New Year's Two of Two: Light and Fluffy

New Year's!

Have I ever actually carried out my New Year's resolutions? I doubt it. But here we go anyway. What do I want to change? More importantly, what might I actually change?

Pefume: Remember the collection. So, I read perfume blogs and forums. I learn about new and exciting fragrances. I buy samples. I wear the samples. Occasionally I blog about them. Occasionally I buy a bottle. Then I read perfume blogs and forums... lather, rinse, blah.

Do you see any place in here where I actually wear the perfume in the bottles? No, you don't. Worse than that, there are many days where I don't wear perfume at all (gasp!), because I put off applying perfume until I have time to choose a sample.

The resolution is to wear perfume from my bottles more often. I wasn't sure how to make that happen, until I chose the following weird strategy:  If I haven't chosen a scent in the first half hour of the day, then after I put the electric toothbrush back on its little charger I'll apply whatever's next in the alphabet, based on the names of full-bottle or large-decant scents in the collection. Whee! That means that tomorrow's candidate is 28 La Pausa.

Perfume: Evangelize. OK, this is cheating; it's just casting something that I'm already doing as a resolution. See, I want more perfume freaks. Especially in town. I'm already inflicting little baggies of samples and decants on friends; I'm going to keep it up.

I might even (gulp) work on resolving that Postal Regulation Phobia and start swapping. Basenotes had a recent thread on the exact regulations that gave me some hope that I might be able to do this legally, so, well, maybe. It could happen. You'll all send me perfume in jail, right?

Perfume: Squelch the hoarder within. I was pretty good at this for a while--there are dozens of dozens of bottles that I'd like to have, that I restrained myself from. But as the IFRA cliff approaches (OK, I guess it's not a cliff with a specific date, but there's certainly a steep slope there, with lots of sharp rocks), I sometimes fear that we're seeing the last couple of years of decent perfume, and that adds energy to the craving to buy.

But how to suppress that energy? One possible compromise would be to make a 10ml decant the default "buy" action, rather than an actual bottle. The danger of that is the thought of, hey! what about all those coffrets? That way I could get my bitty dribble of perfume in a manufacturer's bottle! And then we're into money again.

There's also the worry that decant bottles might allow the perfume to decay faster than a manufacturer's bottle, but does that make any sense? I doubt that Tommy Girl, at (lemme check...) twenty-two dollars for a one ounce bottle, is in a museum-archival-quality vessel. Any opinions here?

Diet: Evict sugar (again.) I did a pretty decent job of cutting milk and sugar last year, and lost enough weight to wear new clothes sizes. I fell off the sugar wagon over Christmas; I'll be back on it starting this coming Saturday. (Start a diet at the same time that I go back to work? Very funny.) "The sugar wagon" means cutting most sugar and sugary foods, most dairy products other than butter, and most white starches. Specific scheduled treats are then added back in. Large quantities of turkey are consumed. Efforts are made to increase vegetable consumption. No effort whatsoever is made to reduce fat consumption; that may happen when the sugar wagon is reliably on the track.

Writing: Keep writing. I write, and stop, and write some more, and stop. I want to form a reliable habit, ideally one that grows over time, ideally one that includes some fiction writing, but first let's start with the habit. Three hundred words three times a week, on any topic (a blog post counts) seems like a nice, very modest, start.

Sewing/Wardrobe: Press stuff. That is, once a week, press all the self-sewn clothes that came out of the laundry that week. This sounds like a trivial, itty-bitty resolution, but if I don't press on the weekend, I'm just going to wear jeans and tee shirts all week. And if I don't wear my spiffy sewn clothes, I won't be motivated to sew more of them.

Sewing/Wardrobe: Make a dress TnT. Fitting and perfecting one Tried-and-True dress pattern in a year doesn't sound like much, until you consider that I've been trying to get that done for much of this year, and have failed. I want some bleeping dresses.

Life: Worry less. I used to think that the solution to worry was about reducing caffeine and gulping milk and gobbling turkey. But I'm realizing that when my worries call, I run after them and pat their little teeth-gnashing heads and ask them how they're doing, a lifetime habit that I think I can...well, not break altogether, but reduce. I'm hoping that a worry snubbed is a worry reduced.

Appearance: Care about it. As described often in this blog, for example in On Perfume and Being a Girl, I've always had a rather conflicted view about dressing and ornamenting myself. I still roll up my jeans hems rather than hemming them, and wear Merrells rather than girl shoes (even sometimes with skirts), and rarely wear jewelry.

I'm going to work on this; I'm thinking maybe A Touch A Month. I'll take January credit for buying skirt-to-pants girl shoes, hem all my jeans in February, and so on.

That's nine resolutions. That should be more than enough for anyone, right?

Excuse me while I eat some more sugar before it's too late.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.