Gab White : Make it Gold – Graphic Design, Health and Lifestyle blogging

The Best Things on the Internet: June 20

by gabwhite on June 20, 2013

How incredibly adorable are Charles and Ray Eames? Monday was Charles Eames’ birthday, and before I even start this post I want to share this lovely post that has his proposal letter to Ray. Warning: it’s super sweet and might make you cry.

Hello and happy almost weekend! It’s been another crazy week, so I’m writing this post before heading to work this morning and it probably won’t be as long as my other Best of the Internet posts. I can’t believe it’s almost the end of June, but I actually have a vacation booked for next month SO BRING ON SUMMER!

To start off this week’s round of things that caught my eye: what it’s like to be young, and multi-employed in San Francisco, while looking for full time work. It’s like the rest of North America, except slightly shittier, I think.

The whole internet seems to be pretty excited about Joy’s post, the Art of Being a Go-Getter, and I am excited about it too.

This video from Jim Whittaker, first American to climb Mt. Everest is so good. Not to be missed.

And now for a little bit of baby fever – except not really, I just found the following articles really interesting:

Why Finnish babies sleep in cardboard boxes as well as, the babies who nap in sub-zero temperatures. I grew up in Labrador, so I asked my mom if she ever left me or my sister outside for a nap after taking us for a walk in the glorified wooden box with a set of skis on the bottom (which I can’t remember the name of right now) and she was like, “of course! if you were asleep when we got home I wasn’t going to wake you up to bring you inside!” Smart!

Sixty seconds of salary is incredibly eye-opening and also incredibly frustrating.

And that’s all I have time for this week, friends! Have a wonderful wind-down to your week and I hope it’s filled with warm weather!

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Hello, from the Hammock

by gabwhite on June 19, 2013

Photo credit for the above photo goes to none other than the amazing Ryan Kelly. The man is a genius with a camera and knows how to turn my dark little apartment into an incredibly spacious loft.

While Ryan was in Germany on a work trip a few months ago he stayed an an airbnb spot that had a hammock in the bedroom (plus a real bed!). Chatting with him on Facetime while he was lounging in the house hammock made me super jealous and want my own house hammock.

A few days after Ryan got home from Germany, I mentioned to him that I wanted my own house hammock. The next day one of my friends posted on Facebook that they wanted to give away a hammock that they didn’t use. Law of Attraction anyone?

It took me a while to decide where to put it, but in the end I realized that I had to get rid of some furniture in order to have the ultimate hammock corner.

So I said goodbye to the old chairs! I don’t know what giveaway culture is like in other cities, but here in Halifax we put our unwanted shit on the lawn and it’s picked up by someone else usually within an hour. I posted this photo to kijiji and instagram (#halifax!) and within 2 hours they were gone and a week later I still have people emailing me if I still have them.

These chairs are the 50 footer chairs – from 50 ft away they look like nice chairs but then you get up close and you realize that they’re pretty much impossible to clean. I should also share that these chairs were in the apartment when I moved in almost two years ago, so who really knows how old they are and what kind of past life they’ve had.

I realize now that I’m doing the opposite of what I planned to do when I first moved into this apartment. When I moved in here after living in student accommodations for the last 4 years, I was determined to make this place a “real” home. One with actual furniture and stuff. A home that I wouldn’t mind bring guests into, where I could invite people over for dinner and not feel like a total vagrant. I thought that by now I’d have a breakfast nook and bookshelves – but instead I have a folding table desk, a bike hanging from the ceiling and a house hammock.

But seriously, seriously, the house hammock is the best. It’s my favourite place to collapse after a long day. It’s a fun place to write blog posts from, read book from, and daydream from.

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Real Talk Tuesday: When All You Do Isn’t Enough

by gabwhite on June 18, 2013

It’s been a long time since I’ve done an RTT post. Summer is off to a supremely busy start and sometimes that means that the things I love doing, but somehow aren’t a top priority for me, end up falling to the bottom of the to-do list. I try to be grateful for being busy as long as I’m feeling like I’m being productively busy. Every time I feel overwhelmed with having a jam-packed schedule I try to feel grateful that I’m needed somewhere. I try to remind myself that the work that I’m doing is valuable not only to me, but to other people and that other people are depending on me. It helps makes the long days feel a little bit more worthwhile.

I always feel like I could be doing more, though. I have a giant list of things that begin with “one day when I have the time I will…” and I want to be continually growing, learning, playing, and exploring. While I love my city an incredible amount, I get a little uncomfortable when I think about my firmly placed roots on the East Coast.

I keep hearing everyone talking about “hustling”. Working hard at one thing – pulling 40 hrs a week or more doing something you’re “okay” at and can tolerate and can pay the bills, and spending the remainder of your time actually doing your thing. Doing the thing that brings you the most happiness and trying to find a way to make that thing bring you both happiness and rent money. Or trying to figure out what the heck it is that brings you joy and how to make money off that joy. Counting down the minutes until you can leave your work so you can go work tirelessly on that other thing you do, that one day you hope to do for real.

Recently I started reading Timothy Ferris’s The 4-Hour Workweek, and while many of Ferris’s philosophies presented in the book are fairly unreasonable and not exactly practices I’d be comfortable with doing (see his chapter on outsourcing your entire life to overseas Virtual Assistants, SO not my thing), I could totally get behind his concept of dreamlining. Which, you guessed it, is a combination of your dreams and deadlines.

Setting a goal with a date in mind for achieving it is always where I find that I personally have the most success. So why not set a deadline for your dreams as well? Typically when we talk about our “dreams”, they’re things that we “one day” hope to do, or have, or experience. Setting a deadline turns a dream into a goal, an actionable item which you have to start taking steps towards.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about the direction I want my life to move in, the people I want to work with, the type of work that I would feel happiest doing – but the to-do list for this week and next week and the week after keeps piling up. All of the things that I’m already doing aren’t enough. I’m already doing so much that starting something else is beyond overwhelming. I know that it’s time for me to start dreamlining, start breaking the dreams down into smaller, more attainable goals, and slowly yet steadily move towards them.

Some days I feel as though I’m directing my energy into 100 different places and none of those places are where I want it to be. I’m trying to remember that I can always make space – I can always make a little bit of extra space to put a little bit of energy into discovering what I want for myself.

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Feminist Friday: Women Are Not Your Competition

by gabwhite on June 14, 2013

Image: it may not be a glass ceiling, but it’s the ceiling of the Halifax Club, formerly a men’s only club in Halifax that is now also open to women.

Whether they realize it or not, men have leveraged “being a man” to get what they want since, well, the beginning of time. Men made all the rules, men had all the money, men decided that there were a certain set of rules called “chivalry” on how to act in the presence of a lady. While I’ve personally heard many women argue that don’t feel like they’ve had any less of an opportunity than a man for certain roles (which is awesome for those gals), it only takes a look at the numbers to see that the number of women in positions of power doesn’t even come close to that of men.

It irritates me endlessly how society puts so much pressure on women to compete with each other instead of competing with men.

The media is constantly perpetuating the stereotype of the “bitchy, catty, backstabbing woman”. This is the type of woman that feels an intense hatred for another woman more successful than she is and the type of woman who enjoys seeing other women fail. It’s a sickening stereotype that is harmful to ALL women. I mean, think about it: when women are pitted against each other and they’re taught to feel jealous of each other’s successes instead of celebrating them, it basically opens up the road for men to just cruise by us while we fester in our jealousy and stay firmly in place.

As a woman, I feel like I am constantly trying to prove myself.

To me, I am competing only with men. Women are my comrades and we are all in this together. We have to lift each other up and reach down to others.

If I apply for a job that I really, really want and I don’t get it, then the next best thing is for another woman to get it and I feel infuriated when a dude gets it, especially if I know we were equally qualified.
When I was in university and had a web design class that was mostly guys who liked to show off their coding skills and correct the prof, my only goal was to be better than the guys. I didn’t care what grade I got, as long as it was higher than the arrogant bros in my class.
Nothing gives me more satisfaction when I’m out for a run or at the pool and I pass a dude.
I will open that jar of salsa my goddamn self even if it takes the last bit of strength I can muster before asking a man to help me.

Part of this is because I feel like I am a competitive person anyways, however, things change when I’m competing against a woman. If a woman has a faster running pace than mine, or if she can code HTML and CSS like a machine, or if she is a pro salsa jar opener, then I want to know her secrets. Women who are more successful than I am, or at a stage in their life that I am striving to reach, become my role models and mentors.

Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of dudes that I know who I admire and are successful in their own right and deserve what they earned for themselves. BUT – they also had the privilege of being a male to help give them that extra boost.

If you’re a woman you have to not only work harder than everybody else but men will constantly require you validate your big beautiful brain.

If you completely rock a project, reach a goal you’ve been working towards, or get a personal best time – I guarantee you that there will be at least one man who will try to dismiss your success as something that “anyone” could do. When you take pride in what you do and put quality into your work, this can be endlessly frustrating.Which is why encouraging other women instead of being passive-agressive and jealous is so important to me. We can achieve awesome things and if we can celebrate achieving our own goals together, then we don’t need men telling us that our successes are mediocre.

We have to support each other and say “FUCK YEAH!” whenever we run past a dude.

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Juicin’ It

by gabwhite on June 10, 2013

I’ve been spending the past couple of weeks casually browsing kijiji searching for a secondhand juicer because I didn’t want to spend another $100 on a kitchen appliance (remember my “minimalist kitchen” thing? yeah, that’s not a thing anymore). Unfortunately kijiji can be a bit tricky and every time I inquired about someone’s juicer they had for sale they had always literally “just sold it to someone else.” I couldn’t stand being the juicer runner-up, so like any millenial would, I took to twitter and lamented my fruitless (har-har) search for a juicer. Lucky for me, one of my girlfriends replied that she was considering selling hers. Less than 12 hours later I was carrying my very own juicer in the pannier of my bike and I was so excited to juice everything.

I know that juicing is latest and greatest wellness fad on the go right now, and forgive me if this post is a little bit bandwagon-hoppy, but oh my god, I’ve wanted a juicer ever since a then 90-year-old Jack LaLanne was doing the infomercials on Sunday mornings about how juicing has made him basically a superhuman. And guys, if there’s anything that I want out of like, it’s to be superhuman.

I mean, people are 100% right when they say that juicing is inconvenient. The amount of gross damp veggie and fruit guts you have to clean up afterwords with a scrubber brush makes juicing a little bit of a bummer. But the juice is ah-may-zing.

Green juice in action! also pictured: pile of bacon! this is balanced living at it’s finest, folks.

So I’ve been into doing the green juice thing since buying my juicer, and it’s pretty much bliss in a glass. This is roughly what I use:

1 medium sized green apple
1/2 an english cucumber
two handfuls of kale
about 1/3 of lemon (peel and all)
1″ of ginger root
(optional: throw in some broccoli to give it a more earthy taste)

I feel like it’s better than coffee in terms of waking me up in the morning, the blend of sour and sweet and general “KAPOW” kind of flavours really kickstarts my day. I also really like drinking a big glass of green juice after a workout to pull me through an evening of freelance work or writing without wanting to collapse into bed.

The other juice recipe I’ve been playing around with since getting a juicer a week ago is a carrot ginger combo. This was intense in the best kind of way. I feel like it would be an amazing way to ward off a cold/flu during the winter months. Here’s what goes in:

3 large carrots
1 medium sized orange
1/3 a lemon
1 inch of ginger
optional because I haven’t tried it yet: call me crazy but I think this would be killer with just a dash of cayenne pepper thrown in.

When I made this juice the ginger was POWERFUL. I had some reservations about carrot juice because I’ve had some crappy v8 stuff that tasted like plastic water. But this is incredible. It’s sweet, it’s savoury, it’s tart! It’s also neon orange which is kind of like whoah. I’m also pretty sure you could take the left over pulpy stuff, mix it with the juice, heat it on the stove and have yourself some amazing carrot ginger soup.

I’m a total juice newbie, and I’m admittedly a bit intimidated by the juicing community who are all about limiting fruits to the very minimum and all about max veggie power. I’m super excited to getting into more advanced juicing with beets and swiss chard mixed in funky ways with a few different fruit combos.

If you like juicing things, or you’re super pro at juicing things, please point me in the direction of where to find some awesome juice recipes because I am a crazy-excited novice having way too much fun watching produce get pulverized.