Well… Welcome!

About Me Us

I’m Melissa. I’m 28 years old, and I live in Connecticut. Yes, life is far (far) too expensive here, and yes, folks can be pretty unfriendly. We’re also not particularly good with things like “extreme weather” or “public transportation.” We can do pizza, however! And foliage. There also seems to be a good amount of quality pie. And pie, my friends, is absolutely important.

By day, I’m an urban youth worker and an outreach/communications/recruitment GURU. (Also, I use that term very loosely.) I work for an amazing nonprofit in a lovely city and spend time working with middle and high-schoolers. My students are pretty much the coolest people on Earth, and they inspire me every day. Even when they look at me and say, “Miss, how do you not know what that is? How old ARE YOU, anyway??” (“I’m 28, you guys, not DEAD.”)

I’m a big fan of horses, classical Hollywood cinema (Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn) and all things BBC. I love Gilmore Girls, and on my better days, I like to think I’m a little bit of a Lorelai.

Jasper Hale is my two and a half year-old Disaster Cat, so named for the sheer joy he gets from destroying just about anything in my apartment that I think should be or look just-so. “JASPER. NO.” is a typical refrain heard ’round these parts, as is, “THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS.”

I pulled Jasper out of a tree back in 2009, when he was a wailing, three-pound, six week old bundle of fur, and he thanked me for this rescue with bleeding gashes to the general torso area. At the time, I was with a friend and her 16 year-old daughter, and all of us had just finished reading the Twilight series (whatever, we worked at a bookstore. It hadn’t rotted away the brains of half the population of American teenagers yet, I SWEAR.). He seemed pretty similar to the twitchy, quirky, blood-thirsty Jasper Hale, and so my kitten was named.

Anyway, we hang. This is our blog!

Some notable mentions:

• I started a graduate program in Social Work in September of 2011 and realized it was not the path for me just about 8 weeks later. There is a lot of Stuff Happening, as a result. I will probably talk a lot about job applications and OH DEAR GOD I’M BROKE.
• See the above: I’m not wealthy, and while I love my job, it doesn’t pay me in gold bars. So I’m on a budget, and I might talk about that, too.
• I craft, and I bake. I take pictures of both of those things. And write about them, too. HANG ON TO YOUR HATS.

About the Blog

GoodBeautifulLove.com is brand-spanking-new, registered at the very end of 2011. The site name comes from a Lorraine Hansberry quote: “I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love.”

The GBL blog is hosted (pretty noticeably, in some cases) via Cloudwoven.com, my lovely lady. Cloud was registered on October 4, 1999. That makes her every bit of 12 years old. (And never any back-talk. Coolest. Adolescent. Ever.) I wish I had archives of all these years, but — Cloud has stood by through some pretty tumultuous times, and past entries are spread over many, many data storage devices. (Even some floppies. Don’t tell.) I do hope to put them all together, but that is a project for another… Well. Year. Yikes.