I know that you all only come here for the parts when I talk exhaustively about costuming, sewing and crafting, and that you were sorely disappointed last year when I copped out so hugely. Breathe your sighs of relief, then, because I have determined that I will NOT spend three hours desperately wiring rubber snakes together in an effort to make it seem as though I put effort into my costume choice. NO, this year, my lovelies, I am going to make a costume.
It is not as inspired as years past, but my criteria were different. It needs to be packable, longwearing, lightweight for temperature reasons, and reasonably clever. No sticky makeup, no fussy accessories, nothing I will need to constantly check or fix. This immediately disqualified my best ever costume ideas - the story of the green ribbon, and the gutshot cowgirl - and made my favorite forerunner for this year - a steampunk mermaid - seem unfeasible. I settled on something iconic, easy to put together, and yet challenging enough to make me actually want to work on it. I decided to be the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland.
The elements are simpler than you are imagining. A vest, some pantaloons, a pocketwatch on a chain, some rabbit ears (fascinator style, natch), and a little pink nose. I am rather pleased with myself. I even have a pattern for a vest that I have been holding onto for years, waiting for the occasion to arise where I might need it. Also, I might have gone ahead and bought a pocketwatch today. I need one anyway!
HRH is going to be Little Red Riding Hood, which I am also making. I bought a set of red velveteen curtains at a garage sale for $5.00 and threw them in the washing machine not long ago. I hope they survive the trip. They smelled about a thousand years old. IF so, they are going to make a really beautiful, heavy, hopefully warm cape. I want to make a pinafore trimmed with Bavarian ribbon, too, and then she can wear a white shirt and white tights and black shoes and carry a basket.
So now I have a plan, and two patterns and the fabric for one costume. Now to dust off the sewing machine and set to work. I'll post updates - hopefully with pictures, even! - as I make progress.
There was a time not so very long ago when I was utterly, entirely convinced that I was fated to be alone for the rest of my life. It had been a long painful, messy end to a long, messy, difficult relationship, and I had had my heart ground to dust and splinters. I wasn't interested in gluing the puzzle pieces of my life back together just to let another man dismantle it again. Unfortunately, I was desperately lonesome and while I knew I was perfectly capable of leading a full and fulfilled life without being in a romantic relationship, I never wanted that. One particularly low moment after a mystifying rejection, I asked La Fab if she thought I would die without ever having sex again. She laughed and said, "Are you planning on offing yourself tomorrow? Do you have a terminal illness you are hesitant to tell us about so as to spare our feelings?" Then she went on to reassure me that she believed I was lovely, intelligent, and attractive, and that I just needed to settle down and wait - something would come along. SomeONE would come along.
I thought I knew the kind of guy I would find, if I were to find anyone at all, and I thought I knew how it would go. He would be smart and verbose and rather cuttingly mean; I would feel sick to my stomach with desire and lose sleep thinking of him. The less I thought he thought of me, the more I would try to make him think of me. He would be thin and intellectual, pretend not to care about the way he looked, but really work very hard to be look so nonchalant. He would know a lot about wine and have a ridiculous dream to visit that bar in Belgium with 2500 types of beer.
Here's what I never thought would happen: that I would decide to amuse myself by flirting with a boy in the audience at a last minute bar gig and end up feeling strangely as though I had met him before. I never anticipated that he would take me up on an offhand offer to visit Sitka and see us play again. I never dreamed he would respond to my awkward overtures to befriend him, that he would email and call, that he would answer my questions and ask ones of his own. The oddest thing happened: I slept better, I felt great. There was no heart-pounding, sweaty-palmed second-guessing. He was first dozens, then hundreds, of miles away, and so having a friendship complicated and clouded by lust was an impossibility. I came to genuinely like and admire him.
Here's what I never thought would happen: that I would decide to chase away my own emptiness by filling it with meaningless encounters and find myself a year later deeply in love with my best friend.
I know everyone who reads this has spent the last year humoring me as I tried to make sense of all of this, and I know it has been a month since the last time I posted anything. The thing is, I used writing all of this stuff down as a way to keep it from swallowing my head, and now I have someone to tell it all to and process it all with, so I don't have to write it down anymore. Also, contentment is neither interesting nor funny. For the time being, it might be sparse around here. You can take it up with Z.if you really, really need to.
I lost a friend this weekend. That makes it seem so melodramatic and huge, but I'd known this guy since the minute he was born. My cat died while I was gone to Haines, and everything seems a little askew.
Chester was the biggest one of the litter, and he stayed that way. Eddie was the wild one (his nickname was Psycho Dangercat), Vinnie was the slow one, and Sadie was the sweet thing adopted by Cap'n J, who was 4 at the time. Chester was big and quiet and a little boring. He didn't crawl in your lap and ask to be petted or move you to tears of laughter walking into the walls or falling off the stairs. He spent most of his time sleeping and eating his own body weight.
Vinnie was given away first, since we meant to keep Sadie. He was smallish and needy, and that appeals to a certain kind of person. They changed his name to Sundance and moved him to Colorado. Eddie's rock and roll attitude destined him for La Fab, who had the best kind of love/hate relationship with him. But Chester was a hard sell. He was a lump of raven black fur without the crazy eyes or endearing chirrup of the others. We kept him, too, because we couldn't risk him being put to sleep. We resigned ourselves to three cats: Emily, who belonged to my ex; Sadie, who belonged to J., and Chester, who belonged only to himself.
He had a feralness that was a little startling in such an inert animal. He would hiss and run at the smallest slight, never batted with sheathed claws and bit to draw blood when he thought he was cornered. All of us bore scars from the wounds he dealt, J. in particular, who will drink for years on the story of the divot in the bridge of his nose. We took to shying away from petting him or trying to pick him up; he took to sleeping in the backs of the closets and under the chairs. He was not a loving cat, except in the dark mornings when I was the only one moving in the house. He would come and join me on the couch while I read my email or the last chapter of my book, pressing himself against my leg and purring so lightly I could mistake it for snoring. If I made a move as if to touch him, he would tense and sometimes even move away. On rare occasions he would tolerate my overtures, and it always felt like a gift when he accepted my affection. I cherished that I was the only one he trusted.
Then Z. came.
It was astonishing to see two kindred spirits meeting. First Chester started coming out of the safety of the closets, and then he started joining us on the bed, and then he started coming when Z. - and only Z. - called his name. He took to curling up on my pillow next to Z. the moment I left the bed in the morning. He liked to be on something that belonged to Z. if he could, it didn't matter what it was: motorcycle jacket with stiff bits and pokey bits or cushy red robe or pile of slick magazines. You broke him, I accused. You took a wild animal and made him into just another housecat. It can't be helped, Z. replied. He likes me. And he was right. Chester loved him.
The worst part about his last hours are not thinking of his pained and terrified cries over the phone, or how he must have felt like his own body was drowning him. The worst part is that I think he came downstairs to find us, to find Z., and we were nowhere. I think he wanted us to make him feel better, to stroke his pain away, and we weren't there. In the end, I feel like we let him down. He had a merciful and dignified death, but I am filled with enormous guilt that I wasn't the one to comfort him and wrap him in a blanket that smelled like me so he wouldn't be lonely and scared.
I have had a few pets die, and it has always been swift and sudden, but I have known none of them so long or come to love none of them so well, and I have always been there before. I loathe the gaping tear in my life where he was. I know he was just a cat, but he was my friend, and I loved him.
I don't have any pictures of him because I am not the type lady who takes photos of her animal companions. The best I can do is to tell you to imagine if Aaron Neville were only two feel tall and covered in sable hair from head to foot, and only deigned to sing for you when it was the dead of night. That bulky build, that wild past, that sweet disposition, that lilting tenor voice - if Aaron Neville were a cat, Chester would have been his body double. Because I don't have any pictures of him, here's Aaron Neville instead:
This past weekend my band played Homeskillet Fest, which is a four day music event put on by a local record label. We were an odd fit for the festival, which features mostly independent singer-songwriter-y types with lots of blues and folk overtones. Most of the types who attend wouldn't know a hot rod from a hole in the ground and don't even own lipgloss, much less dedicate half a drawer to organizing just various shades of red lipstick. We got a good reception anyhow, and my new favorite quirky band complimented our harmonies. I went to buy their CD and found myself with their LP in hand instead because 1) I am cool enough to own a working turntable, kind of 2) vinyl seems more authentic and DIY and 3) for the same amount of cash as the CD, I got great big HUGE album art and a poster and all the lyrics to all the songs. I am a fan of big.
this does not show the baby blue marbled vinyl, which is the best part.
Upon investigating the fine print of the liner notes (I am also a fan of liner notes), I came upon a name that was vaguely familiar, though I couldn't quite place a finger on it. It wasn't someone I knew personally, it wasn't the friend of a friend or an acquaintance or someone I met sometime... I turned to Z. and asked, "That cat who you gave a ride to New Orleans to... the Craiglist guy? Who was he again?" "A film guy," Z. said. "Yoni Goldstein."
And there it was. Sitka is magical for a lot of reasons, but its most notable trait is that it is a nexus. Sitka is the one degree of separation for so many people; it goes beyond mere coincidence. You hear stories of Sitkans who meet each other on the opposite side of the planet after not having seen each other in two and a half decades; you hear stories of folks who are recognized in the middle of the night in a grocery store in Connecticut by their t-shirts; everyone has a cousin or an aunt or a best friend who lives here, or lived here during the war, or volunteered at Sheldon Jackson when it was still a high school. And here is another such Sitka near-coincidence: my man, on his way to see me in my favorite city, picks up a rideshare in the middle of nowhere to save on gas, who turns out to be friends with this band (from Ann Arbor Michigan, thanks, La Fab) that I become a little enchanted with when I see them live while holding hands with Z. here in our sleepy village. We are never farther than a step away from anyone here. That is just the way I like it best.
I realize that it is only Sunday, and that I just updated yesterday, but here is an outfit for you, as well as another insightful posting. I decided yesterday that if it wasn't raining, I was going to wear this dress, which has a distinct Dust Bowl vibe to it. I had forgotten, though, that the last time I wore it was several summers ago, when it was wickedly hot here in Southeast, and when I was eight months pregnant. Since it was the coolest thing I owned, I clipped the elastic out of the waist in desperation. I set it aside after that steamy August and more or less forgot about it until yesterday. I put it on this morning and it looked kind of like a feedsack pillowcase. I added this handtooled belt, which is way too long for me, and my cowboy boots.
my pose seems urban outfitter-y.
You can't really tell, but I also added my necklace with the bird and the key and tiny milkglass earrings and petal pink lipstick and perfume that smells like crushed flowers. Then I was dressed for a Jenny Lewis concert. Since there wasn't one, I played the following songs on my iPod while I walked next to the harbor on my way to have coffee at my friend A.'s little cafe. While I was there I wrote some letters and ate some pancakes and read a few paragraphs of an Alice Hoffman novel - she is a guilty pleasure - and allowed myself a moment of wistfulness. It's hard to be wistful for long, though, if you are full of buttermilk and blueberries. Those are the words of wisdom I have to offer you. That, and, if you get the chance, dress like you are acting out a song. People complement you on your outfit that way.
Here are some things that helped to erase my truly bad attitude today:
1) S. came back from Europe with the prettiest shopping bag I have ever seen, full of marvelous little gifts wrapped in hot pink tissue paper.
2) There were still lots of cherries when I went to Chelan at 11:00 this morning. I ate the whole bag of Rainiers before noon.
3) I was asked today, "Do you ride a longboard?" No, I said, I can barely walk down a flat street without falling over. Trying to ride a skateboard is beyond me. "Oh, well, I saw a woman in a red helmet longboarding the other day, and my first thought was that it must be you. I couldn't think who else it would be." Dude. I am not that awesome, but thank you.
4) My retro styled lemon yellow bathing suit arrived in the mail. I put it on immediately. It makes me feel like a Vargas painting.
5) I am going to make beets at some point today. Sooner rather than later, hopefully.
That's it. All of it. I am better now, really. All I require is a nap, and maybe a really cold beer. Ahhh.
I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to those of you reading this whom I have been neglecting or ignoring lately. I am never very good at the communication thing, and it is the very first thing to go when I am faced with difficulties in my life. The past several weeks have been a bit of an ordeal, forcing me to ask some really hard questions and face some uncomfortable truths, and I had to let something slip away. Unfortunately, that something was the connection I cling to in order to maintain my usual equilibrium. I am sorry. I cherish you and I love you, and I was not deliberately shutting you out. I just only had enough strength to do what needed to be done. Now I'm through it, and maybe things will be sort of back to normal. As normal as things ever are for me, anyway.
Sometimes the Universe gives us gifts, you know? And sometimes She gives us lessons. Occasionally, She hands us a pop quiz in order for us to appreciate what we have before us. I feel like I just came up on one of those quizzes. I have come very close in the past several weeks to ruining something glorious because I am insecure and gun shy. I keep throwing the door wide open so he can walk right out if he wants to: telling him flat out that I was keeping an open mind about what happened when I was out of town, telling him that I thought he didn't want me enough, telling him I am full of jealousy and irrationality. Then I needed him really badly and didn't know how to tell him, and somehow he knew anyway. The Universe handed me a giant platter of humility and told me to choke it down and understand that I have been graced with his love and respect. She is offering the both of us the chance to be better people with each other than we have ever been with anyone else, and it will behoove us not to fuck it up.
So thank you, ell and vee and S.F. and K.D. and Em and H. and Meemah and Roo and the other ones who read this and worry about me and love me and hold me up. The Universe is teaching me again and again and again that love is what keeps this incomprehensible rock spinning in space. Before I learned that lesson with him, I learned it with you, and I am unspeakably grateful for your presence in my life.
And thank you, Z., for standing up and standing next to me and being what I want and need. I can't believe it took something this huge and dramatic to convince me that you are being 100% honest when you tell me that you are in it to win it. I hear you. Finally. Stick around, okay? I have a feeling big things are in store for us.
