odds and ends

Here are me, my mane, and Raghu Dixit. My phone was out of juice, and Barry is not good with his camera, so Raghu had someone take the pic with his phone and then posted it to Twitter.

So many random things on my mind...

I work a block from the Union Square Greenmarket, which is the best farmer's market in the city, and especially wonderful in the summer. Yesterday I came home with: local peaches, local nectarines, two kinds of plums (shiro and Santa Rosa), a quart of small heirloom tomatoes, a couple of Kirby cucumbers, French breakfast radishes (very mild), and a couple of young, mild red onions. Ate tuna last night mixed with chopped onion, tomatoes, cucumber and radishes. When I'm there, I tend to buy as much as I can carry. Barry is especially fond of the heirloom tomatoes. He loves tomatoes, but they're basically horrible and flavorless for most of the year. Most tomatoes have been bred to travel well and to be "attractive" (round shape), so most of them end up kind of hard and mealy...they look good but don't taste like much. "Heirlooms" are grown from old, non-hybrid seeds, and are grown outdoors and in season (as opposed to year-round in greenhouses), so they not only taste wonderful, but they're bumpy and delicate and irregular and all kinds of wild colors. When they're around, we basically eat them with everything, or eat them plain, and then buy more.

Splurged a bit today (hey, it's payday) at Sephora on a rollerball of Marc Jacobs' Honey. I got some small samples a week or so ago, and I love it, which is no small thing, considering that I am way picky about cologne and have only ever liked wearing a handful: Bellodgia (Caron), Coco (Chanel), Rush (Gucci), and Escape (Calvin Klein). I've tried others, but those are the ones I return to over and over. I go to Sephora a lot and just walk around and look at things, and always feel rather daring when I actually buy something, since you're basically spending at least $15 for a single item. And my inner cheapskate comes out when I look at $23 lipsticks, no matter how nice they are. I also bought a facial treatment I really like, an at-home facial peel. It's for daily use (yeah, right), but a box of five lasts me a month and only costs $15.

This is Patricia, who does cat rescue and set up near my office on nice days. She's a little wacky, but I love her to pieces. She never lets anyone touch the cats - but she lets me. This is earlier today - she's bottle-feeding three-week-old kittens. I admired one of them today, and she just handed it to me. We've tried to adopt from her a couple of times, and as much as she likes Barry and me, and knows we are long-time cat owners, she stalled and stalled and made excuses until we gave up. She kept saying she had to check this and that with her sister, that her sister would call us, and it never happened, even when we were trying to adopt an older cat - we thought she'd let him go easily, since older cats are much harder to place than little kittens. Still, since she lets me hold tiny kittens, we're still pals.

devoured by my own pleasures

My head is a little hazy this past week. Not enough hours of the day for music, reading, watching movies. There's a different and deeper involvement with social media. Twitter is really new to me, and it's nice to be able to drop a quick line to someone I admire. Not just, oh, say Amitabh Bachchan (it was his fans I followed there in the first place), but also an odd assortment of folks like Josh Malina, Pee Wee Herman, Susan Orlean, Merrill Markoe. I read little snippets from Colin Quinn and the Dalai Lama and Joe Hill.  Met up with Tricia there, the woman who writes the amazing Coney Island blog Amusing the Zillion (I originally registered there under the name @northofconey so the Coney Island people do follow me.) Not many of my friends are there, but Gretchen Kunz is, and of course it's where I first met Shiva.

Facebook has been a slightly busier place than usual for me of late. Of course, it's more public.  I only have 23 followers on Twitter, but I have 131 friends on Facebook. Then again, Facebook does have private corners like messaging and text. A lot of music content for me there, since my friends are a little heavy on the musician side. (Also rediscovered a little know of my college radio friends.) I haven't counted recently, but there are quite a few of my old boyfriends there, a few of whom do flirt. Old reliable Bob Steiner, wicked Michael Sheehan. And some old friends where the arm's-distance quality of Facebook is just right.

So many music clips! so many movie recommendations! so many jokes and political quips, clever notes to respond too.  But then there's also a like of YouTube to look through to find just the right bit with which to represent myself. There are emails I have to crop, which would run to a novel if I said everything I wanted to.

This is a winter of breathing slow and hard, thinking warm thoughts.

After a long online chat the other night, where I was told about how fascinated westerners seem with the Kama Sutra, I decided to finally read it. I'm not sure how many translations are around, but I downloaded Sir Richard Francis Burton's (Project Gutenberg), which I know was the first English translation. I guess like most (stupid) westerners, I believed it to be something like a sex manual, with hundreds of sex positions laid out, and so on. The beginning does deal with sex, explaining how a man and woman should properly enjoy each other, and describes and names certain attitudes and acts. But a lot of it, and the entire book, is just more about relationships and social rules -- most of which seem to be bendable or breakable. For instance, it tells how a proper wife should be chaste, but then there's a lot of space devoted to methods of seducing married women, or sneaking into a harem to enjoy the king's wives. Most of the book is about courtship, really. Some is quaint, some is sensible, and some is astonishing.

Enjoy an unwilling woman by drugging her and taking her home, then enjoying her before she comes to? Legitimate pastime then - date-rape now. Attracting a woman, when encountered at a party, festival, or friends's house, by stroking your mustache, jingling your ornaments, and (my personal favorite), sitting a child on your lap, placing paan in its mouth with your tongue and stroking its chin. O rly?

Overall, it was a pretty interesting social history, a really odd, ancient slice of life. Vastly entertaining.

And our old pal Amitabh is again in the hospital. I knew about his 1983 injury while making the movie Coolie, but did not know that he had subsequent abdominal surgery in 2005. I knew his spleen ruptured and was removed in '83, but apparently he's had lasting intestinal issues, including an incisional hernia. So he's having an operation today for something related to that, and apparently the doctor saw something else on a CAT scan. The EF, of course, are losing their minds. Those are some seriously crazy people, and I still sometimes make the mistake of trying to interact with them. There are a couple I can say that I like, but not many I enjoy reading. Anyway, I think I can also say that Amitabh is maybe too soft-hearted when it comes to those crazies.  He follows a handful of the craziest on Twitter, and blogs from his hospital bed to make all of the insane fans happy. (Though it does also serve the purpose of getting accurate information to the media.)

Some video? oh, if I must. I was lucky enough to find this one, the opening song of the show I attended last January: 

This is how to love David Johansen.

Then I started with "Smooth" again, by Carlos Santana and Rob Thomas. That song hooks me and earworms me up more often than I'd imagine. I'm afraid I may have passed it along to Shiva. There's something so sexy about that song that it's almost scary:

Kind of makes me wish for summer already.

Plans for the weekend: finish watching Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (recent movie, well received, Hrithik Roshan).  Make one more necklace and one more pair of earrings for the Village Scandal. Continue to play four or five different games of Words with Friends at once, and get creamed in most of them. (My Scrabble skills are way rusty, and my friends are way smart.) Buy a few things online. We got our hands on a little extra money and I may finally buy myself a kameez and a bottle of Mitsouko.  

I've been wearing Bal a Versailles, which I bought - reasonably - on a hunch. It's not bad but I have a feeling my aunt Mara used to wear it -- it makes me think of her. Barry likes it a lot, but it's not my favorite. 

Actually I saw a thing on Fiverr the other day where someone will blend a cologne sample to your liking, which of course intrigues me.

I think everything is intriguing me lately. He does feel like it should be spring, leaning into summer...

better? worse?

The weekends mostly depress me since I often don't know what to do with myself.  Last weekend, I took four days off -- took two for Rosh Hashonah because I felt I needed the break -- and we went to the Atlantic Antic on Sunday.  That's a huge long street fair down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, which is held on the first Sunday in October.  I try to set aside a little money because there are generally a lot of nice handmade crafts.  I got a beautiful bronze hairclip shaped like a sand dollar ($5) and a tie-dyed swing top ($20).  Barry decided to come with me this year, but he does what I try not not to:  buy food.  To me, an $8 gyro is outrageous, plus, I'm not a fan of eating while on my feet.  Thought I confess (please don't kill me, oh sugar- starch and gluten-free friends) that we split half a dozen deep-fried Oreos, as neither of us had ever had one.  Worth the splurge.

This past weekend was dreadful because it was The Weekend Before Pay -- that is, broke, broke, broke.  This is the kind of weekend where I am trying frantically not to think, because it will plunge me into even deeper depression.  I slept a lot, watched TV, watched things on the computer. 

A week or so ago, I was really feeling the absence of scent (cologne, perfume).  My big bottle of Bellodgia has a clogged sprayer and although it's about 2/3 full, I can't get any out.  This happened about two months after I got it; at some point, just from pumping and pumping, I got it to work for a few days, then it quit again.  There's no way to open it.  I even wrote to Caron, and never heard from them.  I had bought some Gucci rush about a year ago, but the sprayer dropped off, so it will only stream; plus, it's not holding well on me at all.  My Sublime and Escape were down to dregs.  It's the season where I like to wear something a bit heavier, like Coco, but what was really on my mind was Shalimar.  Mind you, I've never worn Shalimar.  But one of my grandmothers did, or else she simply had a bottle on her vanity, and I remembered the smellvividly.  It was wonderful and almost overwhelming.  I recognize it on women who walk by.  So I got myself a fairly small portion (1/4 oz. EDT) on eBay, and it's unbelievably wonderful.  I can't believe how happy it makes me.  I'm also waiting for a bottle of Mitsouko and one of Samsara, both also made by Guerlain.  It seems like time to wear classics.

I may have mentioned The Perfumed Court, a website where you can buy smaller sizes of almost any kind of scent you can imagine -- plus it really has a lot of information about the history and composition of pretty much every scent on the site.  It's tons of information, but it does help you to find other scents of the type you enjoy -- plus you can get small samples (not free) to check them out.  It's not cheap, but fragrance samples are not as easy to come by as they used to be.

My brother is having more and more and more problems.  Not much to be done for him.  He's having more and more flashbacks about some bad things that were done to him as a kid, and although he sees a therapist, this stuff has totally paralyzed him.  Neither he nor my sister-in-law has worked for a very long time, and I'm not sure how they get along, except that I guess public assistance goes a longer way in Providence, RI than it does in New York.

I do have a new insurance plan through my job, which is about as good as it can be.  Unlike Medicaid, there are co-pays, but there are none for generic meds and none for lab tests, which is a life-saver.

Work is basically good.  The beginning of the term was pretty hectic, but now things seem to be rolling nicely.  I hired a nice new intern who seems to be working out well; I've had good luck so far with interns.

Barry is now without insurance (we lost Medicaid September 30), which is terrible, but there's not much we can do.  I don't have a spare cent to add him to my coverage (which would totally about $6,000 per year).  I'm really pushing him hard about looking for work...rather, I am strongly encouraging him.  But we are just not making ends meet. We've already sold CDs and books and Barry's drum kit.  Something has to change.

popsicles and perfume

Weird pair of topics, I know.

I had been thinking about making popsicles (OK, I know that's a trademarked name, so "ice pops") lately, and the other day, I stopped into one of our local 99 cent stores and saw a set of ice pop molds for 99 cents. In fact they are extremely cute and absolutely made for kids: the stick has a rabbit head on it. (I love the 99 cent stores and they're cheap, but I'm not sure I feel really good about almost everything being from China. It's not as bad as Walmart, who not only sells lot of stuff from China but pays criminally low wages and generally treats their employees like crap -- plus they burden the state economy because none of their employees can afford health insurance. They pollute. And they put American manufacturers out of business because they can't compete price-wise with the Chinese, or if the Americans do business with Walmart, their profit margins are terribly low. Oh, and I believe they don't give a crap about the environment and have caused some problems at some locations. I hate Walmart.)

But back to ice pops -- I decided today was the day, since my last batch of ice cream hadn't come out too well. I was going to buy some juice, but I stopped into a pizza place to grab a spinach roll (yes, my eating habits have gone just a bit to hell lately), and saw that they had their own brand of soda in bottles, in all kinds of classic flavors like root beer, white birch beer, cream, grape, orange...and raspberry lime rickey. The latter is usually just called lime rickey, and it's a real Brooklyn thing and hard to find any more (ideally it's made at a soda fountain, also hard to find). Actually, it's usually cherry and lime. The last time I had one was from the amazing sweet shop that was in the train station at Coney Island before they were put out for the renovations (I wouldn't have minded except they never came back). It's basically just a raspberry and lime soda, but if you get it at a fountain, it's concocted with seltzer and syrup right there, so it's not exactly blended.

Anyway, I bought two bottles, raspberry lime rickey and root beer, to make ice pops. I've made sorbet out of soda. All you have to do is sweeten them just a bit extra, because anything that's frozen tastes less strong than at room temperature. (Important ice cream fact. Which is why it's best to let ice cream soften a bit before you eat it -- it should be just about about to melt as you put it in your mouth.) So I made lime rickey ice pops, but then I had trouble getting the pops out of the mold. I did hit on a solution, since the tops have a cup shape on the handle: you warm the mold a bit with your hand, invert the mold, and pull the pop out that way (one at a time). The pop ends up kind of sitting on the cupped handle. The pops were great; nothing much better on a very hot day. I want to try root beer and also (very summery and nostalgic) Hawaiian Punch. Also some of those nice Goya fruit nectars like mango.

OK...perfume. Actually, cologne, because who can afford perfume any more? All time top four are: Bellodgia (made by Caron), Escape (Calvin Klein), Coco (Chanel), and Rush (Gucci). I wish I liked the cheap stuff.

Bellodgia was the first one I ever wore. My mother used to wear it, but when she married my stepfather, he didn't care for it and bought her a bottle of Chanel No. 5 (actual perfume, to boot). So I got all the Bellodgia -- I think I was 14. Some of what I got was actual perfume (I'm kicking myself for not saving the bottles, which were really fancy crystal, I think Lalique, and the old ones now sell for a pretty penny). My aunt used to go on cruises and buy a lot of stuff duty-free, so she kept me supplied. This was the only cologne I used until I was 28.

I got a sample of Escape in a swag bag at a movie preview (I had a boyfriend who used to get passes to a lot of previews and screenings), so then I started wearing Escape. Bellodgia had gotten hard to find. It still is; it's not a hugely popular scent. It's mostly carnation.

A couple of years later, I got a sample of Coco, and really loved it. I can't remember where I first checked out Rush, but I went crazy for that, too.

Well, Bellodgia is hard to find, and Escape, Coco and Rush are either discontinued or on hiatus. This seriously sucks, though a lot of them can be bought on eBay. Which is how I just got the first bottle of Rush that I've had in years.

Other colognes I've worn from time to time:

Rive Gauche (Yves Saint Laurant) -- always too strong, even if I tried to put on very little.

Aromatics Elixir (Clinique) -- for some reason, I tried to like this, but never did. However, my late mother-in-law wore it, and I liked it on her.

Jil Sander No.4 -- I don't know if they make this any more. I liked it a lot; it's a similar type to Coco. (I am kind of a numbnuts as far as knowing the components of scents, all of the top-note and middle-note stuff, and even if a cologne is "spicy" or "floral." I'm not even sure how I found out that Bellodgia is mostly carnation.) I think I stopped using it because at that time, about fifteen years ago, I "had" to get the cologne and the lotion for every scent (I would keep around two of three of the ones I liked -- for many years, it was Escape in warm weather and Coco in cold weather). It was running into a lot of money, and I guess the Jil Sander just didn't make the cut. I think I only ever had one bottle of the cologne and one of the lotion.

Jean Nate. I'm wearing it now. I sometimes go for ultra-light sprays in the summer, so I can use a lot, although Jean Nate does have a fairly strong scent. I'm sometimes not sure if I like it, but it's a very nostalgic smell for me. I associate it with my aunt -- I'm not sure if she wore it or just had a bottle in her bathroom that I liked to sniff. (My aunt had a lot of scent in her bathroom.)

Sometimes I used to wear Enjoli, which was also a cheaper brand, and I'm not sure if they make it any more.

Another summer scent I'm wearing right now is something called Ohm, which was made by Olay but I don't think they make it any more. The scent I have is citrus ginger, which makes you smell exactly like a glass of ginger ale.

I also have the dregs of a bottle of Sublime (Jean Patou); I used to get it fairly cheaply at Cosmetics Market (don't get me started on that place -- tons of discounted brand-name makeup, which I love to buy and don't wear much).

I also like 1000 (pronounced "Mille" in French or "meel" if you don't know French -- also made by Jean Patou). Most of the colognes I've mentioned run about $45 for 1.7 ounces; things like Ohm and Jean Nate are much cheaper; and the Jean Patou scents are more expensive. I had a bottle of 1000 in the mid-eighties which I did not have to pay for, and haven't had it since.

I like those cheap light drugstore sprays but not the fruity or overly sweet ones. I like stuff like cucumber melon. I also love plain vanilla and have been known to dab vanilla extract behind my ears. I used to wear amber oil, but somehow Barry took to it, and it's become his scent. I like it on him.

I don't like too many sweet, flowery colognes (especially things with a lot of gardenia or the ones that are mainly rose -- I assume that some of the ones I use have a rose component, but I don't like the ones that are mostly rose). But I am fascinated by Shalimar (Guerlain). It has a lot of vanilla in it, and it's really sweet. It's also possibly the oldest of all of the scents I've mentioned here. I always think of it as an old-lady scent...I'm fairly sure that my maternal grandmother wore it. I don't really know how it would smell on me, but I'd love to have some and try it out. (Also an expensive one.)

That's one the reasons I like Sephora -- you can test colognes on paper strips, and if you like one, you can spray some on yourself and walk around to see how it smells on you and how it holds. Some colognes smell better on paper than on you, but it varies from person to person. Same with hold -- some scents just fade away fast, and some stay strong, which I assume is also a chemistry thing. Apparently the one that smells best on me is Escape -- I used to get stopped all the time by people who wanted to know what I was wearing, or who knew it but (I guess) thought it smelled particularly nice on me. (The ones who stopped and said, "Hey, is that Escape?" tended to be black men. I have no idea why.

Although I don't wear makeup that often, I put on scent pretty much every day. Even if I'm not going out, I put it on. So I think about it a lot, and always try to have as wide a selection as possible. I also get kind of miserly with it when a scent runs low, so I now have last little bits of Bellodgia, Escape, and Sublime. But I have a brand-new Rush (thanks eBay, got it unopened, and the price was about $15 less than I used to pay), and it smells really good. I like to smell nice to myself all the time.

I am also careful not to overdo it, for the sake of others. Nothing quite like the agony of too much scent on someone nearby. (My first serious boyfriend reeked of -- eek -- Brut.) I often don't wear any when I go to a job interview, because some people are allergic or just don't care for it. But that's probably the only time I leave it off -- that, and if I'm going to be somewhere that has a lot of mosquitoes (like Jannah's deck and yard).

Oh -- my mother and my aunt had their own special word for scent: stinkwater. Barry calls it something similar in Yiddish: schmecksaltz. (As always, all English spellings of Yiddish are only approximations. Cause that's how it is.)

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