If you haven’t heard the name Jayne Appel, then you haven’t tuned into ESPN or Sportscenter in the past month, because her name is everywhere. Appel, senior at Stanford University, has taken the college basketball world by storm over the past four years.

As an All-American athlete, Appel has led the Stanford Cardinal to the Women’s Final Four for the past two years. She has more basketball awards than one can count, was one of Glamour magazine’s 2009 Top 10 College Women, and was the number 5 draft pick of the WNBA, picked to play for the San Antonio Silver Stars.

Basketball has been her life, but basketball isn’t the only arena that Appel dominates. With her bleach-blonde hair, notorious neon pink painted fingernails, and constant carefree California attitude, Jayne Appel is just another girl ready to make her place in the world. And as a recently graduated senior (due to that whole WNBA draft thing), Appel has officially entered the real world. Okay, so maybe instead of a 9-5 desk job she’s playing a sport she loves, but she is just as scared about life post-college as the rest of us.

Since most girls our age haven’t seen their dreams become reality yet and don’t have their own Wikipedia page or Facebook fan site, I wanted to sit down with Appel to ask her some questions and pick her brain about life after college. Read More »

My mother is 100% Italian. My father, a 100% Irish. My brother got my mother’s olive skin tone: the two of them could sit outside for hours, lathering up in baby oil and bake to a beautiful golden brown. I was the fortunate one (insert sarcastic undertone here) who got my father’s Irish skin. The two of us can’t go to a windy afternoon baseball game without using SPF 45, unless of course, we want to find ourselves covered in sunburn and blisters.

Last summer, I thought I was invincible when it came to the sun. My friends can get tan with SPF 4 or 8, so why couldn’t I? On two various occasions, I felt the effects of not listening to the realistic side of my brain in terms of summer sunshine. I spent a week in June in San Antonio, Texas, where it was roughly 95 degrees every day. As this was a more family-oriented – go out to dinner, do family related things – sunbathing took a back seat, until the last dreaded day, when I thought it was appropriate to lay at the pool, for three solid hours, with nothing – and I mean, not a drop of sunscreen – on my body. Read More »

Girl in a Coma: “Clumsy Sky”

From the album Both Before I’m Gone. Download it now.