Thursday, August 04, 2005
Wardrobe malfunctions
I have this coat. It's like a sort of ageless granny coat. Big cream wool thing with fake fur collar. It's intimidated me somewhat since I was put in a headlock in Christmas sale and ordered to buy it for the good of my health - it was on sale but it was still expensive. I have a large distrust of pricey shit, can't assimilate it somehow, gives me some funny mental itch. Anyway, this garment is imposing and heavy, and in course of clothing purge the other night it pounced on a vulnerable mid-point on my wardrobe rail like a big cream wool bear and the rail groaned and snapped with a dull ping and there was an unholy ungainly cascade of neglected jackets trousers and dresses everywhere. Now they're all loitering just outside the wardrobe, festooned outside of it, looking grumpy and formidable.
Clothes are like anything else you own - they absorb your (I know, I know, but there's no other word for it) energy. They do. Possessions are like those little pen-dictaphones, they can record up to thirty seconds of really powerful memory and association and then repeat it back to you unbidden when you pick them up. Fully automated system. After a while, once you've accumulated too much stuff, it's like you've given blood a bit over-generously and get a bit faint. You can't get the energy back that you put into your stuff - you just recognise it as a very small still-twitching part of you, behind some thick glass. And clothes seem to suck up quite a lot. It's a wrench to get rid of them, even as it's terribly Healthy. Some of them I can't be parted from despite the fact that I'll never wear them again.
I have this ridiculous dress that I wore on my 21st birthday - very noisy blue with photographic print all over it. (It's an American landmark, and could be interpreted as some kind of rude self-deprecating joke if you were that way inclined.) I've got a couple of pictures of the night, and one of me all sober before setting off out to try and get my disparate friends to make small talk with each other. I can hardly bear to look at that one. Not because I was a couple of stone heavier - feeling a bit disappeary at the moment, and it's unpleasant - but just because I look so fucking awkward and frightened and unsure. This dress needed someone full of themselves inside it, and I look like I'm trying to delegate everything to this bit of cheap stretchy fabric.
So the associations aren't especially happy even though I had a good time in the end, but I can't get rid of it. Same goes for the red sweet-wrapper one (23rd or 24th or something), for almost polar opposite reasons - that one made me invincible, buah hahahah, and I'm just sad it no longer fits.
Yes, so attack of girlishness this week, and a glimpse of what life could be like via crinkled gossip mags in hairdressers. Smelling hair dye, marvelling at how modern cosmetic science at last succeeded in making it smell better than old shark's fin soup (the cartilage smells of pish, apparently), looking at the only reading material available and marvelling at the prominence of the veins in Tara Palmer-Tompkinson's arms. I never read gossip mags, or women's mags for that matter although I like to skim over the covers, boggling at how crammed a market it is, noting the little tricks and tics they have. There's something soothing about reading the rhetorical questions jostling around the cover models - ARE YOU TOO NEUROTIC? etc - and knowing that I don't need to grab the shiny enticing thing and rush home to find out the cunningly inconclusive answer, stuffing myself with fresh little tapeworms of inadequacy even as I get my relief fix (whew, it's normal to be slightly unhinged for a few days every month - ohhhh pass the 500g of Whole Nut). I find the whole culture fascinating, not least because I'm susceptible to it myself and can't be 100% objective.
So actually spending some time going through Closer - I shuddered at the quality of the writing (although Hotdog the film mag desperately needs a me-type to point out the difference between 'effecting' and 'affecting'), I winced at the flagrant hypocrisy (the brackets within which women are considered normal and healthy, physically or psychologically, is about the same as the one between 'unpleasantly lukewarm' and 'scalding christing hot' on the average cheap shower dial), but I did enjoy myself. I'm not proud. Well, I am, but it was nice to not worry about that for a bit. No one was looking.
Conclusion: Jordan's a challenge to anyone of feminist leanings but she's OK with me (and dealing manfully with clearly very sick kid who'll always be sick). Coleen McLaughlin is actually very pretty. Sienna Miller is useless. Clothes are far too expensive. None of this is important. And I'd probably rather be the sort of person who subscribes to New! than the sort who subscribes to Private Eye.
Yes, the upside of the self-consciousness and the stress and the conflicting wotnots about being female is that you can indulge in the superficial. It's incredibly soothing and fulfilling, sometimes, to buy lip gloss, coo over boots. That's the sort of stuff that you do get the energy back out of, occasionally.
Magnetic Fields' tightly-wound totally disingenuous little songs are sweet, and remind me of Sensible who is somewhere Antipodean having adventures with quokkas. I miss him.
How fucking roman. . .tic
All the stars are out
Twinkling twinkling twin. . .kling
And fluttering about
What a tacky sunset
What a vulgar moon
Play another char. . .ming
Rogers & Hart tune
How fucking romantic
Must we really waltz
Drag another cli. . .che
Howling from the vaults
Love you obvious. . .ly
Like you really care
Even though you treat. . .me
Like a dancing bear
Toss your bear a gold. . .fish
As it cycles by
Don't forget to feed. . .your
Bear or it'll die
He's a clever chap.
Don't fall in love with me yet
We only recently met
True I'm in love with you but
You might decide I'm a nut
Give me a week or two to*
Go absolutely cuckoo
You'll only see your error
Then you can flee in terror
Like everybody else does
I only tell you this cos
I'm easy to get rid of
But not if you fall in love
And know that I'm on the make
And if you make a mistake
My heart will certainly break
I'll have to jump in a lake
And all my friends will blame you
There's no telling what they'll do
It's only fair to tell you
I'm absolutely cuckoo
These things are great when you've got nonsense on the brain.
Oh, and I found a way around my utter inability to imbibe alcohol in daylight. And its name is Gordon. I thangyew. That and the company were worth the iffy food and the mild sunburn.
* as opposed to 'your ecru tutu' which is so much better and gayerer.
Clothes are like anything else you own - they absorb your (I know, I know, but there's no other word for it) energy. They do. Possessions are like those little pen-dictaphones, they can record up to thirty seconds of really powerful memory and association and then repeat it back to you unbidden when you pick them up. Fully automated system. After a while, once you've accumulated too much stuff, it's like you've given blood a bit over-generously and get a bit faint. You can't get the energy back that you put into your stuff - you just recognise it as a very small still-twitching part of you, behind some thick glass. And clothes seem to suck up quite a lot. It's a wrench to get rid of them, even as it's terribly Healthy. Some of them I can't be parted from despite the fact that I'll never wear them again.
I have this ridiculous dress that I wore on my 21st birthday - very noisy blue with photographic print all over it. (It's an American landmark, and could be interpreted as some kind of rude self-deprecating joke if you were that way inclined.) I've got a couple of pictures of the night, and one of me all sober before setting off out to try and get my disparate friends to make small talk with each other. I can hardly bear to look at that one. Not because I was a couple of stone heavier - feeling a bit disappeary at the moment, and it's unpleasant - but just because I look so fucking awkward and frightened and unsure. This dress needed someone full of themselves inside it, and I look like I'm trying to delegate everything to this bit of cheap stretchy fabric.
So the associations aren't especially happy even though I had a good time in the end, but I can't get rid of it. Same goes for the red sweet-wrapper one (23rd or 24th or something), for almost polar opposite reasons - that one made me invincible, buah hahahah, and I'm just sad it no longer fits.
Yes, so attack of girlishness this week, and a glimpse of what life could be like via crinkled gossip mags in hairdressers. Smelling hair dye, marvelling at how modern cosmetic science at last succeeded in making it smell better than old shark's fin soup (the cartilage smells of pish, apparently), looking at the only reading material available and marvelling at the prominence of the veins in Tara Palmer-Tompkinson's arms. I never read gossip mags, or women's mags for that matter although I like to skim over the covers, boggling at how crammed a market it is, noting the little tricks and tics they have. There's something soothing about reading the rhetorical questions jostling around the cover models - ARE YOU TOO NEUROTIC? etc - and knowing that I don't need to grab the shiny enticing thing and rush home to find out the cunningly inconclusive answer, stuffing myself with fresh little tapeworms of inadequacy even as I get my relief fix (whew, it's normal to be slightly unhinged for a few days every month - ohhhh pass the 500g of Whole Nut). I find the whole culture fascinating, not least because I'm susceptible to it myself and can't be 100% objective.
So actually spending some time going through Closer - I shuddered at the quality of the writing (although Hotdog the film mag desperately needs a me-type to point out the difference between 'effecting' and 'affecting'), I winced at the flagrant hypocrisy (the brackets within which women are considered normal and healthy, physically or psychologically, is about the same as the one between 'unpleasantly lukewarm' and 'scalding christing hot' on the average cheap shower dial), but I did enjoy myself. I'm not proud. Well, I am, but it was nice to not worry about that for a bit. No one was looking.
Conclusion: Jordan's a challenge to anyone of feminist leanings but she's OK with me (and dealing manfully with clearly very sick kid who'll always be sick). Coleen McLaughlin is actually very pretty. Sienna Miller is useless. Clothes are far too expensive. None of this is important. And I'd probably rather be the sort of person who subscribes to New! than the sort who subscribes to Private Eye.
Yes, the upside of the self-consciousness and the stress and the conflicting wotnots about being female is that you can indulge in the superficial. It's incredibly soothing and fulfilling, sometimes, to buy lip gloss, coo over boots. That's the sort of stuff that you do get the energy back out of, occasionally.
Magnetic Fields' tightly-wound totally disingenuous little songs are sweet, and remind me of Sensible who is somewhere Antipodean having adventures with quokkas. I miss him.
How fucking roman. . .tic
All the stars are out
Twinkling twinkling twin. . .kling
And fluttering about
What a tacky sunset
What a vulgar moon
Play another char. . .ming
Rogers & Hart tune
How fucking romantic
Must we really waltz
Drag another cli. . .che
Howling from the vaults
Love you obvious. . .ly
Like you really care
Even though you treat. . .me
Like a dancing bear
Toss your bear a gold. . .fish
As it cycles by
Don't forget to feed. . .your
Bear or it'll die
He's a clever chap.
Don't fall in love with me yet
We only recently met
True I'm in love with you but
You might decide I'm a nut
Give me a week or two to*
Go absolutely cuckoo
You'll only see your error
Then you can flee in terror
Like everybody else does
I only tell you this cos
I'm easy to get rid of
But not if you fall in love
And know that I'm on the make
And if you make a mistake
My heart will certainly break
I'll have to jump in a lake
And all my friends will blame you
There's no telling what they'll do
It's only fair to tell you
I'm absolutely cuckoo
These things are great when you've got nonsense on the brain.
Oh, and I found a way around my utter inability to imbibe alcohol in daylight. And its name is Gordon. I thangyew. That and the company were worth the iffy food and the mild sunburn.
* as opposed to 'your ecru tutu' which is so much better and gayerer.
