Seriously. I want to make a cake, but I don't want to make just any old cake, I want something really, really worth eating. Something delicious. Something outstandingly good, something you want to nibble forkfuls out of the fridge at 1 am from. Something with a ton of flavor, not just a sugar high, to offer. Something that makes you sad when it's et. Can be simple, can be complicated, can be anything at all......you know what I want?
Magical Cake.
Got any recipes?
Well, I'm a big ball of sweat.
This weekend was all about the slow transformation of my basement. I expect the next week will be as well, as slow seems to be the operative word.
The TV/reading/knitting space in my house is a finished basement, sorta - the house is built into a slope, so street side ground floor is back yard second story. The downstairs is a pretty good space, nice and coolish in the summer (comparatively speaking) but the only natural light comes from sliding door into the little back yard.
If you were here you could walk down the steps into the couch/tv area and then, if you wanted to, cross the room into the desk/book/possible fiber studio area that looks out through the glass doors into the desk. Except in practice, the desk/book/fiber studio area is an afterthought space because you come down into the tv space and sorta stop and the fiber studio has remained potential. This study or whathaveyou is a forgotten zone (where junk accumulates) and a pathway to the door out. And the path has become a divider - books on the left - four cases of them and this huge old desk that belonged to my great grandfather on the right. But no unity of space.
(Old book cases on left, desk on right. Yarn covered chaise and boxes of fiber free floating in the middle looking for new home.)
So after 7 years here, last month I am standing in between the two rooms holding some yarn - there's always yarn and it tends to collect on the chaise that resides on the border between these two spaces - and I have a doh moment. These rooms should be switched. The books should be on cases along the wall where the couch lives and the desk should be where the TV is now. The TV should be where the desk lives and the couch where the books are. So simple
Natural light near sitting area? Good.
Sitting and tv space in the slightly smaller space, leading to coziness? Good.
Bookcases installed along the longest wall? Good.
Library area leading to sitting area bringing two disparate spaces into a cohesive living area? Good.
The fact that it took me 7 years to think of this? Less Good.
Once I got the color thing more or less sorted (I'm worried its too sunshiney now, but I'm committed) I painted the long wall and spent the weekend installing the thousand feet of hanging shelves and moving books.
This may be the first time in my life I have more shelf than I have reading material, though come to think of it there are more books to be gathered up and put away.
Once I dig them out from behind the furniture I have shoved over against the desk.
I tried to draw you a picture but not so much the paint program skills. I made a home for the drum carder though.
Anyway, I should totally have been able to paint the whole thing by now, but there is just Too Much Stuff down here and there will be until Monday night, when I can put the old shelves, a table and two chairs out to be hauled away. In the meantime, I think I could probably spend some useful time bagging and storing yarn. Man does that stuff creep.
But I wasn't kidding about the big ball of sweat thing, so a shower first.
OK, I bagged the yarn and now I'm confused. Tidier, but confused.
Because I think I might like the couch in front of the bookcases. And maybe the space where the books used to be should be a fiber studio after all. Huh.
Oh, also. If you drop a box of shelves on the floor and you try to break the fall with your foot because the shelves are like, expensive and you don't want to dent them before they ever make it onto the wall brackets? This is what your toe will look like:
I don't recommend it as a solution really. Ow. Saved the shelves though.
The problem I'm having these days is that - I'm rather happy. Good mood. Angst has more words in it. Now I'm all like, I have extra joy today, would you care for some? Maybe that's just this week, but I dunno, feels like a possible cosmic shift.
I've been in therapy a long time, y'all know that, right? I started going after my dad died and kept at it because it seemed like the first actually effective method I had ever found for genuinely generating change and self awareness, which are like, my favorite things. Anyway, I was having a little bit of an obsessive brood this weekend about some topic whose grooves are well worn in my head - I'm not trying to be deliberately oblique or anything, or maybe I am. The topic is to do with not believing what other people say or do when it comes into fundamental conflict with my own self doubt, but the details I must leave partially behind the curtain.
Anyway.
I was feeling self-effacing and under-confident in a friendship and wrote an email - one of those ones where you want to ask a question but think maybe you are too much or too pushy or are overstepping the bounds and so you couch it in indirect terms in a way that really, if you saw a friend doing the same thing, would make you yell at them? I did that and I got back this completely normal email where the friend, like answered the question, no fuss. It was an incomplete answer, because there did not yet exist a final one, but it was an answer from a person clearly UNoffended by the question.
And for some reason I actually noticed this, it caught my attention and having been noticed drew my attention backwards, connect the dots style, to the fact that my assumption that I was imposing in some way was - um. Not consistent with the facts, let us say. And in fact, maybe it was a bit contrary to the facts. And always had been, historically. And that maybe the delusion I was experiencing was getting in the way of a few things. And had always done so. Um. Yeah.
And though these moldy old ideas have a way of coming back in cycles, this feels like one of those emotionally chiropractic moments, the therapeutic Doh, from which life proceeds quantum-ly altered. I love therapy.
Also, I have turned the heel on sock two. But I'm not knitting much. It is 12 million degrees and also, I am moving all my shit around. I tend to embark rather suddenly on long contemplated projects. They cook in my head - I have a notebook with color samples and room measurements and pictures of furniture, it lives in the car. And one day I wake up, look at my living room wall and think, I'm going to paint you orange, where's that paint chip and my car keys.
Why a blazingly hot June seemed like the moment...well, actually I know why. Company next month. Always a good time to motivate one's self.
Other News:
For the first time in about 4 months the number of unread knitting posts in Newsgator is under a hundred. That's both cool and alarming - there's been something comforting about knowing I always have something to read (because the 150 unread books in my house are Not Enough) but now that they begin to run out, I am facing the unhappy thought of actually getting some work done. Botheration.
Did you know there are perfume blogs? Just as devoted and obsessed as fiber dorks. Read this and see. Yes, I'm still on that kick, but have branched out into niche perfume houses and industry classics and a little of this and that of all kinds. The Perfumed Court has taken many of my dollars in exchange for dozens of wee vials of mysterious potions. I have learned that - and this will stagger you, I know - that I like odd things. Bring the smoke, bring the funk, bring the weirdly floral, the cooking smells, the middle eastern spice market and the salt of living things. Keep your Joy and Chanel 5 WAY over there - they smell like boarding school to me, like privileged lives, like beloved aunts drinking coffee after dinner. In demitasse cups. Brought in by the maid. Beautiful, comforting, yet cloistered in a kind of limiting way.
Today I smell like a field of hay in the summer (never mind that if I recall, hay isn't baled until the fall, this is alchemy) with a barn on the far side of it, a barn with an unusual selection of animals in it. Dzing! Delicious.
And I have had some paint sampling woes. My basement - which walks out, townhouse - was a boring white room and I had been hesitating over the blue/green I THOUGHT I was going to paint it for two years and then I saw a wall at Mamacate's I liked, light but rich. This is a light poor space, so light but rich was ideal. She wrote down the color and then the store I went to didn't carry it.
But I wanted to ACT NOW, so I picked out a sample I thought was a close match. Dude mixed it, I went home and I get about half way through the sample and go -- no, this is way too yellow. What was I thinking?
So I drive to another store and buy a sample of the actual color and begin to paint over the mustard. But it is too light - what looks rich in a sunny room looks barely non-white in my basement.
And I FINALLY think to get out the color card for paint 1 - turns out the mixing dude made a fairly large mistake reading the formula.* Color THREE on the left, is the one I chose in the first place. Top cream yellow with a teeny bit of violet in it, it looks rich but bright in low light and dirty-sunny illuminated. Perfect for my basement cave.
Yellow is a way tricky color, yo.
I am presently obsessed with apples and peanut butter, which also makes me think of boarding school, but in a better way than Joy. Though these days the peanut butter is natural and supplemented with flax seeds. Which are odd, but strangely good as an addition.
*(He was having a DAY, which he told me about at the time. So not a huge surprise. I find I'm very interested in people's stories these days - what does what she's wearing say about how she sees herself for example, or his distraction, what does it mean. And you know, if you look people in the eye and say hello like you mean it, offer a bit of your own story - they'll tell you the world.)
The internet is slow today - it is as hot and cross as I am, as everyone is. I'm at work alone because I told everyone to leave when they hit their personal heat limit. They made it to 10, which I thought was good, really good in fact.
The chocolates that live on my desk are not quite melted but neither
are they quite solid. A delicious texture in fact, except that the
environment that created this state is the one we all have to sit in and semi-solid people are less delicious.
Which is to say the air conditioner done broke, and this is a building
built in a technologically dependent age. No airflow.
And even so, it is a million degrees out. Airflow would only make the poaching well ventilated and breezy. My ear keeps waiting for the shimmering vibration of cicadas, which I associate with this temperature on some kind of visceral level. It must not be a cicada season, though I swear they were all cicada summers when I was small.
The nice man is out sweating behind the building. I brought him some ice water in a cup - which was weird, I'm so used to bottles but a cup is what I had. It felt old fashioned, bringing the repairman some water in a cup. I wish it had been a beer, but I don't keep beer at work.
Yesterday I went medieval on my kitchen - someone asked me how my house can be the mess I always talk about, with just me and the cat (who totally does her share of mess creating, little shedding beast). The truth is I hate house work AND I never learned to do it well and efficiently. There is an art to it, or a knack at least, and a discipline: I am the daughter of a born-again slob who was the daughter of a dyed-in-the-fucking-wool psychotic neat freak (related items, I think) and I am not saying this is my mom's fault because am 39 and take care of my own business. But I am sort of realizing that since I did not learn these habits at my mama's knee I have to teach them to myself and that the cat hair is not going to vacuum itself, no matter how much I wish it would.
Typically I do the bare minimum to keep it civilized. But I think my minimum standard for civilization is changing and I'm tired of feeling like I have to clean up for company. I like clean, it makes the house feel calm and good and me too. So my choices seem to be get over myself, or dust more and I am aiming for both - if I could average out my mother and grandmother I might turn out have a fairly balanced approach, in this one area at least. But to get there, there has to be a higher level of clean attained. A new baseline.
Plus, I want to paint everything in my house and thatgoes way better when you start without a layer of weird, sticky baseboard dust. Not that these were conscious decisions - I woke up yesterday and went down to make some breakfast and accidentally scrubbed the baseboards and vacuumed the screens and and washed the windows inside and out and stuff, for oh, like 10 hours. I went behind the cookbooks, people. With a vacuum and THEN a dust rag, and did all that odd chore stuff too, like polishing the silver fork wind chime, and taking down the brackets for the blinds I deep-sixed 4 years ago and removing the holder for the paper towels I don't use.
The kitchen looks a million times better with the screens down and the glass clean - LIGHT! VIEW! It's kinda crazy nice. Satisfying.
I think the trick is, clean the shit out of one room, then the next day, clean it again (which only takes 10 seconds because it is already good) THEN clean the shit out of the next room. Day 3 do rooms A and B, then clean the shit out of C. And eventually you can keep the whole thing going on a hour a day (A thought both horrifying and appealing. But I think the Internet can probably spare me a hour a day, right?). Except I am going out of town Wednesday and when I get home? Brace yourself for home improvement: I had one of those spasms I get sometimes and 1050 linear feet of new book shelf are on the way here.
Tonight I corral yarn and hang up the laundry. Maybe a bit of dusting. We'll see what happens to 'a higher level of basic civilization' over the rest of the summer. The whole thing would be simpler if I just shaved the cat though. Well, simpler except for the plastic surgery to repair the damage.
Oh god, I blogged about housework, didn't I?
It is the heat, forgive me.
I HAVE started the second one. But it goes really slowly when you spend a weekend with a brush attachment in one hand and a dust rag in the other.
Oh PS. I talked to my brother yesterday and every two seconds he had to go pry his two year old daughter off of something she wasn't supposed to be into or renegotiate the terms of some thing or another. She's a twinkling, button-pushing, ferociously stubborn pack of trouble that one, and it makes me incredibly happy because a) she's a riot and b) so was he, the rat, 35 years ago and serious big sister was target no. 1. Also hearing my brother repeat as his calming mantra "well behaved women seldom make history" was like, the best thing ever.
(he's an awesome dad, just so you know.)
I had this whole thing I wrote and then stared at for days about Massachusetts, and in the end, I scrapped it, wrote a letter to friend containing the essential wonder of it all and then came back and stared at the amputated post some more.
The problem I am experiencing is that I have been so extraordinarily lucky as to make some really real friends through the blog, friends I love not because we have blogging in common, but because blogging shortened the distance between two remote points such that we met. And they are real people whose lives move and inspire me, and that's personal and delicate and what I think about it is not something I can write about here, because you know C and K and C and J and L and M and L and M and J and C and S and all in some way, and so it can feel like betrayal not revelation. You may have noticed I don't take many people pictures for the blog anymore. All related.
I know, I think too much. And am weirdly private for someone who writes about her life on the Internet, and who appears social and gregarious when spotted in the wild. As I said to someone a few months ago in an admittedly different context, I'm a complicated woman.
Let me just say that I had the best weekend I have had I a long time, and I AM a total sneak, running off to Cummington, though you will find if you look back, no mention was made of Massachusetts in the discussion of things to be adjured. That was a deliberate omission, y'all.
I got just enough of a sunburn to know I spent time outside in sunlight but not enough to be sorry, I ate waffles three days in a row, tasted 12 different beers with a table of friends, ate some really tremendous chili cheese fries (those I might have a picture of, come to think of it. But NO camera cable), had the same waitress at two different restaurants 30 miles apart on consecutive evenings (that was really weird, particularly when she proved she remembered us by reeling off the previous nights orders). I bought 11 eggs. And a hat (not at the same time). I discovered that the absolute proof of collective and fundamental geekery is to ask a friend for hand cream by demanding "Moisturize Me"* and have everyone in earshot fall down laughing. I held my hand on the belly of a newly pregnant friend and hugged people I do not hug nearly enough. I got to see people relax from the crazy that is life and be transparent and free for a minute. I hope everyone felt what I did, saw the little unexpected moments.
The fiber was lovely, but really, genuinely, secondary.
My thought for the week is that more and more I believe the real business of life is to know ourselves well enough to be internally still, to know ourselves well enough to know when to tell our stories and when to let others speak, to know ourselves well enough to let others exist in our sphere. To work and listen and examine until you can see people, see the flickering bits of their exposed vessels with tenderness, hold them lightly so they can be, just for a minute sometimes, sometimes for hours or days.
Sometimes the gratitude I feel for the life I have now and the people in it rises up behind my eyeballs until I can hardly contain it.
I planted these from a patch I dug up at my mom's when I moved into my house in 2001. They sorta sat there not quite doing badly, but certainly not doing well until last summer, when they made one (1) flower and perked up a bit.
When I got home from Mass, this was what I saw:
* Dr. Who, Season 1, Episode 2. As if you didn't know.
At Christmas we went to the zoo.
This is near my mother, an excellent small zoo just the right size for people under five to enjoy a refreshing and adventurous day and not be quite tired enough to cry on the way back to the car. We saw lots of excellent things like a rhinoceros, and giraffes eating Christmas trees. There were monkeys. And an anteater. The giant tortoise was hiding and my nephew fed the ducks with shaky hands and nervous shrieking laughter. The coi, no dummies, tracked the path of children along the pond's edge waiting for the inevitable bounty. Sometimes they even beat the ducks.
Just before the ducks, and after the parrots, we walked around a corner and saw these.
Flamingos, subjects of a million pink plastic lawn tchotches, they've become some kind of shorthand for kitsch. When I wanted to annoy my fastidious neighbor I considered a pink flamingo for the front step. What was I thinking?
They are beautiful, so astonishingly beautiful with a thousand impossible shades of coral and pink and vermilion knees, the s-curve of their necks as they drank and the blackness of their beaks and the ripples of light in their feathers and the Seussian spindle legged feather puffs of them as they slept.
They sorta stuck with me, in this brilliant mind's eye picture, I haven't the words for it exactly, but this moment of breath lost, this moment of unexpected drenching beauty, this moment of expanded perception, these birds. (Not for the first time I realized that human beings can be oddly reluctant to fully embrace the beauty of the world and the wickedness too. We settle for the pink plastic lawn version too much. What is up with that?)
Naturally, I could not resist the exact deep glowing Flamingo coloured-ness of this. Because when you can express memory and perception in yarn, you so totally should.
Yes, that's the same yarn vendor Steph blogged last week. Yes, I am a sheep. Yes, you can bite me. (And yes, that is the vendor's picture. 1 million tries got me 1 million pictures of bright eye-searingly pink yarn. Nothing like the real thing.)
469 yards, 70% superwash merino, 30% silk. It is divine. The color is as brilliantly varied and yet harmonious as the inspirational feathers, and the silk is giving it the tiniest halo while I work with it. I want more. Given my history with socks (ugly, abortive, brief), probably not a fiscally prudent idea. But the desire is there.
Yes, Lisa, I said sock.
Really. It is even a bit bigger now.
A Loksin actually. Baa.
(In strict accuracy, I had long ago (January) decided that my next attempt at a sock would be a Loksin. I swear it.
(I find them perfectly charming, particularly once I stopped spelling them Loskin).
This was after a recent sock attempt that went awry. (I never told you. There was some gauge trouble. It was very sad. It is 'resting' now.)
It was just the flamingo yarn that moved me to start (and who could blame me?)
But one cannot deny the influence of strange outside forces upon one's behavior. No matter how much one might like to claim complete autonomy in one's desires and actions. (Ahem.)
So great yarn, great pattern, not-so great sock knitter. It is going. But nobody hold their breath or anything, I'd feel responsible if anything happened.
So I didn't go to Maryland S&W. Or Connecticut. Nor will I go to New Hampshire this coming weekend. I would actually like to go to NH but I can't face the drive this year. Between gas prices and available time, I just can't. I'm going to spend the gas money on dirt and flowers and spend some of next weekend grubbing in my back yard.
Instead I hope to go to SOAR again in the fall.
The festivals are truly wonderful, particularly as a way to connect with what I like to call the like-mindedly odd, and of course to shop. They can encourage frenzy in the unprepared. Or even the prepared with insufficient emotional resources.
If I needed to supplement the wool erupting in every corner of my house.
Which I really don't.
I had friends over last week and I was showing off stash - the way one does (Or is that just me?) - and I just got kinda flummoxed. I have at least three fleeces unwashed in my kitchen in the corner (Maybe the garden grubbing can be supplemented with some fleece washing?) At least 5 processed into roving. One three that are washed but still locks or partially locks or half carded. It goes on.
And that doesn't count the bags from the Spinning Bunny, the roving from the Woolen Rabbit, Spinners Hill, Buckwheat Bridge, Carolina Homespun, Spunky Eclectic, Abby Franquemont. All gorgeous and inspirational materials.
This is just off the top of my head. And does not include yarn. And I do not have the least among stashes, if you dig what I am saying. (Is this like every stash reduction post in blog land? I hope not. As a note, I am comfortable collecting wool as a hobby, but want to collect not heedlessly grab and horde. Fine line sometimes?)
Perspective, children, is what I need. Perspective and goals (I suck at goals, my whole life I have sucked at goals. So maybe intent is a better word.)
Perspective and Intent.
I love fiber. I want it to continue to be a force for good in my life. Which means it can not always be a primary line item in my budget, an excuse for heedless acquisition without purpose or a place to hide from the rest of my life.
Sometimes that's what hobbies are, a refuge. And that is good, shelter from the storm is essential.
But it can go wrong too - I was watching some frenzy of acquisition on some board somewhere recently, someone gnashing and weeping because she had missed out on some exclusive yarn somewhere and I was startled to discover that I understood her upset. My rational mind was all - dude that's crazy, it's yarn - and my irrational mind was all - let me corner the market on this, my preciousssss.
This was right around when I chased down some rare sock yarn last week. Because you know, I am SUCH a sock knitter.
But it tied into what I have been thinking about recently, about that perspective and intent. I'm not 14 any more. I don't give a shit that I am not a cool kid. I have LOTS of shoes and yarn and more importantly, a home and friends and family and thoughts and dreams and hopes and the best cat in the world. I woke up in a pool of sunlight in the first world, I am tall and strong and healthy and I am so fucking lucky I can hardly look at it sometimes.
But there have totally been times I was in danger of pulling the refuge in after me, of having the shelter become a cage, of becoming so obsessed with the tangibles of fiber stuff that I forgot the intangibles of it, the depth that is possible, to appreciate, to see. Forgetting that there will always be something else exquisite to discover, always be another fleece, another yarn. I hate that me, that forgetting, greedy me.
For this to work, I need to learn, I need to have balance and I need to be traveling somewhere - and I don't mean New Hampshire. I mean if I try and have every festival, every moment crammed in, I won't SEE any of it. I mean I need to take the learning and DO something with it.
I need to knit a sweater that challenges me.
Spin more than 3 ounces of a single fiber. Knit something with it.
Learn to use the knitting machine that's been behind the couch for 2 years.
Sew up some of the fabric piled in the guest room, be damned to mistakes.
Be damned to mistakes is it, really. No one is imperiled by my fiber mistakes. Not even me.
I read something great about mindfulness recently and if I could remember where I would give you a link - but she made the point that mindfulness wasn't getting it right every time, it was trying as much as possible, making small corrections, failing sometimes and keeping the arc of progress going even when intent falters in a moment.
So SOAR is my choice this year, to learn and apply that learning, to find inspiration and the tools to follow it somewhere, instead of every festival in a chaotic spring of blurred experience. Less buying (Notice I don't say NONE), more using. Lots of talking to people. Maybe some beer. Moments savored not gulped. Sunlight. Sheep pictures. Laying on the grass.
Still going to Rhinebeck though.
Come ON.
When I was a wee lass I went to boarding school. I think it was the first time I became aware of stuff as desirable in a way that related to other people. Not that I never wanted anything prior to sleep away school: I liked shiny things as much as anyone - makeup and I were old friends, I liked pretty clothes and blown-glass horses standing on a sunlit shelf. What book bag one carried was socially significant. Hell, I got up and curled my hair before school every day, something I have a great deal of trouble believing now, and yet, I remember it. I know I did it. There were trendy girls and not, and I knew I was Not. But I don't think I had yet had a moment where I looked at someone else's stuff and coveted it, pined for it. Mostly, if I had enough to read I was happy, though envious of the more petite and socially graceful.
But in boarding school there were girls with money, girls who brought their own rugs to the dorm, girls who had more shoes than I had novels, girls who liked New Wave, girls with Good Jewelry, girls wearing those Guatemalan woven hooded shirts with the pouch in the front, girls who collected vintage dresses. It was a word of stuff such as I had never imagined. Some of it was healthy - choosing things to represent who you are and want to be is normal I think - and some of it was money substituted for love or peace (and it was still a lot more innocent than the mass marketed consumerism we live with today). It was a world before aspartame. A world before the internet and all the acquisitive impulses that has fertilized.
The first day I was there I fell in love with "American Pie"* as well as with the idea that you could hear of a song and track it down and listen to it - oh, this world before iTunes, where you had to look for old vinyl if you wanted it. And it wasn't long before I had a poster of Adam Ant, another by Robert Doisneau, a crush on Simon Le Bon, the beginnings of a fine collection of dangling earrings (come to think of it, I had those when I got there), a new opinion of the clothes my mother bought for me and a collage of words and images cut out of magazines hanging on my wall.
One of the things that lots of girls had that I had never considered for myself was perfume - my mother had perfume she rarely wore and yet cherished, my grandmother traveled in a terrible cloud of Opium. This was grown up stuff. Not for me. But the little bottles fascinated, the tiny samples of fantasy you could send away for. I ordered Tatiana - something about the shape of the bottle, the description spoke to me and I waited for it and adored it except that I hated the way it smelled. Hated it. There was another, something with roses, that provoked the same loathing.
It was a lesson that took some time to assimilate, that affectation is useless, that you can't wear it or be it if it isn't you. Scent is visceral.
Somewhere along the way I fell hard for Obsession and wore it it a toxic 80s cloud through college, alternately with Fendi and Chanel 22 and one or two others I think I owned for the bottle rather than the smell. The imagery of perfume advertising captured me far more than fashion did, this idea of bottled identity, projected personality, applied confidence, the way perfume allowed boys and girls to bridge the gap between each other, an excuse to move closer, a catalyst for the profound intimacy of breathing someone in, the way scent changes with time and sweat to define evenings, moments, memories. There was a boy in college I loved. We kissed once and the whole evening is scent-colored in my head, tied together with vanilla and amber and terror and hope and desert air. I think that might have been the beginning of the end of Obsession, that and I swear they changed the formula along the way. Much sweeter now, almost intolerably so.
Later I wore Fracas - which was worn in a book and I fell in love with it and found it and adored it for real, then Agent Provocateur.....then nothing for most of my 30s, except on special occasions. I tried clean scents, green teas and grapefruits, daytime scents, but they didn't stick. Mostly they smell like the detergent aisle at the supermarket to me, scent afraid to be a smell. They have no dirt in them, no life. I like dirt. Eventually I got rid of the old bottles - keeping just Fracas, Agent Provocateur which I still loved, and an old bottle of Obsession I never touch but still smile when I see.
Perfume was a branding idea in someways, a projection of what I wanted to be but was not quite yet and around the time I started therapy I think I stopped trying to project something - sexy! mature! confident! clean! professional! - and started trying to be it instead. Whatever it was going to turn out to be. I stopped wearing makeup regularly at the same time, and took up exercise instead, and casual clothing. I went inside my head, not to hide, but to do a little work. How could I assume an identity when I was actively trying to map my own?
I've come to miss it though, the enhancement of image, the mood interaction, the fantasy, the engagement of the senses. I have a much better idea of who I am now and it occurred to me recently that I want that again. Lipstick. Dresses. To enjoy the scent rising off my own skin. It's a flirtatious impulse obviously, but not just in a sexual sense. I have this desire to engage with the world more, to meet people's eyes, to talk to them, to hear them, to have my shutters open. To have gravity on my personal planet.
Which led to my falling down the rabbit hole into Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs. Some of you are probably familiar with them - the gothic perfumer. They have perfume oils with literary antecedents and florid atmosphere, fantastic descriptions and complicated associations. And they sell samples of most of their scents. Perfect for the mild obsessive on a personal quest.
It's a site that demands a certain amount of surrender to the inside of the creator's mind, and it overwhelmed me for a long while. Couldn't give in. I would try to pick out six to try and get confused by what was sample-able and what wasn't. How everything interacted. How to find something when I wanted it. So I would click away. But a few months ago, I wasn't overwhelmed, I was enthralled. I ordered a bit of this and a bit of that and was charmed to my toes by the story each perfume was crafted to represent. It is brilliant, almost performance art. Is this my story? Do I only think so until the reality of a scent hits my system? What do I like? Why? What am I surprised to like or hate?
I've been trying one or two every day - depending on how I like it or how long it lasts. I have dozens and dozens. I'm going to have elimination rounds. I'm on a mission. I'm having so much fun.
* While I was looking this up to add the link and reading about how Killing Me Softly was an inspired by American Pie, Killing me Softly came on the radio. Literally as I read the words. How spooky is that?
So this morning I dreamed of the Jailhouse Rock production number from the eponymous movie (which I have long maintained, though with no firm factual basis, was the first music video). Often these odd dreams are what a very clever commenter referred to as NPR dreams (this was upon the occasion that I dreamt my Thanksgiving turkey went to war) but today I had the buzzy alarm not the radio, so the imagery and soundtrack came from less obvious locations.
And while I yield to no one in my admiration for charm and beauty of the young Elvis, I fail to see what Jailhouse Rock has to do with knitting. And yet it did. A black and white scarf. That I am assuming was colorwork, because it needed to be steeked at the end of the number. Not unlike the climax of "Under the Sea", but with scissors.
It is possible I may be coming down with something.
Sore throat. Chill. Sore neck for the past few days. But I refuse to acknowledge it until I've written a check, mailed it and done the payroll.
And now it is later and I have mailed the check and gone over the wall at the post office and been late for a forgotten meeting because I went to order eyeglasses on the way back (well sorta on the way back) and done half the payroll and had that meeting after all, very usefully and efficiently and also, ahem, created a database to keep track of my most recent obsession which I will show you if I am ever home during daylight again, and now I am eating lunch, courtesy of the fine people at Amy's.
I have been obsessed with this recipe this week: Adzuki Bean Croquettes. From Nourish Me. Which I would encourage you to read for the beautiful food, beautiful pictures and beautiful words. She's tremendous. Braised fennel, people. With wine glazed lentils. My obsession with her cooking bears out one friend's belief that I am 18 months away from vegetarianism and closing fast. On the other hand, I had a creole style pork tenderloin (in a converted church, in fact) last week that was delicious. And murdered a pastrami Reuben on Sunday. So perhaps not.
I hardly need glasses, but when I do need them, I need them most definitely. A strange by product of either advancing decriptitude or LASIK (both?) is that my vision - which, five years post operatively, is about 20/30 on one side and about 20/50 on the other - can go exceptionally fuzzy on days when I am exceptionally tired. Particularly around my period - hormones can effect ocular pressure, did you know? - and particularly when I am dehydrated. In Arizona, I can hardly read a street sign between the sun and the parched condition I am reduced to. To which I am reduced. You know.
So I need glasses whilst driving in unfamiliar places, in New York, when I have PMS and when I am so tired I probably should not be operating a motor vehicle anyway. And also, sometimes for the computer, which is a different pair of glasses. On average, maybe once a week. Its stupid. But not having them? Also not working out so good. And now that I have peripheral vision and stuff, I don't find them at all burdensome. In fact, they are sorta cute when I'm not helpless without them. Perspective is a marvelous thing.
Anyway, I think these are the ones. This brand seems to make a frame width that fits my giant head, and they are light, and cute and flattering and I think I can live with them for 5 years of occasional use.
Also? I knit this week. It was thrilling until I tried to groom the cat and she sunk her talon into the tip on my index finder, effectively limiting my enthusiasm for repeatedly shoving a wooden stick into the resulting hole. But still. I have - brace yourself - completed the long languishing right front of this sweater and begun the left front. I have learned a new button hole method. And most shockingly of all, I have matched the gauge of the back, begun three years previously.
Also, you have to go here and watch this guy. I found him via Feministing twice: on the subject of the music business and the moral high ground and on MLK. He was brilliant and I wanted to tell you and then I forgot. Twice. And then Flea at One Good Thing (a long time favorite read) mentioned him. (Except it was on her other blog. Oops.) And I went over again and found this. So dudes, settle in.
And I smell like pirate. Sort of. Not really. But kinda. In a good way.
Thus concludes this edition of non-sequitorious blogging here at EnchantingJuno.
So I went on a date last night, which is not the point of this story, but nice. It was a good date. Which is also nice.
Restored steam locomotives left unattended in the wee small hours of a fine spring night are a good place to kiss someone. Make a note.
Anyway, in order to go on a date you have to get dressed for a date, which is a challenging thing. Attractive but not overt, appealing but not too sexy, like you made an effort, but not TOO much of an effort. And for me - no heels, as I have a tendency to trip if I turn out to be attracted to someone. Injury is not a good outcome. (Alternatively I will drop my keys, spill the wine or similar.)
I know some people just wear whatever, but I dunno. I think its nice to show up like this is something you're really there for. I realize that optimism in the face of dating is counter to the prevailing ethos, but I say dudes, if you haven't got the balls to hope for it, you ain't never going to find it. Whatever your it is. And for me showing up un-groomed is going in with LOW expectations.
So I worked out some variation on my normal theme of basic black with some stuff.
Wrap dress. Mohair shawl made by a freind. Nice earrings (one of which I lost, dammit. Maybe the etsy lady can make me another?). Chunky ring. Ridiculously expensive suede bag I bought literally under the influence (never shop with a label conscious friend after three cocktails. Tip from me) about 6 years ago and still love.
And these great flat-heeled knee high, unlined black suede boots I bought over the winter. Now, I've worn them before, to walk around the city, to go to dinner - very comfortable. But always with black tights. Last night - as it is April - I did not wear tights. I wore legs.
I was out for oh, 6 or 7 hours. And I came home and took off my boots and checked my email and took off my jewelry and sat down.
And happened to notice something.
My legs were black from the knee to the ankle. Like, ink-black. Squid ink black. Crocked, by gum. My boots are crocked.
I forgot to take a picture (It was two am, when I thought of you it was already too late. Forgive me.) but when I get home tonight I will show you the formerly white towel I scrubbed down with.
If it were yarn I could try rinsing, and a setting agent. But suede?
I'm at a loss.
