Enchanting Juno

Mulligan.

I wrote this email yesterday to a friend, all about my improved mood and non-specific happiness and old friends and circles closing and how self-image defined by the opinions of others was stupid and I was done with it and it left me feeling full of light and goodness and I was a new person, yay.

Then I went to therapy and got run over by a truck.  Before I even sent the email, which now needs revision.

Therapy is like that.  My belief that I am on top of something is chum to that man.   I asked him about it - he thought I was assigning malice to the incident but no.  It is just that I've noticed that when I have a week where something really feels like its fallen into place and I want to talk about that, he always, always, always directs my attention to something that is still in progress.  Maybe something that couldn't be looked at until that piece fell into place.  He's fucking uncanny, he is. 
I'm a little bitter about not getting to dwell on the happy for a bit longer, is all.  But taking the long view that the fact that he is not always as gentle as he used to be is maybe an indicator that I don't need kid gloves they way I used to.  I am stronger.

All I have to say is that anyone who thinks therapy is self-indulgent ego massage has clearly never been.  This stuff is incredibly, ass-kickingly, hard work. 

However, I was wearing a new mascara and I would like to recommend it on two fronts.  It is  a completely non-flaking formula that stayed out of the lines under my eyes all day and when I cried snottily all over myself in therapy it came off neatly onto the tissue without leaving those flattering raccoon smudges all over my face.  Thumbs up.

Actually I have two new mascaras :
Inju Fiberwig - a lengthening mascara.   
And Kevyn Aucoin The Volume Mascara

but they have in common their style - not waterproof, but gel (or possibly magic) based, non-smudging and remove with warm water.  No plastic waterproof mascara thing.  As always, wipe the brush down first and go to town, use a Q-tip for application clean up (or is that just me?).  Then you're good for the day.

(For the record, I was wearing the Kevyn Aucoin.  But the Fiberwig works in much the same fashion and is a fantastic lengthening mascara if that's what you need.)

In the same spirit of getting things right EVENTUALLY:

Original curling mitts.  I followed the pattern without, apparently, using my cognitive processes at all.  Despite the fact that this left a chunk of the gorgeous SuperYak unused.  I adore this yarn, it makes this plush velvety matte surface.

It is, clearly, a bit scant.  My knuckles were cold, a draft wafted up the back of my hand whenever I wore them and the curl of the bind off was both a practical and an aesthetic annoyance.

   

As you can see, when the subject employs fuller use of her native intelligence (two years later), the result is a more pleasing and useful object.  Only 2 feet of yarn were left, an efficiency that adds to the over all satisfaction of the project.

1 skein Karabella SuperYak on 4 mm Susan Bates dpns, Fetching mitts.  Originally knit in Feb 2007, revised in Sept. 2008.  No visible difference between old and new yarn, which is rather nice, and not a pill on them.

I'm wearing them right now.

Seventeen.

Seventeen push-ups.

I used to do three sets of 20, sometimes four - though I did them with my feet up on a crunch ball, which I think is a bit easier.

So this summer my trainer quit the gym and I wasn't totally on board with the training philosophy of any of the other candidates and I had home improvement and I was busy and I should really be more self starting about this at almost 40 and and and.

But now it's been over a month since I went to the gym at all and close to two since I went regularly.  Part of the problem may be that I want to integrate exercise into activity more - yoga or aikido or bike riding or walking in the woods (none of which I do) - like life maybe, rather than having it be all about an appointment at the gym.

The gym is narcissistic.  And that's OK to a degree,  I am completely happy to be mildly impressed with my calf muscles.  But I think I might be starting to be over it as a lifestyle, you know?  All that staring at yourself making small adjustments.  Makes it hard to have an overview on activity or health or fitness.

Anyway I was reading the superbly talented Ruth (look at her jewelry), who is getting organized to get more active and she mentioned the 100 Push-up challenge.

100 Push-ups.  Without the exercise ball, without sets, with good form and no fooling.

I added to my list of things to consider maybe thinking about doing when I might want to start getting moving again and in the meantime, where is that couch?

You guys know Marin? 

So we're talking about perfume last week - it's an affliction we share (We have databases). 
Perfume and pantyhose for men and why the New American Palinized Landscape makes me want to hide under the pillow, and breast lifting surgery, was the actual scope of conversation.  Which lead naturally - naturally - into pectoral muscles and triceps and the need to combat bingo wings and gravity as the world turns on.

I found myself recommending push-ups as a great way to do both of those things.   WTF? Before I know it we are reading the 100 Push-ups rules and discussing HOW humiliating this will be, exactly.  A couple of days later we agree to do it and not just to do it, but to ADMIT we are doing it in case we NEED the humiliation to motivate us.   Or more properly, shame us into compliance.

I might have been able to do more than 17.  The phone rang and I quit to answer it.  But that's sorta the point, isn't it?  I quit to answer it.  I was EAGER to quit to answer it.  I'm in OK shape mostly - or I was until two months ago, though I'm a cardio slacker.  But for all the gym time I have put in, I am at the bottom rung of what a human being needs to do to be healthy, that was QUITE clear when I was puffing around in the woods in July.   

Anyway.  10 minutes three times a week, more or less, doesn't seem like too high a price to pay for non-flappy upper arms, does it?   

Plus, it's just so butch, I have to do it.

Logic is a guy who ought to empty his pockets

Someone told me recently that I often seem distracted, that a part of me is busy cogitating all the time.

He said ruminating first.  But the cow implication resulted in a very severe face on my end, so he amended. 

Cogitating, ruminating.  Either way, I am afraid it's true. 

I can feel it sometimes, that I have to make a conscious effort to step across thinking to join things.  Not that I feel isolated, or unwelcome.  Just apart.  Thinking about stuff.  Whys.  Reasons.  The color of that bag over there.  How beautiful her skin is.  Meanings.  Details.  It's not even noticing sometimes, it's recollection filtered through the brain instead of experience lived and memory inhabited.

In the past the thing most people said to me eventually was “you know, you’re weird”  but now its “You think too much."   I wouldn’t mind so much if the thinking was part of a creative process that made something. If it led somewhere.  Other than to more thinking. 

Being, I am not so good at all the time.

I turned that cartwheel the other day.  Rustily and without straightness.  But the knack is still in there somewhere.  It felt good.
Took me a few minutes though. 

I had to think about it.  Take a few hesitating steps.  Stop.  It was fearful somehow, to risk falling.  Looking a fool.  Alone in my backyard.   I do that a lot, stop before I make a fool of myself.    Sit on the edge, while someone else climbs on the rocks.  Cautious.
Or sometimes rushing things, when stillness alarms me.   Which is another kind of caution.

I want to know what it is exactly that I am afraid of, or if it is even about fear.  Control?  I'm controlled.  Why?  What’s so bad about looking like a fool?   What am I trying to stop from happening?

More thinking.

The same friend told me I should dance more.  I never do.   I think I’m bad at it.  (Again, so what?)  It's fun though, forgetting self-consciousness.  Being a goof.   Forgetting to remember to monitor systems. 

I know this sounds kinda of gloomy but it really isn’t.  I’ve been spending the last week or so kind of deliberately at loose ends, letting the impressions of the previous weeks sink into me.    I often don’t allow that, wordless stillness, contemplation without cogitation.
Some times in life are quiet enough that the moments stand clean in memory and can be looked at tidily from all sides and analyzed - perhaps to no one’s benefit, indeed - and some are densely packed, soaked with rain and light and spiderwebs on grass and a flower ripped from its stalk by a toddler and tucked behind an ear.  No room for analysis.  No place really.   Out of my hands for once.  It's very good.

I am exceptionally fortunate in my friends, they are on my side more than I ever dreamed of being myself, all in different ways, with different fires and different styles.  I love them, the fierce and the funny, the thoughtful, the obsessive, the edgy and the adventurous.   
This one makes me think about the boundaries I’ve fenced myself inside and what it might feel like to step over them.   Makes control seem like a useless affectation.    Other pathways entirely possible.   Comfort zones stale and airless.

That's a pretty remarkable present.

Sin palabras

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.)

Proof of Sock

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.)

Good Stuff.

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.

Base Notes

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?

The train of thought is leaving the station.

How loathsome is the word spunky.
Though now that I have said this I recall The Spunky Eclectic, which is a fantastic place run by a fantastic person, and anything but loathsome.  How about I amend that to 'spunky' in conjunction with 'heroine'?

I was looking at my amazon shopping cart - I have found the perfect gift for the world's most difficult recipient and because I have the self control of a wayward 6 year old, I will be sending it along to them as soon as I get my holidays bills sorted, instead of properly waiting for an appropriate gift giving occasion.  I also found the perfect gift for my dad, if he were still living, but since he is not, I shall buy it and read it myself.

Anyway - while I was gloating over these two items and their carefully selected -  even winnowed - companions in the shopping cart, awaiting my first discretionary dollars of 2008, I found a listing of recommended discussion topics (Amazon is another place apparently afflicted with discussion boards.  I have complicated feelings about discussion boards, which I will spare you), one of which was ...wait, allow me to get the correct text....

Ah, can't find it again - something like "desperately in search of spunky heroines", which immediately caused my gorge to rise.  As well as my dander.  Someone told me last week that her daughter's approaching toddler-hood filled her with dread re: the thorny subject of dolls.  Which she herself didn't play with and which she associates with the direst kind of retro-femininity.  This is despite the fact that she knows - intellectually - that there are many fierce and partisan feminists and millions of strong, kind women who played with dolls quite happily and without harm, in her gut, it feels wrong.  And though I played with dolls happily and for years, I completely understand the power of this irrational conviction:  the whole idea of a spunky heroine acts on me similarly - spunkiness, which implies a brave and energetic spirit, is certainly not a bad quality.  But it is an UNDERDOG quality, with a diminutive feel - when applied to a female protagonist it has a paternal air of head patting and a distinct whiff of glass ceiling.  Someone who is ascendant cannot be plucky.

This is the exact same feeling I get when someone talks about Hillary Clinton's neckline instead of her policies, or possible character as a world leader. 

(And how about the Iowa Caucus?  I NEVER thought Obama would take it - but the combination of wins by both Huckabee and Obama I find a little hallucinatory.  Welcome to the split personality of the American people.  What a strange country we are.)

It is a wonder I ever get out of the house, when a passing line on a website loses me an hour of annoyance, irritable mental hunting for understanding precisely the root of annoyance and then writing about it.

If I ever find happiness, it'll be when I stub my toe on it.

Heh.  Met a goal, not a goal person.  Not the writing of greatest clarity.  Oops.

It is totally possible to meet a goal without having one.

I find with most things that I do much better if I sneak up on them.  Emotional growth, human understanding, knitting, exercise....if I make a chart, a goal statement and specific plan, the first thing I do is exactly the opposite of what will make progress happen. Maybe clean the cabinet under the sink.

I've never liked being told what to do, apparently not even by myself.  Which is totally strange really, because you would be hard pressed to find a less indirect human being than I.  Even when I am trying to be delicate and nuanced, all I end up doing is choosing the delicately nuanced word that most brutally rips the band-aid off.  I have a near-genius for it. 
Someday I must tell you about the incident that ended with my closest friend calling me an overeducated WASP bitch - mostly as a joke.  I was trying so very hard to be smooth about the question I had been asked, too. 

It never works. 

A few months ago I was talking about this with a friend - who had just said that I default to forthright, which made me gloomy.  Because, well, it IS true and it seems like such an unsophisticated way of being.  Am complex person, dammit.  So I was glooming - not unlike Eyore - about the problem that is my tendency to leak the truth, and his response was "well, not for you it isn't".  Which has been an interesting way to think about it.  Not my problem?  If another person is troubled by honesty or perception then that might be...their difficulty?
But isn't...everything my fault responsibility problem?  Huh.  (This person also suggested that the DVDs I have in my possession which belong to someone else that I have tried to return and not gotten a straight answer to where to send them are in fact, at this point, mine.  And maybe I could just let go of fretting about my obligation to the original owner at this point.  Huh again.)

Anyway - I do have goals, but making a list and systematically setting out to meet it doesn't work for me.  Instead, I have trends, trends in increased health, fitness, intellectual and emotional development, satisfaction, dating, cooking, bill paying, organization, etcetera....and of course, knitting. I like trends.  Trends leave room for back and forth progress without feeling like a failure, trends allow for maneuvering room, trends allow for flexibility.  Trends allow for falling without failing, for getting up and beginning again without having to start over.  Starting over sucks the energy right out of the soul (well, in this context anyway).

The way I see it, we are always Works In Progress, and there is no end to that.  And absolutes give me indigestion.  So do rules, for that matter.  So no resolutions, no goals.  Be or not be.  Stay in motion.  Some days better than others.

In the back of my mind I began the year thinking that I would like to get it right with a few sweaters, that I would like to get a handle on my fit issues, and choice issues for projects, and have some sweaters I liked to wear and you know, stop dicking around with being half-assed about knitting. No plan, just something to keep in mind.  To inform my choices with.

And here I am, in December. a lot of finished work that works for the last 12 months.  But no plan.  Never a plan.
Just a thought to guide me.
 

 

I used to be a reader.

Before all kinds of things happened.  Now I'm a knitter with a lot of unread books.  Not that I hold knitting to blame.  Things unfold as they unfold - maybe knitting rose up to fill the gap left by the absence of bookwormishness, maybe it was time for a lifetime emphasis to shift.

I just got so raw that the fictional emotions and experiences of characters would haunt me.  I don't really believe in fiction in some ways - if it came out of human imagination, then it is true, one way or another.   Some times calling it fiction, making it a story rather than a tale, gives a narrative even more power, creating a road of access to things the audience might reject awareness of if the things were "real."

Whatever the reason, I kept buying books that interested the self I was becoming, but I mostly didn't read them.   Happened again last week, got a recommendation here, a review there and suddenly there's a box of books on its way.  Started me thinking about this reading thing, and what it used to mean and why that changed and what place I want it to have and how that matches up with who I am.

Introspective might as well be my middle name, really.  If this bothers you, you should maybe read something else.

So I went into all the corners of my house and picked up this stack there, and that pile here.  And while I was at it, maybe these history texts can move on and that pile of historical novels too and let me just alphabetize that and before I knew it, I had a library again, rather than a jumble of books.  It has really been awhile.

I had to move the drum carder first, which kind of tells you how things have been.  Needed doing anyway.....look at this:

Definitely time for some housecleaning.

So once I cleared a shelf or two I started filling it with this jumble of unread things. 

Some of these I have owned for a decade or more, some for only a few weeks.  I'm aiming to make a decision about each one - read it, or send it on.  How long will it take you think?  3 years? 10?  Forever?

With all the book shoving about, not as much knitting as originally planned.  But this is still moving along quickly.