i sometimes have my breakfast right off of a mirror / and sometimes i have it right out of a bottle / come on…
OK I’ve never done either. Like, not even when I was a baby, because:
No bottles for me!
(Hey—I wore that turquoise necklace the other day! My mom keeps giving me all her jewelry, I have no idea why.)
But I am having a bit of a Spiritualized moment right now, so just go with it, OK? And if that video doesn’t go to the song with those lyrics I’m sorry, but I’ve got a jetlagged boy next to me in bed and can’t actually listen to it. I am way too lazy to go into another room.
So! Now things really are better than they’ve been. I’m checking in from the land of happy-manic to say some shiz:
First of all, my boyfrien’ came home from his European tour—the kind of tour where, apparently, the fantastical Paris hotel he reserved will, unbeknownst to him until the concierge points it out in response to a query about local veganosity, have an amazing vegan restaurant in one direction and amazing falafel restaurant a few blocks away in the other (“The! best! falafel! ever! Literally!”), Rothko paintings (your fave!) will present themselves at every opportunity, and walks along the Seine and the whole Paris thing will be indulged, complete with requisite “It’s not Paris without you!” messages to yours truly, even though we were only in Paris together once for like 12 hours ten years ago and he’s been there maybe dozens of times since. It’s true, though, Paris makes you a romantic, you can’t stop it! Maybe it’s the fluffy falafel?
Though and also mayhaps because I have been sweltering in the fetid recesses of my overheated obstreperal lobe whilst he has been ramblin’ around The Continent, his journeys hath [Full disclosure: can you tell I am drinking? Yes, you can. Pastis!] yielded me:
- Pastis! En particulier, Pastis de Marseille. Yum!
- One Parisian baguette, bought immediately before boarding and shockingly delicious eight high-flying, suitcase-squishing hours later. Seriously: terroir! The air, the water, the wheat: it was a great baguette.
- House perfumey stuff (the kind that’s a bottle of perfumed liquid with those reed diffusers)—Paris really is the place to buy perfume. This stuff smells fantastic and is making the house more Continental as we speak. Also covering up the cat box stink quite nicely.
- Hotel stationery and “this magazine thing I found outside a salon with ideas for hairstyles. I thought you’d especially like the ones for kids.” Yeah, he knows me pretty well.
- An addiction to one Eliza Doolittle, who is apparently all over Europe. Cute, no?
- Tons of packs of the chewable adult-strength aspirin (Disprin!) that doesn’t exist in the US, vital for a non-pill swallower like me and difficult to buy in bulk since you can make meth with it. Fun times ahead: meth, and no headaches!
- One lovely pendant charm-type necklace, bought in a “Brooklynesque boutique” and featuring a beautiful old skeleton key: “Because I know you wear the knife around your neck to symbolize your career, and the hanger to symbolize your politics, but I thought the key could symbolize the other facet of your life that you’re trying to figure out now–it’s a key to the more balanced person you’re working on becoming. It’s a key to whatever you want it to be!”
I KNOW. YOU JUST DIED. I KNOW. He’s the perfect man, OK? The fucking perfect man. It’s RIDICULOUS. All I can do is make him his favorite food until he bursts and hope my endless foul-mouthed whining doesn’t taint his new-fallen snow perfection. Our relationship is vastly unequal.
Man, that hanger is beat up.
Oh also, there was this:
As it turns out, he was asking because “well…there was a Betsey Johnson boutique near my hotel, and it had a sale sign, and I remembered you liked that Betsey Johnson dress you got in Hawaii [$2!!!! Hawaii thrift stores, DON’T GET ME STARTED!], but…well….”
“Ah. A Betsey Johnson ‘sale’.”
“Yeah. Everything was still a couple hundred dollars.”
Yikes! How cute is it that he looked, though?
So, my saner half is home.
And we watched Mad Men. Even though I had to pinch him to keep him awake [see above: he is perfect, I am ridiculous to him.]. Here’s my explosive Facebook status about it:
CHRIST ON A CRACKER! JUDAS PRIEST! HELL’S BELLS!! [Friend x], you were so right, the past two Mad Mens have blown me away with amazingness. I jumped on the bed for sheer joy for five minutes after the most recent one. Show me a TV show set in present day that has a serious dyke on it like there is on MM right now–I mean COME ON!!! I’m dying! Not at my desk though!
And then Veronica, my former sous chef/homeschooled genius/knower of all things, informed me that said on-screen dyke (Zosia Mamet, who had a wee part in The Kids Are Alright, though we shan’t speak of that again) is DAVID MAMET’S DAUGHTER and I started jumping on the bed all over again. How can nepotistic casting annoy when it’s just so perfect?
As usual, Tom & Lorenzo’s analysis is beautiful, perfect, eye-opening, and mind-blowing. My god. My god!!!
I sort of think it was the best episode of any TV show I’ve ever seen, EVER.
Maybe a tie with M*A*S*H’s “Dreams.” Seriously! For serious. For reals. Heart is still pounding!
It gave me such hope for humanity—seriously.
I recently had a “why would I watch these unpleasant people” conversation with a Green Party grandma who came up in the 60s and sports Converse shoes and a pot-leaf ring to this day. She started watching Mad Men, but couldn’t do it. She said: “It is really real with its sexism, antisemitism, general racism, materialism, etc etc etc—all the stuff I had to live through so probably why I don’t want to relive it.”
I fumblingly tried to explain the appeal for me: because it’s a story about freedom that transcends time. Because it shows us how far we’ve come, and that we haven’t come far at all. Because it’s pretty. Because I like Joan (that old racist homophobe clotheshorse—she gets me every time). Because I want to be Peggy. Because I feel like Don Draper more than I want to admit. (My entire approach to my childhood is what he said to Peggy in season one: “Peggy listen to me. Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.)
So that was Mad Men.
And another cute thing happened recently to lift my mood, and, hey, it’s something that fits in perfectly with the theme of this week’s Mad Men: sisterhood.
The facts of the case are these:
- I collect tacky/awesome vintage embroideries.
- A woman who lives two blocks from me and is almost exactly my size (always a plus when vintage shopping!) and deals in vintage clothes that she used to sell out of her garage recently opened an actual shop, Judy Go Vintage, two minutes from my kitchen. I pass by it every single day and have yet to go in, because I know it would suck me in for the rest of eternity. You, however, should go. And if you can’t go, yay for Etsy!
- Judy had, a year or so ago when last I checked in with her, an AMAZING embroidery of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. You know the one I mean: sunflowers. Embroidered. Actually, it’s mostly crewelwork, even better. I have long coveted it, but it was a bit out of my bargain hunter’s price range. It was also FRAMED EXACTLY LIKE THE PAINTING. Like: GILT. Needless to say, I think about it a million times a day and have talked about it to everyone I know.
- My friend M. is currently moving, which of course entails shedding some stuff. She brought some clothes in to Judy Go Vintage and accumulated a credit. Not wanting to acquire more clothes before a move (thus clearly possessing more strength than I will ever have), an inquiry was made which M. tells me went like this:
- “Hey, do you have an embroidery of the Van Gogh Sunflowers painting?”
- “Yeah, I do!”
- “Oh cool. My friend is sort of obsessed with it.”
- “Oh yeah, I know her. Dark hair, about my size? Yep.”
- Exchanges were made, and when M. pulled up to the kitchen and told me to turn around and close my eyes and pulled a huge embroidered painting out of her trunk, I just about died.
- {pix to come, obvs!!!}
So.
Just to tie all this rambling to my issues as of late: it’s been a hard week. Few weeks. Few months, actually. The whole year has been, as Holden Caulfield would have put it, pretty crumby, if you really want to know about it. Nothing bad has happened exactly in my life, but my head has been a weird, overstuffed, sweaty place. As I keep mentioning, I’m climbing my way out of some bad habits I’ve developed, and it’s been tough. Obsessions and compulsions, that kind of stuff. Control. Perfectionism. (Just writing those two words gives me a frission of pleasure: Control. Perfectionism. Yum.) I love my bad habits so much, it’s been rough to admit that I’ve got to tamp them down a bit, give them a bit of air.
But I am. I’m moving, slowly, from Holden Caulfield-esque whining to more of a Zooey/Seymour Glass/Teddy-esque Zen thing these days (um…minus the [spoiler alert about books published 50 years ago that, now that I think about it, the aforementioned friend M. hasn’t yet read, so STOP READING NOW, M!] suicides). I’ve got Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind on my nightstand as we speak. I am working hard on emptying my head, letting my thoughts settle like a clear mountain stream, letting things go.
And now I’ve got my little team of sanity [sweet boyfriend, amazing girlfriends, Matthew Weiner, you know] nestled all around me, and I think it’s going to be just fine. In time. And with work.
Do you believe babies are born with perfect, unfuckedup little heads? I wonder. Getting back to the original mind—what a project.
One Response to “i sometimes have my breakfast right off of a mirror / and sometimes i have it right out of a bottle / come on…”
This post is really adorable, I love everything about it! I’m glad you’re feeling better.