I'm a 24 year-old freelance illustrator. I share a 500 sq foot apartment with a grown man and a cat and all our stuff. When I first moved in here, I innocently futzed around the internet looking for ways to do the impossible: organize a bunch of crap in a tiny space and make it look at least semi-appealing. What I encountered was nothing short of staggering. Apparently while I was in college and not giving a shit how dumb my lava lamp and my "vintage" absinthe poster looked with the ugly cookie-cutter furniture that came with my dorm room, "lifestyle" blogging became a thing. A GIANT THING much much bigger and more dangerous than Martha Stewart ever could be.
After all, our mothers knew that Martha had a DP, and people organizing and running everything beneath the surface of what looked like seamless domestic bliss. She was, after all, a celebrity. They could be jealous of her, but understand that it wasn't reality, and that made them feel better when they put down the magazine and looked at that giant pile of laundry or the kitchen that didn't exactly have golden light beaming through a sheer, starched linen drape.
Lifestyle blogging has taken Martha to the extreme in the form of what appears to be regular people, but who are actually not that different from the much-reviled Martha Stewart... and apparently gen Y-ers like are drinking the kool-aid that says you can have a perfect life, with perfect flea market shabby-chic, mid-century modern furniture, flokati rugs, elegantly mismatched antique china, and all sorts of perfectly cutesy but pointless DIY accents. And you can be fabulous, too! With perfect "messy ballerina bun" hair, and the holy grail of 21st century body obsession weirdnesses: the thigh gap.
And don't freaking get me started with the parenting blogs... All these privileged, angelic white kids with whimsical names eating 100% organic, and playing only with toys made from wood and the tears of 100% grass-fed angels. Just... ugh. Not that I hate organic food or anything, or kids (I love them), or wood toys (I had some). It just that everything is so... backlit, contrived, cutesy, impossibly attractive. I went to art school and while I am not a photographer, I know the difference between something that actually required very little effort and something that is made to appear to require little effort. These blogs wouldn't bother me so much if the writers went out and admitted that yes, this requires effort, TONS OF IT. 'Of course Banjo and Lyric don't always look so angelic and well-behaved. Yesterday, Banjo got naked and drew all over himself with 5 different colors of magic marker, and Lyric ate dirt. See? I even took a picture!' That would be refreshing. Hilarious, even. Maybe it would give them street cred. Maybe people would hate it. I don't know.
So... I'm glad I got that off my chest. Which brings me to the entire purpose of this blog: an actual, no-holds-barred, uncensored reality blog where I post pictures of my tiny apartment in whatever state it happens to be in at the time. If I had come across a blog like this, I might have been less depressed the first month I lived here. You can't compare your inside to other people's outsides, people!
Disclaimer:
(If your kids names are Banjo and Lyric, I'm sorry. I literally just wrote down the dumbest, most whimsical, matchy-matchy white people names I could think of.)
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