State of the Phoebe

As you may have surmised by my last two posts based mostly around throwing up images, I have not felt very talkative or interesting the last several days. Overtime at work and lots of responsibilities have eaten up my brainspace. But I am committed to trying to post something every day to keep me always writing, even if it's just something short, even if I don't have anything particularly fascinating to say. So today in that spirit, I'm just going to give a general update on my life.

Work has been busy. I have mostly adjusted to accomodating my new responsibilities, but they fill my time a lot more tightly. This week I worked late several times in order to get things done by their deadlines. I need to limit my time at work so I can do homework without losing my mind, but I can use the extra money, as my budget's been a little tight recently.

Socially I've been somewhat withdrawn. Tiredness, a feeling of having nothing to say, and a desire for solitary pursuits have led me to retreat into my own company. It has allowed me to be very productive recently, which pleases me. I have worked out a lot, as well as worked on writing and sewing projects. I do miss hosting dinner parties, though. Haven't done it at all lately due to the being busy, weary, and in a budget crunch.

I am now preparing to go into the extremely brief, very high-intensity DREAM rehearsal period this August. Apparently it will last... two weeks. Hm. I seem to recall hearing at the audition that the process would be about a month, but apparently we've got two weeks. I know this is supposed to be a somewhat abbreviated, high-intensity, nontraditional production of Midsummer, but yikes. Got my script in the mail the other day, and as we are expected to come in off-book I have dutifully begun work. It's a pretty decent cut, slightly rearranged and pared down. As memorization goes, Midsummer is an easy show for it, as the dialogue is so musical. Helena in particular has some lovely speeches. I've got six scenes, and I'm already solid on the first one. I have also not cut my hair as per the director's request, though it's gotten so flat and lifeless it's driving me crazy. I want to just go get it trimmed and the layers touched back up without reducing the length, but hairdressers have a long history of ignoring my requests to not shorten it too much, and I really don't want to accidentally violate my promise to the director.

I have been working away at my school assignments. Mostly I've done the reading, I have quite a few plays and comic books to get through. As I mentioned, I've also started reworking Mrs. Hawking, the results of which you can read here. But there's a ton more to do. More reading, a plotting exercise, planning for my craft essay, planning more for the comic. I've really got to buckle down. I also need to start submitting my plays to more places for consideration for performance. Apparently some of my colleagues submit to like fifteen places a month in order to get anything at all, which I definitely haven't been doing. I just don't know where to find the submission opportunities. But I guess I'd better start looking.

So I'm a little stressed, a little withdrawn. But I seem to be getting things done.

A gorgeous contradiction

Whenever new people discover my blog, I get anxious about my content. Should I hold off on the silly nonsense for a while and only post, say, polished writings or serious intellectual musing, so as to convince the new readers that I have worthwhile things to say?

But fuck it, this is who I am. My brain gets eaten by larps, I rant about silly pop culture phenomenons, and I drool over pretty boys. Especially the pretty Avengers boys. Which I want to do right now.

I read a Penny and Aggie comic from a few years ago doing a who's who strip of the large cast of characters. They made a point of explaining how, of the two main sought-after male characters in the strip, one is even hotter because he realizes how masculine he is, and the other is even hotter because he doesn't realize how feminine he is. The strip acknowledges how bizarre this contradiction is. And yet, still true. It makes me think of one of my favorite things about some of my favorite Avengers. Tony and Steve are both fabulous, but in a way they make each other more delicious in their contrast, like the salty and sweet in a chocolate-covered pretzel.

You see, Tony is arrogant, splashy, slutty, a smoking hottie and he knows it. Which makes him even more attractive.



Steve is modest, quiet, a little-self conscious, a smoking hottie and he doesn't even know it. Which ALSO makes him even more attractive.



Yeah, I don't know how that works either. But, oh, how it does. How ever how it does. And I'm not ashamed to think that.

...This entry was friends-only for a while. Thought it best not to overwhelm the newcomers right away. ;-)

Blog rec: "This Is Not Porn"

I stumbled upon a photo blog yesterday that I wanted to share with you, This Is Not Porn. It is bizarrely named, in my opinion, as I think it's countering an expectation nobody is likely to have going in. What it is really is a collection of photos of famous people that were taken in informal settings while doing ordinary, normal-person things. Sometimes they are funny or silly things, but they are the sort of shots that people take of each other when they're hanging around enjoying themselves.

Unintentionally hilariously tragic photo of Marlon Brando hovering over an open fridge in a harbinger of morbid obesity to come


Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward


Elizabeth Taylor feeding the pigeons

I believe there's something holy in the ordinary, in the humble things and activities that make up the everyday of life. It's part of the reason I love homey things like crockery and linens and furniture. They are comforting to us, we all have need of them, and what they provide for us physically and emotionally is pretty universal for all humans-- plates and silverware enable the important ritual of having dinner together, linens make us feel comfy and safe in the beds we all sleep in, we all want to sit on comfy couches when we're hanging out in our living rooms. So I've always been interested by the ordinary details about people that are mostly decided to not be important enough to mention. I wonder what Julius Caesar's favorite food was. I wonder what games Abraham Lincoln played with his children. In that we all have and do and understand these things, they are in a way the most real things about us.

Harry Belafonte and Martin Luther King, Jr.


Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney washing dishes

I think we see celebrities as a breed apart from the majority of the human race in a lot of ways, and to a certain extent I think they are. They often get so much money and so much power that they can escape from a lot normal responsibilities like balancing their own checkbook or cleaning their own house or walking their own dog. But that's why I particularly like this one of Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney washing dishes together. It's so normal, so real, for two dudes whose lives became so rarefied and so separate from regular folks. It's like, why would Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney ever have to wash dishes? They're so rich and powerful they probably never had to do any chore they didn't want to. They could just pay their staff members to do it. But it's real-person logic that if you use dishes, they have to get clean somehow. Seeing them adhere to real-person logic even though they have the ability to separate from it in a weird way reinforces humanity to me. That as much as your circumstances may change you, your essential humanity is a tough thing to shake.

Finally, seeing that somebody even thought to take a lot of these pictures just warms my heart. Imagine you are married to, or the child of, or the parent of, or some other relation to some famous important person. That person is photographed constantly, under the best of circumstances, in images carefully composed with a team of professionals on hand to make sure they look their best. And yet, which such a proliferation of flattering images of this person available, you still feel compelled to take awkward, clumsy shots of them where they look silly and unbeautiful, just because you want to commemorate the moment you're in. This is your vacation, your hanging with your friends, your regular happy moment that you want to make sure you remember. Again, circumstances may change us, but there's a ton of commonality to simply being human.

David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed

Or it's just something crazy and awesome, like Sean Connery in a wedding dress or Salvador Dali walking his anteater.

  

I love Hipster Feminist

I have been really loving doing Hipster Feminist lately, my once-daily joke Twitter feed on the thoughts of Rhoda, a girl who finds the only thing more exhausting than the patriarchy is the mainstream. I'm enjoying the challenge of having to come up with an on-point joke for it every day, and even though not everything I've come up with has been comedy gold or trenchant commentary, a handful of them have turned out to be really fun and funny. I am getting interested in developing the character of Rhoda (given that name by morethings5*, along with some my favorites of her jokes). She needs a funny last name, and funny life details, and I might just do my hair up stupid and get a pair of black plastic glasses and skinny jeans and take a picture of myself as her. As it is, her character is kind of inconsistent, particularly in how much she flips between being a good feminist and a bad feminist, depending on what joke I want to do on a given day. But perhaps that in itself is funny and a comment on her nature; in case it's not obvious, she is not intended to be a bastion of self-awareness or true social consciousness. Having to stay within a hundred and forty characters does of course make it tough to really deeply explore her, but it's a good format for one-liners, and I like the challenge of working within the limitations.

I just got a whole bunch of new followers lately, too, bringing me up to an awe-inspiring twenty-six! ;-) This is special if only because these new people are people who don't know me and most likely aren't following me to throw me a sympathetic bone. One of those followers is, amazingly, Holly Pervocracy, who write an excellent feminism blog that I started reading a few months ago. She also writes a great deal about sex and kinks, which is fine but not really my cup of tea, but even so it's totally worth following if only for the feminist writing. I wonder how she found it! I also wonder if she noticed that a couple of my HF jokes were drawn from things I read on her blog. :-) At any rate, I'm flattered that she's interested, because she's pretty funny herself and definitely knows her shit when it comes to feminism. Gives me a little confidence that my jokes are sharply observed.

Only mainstream hegemonic assholes don't check it out. ;-)

Gertie's New Blog for Better Sewing

I just want to take a moment to recommend a blog I've been reading, a home sewing blog called Gertie's New Blog for Better Sewing. It began as a New York woman who enjoys vintage fashion chronicling her efforts to make all fourteen pieces described in the 1952 book Vogue's New Book for Better Sewing. But now not only does she talk about her work on those projects, she sews many other things as well, including tutorials, examinations of other pieces she finds interesting, sewing and garment terminology and technique, the history of various fashions, and even looks at them through the lens of the feminist viewpoint. She is a talented seamstress as well as a charming writer, speaking clearly and engagingly on all her subjects. I love the way she'll look at a dress and make guesses at how it's put together and breaking down what works and doesn't work for her about it. The way she goes through her endeavors-- even the way she examines the construction of pieces she admires --really speaks to the part of me that loves being witness to the artistic process, and the part of me that just wants to make things, things of all kinds, all day long.

Isn't she adorable? And she made that pretty yellow dress. I kind of envy her life, editing children's books for work while sewing and blogging in her spare time. Her love for the vintage aesthetic tickles me because her name is Gertie, which my grandmother Gertrude was often called, so it's a name I associate with the retro and the old-fashioned. That in contrast with her badass sleeve tattoos really makes mes smile.

If you're at all interesting in sewing, couture, the history of fashion, or just like artists going through their process, I really recommend her. Now that I have more free time again I want to go back to teaching myself to sew, and though I am interested more in costuming than in vintage or even things for daily wear, she is a real inspiration to get going.

Posts yet to come

Just to remind myself, what with not being on LJ so long I have a number of topics to post about, so I am making note of them here. Expect them to be forthcoming over the next week or so--

- detailing the acting of Othello
- detailing the makeup and costuming of Othello
- detailing the lighting and other technical aspects of Othello
- report of The Prince Comes of Age at Festival
- report of running The Stand at Festival
- report of Ruins of Grandeur at Festival
- report of running Resonance at Festival
- my forthcoming housing situation

The longest I've ever gone without posting

Wow. This is the longest I've gone without posting in my LJ in literally years. Two weeks ago I was consumed by crushing depression (something that nobody needs to see written about day after day), last week I spent all my time in the theater helping with tech week for Othello, and this week I guess my daily posting habit was broken by the last two.

I will try to catch up on the interesting stuff, particularly about Othello, which went fantastically well. It may take me a little time, but I hate not posting and not keeping a record of my doings and thoughts, so I'm going to make the effort.

Unsettled, trying to be hopeful

Nervous today, unsettled. Brain is going a mile a minute in a million different directions. Have been pretty productive, though; got all my work done so far and even wrote my third Examiner article for the week; that puts me way ahead of schedule. Maybe I channel some of this intensity into writing now. That would be great. Haven't done enough writing this week; the weekend will have to be devoted to it.

There are lots of people I don't know following me on Twitter. Wonder why that is. Maybe it's from my Examiner profile? I think that's the only place my Twitter name is posted with a high likelihood of being seen by people who don't already know me. It could be their way of following my articles. If so, that's cool, I guess. More readers, more hits, eventually more money. It doesn't make much at all, but I suppose it's more than I'm usually paid for writing, eh? Maybe eventually it will work its way up.

Again and again, I am confronted by how against my nature it is to hold out hope. I am a realist on my best days, a pessimist on average, and on my worst certain the universe might as well just kill itself now. Right now I've got something ahead of me that could be really good, something that should be proving to me that there are reasons to stay hopeful. But I'm having a hard time shaking the thought that I have been in this position many times before, and it's never worked out the way I wanted. What I should be focusing on is that this is a new chance, something that came from my efforts to make things better. That should be reason enough for hope. It's just really hard for me to get rid of the thought of "Why should this time be any different?" I am learning. I am resolved in 2011 to try to learn.

I dressed up pretty today to try and feel better. It helped a little. Black skirt with simple tan floral pattern on it, white tuxedo skirt, red leather jacket, black tights, black strappy ballet flats. Amber earrings, anniversary necklace. I look nice, if a little formal. The jacket mitigates that a bit. Would look nicer with heels, but I'm not sure how much walking I'll have to do today. You'd think because the skirt is neutral I'd wear it with all kinds of colors on top, but for some reason I always just seem to pair it with black or white. Should try something more creative. Went with the tights are because they're prettier, and my leggings have finally bit it. Reminds me, I've been meaning to get some new leggings. They're good for wearing certain skirts in the winter, and I like the way they look under my tall boots. I wonder if I could pull off any color besides black. Maybe gray, but I'm not sure I'd like the look of chromatic leggings on me. Who knows, captainecchi* looked fantastic in purple tights on New Year's, maybe it's worth a try.

God, my brain is scattered. Still, I seem to be able to be productive in spite of it. Should be writing something for the projects. Trying to work up The Stand bluesheet. Wanted to see if I could do it in the form of a newspaper, to add to the diagesis without sacrificing information. Wish me luck.

Dirty Twitter sellout

I have finally gotten a Twitter account. I feel like a dirty sellout, but I caved and now I have one. I was using Google Buzz anyway, which is basically the same thing except part of my mail client, and I like having lots of new things to read, so I figured if I'm going to be a microblogging slut I might as well own it. :-P Even though I think it's kind of a silly expression of an inclination toward narcissism and time-wasting, I can see why it appeals to me-- it's another outlet for my content-generation compulsion with lots of new, if brief, material that updates very quickly. My name is breakinglight11 if you'd care to follow me, though I warn you most of my entries are along the lines of "Stupid thing I observed about something only I care about." As an early commenter on Twitter said, if I were doing something really interesting, like a daring rescue or engineering a cure for cancer, instead of avoiding the mountain of writing I have to do, I wouldn't have time to Tweet it, nor could I adequately describe it in a single sentense.

Chemise progress

I want to have more pictures to accompany my posts, particularly when I'm working on a project or talking about something that would benefit from a visual reference. It would make the blog a lot more interesting to read and to look at. It would be easy enough; I have a pretty decent point-and-shoot digital camera, plus there's always the not-totally-terrible camera built into my iPhone. So I think I will document the progress of my endeavors will pictures of things like the dishes I cooked and the costumes I put together. So, in the spirit of this, here is a picture of my progress on my chemise.

Kind of ugly, isn't it? Well, it's my first try, and I'm hoping once I finish up the edges it will be less so. At the moment, one half of the bodice is put together, and the sleeves are attached to that half. You can see the unnecessary seam up the middle that I would not have had to put in if I'd doubled up the fabric when I cut it out. The sleeves have the same problem; I folded the left side over onto itself to show what it's roughly going to look like when it's totally sewn up, and I left the right side unfolded to show the unnecessary seam. At least on the sleeves a seam up the side is not that noticeable and probably won't change the overall appearence of them all that much. But since I had a little extra fabric, I cut out the second half of the bodice in the proper way so that at least one side of it will look the way it's supposed to. And to save me on sewing. If I'd cut things out properly the first time, I'd have sewn everything that needed sewing already. ;-)

The next steps will be attaching that second bodice half, and then finishing up the sleeves. You may have noticed that this is extremely short for a chemise, and that is intentional. Partially to save on fabric if this thing turns out to be a total mess, and partially because I was thinking of wearing it to the Wrathskeller as part of a slutty tavern wench look if it doesn't turn out to be a total mess. After everything is attached, then i will be trying to put elastic in at the neckline, cuffs, and hem. I am kind of dreading that part, as it will require care to put in some meticulously straight seams. I will just have to pin very, very carefully and draw a guideline, I guess. More pictures to come once those steps are taken.

Experimenting with Blogger

God knows I'm not very technically savvy. The level of knowledge I possess about how technology of any kind works and can be used is pretty pathetic, especially by comparison to so many of the people I spend time with. But one thing I've always been pretty proud of is I'm not half bad, when given a decent chunk of time, at messing around with a computer program until I figure out how to more or less use it and make it do what I want.

Today I was messing around with Blogger. I've been toying with the idea of keeping a freestanding blog in addition to this Livejournal, with content mostly the same but geared less toward people who know me personally and more toward the public at large, taking a more "article" approach for the format and not so much a diary. I would post mostly only my rants, musings, projects and the like, but not so much the stuff I did this past weekend. Since I've had a Blogger site that I've mostly used as a mirror of this LJ for use in cross-posting to Google Buzz (never did manage to get the LJ-cross-posting-to-Buzz to function) I thought it might be worth messing around with that to see if I could get it to look the way I wanted.

Basically I wanted to construct a widget that would let me divide my writing into broader categories of my interests-- larp, cooking, writing, theater, culture and criticism, that sort of thing --and have icons across the top of the page leading to posts on each particular subject. The closest I could manage in Blogger to that was to construct original HTML widgets that allowed me to link an image to a particular tag page on the journal in a left-side column. This is imperfect, as I wanted to cull only certain entries from within those tags and also combine certain other tags under new headings, which this doesn't allow. I suppose I could re-tag everything, but that would be labor-intensive and make these icons redundant with the tag system.

What I have right now I kind of like, but as I said I'm dissatisfied. The header image definitely needs tweaking, and as I said my categorizing is not quite what I want. I'll have to mess around with it more. And this is still just basically a mirror of my LJ. Perhaps I'll just reorganize everything and actually bother to re-tag if I make a more "general-audience" version of the blog. I know you can tag things and make those tags invisible in Blogger, which might eliminate the redundancy problem. For now I'm just experimenting with the setup, and seeing if I can use the conveniently already-existing Blogger technology to accomplish what I want.

Crawling out of the smoking crator of my rage...

Wow, yesterday was a bad day. An angry, upset, yelling kind of day. Apologies to anyone whose feelings I hurt by focusing my rage on that Facebook breast cancer meme. But yesterday was not a good day for that meme to be in my world. Due to certain things I've had to deal with recently, I am a little too aware of cancer, thank you.

So, on to nicer things. It occurred to me the other day that despite my ravenous need for protein, there are not many forms of non-animal protein that I like. You'd think with the particular quirks of my metabolism any and all protein would be glommed up, but while I guess I can eat these things, I don't really enjoy them, and I don't feel satisfied afterward. Still, I am trying to experiment with reducing my meat intake at least a little for the sake of the environmental and of my pocketbook. Having failed to really enjoy soy, lentils, or really any kind of bean, I have turned to chickpeas to see if I can teach myself to like them. I found a recipe on Stonesoup called Butter Chickpeas that seemed like it might taste like my favorite Indian dish, chicken tikka masala. I didn't have garam masala, though, so I had to make it myself out of various spices I had in my cabinet that I knew garam masala often contains. Don't know how different it was from the intended dish, but while it didn't come out too badly, it wasn't what I wanted. I did a little research and found out that it was a spin on Butter Chicken, which is a dish similar to and commonly mistaken for tikka masala. Which explains it, and makes me want to find a real tikka masala sauce recipe to cook chickpeas in, because that I think I could get behind.

Also, have sought comfort in blog-reading, including some I haven't checked out in a long time. I remember why I stopped reading Tomato Nation. Back when I started reading as a little nipper all the way back in, like, 1999, her entries on this humor pop-culture-and-quirks-of-life blog used to be all essays-- I called her an "essayist" way back when I didn't know the term "blogger" --posted once weekly. And I read faithfully all through that time. But by about 2007, they started becoming little snippets of stuff and less like complete, coherent pieces. More like a personal blog, which I guess the site was, than like a column, which I kind of wanted it to be. Not that they weren't interesting, but they were usually way shorter, less substantial, and harder to follow. I dropped off not long after that point. I'm trying to give it another try for old time's sake, and I still enjoy the old essays, but the new still is a little tougher to get into.

And that's all the positivity I can must for now.

My minimalist pantry

A while ago captainecchi* suggested that if I was interested in a cooking blog, I should check out Stonesoup, written by a cool Australian lady named Jules Clancy concerning keeping a minimalist kitchen and producing delicious dishes in a minimalist fashion. I am very grateful to Lise for the suggestion, as reading this blog has provided me with lovely fascinating reading on one of my biggest interests. One of my favorite entries on Stonesoup is the one about what Jules keeps in her minimalist pantry-- the absolute essentials she keeps on hand at all times due to their importance in her cooking, plus the other, slightly less vital things that she still likes to have. I like this exercise, to figure out what is most important to your cooking and eating like that. So I thought I'd make a version of that list of my own.

I define a pantry essential as a thing you want to have on hand at all times because of the frequency with which you cook with it, the sort of thing you buy as soon as it runs out without having a specific dish in mind. On the secondary list, the nice-to-haves, are the ones that I like to keep around because I use them regularly, but not necessary all the time, so I wouldn't suffer immediately if I didn't replace them right away.

Here's what I have in my minimalist pantry.

The Must Haves:

1. Olive oil - The perfect cooking medium for practically anything you can name, plus the most delicious dressing I can think of. Extra virgin that is not too expensive is usually able to do double duty as both cooking fat and finishing touch. Still, it is nice to have a bottle of the really fine stuff on hand for dressing.

2. Butter - So versatile and delicious in cooking, baking, and plaing eating, so much is possible with good sweet butter.

3. Onions - I use these in just about everything I cook. The most versatile aromatic there is.

4. Garlic - Just love the flavor. Use it all the time.

5. Flour - Necessary for most baked goods of course, but also good for dredging meats so that they brown better.

6. Sugar - A dessert making necessity, and the most efficient sweetness delivery system there is.

7. Salt - Goes without saying. Things taste flat and dead without seasoning with salt.

8. Basil - Easily my favorite herb of all time. I prefer the fresh, but it doesn't keep long, so I always want to have the dry stuff around for seasoning purposes.

9. Chicken broth - Great as a base for sauce. Chicken broth is the most flexible flavor of broth and can work well with a wide variety of meats in addition to chicken.

10. Balsamic vinegar - God, I love balsamic. Good for sauce making as well as the other half of my favorite salad dressing. A middle-range bottle can perform for both, but having an expensive aged bottle for dressing means flavor incomparable.

11. Red wine - I don't drink, but it's one of my favorite flavorings in savory dishes; another fantastic base for sauce.

12. Milk - I probably shouldn't drink it due to lactose intolerance, but I love chai latte, and a shot of it improves all manner of cooked dishes and baked goods.

13. Eggs - Useful for so many culinary things, and a quick, high-protein meal all on its own in a pinch.

The Nice to Haves:

1. Vanilla - My favorite flavoring in baked goods, and I enjoy a little shot of it in my chai. But I do not bake desserts so frequently that I need it all the time.

2. Honey - I like to having it around, mostly for sweetening tea, but I don't use it for much else. I wish I liked it more.

3. Marsala - Not as versatile as red wine, but I love the flavor, and it's great in many of my favorite sauces as well as desserts.

4. Oregano - Another frequently used herb I like to have around in dry form for seasoning. I guess I could also include thyme and tarragon, which I also use more than most other herbs.

5. Cinnamon - My favorite and most frequently used spice. I mostly use it in baked goods but I also like it on roast squash and in my hot apple cider. But again, I don't bake all the time. Ginger is probably the only other spice I use with particular frequency.

6. Canned tomatoes - An easy addition to any number of dishes to add savory flavor. Not sure which variety I prefer, but probably diced is what I go with most often.

7. Brown sugar - I like to have it, because some things are better than if you use regular sugar, but more often I find I need the white kind.

8. Baking powder - There really isn't any subsitute for it in certain recipes for baked goods.

Things I Keep Around Because I Like to Eat Them:

1. Chai mix - A specialized luxury item, but my personal crack. Mix with milk, heat up, and you're in Heaven. Fragrant, sweet, spicy, rich, warming. Worth enduring the effects of my lactose intolerance.

2. High-quality tea - In addition to my spiced chai mix mentioned above, I also like to have a high-end chai of the sort one steeps in hot water. It's comforting, hydrating, low-calorie, and often I use it as an appetitue suppressant.

3. Lowfat yogurt - My breakfast pretty much every morning. I like vanilla, raspberry, and strawberry best.

4. Carrots - Great for healthy snacking, and a useful aromatic.

5. Apples - Also great for healthy snacking. I try not to let myself snack otherwise.

Things I Pointedly Do Not Keep Around:

1. Pasta - I try not to eat pasta. It's just starch and not good for the figure.

2. Potatoes - Ditto. I love them, but I just try to avoid them entirely.

3. Coke - If I have it, I will drink it. I love it so, empty sugar solution that it is. It's my one real nutritional pitfall.

4. Crackers - Another thing that I just keep eating until they're gone. Not healthy.

5. Nutella - I used to think that a spoonful of Nutella would be a nice, moderate little treat to reward a healthful day. Then I found out it's over two hundred calories a tablespoon. Fuck you, chocolate-hazelnut traitor.

6. Snacky anything, really - I have a tendency to eat food like this until it's totally gone if I have it just around. Not so much in a self-control department, you see.

Is good body image dependent on feeling physically beautiful?

I wrote once a while ago in this entry that for some reason I was bothered by how so many of the style blogs I've started reading go about promoting positive body image. Back then I was trying to parse out why the approach they took felt off to me, and though I still don't have real conclusions, something occurred to me that I wanted to work out. I think a major component of my discomfort with their approach is that it seems to suggest that the only way to feel good about your body is to be able to regard it as physically beautiful.

I hear so much complaining about how much societal pressure there is on women to be beautiful and that there is something wrong with the notion that this is the most important thing for a woman to have. But appearing so frequently along with that are exhortations to expand the standards of beauty so more women can fit the definition. That seems really contradictory to me-- it puts a weird premium on physical appearence that I'm not sure is healthy. It suggests that even though beauty shouldn't be a value indicator, it IS a value indicator, so everyone has to be able to feel beautiful, because it is simply too important a thing for any person to feel complete and valuable without.

Does that bother anyone else? Because it feels like a mixed message to me.

I do feel like everyone deserves to feel desireable-- to feel like they are worthy of being wanted, loved, and valued. One of the reasons I believe everyone should dress well is because it gives you the power to appear to your best advantage, telling the world that you are a worthy human being from the moment they lay eyes on you. Concerning yourself with this is helpful to you because you have control over this presentation. But your physical beauty is determined by factors which can only be marginally affected by anything you do. Everyone's heard of that person who is constantly struggling to lose weight, to hide things with makeup, to change something about herself that genetics already determined were not going to be changed. Do we want to say that just because nature made it so you're always going to be a size twelve or that you have a round face instead of a heart-shaped one that you are not worthy of being wanted and loved? Do we really want to allow beauty to have such an enormous share of what constitutes desireability? If we're so fed up with being bombarded with messages that YOU'D BETTER LOOK PRETTY OR WHO CARES ABOUT YOU, shouldn't we be encouraging ourselves to place value on other, more important qualities instead of all scrambling to claim the "beautiful" marker?

Now God knows it's not like I don't have trouble with this issue myself. It was suggested in a very trenchant observation by meamcat* that in that original post I might have been trying to ask the question of "How do you feel good about your body if your body is not beautiful?" This is something I have a problem with. I have a hard time liking the features of my own body that I don't feel are beautiful. I had about a paragraph here in my first draft of this post about everything that's wrong with my boxy ribcage, but I deleted it because I decided it was in bad taste. Because it demonstrated how deeply I too am in that mindset of putting all the value in beauty, and not in any other quality, and that is not something I want to be endorsing. We don't all NEED to be pretty, because that is not the be-all and end-all of personal value! We should be able to feel good about our bodies even if they are not physically beautiful!

I hear the reaction to my saying that now-- "Easy for you to say, conventionally pretty girl. How would you feel if you didn't get to see yourself as beautiful?" Got a point there. God knows it is way too important to me that I be the pretty girl, that I base too much of my self-image and maybe even self-regard on it. I acknowledge that I am more fortunate in that department that many are, and I don't have to know what it's like to be in a less fortunate situation. Maybe if I were, I wouldn't feel so comfortable saying "We don't all need to get to be pretty." But we all have things that are good about us, and that's one of my gifts. There are other things that I don't get to be. I can't sing, I'm not good at math, I can be very unkind, I'm surrounded by people who are smarter than me. Not everybody gets to be good at everything. Am I really so compensated by my physical appearence that clearly it overshadows anything else I might lack? Is being pretty SO MUCH MORE intrisically valuable than any other positive quality? And if it's not, do we want to give it that status by treating it as if it is?

It doesn't sit well with me when I see an image of a woman on one of these body-positive blogs and the blog exhorts me to see her as beautiful when I don't. The issue, for me at least, is two-fold. First of all, honestly... there are things about people I just don't find beautiful. It's not that I think there's anything wrong those things, or those people, or even that I think they're ugly. It's just that on a purely aesthetic level they are not optimally visually pleasing to me. And whenever a blogger or whatever goes off on how unfair it is that a person who looks a certain way doesn't get to be considered beautiful, I get a little uncomfortable, because I think to myself, "But... they're not pretty. They just aren't." But I shouldn't have to feel guilty about that. I'm not saying every woman should comform to my aesthetic standards. I get that you're not here to decorate my world. But I'm not here to admire your display. I'm not sure why, maybe I just don't like feeling pressured or obligated to say something I don't believe, but I strongly dislike anyone trying to tell me that my view on what is beautiful is wrong. Beauty is, as the trope goes, in the eye of the beholder, and if you force me into your definition of it, you're just as bad as any cultural image that you decry that tried to do the same thing to you.

And secondly, I don't want to admire her for a virtue that I don't believe she has, and I feel like it's degrading and patronizing to her as well. Why can't we admire her because she's smart, talented, funny, or kind? Why do we have to manufacture a positive trait for her when she's certainly got real ones of her one that she deserves to be praised for? Everybody is good at something, and everybody is not good at something. We don't all get to be considered funny or wise just to spare people's feelings. By making beauty into something a person NEEDS, aren't we just reinforcing the notion that PRETTY IS ALL and if you don't have it you're WORTHLESS? Screw that.

On some of these blogs I read recountings by people who were tormented through their youths because they were not physically beautiful. Some people might use these things as examples of just how damaging it can be if people will not see you as pretty. But I find that an inappropriate reaction. The problem is that people are cruel, not that people don't get to be pretty. If people treated someone cruelly simply because she wasn't physically attractive, those people are dicks and their behavior is wrong. If that poor girl magically became pretty and was no longer set upon, the problem would still be just as disgusting-- being nice to someone, or at least not mean to them, because they're pretty is just as much bullshit. NOBODY gets to treat ANYBODY badly, FOR ANY REASON. The problem is not that their definition of beauty is too narrow-- their problem is that they are MEAN TO PEOPLE for STUPID REASONS like phyiscal appearence.

I'm certainly not saying beauty is meaningless. I believe it's a wonderful thing that should be enjoyed and celebrated. But I do not believe that it is more valuable, or even always AS valuable, as so many other good things a person can have. Not in life, not in work, not in art, and, to make an old-fashioned but still relevant point, not in love. God knows it can be hard for us girls to believe at times, but our mothers tell us this and we know it to be true. Beauty makes a man notice you. It doesn't make him love you, stay with you, or treat you right. It takes real positive qualities, less transient ones, to do that. And beauty makes you more of a target for bad men who don't care about those things. Being pretty certainly has its advantages, but it is NOT the most important quality to possess in this life.

And anyway, beauty fades. Yes, I'm very pretty now, but I'm going to get older and someday I'm going to get wrinkles and put on weight. And when I'm not pretty anymore, I better have something else that's good about me going on, because in the long run it's those other things that really matter, that make you who you are. Yes, pretty is a great thing, but in the end it's an accident of genetics that tends to have an expiration date.

I know it's a hell of a lot easier to SAY this is the right thing to think than it is to actually convince yourself of it. This is of course something I need to work on as well. God knows I'm just as fucked up as anyone, and like anyone I have good days and bad. I have days when I believe to the highest level of certainty that I am the most delicious creature that ever graced this Earth with her presence. I have days when, often when my unibrow seems particularly intent on growing back in, I am equally certain that I should be considering relocating to beneath a bridge conveniently near to a billygoat's home. Sometimes I am so disgusted by the gooey greasy slimey squishy meat-sack that is this human flesh I wish to trascend my base fluid-filled shell and become a being of light or perhaps a cloud, and I think to myself, "How can anyone NOT hate their body?" Sometimes I just can't get over how AMAZING it is that God made me this thing out of dust that lets me run, dance, type, fight, swim, have sex, have babies, heal myself, taste the difference between sweet and salty, and feel the sun on my skin, and I think to myself, "How can anyone NOT love their body?"

I need to believe this too, I need to learn this. My being influenced by this poisons me too. Among other things, this is where my fear of aging comes from. I've got to get past that fear of becoming less pretty, because I don't want it to be true that once it's gone there's not going to be anything left that's worthwhile about me. If I can't teach myself that there are more important things, how am I ever going learn to let go when the time comes that I have to?

Artists record, sometimes compulsively

Artists by their nature tend to, if not document life, at least incorporate elements of it in their work. This frequently leads them almost compulsively to establish some kind of metacommentary on whatever it is they do or happens to them so they can use it somehow in their work later. I read once that when Steven Speilberg's wife told him she was leaving, immediately after ran into the bathroom with his video camera so he could record the sadness in his face. While I'm not quite on that (in my opinion) bizarrely detached level, I often have similar instincts. In me this expresses in a tendency to mentally construct a summary or narrative concerning whatever it is I'm doing as I'm doing it. I sort of compose in my head what I'm going to write or say about the experience later as it's happening to me. On one hand I like this, as it helps me formulate interesting, experienced-based material to draw upon should I need it, even if it's only in the service of an interesting LiveJournal entry. Many of my entries are mostly written while their subject still went on. On the other hand, I dislike how often this tendency takes me out of the moment and keeps me from fully taking things in because I am distracted by the effort to record. I wish I could balance the two better, both crystallize material for the creation of my art but not be so focused on the meta that I lose something of the real experience itself.

Things I have done to pass the time until Jared gets here

Stained my new coffee table. Using some of the wood stain generously given to me by morethings5*, I picked the darkest color and went over the whole thing twice. It is imperfect, you can still tell the difference between the marked and unmarked parts of the surface, but it looks a hundred percent better and is now closer in color to the end tables. I am quite pleased with it.

Reading Stonesoup, an awesome, beautifully photographed blog on keeping a minimalist kitchen recommended to me by captainecchi*. My anti-stuff nature and desire to eat deliciously but healthfully is appealed to by the notion of keeping a small number of essential kitchen tools to prepare things with just a handful of tasty ingredients. She recently released a free e-cookbook that looks lovely, and I have especially enjoyed her interesting, thoughful entries on topics like how to season your cooking and the best things to have in minimalist kitchen.

Worked on my new cowboy-themed larp bid for Intercon, The Stand. I am currently working on fleshing out a backstory that will provide a mystery to solve and will hopefully be a plot that affects a large percentage of if not the entire game. One notion that occupies me strongly as a larp writer is that in-game mysteries must be solvable-- there must be evidence of some sort that is possible for players to put together to figure things out. The trick is making is that evidence neither too obvious nor too obscure, a surprisingly difficult thing.

I've also been doing a lot of staring at the clock, but that's less interesting than the other things. Just five and a half more hours to go.

Summer Black-Out Challenge, Day 1

Today marks the first day of my Summer Black-Out 2010 week. That is, in case you missed my introductory post, where I challenge myself to not wear any black at all for an entire week in an effort to enjoy some summer colors. And for the hell of it, to document it on the blog.

I was going to go with a white blouse today, but I decided that was a pussy way to start off a week that's supposed to be about color. So today I wear BLUE. Oh so very much BRIGHT TURQUOISE BLUE.



Textured turquoise button-neck shirt, hand-me-down from Mom
Blue varicolor scarf
Skinny turquoise scarf for belt
Sweet Dreams jeans
Silver-set amber necklace
Amber drop earrings

Why is it so tough to take a full-length picture of yourself in a mirror without covering up your face?



Hello, face. Nice to see you again. Wish I'd thought to get my earrings in the shot, but at least you can sort of see the necklace, the only non-blue in a SEA OF OVERWHELMING TURQUOISE. 

Jack never approved of journaling

I have always been bemused by C.S. Lewis's oft-mentioned dislike of the practice of journaling. Despite so frequently denigrating it, he actually did it quite often, and some of his most powerful self-reflective works (A Grief Observed, for example) were technically composed by journaling. But seemed to view it as a sort of self-indulgence, a practice that encouraged excessive focus on the self.

I think he was so sensitive toward anything that so encouraged because he already recognized a strong tendency towards it in himself. One of the things I most admire about Lewis and have always worked to emulate was his ruthlessly accurate understanding of his own nature. But the unfortunate companion to the truly self-aware is often some degree of self-absorption. God knows it's certainly dogged me in my own efforts. It takes a great deal of time thinking about you to arrive at real personal understanding, and all that time is necessarily precluded from regard for other things, such as other people, or important efforts, or God. I believe it is in criticism of this that Lewis makes his stance-- he was not about to approve of anything that drove him even further into his failing.

I don't really agree; I think journaling is a very positive thing. I like that it encourages me to produce writing, which in turn improves my writing. I think it helps us work through problems, clarfying thoughts, developing points, and cope with our pain. I also believe that the achievement of true self-awareness is worth some time spent in excessive self-absportion; remembering to attend to the external can always be yet worked towards. And you'll notice that even though Lewis disapproved of the pursuit he did it anyway-- because it helped him clarify, develop, cope. We have some of his powerful personal works because he did it anyway.

But I know what he means. He was so ruthlessly fair, so clear-eyed for both the hard edge against and the compassion for the human plight. He articulated both "Who am I, that it is so wrong that I should suffer?" and "I am such that my suffering does signify." He was so full of that burning contradiction, so strange and yet so critical, of the everything and the nothing of our state, unafraid to at once accept the burden and claim the significance. He kept cutting, no matter how painful, until he exposed truth.

I don't always reach the same conclusions as Lewis. I don't always have the same experiences or viewpoints. But he speaks to me because he cuts himself with all the same blades I do.

Style Challenge: Summer Black-Out 2010

So I read a style sometimes blog called Already Pretty, which I like for it's theoretical style advice and applaud for its positive body image outlook (even if I don't always necessarily agree with its approach on that front.) The writer has issued an interesting personal challenge to herself-- could she not wear any black clothing at all for two entire summer months and rely solely on more vibrant colors to create interesting, seasonally-appropriate looks? She calls it her "Summer Black-Out 2010 Challenge," and exhorted her readers to give it a try as well, not for the entirety of June and July, but just for the week of Monday, June 7th to Monday, June 14th.

Now I love my neutrals, especially black. Black looks good against my pale skin, and being a goth deep down in the depths of my tormented soul, it is a color that suits my tastes. But I depend an awful lot on it as a standby when I can't think of anything else, so it might be a fun challenge to cut it out entirely as an option. I certainly couldn't go two whole months without it, but a week could be interesting. So I thought what the hell, I'll give it a try. From the 7th to the 14th, expect to see me trying to creatively work around including any black in my outfits.



We could all use a little more color in our lives. :-)

And until then, I will be wearing ALL MY BLACK.

Stupid obsessing over LJ stats

Did some quick calculating on my stat page yesterday across the four months of this year so far. Since it occurred to me that I'd posted so many fewer entries in April than I did in March, I decided to see how many hits I got a month for each entry that month.

8,875 hits/41 public entries = 216.46 hits/entry in January
10,324 hits/41 public entries = 251.80 hits/entry in February
12,933 hits/41 public entries = 315.44 hits/entry in March
11,271 hits/29 public entries = 388.66 hits/entry in April

That's actually a fairly significant increase. Especially if it's true that some people are reading the cross-posts in Buzz instead of coming to my LJ. If I keep my level of new entry production up, I will probably in turn keep my hit count up, or possibly increase it as the trend shows. I worry it's likely to lead (if it hasn't already, see some of yesterday's entries) to me posting stupid stuff just to increase production of new content, which is a bad idea because if people quit enjoying reading, then they won't come back for new content. But it's nice to know that people haven't gotten bored of reading me.

It's stupid that I care so much. But I haven't been feeling so good lately, and little nice things are better than none at all.