The HIT List: January

Reading

How to be a Parisian Wherever You Are: Love, Style, and Bad Habits by Anne Berest

If you think this is a how-to book or a self-help manual, find something else. This is just for fun, and at more than one point you will laugh and say: “Yep, that’s me!” Color photos and drawings, recipes, and mood charts included.

Watching

Marvel’s Agent Carter, Tuesday night at 8 PM EST

For the kiddos: Paddington (in theaters), charming with subtle adult humor once in a while just for the parents. 

Learning

Italian through Duolingo app while sitting in the car waiting for school to get out. Lesson plans range between 5-20 mins. If you already have some basic knowledge of a particular language you’re interested in, you can test into a level that’s right for you. And it’s free!

Discovering

The New York Times 52 Places to Go in 2015 is a great guide when planning a new vacation adventure. Number 45 is a personal favorite, Numbers 2, 25, and 51 are definitely worth a serious consideration. There is even a new take on old favorites.

Eating

Planning to try Meatless Mondays. As in eating vegetarian one day a week. Although I would say that poultry and seafood works too, since they are not meat.

A Brick in the Wall

For God knows how long, a hideous Monster was living in this house. We hid it away from people for over a decade. But it was haunting me every single day I was in my family room, snickering from behind the picture frame "I'm gonna be here forever, you can't do anything about me, you can't even paint over me, I will outlive you!" Well, I finally killed. Or to be more precise, I hired some one to kill it.

The Monster was a floor to ceiling marble tile fireplace in our family room. The so-called centerpiece of this monstrosity was not the fireplace itself, but three hideous diagonal black stripes, also in marble tile. Miami Vice was the inspiration, if you can call it that.

The Best and The Worst of the 72d Golden Globes

Let's start with the Worst Dressed List, so our eyes can recover afterward by the Best List.

The Worst Dressed

Lena Dunham – if you can believe, this is a Zac Posen. I know they're friends, but she clearly does not do him any favors wearing this gown. The dress was designed for an actual waist. One word Lena: Spanx! Or, in your case, about twice as many as Adele wore to the Grammys (which was 4). You're in Hollywood, it's a job requirement!

Paris, Je T'aime.

I visited Paris twice. The first time I was a college student, my parents bought me a ticket after a bad breakup. It was their way of getting my mind off the breakup and on to something interesting. It worked, only by the time the trip came up I already had a new boyfriend.

I went with a friend, she was much younger than me but that did not stop us from ordering wine with oysters at dinner. We felt very sophisticated and Parisian, sitting in a tiny restaurant eating plates of tiny oysters and drinking a glass of wine. We walked everywhere, the city is quite easy to navigate on foot thanks to Eiffel Tower that one can use as a guiding beacon. We climbed to the first level of Eiffel Tower (stairs all the way), discovering in the process that both were afraid of heights. The trip down was a very slow one, clutching each other in a death grip. I opted for Musee D’Orsay instead of the Louvre, and found Degas pastels are rather quite small and are kept in a very dark room. Studying them previously in art history, I just assumed that they were much bigger, and the discovery of their actual size was a disappointing moment. But I got over it eventually. I loved the museum overall, it’s an old railway station and best part is to just sit on a bench and take in the entire space – it is breathtaking.