Offshore

Oh, so this is what we call wallowing. These past couple of days. I know better, I can do better – but some part of me is choosing not to. Some part of me is throwing a deep-seated tantrum, and refusing to listen to the rational voice.

This is the same part of me that just wants everything to be fine, to not have to work so goshdarn hard all the time to have empathy and compassion and sympathy and understanding. This part is laaaaaaaaaazy. It says “I don’t WANT to consider where you’re coming from on this, I AM BUSY BEING HURT.” Nice.

I had a full-on panic attack on Saturday for the first time in many months. My vision went dark and my hands shook and I couldn’t breathe and then I acted like a twitchy, twitchy freako. But unlike months ago, when I was having them all the time, I could tell what was going on, why it was happening – and I didn’t lean into it. I didn’t wallow on Saturday – I breathed and focused and UGH SO BORING.

Anyway, I guess I used it all up that afternoon, all the energy in those coping mechanisms, because there’s a lot of faking-it-til-making-it going on at the moment. Unfortunately, making-it hasn’t started yet.

It is a little thing

I feel like I’m pretty much blah-blah-blah WEDDING these days, which is kind of embarrassing for someone like me. Someone who swore to myself that I’d never be like this. But ANYWAY, it is so, and I am thus, and things can only be what they are. Yes? (No, there is always the potential to change. But let’s be honest, I’m kind of enjoying thinking about this stuff. Kind of.)

We have had a place in mind for quite a while where we wanted to git ‘er done (as it were.) There’s a really pretty lake that has featured in several of our camping trips – it had some facilities (bathrooms, whoa) and a pavilion (rain shelter!) and – most of all – it was really, really pretty. But I’d heard some rumors that last summer’s hurricane might have been less than kind to the lake area, so we went up there yesterday… and it was devastated, that area was. The roads were washed out in most impressive ways, and half the lake’s beach sand was gone, and gullies four or five feet deep ran down the hill that used to be solid. The pavilion that we had contemplated as our potential rain plan was just a pile of splintered wood and brick.

“I… don’t think this is an option any more,” I said, kicking at the base of what used to be a 12″ supporting beam.

“I think you’re right,” he said.

So we got back in the rental car and drove around for a while, and encountered something I never thought we’d encounter.

We pulled up to this place, this place we saw on the map and thought to check out just for curiosity’s sake, and as we got up and looked around, I felt the completion of my transformation into another kind of human.

“I WANT this,” I said, quietly. I haven’t WANTED much of anything concrete in this process – just to have a party that allows our families to meet each other and to make official a thing that is already sure in my heart. But suddenly I WANTED to do this, here, in this place, with these particular conditions.

And he did, too. We were sort of odd and wide-eyed and surprised to come across this place, to encounter something so much better than we had envisioned in the months we’ve been thinking about starting to maybe plan this thing.

We don’t know if it is possible, or even if it’s probable – calls have been made, and fingers crossed, and a weird sense of HOLY COW WE’RE DOING A THING has basically kept me from getting much work done today.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green

Finally, it is finished.

I started working on that shawl an embarrassingly long time ago. Last July. I  based the design on the leafy lace pattern in this cardigan, turning it into a wrap rather than a sweater.

I set it aside in September to focus on holiday gifts and other projects, then got lost in a month or so of hat obsession… and finally picked it up again a couple of weeks ago and finished it off in about a day. It’s odd how often that happens – a project (of whatever type) becomes a total mental block until… it isn’t. Apply a little focus and willpower and suddenly, the impossibly obnoxious thing is done.

I’d say that’s been the primary lesson of the last year or so, but that would mean actually sorting out the lessons I’ve been sitting with. It doesn’t matter much, really, which lesson is primary. When the end result of a lesson is a finished object, it’s a nice feeling.

P’tauk-seet-tough (home of the white-tie bear)

Based on an intriguing little stub on The Awl, I found myself reading this brilliantly insane interview with Stefano Pilati, head of YSL. With a title like “The End of Elegance,” how could it be anything but grand? The “this-is-not-your-world” bar was set high with “He was sitting in his office in Paris, dressed to the nines, while I wasted away on my bed like a Nan Goldin photograph.” It was later topped – easily – by everything else that was said. Including “[w]hen people enter our store they imagine cashmeres, silk cravats, shirts in crepe de chine, crocodile shoes. Obviously, we make them, but it’s like hitting myself in the balls. I have 800 cashmere coats and 900 silk cravats.” What does that even mean?

I smirked my way through the first page-and-a-half of self-congratulatory nonsense, before coming to this gem:

“Consider this: Yves Saint Laurent was one of the first designers to revisit vintage. If you read his biography, you’ll see it. He used to go to London to the first secondhand markets and find clothes from the 30s. That’s how he invented the tuxedo. He bought a man’s smoking jacket and put it on one of his muses.”

I…hm. I am certain – certain – that Yves Saint Laurent did not invent the tuxedo. But then, who did? Thank goodness I’m using the internet, and there are thousands of answers for everything. According to the myth the internet sets out, the tuxedo as we know it was “invented” in 1886 by a wealthy tobacco magnate named Pierre Lorillard IV. Yes please! Mr. Lorillard and his wealthy tobacco magnate family lived in New York state – slightly upstate from New York City in a town called Tuxedo Park.

Tuxedo Park is a place I know well, since fully half of our camping expeditions start with either a train or bus ride to or through Tuxedo Park. It is definitely a place for the hoity-toity, though I’m not sure how many magnates of any kind live there now. Tuxedo apparently derives from p’tauk-seet-tough, an Algonquin phrase meaning “home of the bear.”

So! Mr. Lorillard “invented” this new formal wear for men, and named it after the town where he was busy being a rich, rich, rich, rich, rich man. It is unclear whether he actually wore his invention or not – I prefer the version of the story in which his son, Griswold Lorillard, was rebellious enough to go against the grain and wear the short jacket.

The takeaway, of course, is that major fashion house designers are all insane, and can’t be taken seriously about anything.

“But I love this experience, and I love my job. I’m more grateful for the lifestyle this job has bought me than for the fame or the recognition. If I walk the streets and somebody recognises me and asks for my autograph… well, it stuns me. I ask myself, “What did I do?” I mean, are you sure you want my autograph? Because, if we lived in Picasso’s time, what would this person do if they met Picasso? Would they ask him to kill them? “

Amazing.

It’s so strange

First, you should go watch this video.

Fashion. Dude. It is SO WEIRD. I really don’t know how to process how utterly weird it is.

I stopped by the armory after work the other day to drop off coffee and cookies for a couple of people who’d been awake and at work for most of the previous 48 hours. Their days were nowhere near done – they were at that point well into a work call that would end up lasting 34 hours. For this, for fashion, for tiny women with strange angles to walk in a square while wearing expensive clothing. While people applaud.

There are definitely at least a dozen reasons that this world gives me such a lurch of awful feeling, some of them nobler than others. It is a perfect storm of playing on my complex thoughts about women and body image (and people as objects) as well as my feelings about leaving the world of entertainment and yet still losing my partner to that world for weeks out of each year. It mixes pride in my partner’s accomplishments and, less noble, fear of the past he no longer inhabits. (Because, I ask myself, can anyone ever leave that part of that world and be fulfilled by all of this?)

But stronger than that, than the disconnect and the pettiness and the feminism, there is that dentist-drill whine in my consciousness, reminding me, sharply, of the worst parts of living in otherness. It is weird to be this close to something I disdain this much, to be affected by something I really wouldn’t have heard of if it wasn’t for Leo’s involvement. There is some moth-and-candle action, and every February and September, I have to figure out how not to get burned.

My kinda party

(reddit, of course.)

Little bits (almost entirely related to shallow things)

1) Are there any dudes on Pinterest? I don’t think there are. Congratulations, ladies! Our pinboards about weddings have officially alienated every man with internet access. I’m pretty sure our mothers are proud.

2) Speaking of mothers being proud, I watched 1.5 episodes of Say Yes to the Dress, and I am an angrier and more horrible person because of it. My favorite (“favorite”) quote came from the woman who said that a woman’s wedding dress is THE MOST IMPORTANT part of the wedding, the key to making it all work. This may have been the lady who bought the $11,000 dress, I lost track after a while. And while I tried, I really tried to stick it out through the second half of the second episode, I just wanted to punch all the ladies in the face.

3) Fiber One bars are the “official snack” of Fashion Week. I KNOW. The ads are all over the subways, and I just can’t take it seriously. Also, wow do I hate FW. Now that the tents are in a location along my work commute, I get a good, solid daily jolt of seething about it.

4) There is a vague, vague, vague possibility that I’ll get around to finishing the green shawl in the next couple of days. That’s only if I don’t distract myself with any more hats, mitts or amigurumi. We shall see.

Feeding the normal

I am reading Deborah Madison’s What We Eat When We Eat Alone, and find it surprisingly thought-provoking.

I don’t know why I am surprised – I’ve had a complicated relationship with food for over 20 years. Eating alone has been, until very recently, my always-preferred way of eating, so it is interesting to learn how special it is for some people. The people who make themselves a ritual dinner fascinate me the most, perhaps, although ritual is certainly something I understand.

What do I eat when I eat alone?

In answering that question, it occurred to me – for not quite, but almost, the first time – that I have been pretty successful in letting my shame around having other people see me eat rule the day. I deflect dinner plans into something else, or simply deflect making plans at all. This is not exactly a good thing.

Still, I have worked on this, and am now a thousand, thousand times better about it than I was even a few years ago. I still won’t eat from a passed tray or a buffet, but I can have a meal with friends without being a total spazz.

But the things I eat when I eat alone… I eat beans and rice. Or broccoli and rice with spicy peanut sauce. I eat oatmeal with salt, or toast. I char some cauliflower or some brussels sprouts or some kale with a metric ton of garlic. I eat carrot sticks with hummus. Or spinach with pickled beets. When I was 22 and had just moved to Los Angeles, I made secret meals of corn chips and pineapple juice.

More telling, I think, are the things I do NOT eat when I eat alone. I never eat a meal that involves more than one element. When Leo and I make dinner together, it usually involves a main dish of vegetable-and-protein, a salad, some starchy carbohydrate. I would never do that for a meal on my own. I will probably never scramble eggs or make a frittata when I eat alone, although those are in regular rotation for dinners together. And unless I’m going through a phase (oh, boy, do I go through phases) I probably won’t make pasta.

So. What do you eat when you eat alone? Do you treasure it, or is it a chore? Please share, ’cause this was harder than I thought it might be.

Half-assed check in

Sunday night, as I was getting ready for bed, I found myself musing on a little conundrum.

Over the weekend I finished one knitting project, started and finished another, finished a book and started reading another, watched a movie, went to the gym twice, ran a total of 10k, did my laundry, made dinner on Saturday and took Leo’s sisters out to a Fancy Dinner on Sunday. (We had to ask a favor of them, and favors often go well with Fancy Food.) And yet, at the end of that, I felt like I had done… nothing. At first glance, the lesson might be somewhat obvious (“just do more”) but on deeper reflection, I decided that the lesson was actually “don’t forget to take your emmer-effing Zoloft.” I missed two days and the backsliding was incredible. Oh, hey, terrible ennui, guilt and obsessive thought patterns that make me just want to give up. How you doing? I didn’t really miss you.

I don’t want to be one of these people – I want to be a person who doesn’t function a thousand times better with medication. I want to be free of a drug that changes my brain chemistry and makes me gain weight like weight gain is my business but at the same time makes me feel so much better. I want to be confident that someday my brain will kick in and do its job and start making the chemicals that make it possible to not say “SORRY, I’M SO SORRY FOR EVERYTHING” every few sentences, or dig into self-served meals of obsession and weepy spirals of irritation. Now that I know what it feels like to not be basically, fundamentally, chemically depressed – to feel like a normal person – I don’t want to give it up. But I don’t want to rely on a little yellow pill to feel normal. But I’m not sure I have any other option at this point in my life.

Whoa! Ok! So that happened!

This also happened:

I have had a shockingly difficult time actually taking photos or keeping track of the knitting projects I’ve been finishing. This is the one I both started and finished, and this picture is actually from before I decided it was actually finished – I didn’t love the way the earflaps ended up sort of spade shaped, so I did a little nudging. Thrilling, yes? I also made myself some fingerless mitts, which I have failed to photograph at all, but which have already done a lot to change my life.

Maybe fingerless mitts will replace Zoloft someday.

The Fashioning

A little bit ago, Leo forwarded me this email, with the words “I know where I am shopping for wedding clothes!”

I don’t think I’ve written about my mild obsession with Karl, but I find the man deeply, insanely fascinating. As I saw him referred to once, a cotton candy haired quote machine. (SOMEONE GAVE HIM A FACEBOOK IN WHITE GOLD.)

Anyway, I don’t care what else happens, I don’t think Leo and I can get married unless he’s wearing this… necklace? Medallion?

He’s planning to use it to summon Mr. Lagerfeld in a mirror, Bloody Mary style. There will be a FASHIONING.