1) Chictopia.com
This site is a look book of personal style pictures, self-photographed by chic site members. It’s comparable to a cross-section of the internet’s personal style blogs, collapsed onto one page with infinite scrolling. If you join the site you can “favorite” outfits that tickle your fancy and amass a collection of inspirational pictures.
2) Thesartorialist.com
The cream of the crop in street style blogs. Founder Scott Schuman sews together the worlds of fashion and daily life with every last shot of a chic Parisian or well-groomed New Yorker. When you scroll through photos of a fashion show, there’s always that initial reaction, like, “And how the hell would anyone wear that in everyday life?!” Then you head over to the Sartorialist and have that “aha!” moment. “That’s how!” Side note: I’m not sure if Schuman’s headed into Boston anytime soon, but perhaps daydreams of your superbly styled self gracing his homepage will be inspiration enough.
3) Streetpeeper.com
Another multi-city street style blog. This one’s categorized by major cities (but no Boston representation?!) and “elsewhere.”
4) The lesser known fashion and lifestyles gems of the blogosphere – for example:
- Wecouldgrowuptogether.blogspot.com
- Thatkindofwoman.tumblr.com
- Fashionbitsandbobs.com
- Ninagarcia.tumblr.com

• When you were little, your parents probably told you to count sheep. Don’t. Counting anything only marks the passing of time.
• If you have one of those infrared, bright-as-all-hell alarm clocks, turn it around or flip it on its side. You don’t need the temptation of watching the minutes pass. It’ll only up the ante on your anxiety.
• This one might sound obvious, but don’t think about what you have to do tomorrow. Don’t stress the day ahead and the exhaustion with which you may have to face it. Sure, that’ll be the case, but you can confront that (or caffeinate that) when the time comes.
• Use a mantra or comforting phrase to will yourself into relaxation. The best ones are “tomorrow always comes” or “this too shall pass.” They don’t mean to sound melodramatic, but when you’ve been lying in bed for hours, the smallest problems suddenly seem far worse.
• Keep your phone on your desk or anywhere that’s not within reach from your bedside and keep it on silent. Just make sure you’ll still be able to hear your alarm when it sounds in the morning (if you use your phone’s alarm clock to wake you up).
• Sometimes it’s best to get out of bed for a little while. Go to your desk and read a book or magazine. Don’t do anything too stimulating – not even homework. While it may seem logical to use your wakefulness in a productive way, it’ll only wake you up more.
• Don’t turn on too many lights. For those of us with roommates, this one’s a given.
• Alright, this one’s going to sound kind of weird, but bear with me. Don’t pay attention to your heartbeat. (I could totally make a Tell-Tale Heart allusion here.) Just trust me on this.

Sweet dreams!

Danielsen Hall marks the eastern most limit of the BU campus. Every time I tell someone it’s where I’m living this year, their face melts into a sympathetic mug. I assure them I’m happy with my place of residence. Still, they must think I’m just being tolerant because the universal reaction is to smile in pity.

Danielsen may feel like a million light years from civilization, but I enjoy the trek. No sarcasm. Really. I didn’t pick a city school with the dreamy thought that I’d roll out of bed every morning and leap a few beats across some grassy quad straight into a desk. Walking a distance to class gives you the chance to clear your mind, bounce to whatever’s on your iPod, cut some time off your cardio session at Fit Rec.

Living in Danielsen makes me feel a little more independent, too. Don’t get me wrong; Warren Towers was a blast. As a freshman getting my bearings, I appreciated being just a few minutes from class. But living on Beacon Street this year, I feel, forces me to take more advantage of city living. Being about a skip away from Newbury doesn’t hurt much, either. (Thank God for summer job savings.) And what’s more, all those MIT frat parties I crawled to for what felt like hours in the icy Boston winter are a couple doors down this year.

My roommate and I appreciate falling asleep (sometimes with a little trouble) to motorcycle purrs, and waking up to sirens. If I’m being entirely honest, I loved the tower-to-tower people watching afforded by Warren’s set-up last year. But it’s completely outdone by the opportunities for creeping on the eclectic passerby on Beacon Street. This year, my roommate and I even have a bathroom in our room. We savored the opportunity to buy our own bathmat and bathroom trash can; it was money gratefully spent.

The moral of the story: make the most of your living situation. We’re all going to experience roommates from hell, claustrophobic quarters, ridiculously hot nights and unbearably cold ones, intolerably loud hall mates with atrocious taste in music, and those days when all we want is our bed back at home. These are the misgivings of dormitory living. But as BU students, we have one common denominator in our living experience that trumps any minor troubles: we live in Boston. Not in Chestnut Hill (ahem), but the real city of Boston.

My first ever post for Uncommon Discussion , “Unafraid to Feel,” talked about my ex-boyfriend, Jordan’s suicide and the rampant emotional and mental health difficulty experienced by college students, freshmen specifically. Since Jordan’s death, his parents have established a foundation, The Jordan Matthew Porco Foundation. Its mission is to “honor Jordan’s 18-year life and assist other young adults in coping with the stresses of college life.”

A couple nights ago, I met Jordan’s mom for dinner. She talked to me about the foundation’s mission and how crucial it is that mental health services be readily accessible for college students. Even at schools like BU, where our behavioral medicine services are a mere call away, many students are too afraid to make the call. Shame, guilt and embarrassment push students further into a corner, and their feelings deeper into an emotional abyss. Denying feelings of anxiety, stress, and sorrow will not cause them to disband. Far from it – suppressing emotions in lieu of addressing them only adds fuel to the flame.

Organizations like BU’s chapter of “Active Minds” have a similar mission to the Porco family’s foundation. Active Minds takes aim at the taboo air surrounding mental health. You may remember the organization’s Post Secret project this past spring which provided an entertaining albeit eye-opening glimpse into the anonymous minds and hearts of our classmates.

Our school’s Women’s Resource Center is a warm, welcoming (hello, comfy couches!) spot for the tackling of such diverse topics as sexuality, women’s issues, and the importance of meeting one’s emotional needs to ensure mental health and stability.

Suicide is the second leading cause of death amongst college students. About 1,100 students will commit suicide on campus this year. The statistics are alarmingly high. However, more important than dwelling on suicide prevention is attacking the causes of the act. Mental health problems amongst college students stem from a number of areas: low self-esteem, eating disorders, sexual assault/rape victimization, academic and financial pressures, and a litany of other causes. That students enter their college experience, the “best four years of our lives,” equipped with the tools and resources necessary to combat these stressors is crucial.

The Jordan Matthew Porco Foundation is spearheading a national “Fresh Check Day” at several college campuses throughout the country. On a Fresh Check Day, college freshmen will be invited to listen to speakers, hear a live band, engage in relevant activities, and learn about their school’s resources for mental health. The foundation’s pilot Fresh Check Day will take place this fall at Jordan’s school, St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont, and the band Barefoot Truth will perform.

In “Unafraid to Feel,” I discussed the importance of being emotionally open with friends, telling those close to us what’s going on behind our calm, cool, and collected facades. Sometimes we think the weight of our problems is too burdensome to share with peers. Other times, being away from our parents, we crave “adult” wisdom and advice. Still other times, our situation grows too dire to simply “talk out” and the help we seek must be immediate and informed. On these occasions, we need to lean on the resources established for us and be confident that somebody, in fact many people out there do really, really care about us. At BU, this means calling behavioral medicine and making an appointment, getting in touch with a student health ambassador, joining a behavioral medicine group, or taking part in a workshop. Whatever route you take to keep yourself healthy: seek it. Never in a million years would I have predicted Jordan’s fate. He was goofy, happy-go-lucky and full of smiles. His story is empirical proof that it can happen to truly anyone.

1) “That Kind of Woman”: thatkindofwoman.tumblr.com
The blog’s creator, Kat, has compiled a really fresh, crisp bunch of photos, videos, and
what-have-you. Her style is best described as prep-ster (a dash of J. Crew meets a pinch
of Urban Outfitters) but nevertheless the here-and-there words of wisdom about fashion
are universally insightful. She might say the blog’s aimed at a woman with an “overactive
imagination” and “good head on her shoulders,” but “That Kind of Woman” has a unisex
appeal.

2) “Nerd Boyfriend”: nerdboyfriend.tumblr.com
Inspired by the perhaps-accidental sartorial inclination of geeks, this blog dissects
menswear ensembles in photos and from celebrities to make the looks accessible to your
everyday nerd. Geek chic is hot; fellows, take note.

3) “Unhappy Hipsters”: unhappyhipsters.tumblr.com
This Tumblr’s tagline says it all: “It’s lonely in the modern world.” The photos feature the
mod décor and ultra hip daily life scenery of a stereotypically-generated unhappy hipster.
Their captions are sarcastic, sardonic, hysterical. The next time a bearded twenty-something
cuts you off on his way to the organic food store while smoking an American Spirit and
blasting Bright Eyes… forego the flipped bird, and channel your rage later by hardcore l-o-l-
ing at this Tumblr gem.

4) “Things Organized Neatly”: thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com
What’s better than a perfectly stacked pile of anything? Or a color-coded closet? Even the
sloppiest of dorm-dwellers can appreciate the eye feast of a hyper-organized slice of life.
This blog posts photos of examples of perfect organization. If your room’s gone awry, see for
motivation.

5) “Yes, but No”: yes-butno.tumblr.com
A chief goal of this Tumblr is to disband stereotypes and disprove generalizations. Example
post? “Yes, I am from Massachussetts. No, I don’t live in Boston.” (This seemed appropriate).
Or another: “Yes, I am a guy. No, there’s nothing wrong with being emotional.”

This is a sparse sampling of Tumblr’s best and brightest. Tumblr may not be your cup of tea. A lot
of people I know discredit the site for a lack of promotion of originality, what with the incessant re-
blogging. (I’m a shameless re-blogger, no apology for that). But if you’re prone to boredom, fed up
with Facebook, or purely curious… bombs away!

(P.S. Shameless plug: My baby-stages Tumblr url is ingridrose.tumblr.com!)

Black Lips are four punk-esque garage rockers from Atlanta, Georgia. Spin calls them the “road warriors” for their extensive travels and frequent misadventures. Their aura is distinctly “Jackass”-esque: setting instruments ablaze onstage, urinating into the crowd, lighting off fireworks, performing in the nude. The band even exploits the symptomatic vomiting of a member’s medical condition for shock value. While they’re not my musical cup of tea, I suppose I could see how somebody else, with more punk-inclined ears, could really dig into their sound. But what’s with the off-the-wall antics? I’m not one of those uppity people who decry the sort of extreme risk humor popularized by the program “Jackass” (I totally crushed on Johnny Knoxville) and its TV show spawn, “Viva la Bam” and “Wild Boys.” I think those stunts are hysterical – extremely stupid, obviously dangerous, but usually pretty hysterical. But that has its time and place. Black Lips has dipped into this sort of stunts meets extreme potty humor shamelessness to gain publicity and, ultimately, fans. In the Spin article, the Black Lips’ members admit to not being quite as stupid as they look. Their crazy antics are a ploy to get people to underestimate them, setting listeners up to be taken aback by their actual musical merit. (But I’d beg to differ, I don’t hear much of that, especially on tracks like “Bad Kids.”)

So what’s this say about the “successful” music of right-now? Do you have to have some sort of a gimmick to make your mark? Bon Iver aka Justin Vernon has the whole bearded outdoorsman meets romantically inclined poet vibe going for him. Arctic Monkeys have the whole, well, being English thing going for them. And Black Lips have the whole… pissing into the audience thing? Flashing their genitalia thing? Rebels without a cause, kids your mother warned you about, kind of gross and a little bit creepy thing? Again, this is all entirely my opinion; I’m not a garage rock junkie by any means, so my ears are a little biased. But if we’re all arguing “our” music is the most artistically authentic, I argue that the whole pyrotechnics and piss claim to fame is a little bit like cheating.

In the sixth and seventh grade, I watched Nickolodeon’s Sunday night programming and rummaged through my closet, coordinating a week’s worth of potential outfits inspired by the likes of Emma Roberts’ character in Unfabulous and Jamie Lynn Spears’ in Zoey 101. (Thank God, my style matured as I did.) In high school, I began gathering magazines and catalogs from around the house and clipping images of women in stylish ensembles and red-carpet dresses. I especially coveted an edition of Lucky in which I was sure to find lots of pictures of clothes not on bodies – this way I could arrange the pieces on paper and create my own outfits. Creating these little fashion collages became my favorite pastime. I indulged in escapes into the glossy pages of a polka-dotted, bohemian-printed dream world. It’s a hobby I still haven’t given up. Even my most recent journal is scotch tape-plastered with images of January Jones’ recent asymmetrical hair look, Blake Lively donned in sparkles at a Chanel party, and a black and white portrait of my namesake Ingrid Bergman snipped from pages of Vogue and the like.

Girls like me who spend “too much” time scouting out a good sale or rouging their lips in accordance with Allure’s suggestions are often called “girly girls,” in a way, as a criticism. In a culture which pushes for equality and a distinction between sex (biological) and gender (socialized; ie. our societal idea of femininity), “girly girl”-ism is sometimes frowned upon. I entirely agree with Coppola’s affiliation between fashion and frivolity, and I whole-heartedly appreciate her assertion that substantial people can still enjoy fashion. It’s a sweeping generalization, and the majority of people aren’t judgmental enough to deem all fashion-lovers dumb or insubstantial. That being said, I’ve been victim to the occasional rolled eye when I try to bring up something sartorially-related in conversation with people who think themselves too intellectual to talk about what they assume is just fabric and thread (what do they know?!?).  When the world’s as chaotic as it is, at least I can mix-match a floral with a stripe, or paint my nails fire-engine red just because. I’ll admit it: I’m a girly girl, so sue me. The next time anybody’s got something to say about it I’ll be quoting my good friend (I wish) Sofia.