Spring, Welcome In

Bright is Right, JCrew says. I would have to agree.

Haha! I will talk about God sometime soon. For now, stolen images and consumerism!

Pretty

Who else read this cool article on Apartment Therapy?

“The New Prettiness”: The Resurgence of Traditional Femininity in Decor

Is it possible to agree with both opinions? It makes sense to me that the increasingly complex society/economy/politics of our time makes us nostalgic for when things were more defined and expectations were clear. I’m not saying we actually want to go back to those times (that would be horribly ignorant) but how often do we talk about the information age changing how children are being raised, friends relate to one another, and how people read, write, and even think?

To my mind, women in the past have often had to choose between being the traditional, pretty woman and the modern, hard-edged female, but the New Prettiness has a new attitude that goes along with it: we can indulge in soft, gentle decor as much as we’d like without sacrificing our boldness or originality. This means that, aesthetically, I can be feminine in a traditional way without fitting all the old stereotypes that used to accompany it. Perhaps the New Prettiness isn’t so much an escape from creating new female identities as an assertion that a woman doesn’t have to choose a single feminine identity anymore.

It’s like a little museum

Cyclamen are following me everywhere.

By the way, I have given up on gardening. There is not enough sunlight in my backyard. My cyclamen began to die just a few days after I brought them home, the violet ones first of course, just as I foretold. How dismal. But it’s alright – I am not upset (at least not much). When I do ever set my roots down anywhere, I’d like a pleasantly warm home – I couldn’t care less about square footage but temperature and ceiling height are critical – with a considerable yard where I can have one shade tree in the corner (perhaps a yellow leaf gingko tree to remind me of Korea), trees of lemon, apple, and persimmon, and a smelly compost on the side. Of course we’ll have lots of sunlight and I might become vegan for good, harvesting my own food and teaching my children how to grow tomatoes before they even walk (I will carry them down the rows while they water).

I believe I was talking about cyclamen. I spotted beautiful magenta cyclamen at Santana Row. It made me very happy. Since it’s a public walkway, I can go see them whenever I want, and maybe I can even pretend they’re mine since my own pretty much look like damp crinkled tissue paper now.

Yesterday my mom gave me a 10 fl. oz Marc Jacobs ‘Fig.’ It smells crisp and musky, which is great because I love the smell of men’s scents so much more than women’s! That’s the way it should be maybe. According to the reviews, some women love it because it’s fresh and green and succulent without being overly sweet or tangy and some women hate it because it smells like “mens fragrance gone bad,” but regardless it’s one of the few fragrances out there that get the fig part right.

One review stated that it works nicely blended with something else more sugary or floral so I looked into the other fragrance I’ve been using for a while now, Hugo Boss ‘Pure Purple” to see if it’s a match for Fig. I don’t know jack shit about perfumes and never bothered to look it up before (going through a year of discovering womanly stuff, how complicated!) and didn’t even know people mix their fragrances. Surprise! The top notes of Pure Purple are cyclamen and nectarine. http://www.hugo.com/purepurple

Yao says that she read somewhere that cyclamen is a symbol of farewell and resignation and yes I think that means something to me. 10-27-11 I wrote:

In Walk Two Moons, wherever Sal goes she sees blackberry kisses and singing trees and is reminded of her mother. Supposedly one of the messages of the book that Sharon Creech wanted to convey is that the present is not its own isolated place in time but is constantly interrupted by the past. The past intrudes on the present because the present is primarily an attempt to relive and come to terms with what has happened, especially the events that have cut us deep. O How this resonates with me. Sometimes I feel like all I am is the sum total of all that’s happened and I live today to reflect on the confusion and clarity, bitterness and bliss, nakedness and newness I experienced and have not yet accepted….

I know some well-known celebrity Christian has said that when our memories become stronger than our dreams, we’re already dead. I can’t disagree that looking onward and living as if we have something to attain is crucial to a sense of well-being. But how can it be that our obsession with our past, running away from it, running back towards it, and coming to terms with it, is not a powerful and profound urge that often propels us as well? Maybe our memories are our dreams. Maybe to splice our dreams of the future from our memories of the past is only divorcing two interlocking parts of ourselves. How can we be more or less than what we have been through?…

Back on point, I find it hard to talk about the past because I haven’t come to a conclusion about it yet that will help me feel comfortable. Or perhaps there is no comfortable solution to the puzzle. Perhaps the past will always be like a sore spot.

No, I don’t think so.

I am sorry to God for being jealous as a 19 year old of people who had numbers following them around. I would feel so much resentment towards the world and God, because I felt rejected about His speaking to other ladies in such exciting ways. Now, I realize I was very very immature and stupid. It took time, but I got the hang of the way God speaks to me, too, which is different and much more right for me. I’m aware now that I prefer flowers anyway. Numbers I wouldn’t know what to do with and Abbah knew it.

Um I love this