm definitely not pear- or rectangle-shaped. I have a little bit of hourglass, apple (or round) and inverted-triangle going on, however. My weight concentrates at my breasts, stomach and back - or, as I like to say, "I'm all boobs and belly." And because I'm two completely different sizes on top and bottom, in addition to being a petite 5 foot 1, dresses are the most challenging thing for me to shop for.

Developing a Signature Style

This was one of the most interesting chapters. Natalie describes 7 core styles of "traditionalist" "outdoorsy," "sophisticate," "seductress," "romantic," "eclectic," and "diva," and gives examples of celebrities exemplifying each. It was fun figuring out which ones describe my style - she says most women blend these elements into their own personal look. I have described my style, real or ideal, as classic but low-maintenance, with subtle feminine touches. Using Natalie's labels, that would make me a blend of traditionalist, outdoorsy, and romantic. Incidentally, she describes Natalie Portman as a celebrity blending these three styles. Not a bad style role model, I don't think. :).

The Need for a Properly Fitting Bra as a Wardrobe Backbone

Whoops. I have a little bit of a problem here, as I don't own a single bra that fits me 100% perfectly. This book did reinforce my goal of having a professional bra fitting done, although I can't say it's the number one thing on my list of priorities. She also mentioned a bra brand called "Le Mystere" which I was unfamiliar with but as a busty gal now need to check out.

She talks about women who wear uniforms and face the challenge of figuring out what to wear when they are not in their uniform. I had to wear a uniform through middle and high school, and while that was a long time ago I could relate to that point.

I wish she had gone further to address issues of time and money. She touches upon how a put-together style doesn't have to be high-maintenance or impractical, and she makes the case that some items are investment pieces worth splurging on while some can be cheaper. I'm a thrift store junkie, so I've been able to add to my wardrobe while at times on an extremely tight budget. But that was always my biggest frustration with "What Not to Wear" - of course anyone could look put-together 24/7 if they were given $5,000 to spend on a new wardrobe.

As far as implementing things into my own wardrobe, this book was a case of "take what works for you and leave the rest." A lot of the material on color, body type, wardrobe background, etc. was fairly familiar. But where the book excels is in helping tie together style elements into a confident, authentic and positive self-presentation.


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Restaurant Ordering Habits

Quite awhile ago Elizabeth had been doing blog posts based on the "Nanoblamo" (National Blog Post  Month) prompts. One of them from the beginning of this year was "Do you tend to order the same thing at restaurants? Or do you like to jump around the menu?"

I was thinking about this recently, and so I decided to dig up the prompt and write on it...because I can always use more blog content.

Like Elizabeth, I vary on this. For me, it actually depends on the restaurant. I do love eating out, although I don't do it that often, and I enjoy trying new things when I do. I'm not super adventurous, but when I know I like a particular food I will try it in new combinations at new restaurants.

Recently I went on a work lunch outing to Clydes (a DC area chain that I had only previously been to the Columbia, MD outpost of). My "adventurous" menu choice there was a soft-shell crab sandwich, as I have had soft-shell crabs before and generally like them. I had been thinking of trying a burger with fried green tomatoes (which I have not had but have been meaning to try) but decided against it. But yes, generally at sit-down restaurants, whether chain or single-store, what I order is based on what I'm in the mood for at the moment, and so I jump around. Variety is the spice of life and all.

With fast food/fast casual chains it's totally different - there, I have my "usuals" that I stick with. When we had a Panera luncheon at work, I went with my usual chicken panini, which along with their tomato soup and a Thai salad is one of my Panera staples. At Chipotle I always get the same order of chicken burrito bowl, black beans, etc. etc.

However, one more fast-casual-type place where I do like to "mix it up" is Ghengis Grill, the Mongolian place a few friends and I are big fans of. My friend actually remarked on this, which is what got me thinking of this topic. She has her usual dish at Ghengis, but for me the fun of a place like that (you are creating your own bowl right from the protein to the produce to the sauce and spices) is to try something new each time.

How about you, dear reader? :P

News Burnout, Fall

Let's face it, the world can be a pretty depressing place, especially if one is a news media consumer. It is for that reason that at least a couple people I've spoken with or heard about have stopped watching/reading/following the news.

While I understand this approach, it isn't one that I personally take. Aside from short, deliberate news fasts, I find it important to be an informed citizen, in spite of the emotional toll it may take.

Granted, sometimes I can only take the news with a heavy dose of humor (Jon Stewart, I miss yoouuuu...), but I do feel a need to be plugged in not only to social media but to the larger world around me. This may be partly because of my field. My Master's degree is in Communications, so the media is an important part of what I do and most of my classes required some degree of news consumption. But honestly, I actually feel better when I keep up with what's going on in the world.

I do need to tune out a lot of the partisan bickering, but no matter how bad things are in the world, I feel better when I remember that the world is larger than myself. It's a unique kind of misery being in your own little bubble, and the news helps me get outside that.

And while watching or reading the news can lead to feelings of helplessness, that's when I as a person of faith turn over the things I can't control to God. Because I need to pray for the world and not just for my world.

Do you find that news consumption leaves you feeling helpless or connected? Do you limit your news consumption, or avoid the news altogether?

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On another note, it's fall! I'm not sure if today or tomorrow marks the official start of fall, but Labor Day has come and gone and pumpkin spice lattes have been out for awhile.

I have been partaking of the pumpkin products (usually pumpkin iced coffee from Dunkin Donuts), but this season has been all about the aroma therapy for me this year.

The other week I went into Bath & Body Works. I was looking for my favorite seasonal lotion, Sweet Cinnamon Pumpkin. But oh, my goodness, I lost count of how many different scents of pumpkin alone they had. Pumpkin latte (of course), pumpkin cupcake, caramel pumpkin swirl...it was actually kind of overwhelming. The sweet cinnamon pumpkin is still my favorite though.

And I'm becoming really partial to apple scents. My car smells like apple (thanks to a Bath & Body Works refresher), and I bought some Fe-breeze apple scented stuff. Best part? No calories, haha.

Fall smells as good as it tastes.

Summer Sangrias

I'm not that big of a drinker. But you wouldn't know that looking at my Pinterest board. In addition to non-alcoholic drinks and food recipes, I've collected a whole slew of cocktails - most of which I haven't actually tried.

When I do drink, I'm into stereotypically girly drinks - wine or fruity cocktails. Thus I love sangrias, because they are both wine-based and fruity. In fact, at its basic, that's all sangria is, wine and fruit. Its perfect in that it is both simple (sort of) and customizable. Along with the wine and fruit/fruit juice can be added other liquors (often rum), soda or seltzer water, and various sweeteners or spices.

In my collecting of drink recipes, I've come across sangrias for all seasons - sugar plum for Christmas, various fall apple cider based sangrias. It is summer, though, that I think sangria is truly best suited for.

Here are some of the most summer-worthy sangrias I've come across:

Cherry Limeade Sangria c/o Recipe Girl 

Limeades themselves are the epitome of summer, but this sangria ups the ante by mixing store-bought limeade with cherry juice, fresh cherries, Sauvignon Blanc and vodka.

Or how about a lemonade sangria? 

There are different variations around, but the above raspberry lemonade sangria looks amazingly easy and simple as well as refreshing. It uses just white wine, vodka, raspberry lemonade concentrate, fresh raspberries, and Sprite.

Did I mention I like fruity drinks? The tropical passion sangria from the blog Pineapple and Coconut is basically a cross between a pina colada and a sangria, with a little bit of passion fruit juice thrown in. The pineapple simple syrup sounds a little daunting though.

Krista from Joyful Healthy Eats mixes sweet summer fruits with a kick of spice in a Strawberry Jalapeno White Sangria. 

Of course it wouldn't be summer without iced tea. The Loveless Cafe in Nashville, Tennessee features a sweet tea sangria made with red wine, sweet tea, lemonade, strawberries, oranges and lemon.

Of course if I don't feel up to attempting any of these recipes, there's always chilled white wine mixed with frozen strawberries for a simple summer slush.

Cheers to summer!

Pixar Has Done It Again With Inside Out

Usually I leave the film reviews to Ken and stick to reviewing books, but I did want to post on Pixar's newest film, Inside Out. 

With my academic and personal interest in psychology (I double majored in it along with English in undergrad), I was really excited to see that Pixar would be making a film in which the main characters were personifications of the emotions inside a preteen girl's brain. Pixar has a reputation for making multilayer-ed films that appeal to adults as much as to children, but Inside Out took this beyond most of their previous films (beyond maybe Wall-E). Topics that I'm sure went beyond the heads of the many children in the audience included core memories, long-term memories, abstract reasoning, and dream production. Oh, and my favorite, a "train of thought" was portrayed as an actual train which the emotions Joy and Sadness hitch a ride on.

Joy and Sadness, along with Anger, Fear, and Disgust, live in the Headquarters of protagonist Riley's brain. With Joy in the lead, the team helps her make sense of the world, and things are going smoothly until Riley's parents uproot her happy home life in Minnesota with a move to San Francisco. From there, conflict ensues at Headquarters and Joy and Sadness find themselves lost.

It's all pretty existential stuff that only Pixar could pull off, making abstract emotions into believable characters. Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust look and sound the way we imagine the feelings they represent would. Anger is squat and red; Sadness is blue with a voice like Eeyore. The relentlessly optimistic Joy looks and acts like a fairy/pixie. And the green Disgust, voiced by Mindy Kaling, is all sarcasm and snark.

Yes, the kids in the audience, of which there were many, enjoyed Inside Out too. It's colorful and whimsical and funny, and not really scary (besides a couple scenes with a huge clown, which is terrifying at any age). But the content is way deeper than that of the average kids' movie.

I really appreciated the underlying message of the film, which was refreshing in a society that can take "positive thinking" overboard to the point of dismissing or suppressing all "negative" thoughts or emotions. Initially Joy tries to prevent Sadness from touching Riley's core memories and "tainting" them. Over the course of the film, however, she and the audience see that Sadness actually has an important place in Riley's life (and all our lives). It is Sadness that allows Riley to feel and receive empathy, and it is Sadness that finally urges her to open up to her parents about missing Minnesota.

I would enjoy seeing where Pixar would go with a sequel.  After all, our emotions only get more complex as we age. Would they add more characters to capture nuanced emotions like confusion or impatience? Or would the main team of emotions work together to create these degrees and blends of feeling? Maybe emotions are like colors, with primary colors mixing together to create blends or giving off more or less saturation for various shades/hues. But I digress...

After a few lackluster films, Pixar is definitely back to doing what they do best: multi-layered movies that are deeper than they appear. Inside Out has something for pretty much everyone - kids, adults, people with an interest in psychology, anyone trying to navigate their emotions in a healthy way. Yeah, really, everyone. 

Painted Wine Glasses

More in Emily's adventures in craftiness. 

I took a wine glass painting class. 

I found out about this class through a booth at a festival at Bowie Town Center, and it sounded like an awesome deal - for $25 (pre-registration fee) you get two wine glasses to paint, one glass of wine/cocktail drink, and appetizers to share. And as I've mentioned before, I am always on the lookout for new artsy/crafty ideas. 

I get the creative drive from my dad. He's a painter (watercolors, acrylics, mixed media...) and when I was a kid I would take drawing and painting classes with him. Eventually my perfectionism and comparison kicked in and I didn't consider myself to be much of "an artist," but I still always had that creative drive. Now I'm drawn more to design and crafts then drawing or painting, and Pinterest, love it or hate it, helps me get ideas, even if those ideas often go unpursued...

So yeah, back to the wine glass painting class. It was run by Wonderfully Made 4 You, who do these classes once a week at T.G.I.Fridays locations throughout PG County, MD. It was pretty low-key and straightforward; basically you use acrylic paint and then just paint anything that strikes your fancy, although they had examples available. 

My first one I copied from one of the samples but used my own colors. The sample said "Grandma's Sippy Cup," (I've also seen "Mommy's Sippy Cup") but since I'm not a grandmother or mother, I thought of personalizing it with my name but just went with "sippy cup." ;) 

It actually doesn't look as polished as I had hoped...there's that damn perfectionism again...but it was fun to make. 

The second one I like better. The flower stencils (just paint and peal off!) really allowed me to get more detail in, and I like the grass effect I got by using a broad foam brush on the base and bottom of the glass. 

Fun stuff. In addition to the Fridays' events, they do private parties and events for children (pottery painting), so it's a cool activity for individuals, friends, families, anyone needing to scratch that crafty itch. 

Goodreads Book Review: Dark Places

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While I think an author's books should be evaluated independently of each other, it's going to be hard for me to not compare Gillian Flynn's novel Dark Places to Gone Girl. While Dark Places was actually written first, Gone Girl achieved wider popularity including being adapted into a film first. Both books are set (at least partially) in Missouri, and both feature extremely twisted and dysfunctional characters as well as suspenseful plotting. Although I thought that not all elements of Dark Places fully came together (certain plot elements' connections were never explained as more than not-so-believable coincidence), it was still a sick and yet addicting read.

But be warned: Dark Places visits some truly "dark places." The content includes poverty, child neglect, general family dysfunction, alcoholism, drug use, homelessness, bankruptcy, stripping and prostitution, rumors of child molestation...oh, yeah, and devil worship. I didn't love that Flynn included the devil worship, but clearly she was trying to explore the darkest sides of humanity and the places that yearning for belonging and lust for power can take a person. Although the title "Dark Places" refers specifically to the regions of narrator Libby's mind she visits when she thinks about the murder of her family, virtually every character in this novel is well acquainted with dark places.

Libby Day is the sole survivor of a murder that took her mother and two sisters in 1985. A seven-year-old at the time, she testified that her 15-year-old brother Ben was the killer. Twenty-five years later she is contacted by a man from "The Kill Club," a secret society obsessed with crimes. They are convinced Ben is innocent and enlist Libby to help them free him. Libby, motivated by the promise of financial reward, agrees to help them, although it means revisiting her terrifying history.

Libby is not a likeable narrator - she is a moocher and a thief, hungry to profit off of her tragic story - but there is something refreshing about her character, which is far more believable than the angelic, heroic survivor that the public views her as. As for the "Kill Club," they are a disturbing yet fascinating sub-culture that I wish Flynn had explored further; this group of obsessed misfits is cast as freaks, but they seem to be reflective of a society that eats up true-crime stories, namely American society at large.

The novel is told in alternating points-of-view, switching between present-day Libby and her brother and mother, Patty, on the fateful day of the murders - January 2nd, 1985. The plot is tightly paced, with the events leading up to the murder spanning less than twenty-four hours. Flynn's use of multiple perspectives shows just how different people's understandings of the same situation can be; significant details are described multiple times through the eyes of characters with disparate knowledge.

As with Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn is a master of setting and tone here. The Kansas farm town where Libby grew up is not idyllic but bleak and foreboding, and the places Libby visits in her search for the truth are equally seedy. There is a sense of desperation in the lives of both the poor Day family in 1985 and present-day Libby.

As noted above, I definitely felt that there were plot areas that never came together, and the final twist of the novel just wasn't quite as shocking as that of Gone Girl. That being said, for all the darkness of Dark Places the book ends with a slight note of hope that wasn't present in that other novel.

Comparisons aside, Dark Places is a masterful book in and of itself. But it also shows the extent of the twisted brilliance in Gillian Flynn's imagination. I'll be reading her debut Sharp Objects next (going at her books in reverse-order), and I hope she'll keep writing.




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