Alyssa is a singular girl

I just learned that Hysteric Glamour sells art books. I may not have the extra money to spend on their clothes (even though I REALLYREALLY wish I did), but I could afford their lovely, lovely books.

Catching an Arcade Fire song on the radio tonight, I was reminded of all the amazing bands out of Montreal. My iTunes has at least four Montreal bands on it: the Arcade Fire, Stars, the Stills, and the Dears.

I live near Minneapolis, which has always had great music, and I’ve always appreciated cities with good music scenes. Skulking around Montreal’s clubs, you’d have to find some amazing music, both famous and not so much.

Maxim’s Bakery is only a few blocks from the Chinatown stop on the Red Line. Go to Maxim’s. It is cheap and delicious, two of my very favorite qualities in a food establishment. I’m sad it took me so many trips to Chinatown to discover this place, but I’ll be going there on every visit from now on.

Cupcakes!

Vancouver has the first all-cupcake bakery, Cupcakes, in North America. And now there are TWO locations.

The Hot Topic here is truly no different than the one you have at your hometown mall, except that the MOA has like 14 of them. The theme park is also certainly nothing to write home about.

On the upside, the cheese curds at Minnesota Picnic are delicious (as all cheese curds are), the people-watching is excellent, and there’s no sales tax on clothing in Minnesota, which is one of the best things about living here.

I’m trying to convince my best friend to go to Costa Rica with me next summer. I’ve never been to Central America. I would love to see rainforests. Mostly I’m interested in beaches. Glorious, glorious beaches! Costa Rica would be somewhere cheap, and not too far away so I wouldn’t have to deal with jet lag taking like two days away from my trip. I could take just a week off work and go and still feel like I’d seen something.

I went to the Art Institute of Chicago on Monday. Looking at this picture rekindled all of my desires to go to Giverny.

In college, I was in Model UN for a year (DORK!) and my team went to New York to participate in the National Model UN conference. We spent most of our days hashing out things in the beauty of the Hilton hotel, but on our last day all the delegates went to the UN for our final meeting. It was amazing to be a pretend diplomat in the same place where actual diplomats work.

Kofi Annan gets me all fangirly. (DORK!) I have a (very dark) picture of me looking exaggeratedly pensive and intense from behind the very podium where my beloved Kofi speaks.

Freshman year in college, my German class went to the Lyric Opera to see their production of “Die Zauberfloete.” I had somehow just bruised my tailbone. Sitting through that production (which was maybe two hours) was excruciating. I had to switch positions every five minutes, and to this day I have no idea what the play was about.

The building’s pretty, though. I pass it every time I go into the city and I always think I’d like to give it another go.

When I started high school, I wanted to go to college and major in art history, and imagined that one day I would become a Monet scholar. I forced my dad to buy me the book Linnea in Monet’s Garden. I would go to the Art Institute of Chicago and gaze at Monet’s haystack paintings until well past the time people would start saying, “Geez, how many paintings of hay can a guy do?” I had Monet calendars, journals, postcards, and a huge framed print (which still hangs on my bedroom wall). Even though I realized that there would probably never be a huge job market for art history majors, I always stayed interested in the subject, and wrote a final paper for an art history class on a painting Monet had done before he became MONET.

That class invoked a new love for Pop Art in me, and Roy Lichtenstein surpassed Monet as my favorite painter, I would still love to go to Giverny and see Monet’s garden and his little Japanese bridge and visit all the places Linnea visited.