(no subject)

Today has been low-key, because I decided I wanted to spend the evening at home.

I cooked dinner (roasted chicken, mashed potatos and gravy, but no salad because my carrots wilted overnight - these gorgeous, cartoon-perfect carrots are now sort of rubbery).

We watched Autumn in New York, which is amazingly, laughably bad. The end is supposed to be sad and moving and we laughed all the way through. Every event in the storyline is so predictable that it hurts. Is it sick that I found a movie about a 22-year-old girl with a heart condition hilariously entertaining? Poor Winona Ryder. I used to like her a lot - around the time of Beetlejuice and Heathers - now she's just annoying.

I've spent most of the rest of the evening reading A Conspiracy of Paper by David Liss; I'll withhold my opinion until I'm somewhat further into the story. My mom is finally tackling my copy of Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost because my cousin made her promise to read it. B. (my cousin) has read it something like ten times. It is a good book, but it took me months to read because the middle is slow and, in places, dry, so I cannot see rereading it in the very near future.

I'm talking to Ragdoll and I'm going to spend the next few hours doing housework, then go to sleep.

(no subject)

I have not yet managed to get anything done, having become distracted by shiny objects which were pointed out to me by Ragdoll. Specifically, Hot Topic (the store I love to hate but from which I buy a lot of t-shirts and small accessories) has just introduced a line of Sandman stuff. I've wanted a Morpheus baby tee for years (the cape is hella stupid, though). Somehow I got sucked into the rest of the site and have been happily adding tank tops (which I need for summer) and baby tees to my shopping cart, though I don't know if I'll buy them. I have a Curious George tank top in there, and a couple of big-eyed art things from Fine, and... I probably won't buy much of it.

I'm on AIM right now, by the way. Ahem ahem ahem.

(no subject)

Can someone please explain to me the attraction of all these clothes, accessories, etc, with the Playboy emblem on them? I just don't Get It.

I didn't Get supa-phat pants, either.
I don't Get the new mullet fondness.
I don't Get the cowboy hats that have been popular recently... or the visors... or the ones that look like something Gilligan would wear.

I think I'm getting old.

image consciousness and scent memory

I cannot believe it's 8AM and I'm still up. Maybe I'll just stay up all day... but that would kind of kill the evening, wouldn't it?

I've been indulging in nostalgia. I used to know this super-cool girl & popped by her domain, but nearly all the content is hidden, so I went on a miniature hunt to re-locate where she'd hidden it. I found a ton of pictures but no actual pages. Oh well.

I decided, the other day, to start dressing a little more formally & "goth" again, primarily because I was very rarely fucked-with when I dressed that way. I'm not entirely comfortable in the look anymore, but it'll only be one night every week or two, when I go to the movies, which is fine with me. It should definitely cut down on the kind of incidents I've been dealing with this past week.

Usually when I look freaky I get a ton of positive comments and compliments, and when I look normal more people are nice to me but also more people are willing to give me a hard time. So it's back to platform boots with 5" heels and numerous buckles and straps, and black wigs, and giant silver rings, and so on. Time to drag out the leather coffin purse and the heavy black eyeliner. (gah... I quit wearing it because it was always getting into my eyes and irritating them.) I also need to figure out what to do with my hair. That breed of freakiness takes a lot of time and effort and obsessive concern with your appearance, which I don't know if I can muster... I have a lot of better places to channel my energy, or at least more deserving places.

Strange, because I thought it would be the other way around.

My mom is up now... I know she's almost ready to go because I can smell her perfume, Angel, in the next room. It smells like a patisserie. She's going to stop wearing it when this bottle runs dry, because it's become too available in this area - she used to have to either drive for hours or order online to get it. Now it can be found at the local Dillard's department store & her sister has also bought a bottle & La Mama doesn't feel like it's unique enough anymore. Angel (like Poison, another weirdly foody scent) is distinctive; when someone in a room is wearing it, if you know the scent, you know what they're wearing. It used to be mysterious and now it isn't, not so much. So she is thinking of abandoning it for something rarer. I waggishly suggested Hanae Mori perfume... HM is a Japanese fashion designer and the scent is similar to Angel.

I myself used to be devoted to Casmir by Chopard, but it has become hard to find; now I rarely wear anything but YSL Baby Doll. If I wear something else, it's usually Skin Musk or Angel Innocent or some of my remaining Casmir. I think I still have old bottles of former "signature scents" like Victoria (which I wore so much in high school that my watchband, on top of its leathery scent, reeked of spicy roses - but in a good way!), Pavlova, Anais Anais (wonderful for scenting sheets), Yardley's Lavender, Muguet de Bois, Love's Musky Jasmine, and so on....

L'air du Temps reminds me of something, but I can't remember what. It reminds me of nostalgia and memory themselves more than any particular thing.

Rive Gauche reminds me of when my grandparents were healthier, because my grandmother had a bottle on her vanity when I was small, and it was among the things that fascinated me when I spent time with her.

Opium reminds me of a day when I was about 7 or so and went to a Girl Scout event wearing, bizarrely, either a small amount of Opium or its designer impostor spray, and threw up... to this day it makes me nauseous.

Obsession reminds me of a ballet premiere I went to when I was about 10, Swan Lake, when my mother did theater reviews for a small newspaper and got free tickets; we were given miniatures (wrapped in dusty teal cloth drawstring bags) in the lobby, and she wore it on and off for years, until she realised that our pets disliked it and tended to misbehave when they could smell it.

Electric Youth and Exclamation both remind me of junior high, when the gym locker room reeked of them. I never liked Exclamation (although one of my best friends wore it for years and it never bothered me on her) and can't quite summon the smell, but I can recall Electric Youth's strange cherryfruit scent very clearly, as well as its bright pink color and the bottle with the spiral in it. There are other things that remind me of junior high too - the powdery/chemical smell of certain deodorants mixed with the smell of hairspray - especially those apple and melon scented kinds - and the smell of the gym clothes that had been in the locker all week. The smell of Ginza shampoo, which I used and loved and cannot describe.

Ralph, the new perfume, reminds me of an Elizabeth Arden SPA bodywash that was given to me by a relative for Xmas in the early 90s and that I liked. Additionally, Ralph strikes me as a tremendously unfortunate name for a perfume, being that it is both a synonym for "vomit" and the name applied to the boy's penis in Judy Bloom's Forever (which I never actually read, because all of my friends did and told me every little detail).

I could muse all day on these scent-association things, but a lot of them would be more complex smells, an unidentifiable blend that would bring me back to a specific place or time or person. Rather than doing that, I'm going to eat some oatmeal and try to sleep.

(no subject)

mmmm... maple raisin oatmeal is the bomb.

(well, specifically Fantastic Foods Maple Raisin 3-Grain hot cereal, but who's counting? slap some butter - I mean Brummell&Brown - into it, stir, enjoy.)

chain o' Fool.

Tonight I wanted to do other things but I am chained to the computer. This computer I am using belongs to L; he called and wants it back, so I need to get all of my junk off it (just a few months' worth, in which I have tried to be good about not downloading unnecessary stuff). It's not what I planned to do, but it has been on my mind lately, so I might as well. I also need to finish burning some cds since the cd burner I've been using is on this computer.

I feel very unwell today, coughing a lot and sinus-bound. I made a salad a little bit ago (cut up a carrot and some cucumber and tomato, sprinkled the above on prewashed-ready-to-eat-from-a-sealed-bag organic baby spinach leaves, poured some Hellmann's Citrus Splash Oriental Orange dressing on, and ate), and it just about knocked me off my feet. I never knew that cutting up a carrot and half a cucumber could be so exhausting. But I'm feeling a little better since I ate those nice leafy greens!

Autumn called me earlier but I haven't listened to the message yet, as I was napping when she called, so I don't know what she wanted. Autumn is spiffy. I *heart* her, even though in 1997 she gave me hairdyeing advice that resulted in me having screaming neon orange roots and another foot of dark mahogany hair (my natural color is a sort of ashy honey blonde).