DCOTD: The garden magazines are really gone!

Yeah, I know, I'm taking double credit for the things, but someone did finally take them all. Tomorrow, the back issues of Threads hit the driveway. Plus maybe a vase or two.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

SOTD: Robert Piguet Bandit

I know that I'm back into perfume blogging when my scent of the day is based on whether I'm interested in blogging about it. Today, I didn't have time on the way out to lunch to choose a sample, so I grabbed Robert Piguet Bandit; it's been months since I wore it and I'm having trouble making up my mind about my bottle. I wanted another wearing, and of course a blog post.

I bought Bandit based on a sample. The sample was leathery and a little furry-sweaty, a note that I described as being like a clean cat sleeping in the sun. Today's wearing confirmed that that note is altogether gone from the bottle--the bottle is leather and something spicy that reminds me of Chanel Coco, of all things. It's ladylike with good posture, not contentedly lounging.

I'll give it a few more tries, but I suspect that I'll have decluttered the bottle within a year--it no longer does anything at all that Cuir de Russie doesn't do a lot better.

Image: By Tomascastelazo. Wikimedia Commons.

Rant: "I'm not a feminist, but..."

Over at NaNoWriMo, there was a recent thread about writing female characters. Women, intelligent articulate women, were concerned about writing female characters that might put off male readers, or might give the wrong impression of women. Some of them were just writing male characters instead. I realized that I believed that ideas of women about women were improving over time, that women would have more confidence and strength in themselves than when I was younger. And I'm realizing that, no, we seem to be losing ground in the nearly-twenty years since I was in my twenties. So I ranted the following rant, and after I thought about it, I I brought it over to the blog:

I've often heard the phrase, "I'm not a feminist, but..." and I've never understood it. No matter how many times I try, I can't get my mind around it.

Now, the logic part of my brain has an interpretation. It interprets the phrase to mean that women have somehow acquired a gut-level negative response to the term "feminist", and that as a result, when they advocate the ideas that a feminist advocates, they still can't bring themselves to call themselves feminists. But I don't have that gut-level reaction, so I can't understand it emotionally.

I assume that the reaction has been achieved by the people who take the most extreme positions taken by anyone who has called themselves a feminist, add them to extreme positions that have never been taken by any feminist at all or in fact any person at all, attribute them to all feminists, and publicize the result as far and wide and loudly as they possibly can. Add a few thousand incidences of someone saying, "feminist" on television with that combination of fear, contempt, and pity, and the job is done.

The result is to make women feel that they have to take their focus off their goals and instead focus on being perceived to be pursuing those goals the "right" way, and apologize for even having those goals, for fear that others will misunderstand. A woman who wants a fair shot at a job, or who wants to wash the dishes no more often than the other adult in the house, feels that she has to clarify that she doesn't also want to kill all men, or outlaw fatherhood, or whatever crazy position has been falsely attributed to feminists this week. And when the fear of being perceived that way is a factor, she'll quite often dismiss her own concerns as trivial, rather than risk it.

So she's distracted from her goal, or induced to abandon it altogether. She feels the need to distance herself from other women that might have scary feminist views, because she's been told that lots of women have those views, and she doesn't want to be associated with them. The result is to dilute her focus, dilute her sense of purpose, and suppress any cooperation and unity among women. The strategy takes the natural tendency of women to find a consensus and to work with others, and turns it to making women afraid to work with other women, and afraid to find solutions to their common problems. Women want to be reasonable, and substantial forces are aimed at making a woman feel that any concern for her rights as a woman makes her part of an unreasonable crowd.

It's wrong. I'd go so far as to call it evil. And it should be fought fiercely, even if that fight does raise the risk of someone asking, with that wide-eyed, please-don't-eat me, eew-I'd-never-want-to-date-you, air, "Are you a feminist?" Please, don't ever again say, "I'm not a feminist, but..." Fight for what you think is right without apologizing, and if that means you're a feminist, embrace the label.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Sundays and Grudges

My goal this weekend was to keep tidying and decluttering. My success was limited, but there are five boxes of books, one of magazines, and one of clothes, bundled up and ready to go. These don't count as DCOTD material, because they haven't gone yet, but it's still good.

And there are substantial pockets of tidy. I'm particularly pleased with the hall shelves, all nice and neat and organized for use. There's a section for library and borrowed and new books. And another for books waiting to be shelved. And the subset of cooking magazines that we're keeping is organized in month groups--after all, in November you don't care about the recipes from Thanksgiving of 2007; you just want all the Thanksgiving issues. And the popcorn bowl for wallet cards that are rarely used, like the cupcake punch card or the discount card for the bookstore in another state that we may get to a few times a year.

Details, details; what's my point? My point, I think, is that it delights me to have a home that has systems.

See, I grew up in a hoarded home. Oh, it was a mildly hoarded home--it would never never make it through the audition process for either of the Hoarders shows. But an important thing to know about a hoarded home is that it's organized for the convenience of the hoard, not for its occupants, not even for the hoarder. A hoarded home is owned by the stuff. And systems are for people, not stuff. Therefore, we didn't have systems. Most of the closet and bureau and cabinet space in the house was filled with rarely-used junk, and the things that we actually used either had to be shoehorned in and out, or had to find some surface to perch on. Even the refrigerator crisper generally contained more decayed than usable food.

The situation wasn't entirely out of control. When it was no longer possible to put a fresh item in the crisper, it would finally get cleaned out. The junk usually only filled the closets and bureaus, and maybe a thin layer stacked on top or nearby; the piles were low, and there wasn't much overflow onto the floor. But that strikes me as all the stranger. Clearly the situation wasn't one of uncontrollable accumulation. But if it was possible to stop accumulating when all of the storage, plus a bit more, was full of stale unused items, why wasn't it possible to clear some space for items in actual use?

It was as if a home that was arranged in any way for daily life was a little bit distasteful. We crept around the edges of the house, using elements of it rather like a peasant farmer, tasked to maintain an ornamental garden, might surreptitiously grow a few vegetables in a corner somewhere. Concern for our own convenience and comfort would be like eating an ice cream cone in church, except it's not a deity being worshipped, but junk. I find it interesting that my metaphors are about food. Our home didn't feed us. We fed it; we fed it junk, and then we left it in peace and tried not to disturb it as it digested.

The house did let people live there, but grudgingly. Drawers stuck and weren't fixed, handles fell out and weren't replaced, one of the stove burners failed and was never repaired, the bottom of the sink cabinet rotted out and was never renewed. One of the base supports for my dresser fell out of the front right leg regularly, several times a year, and several times a year I took the bottom drawer out and shoved the support back in the leg. It never occurred to me that it could ever actually be fixed. It wouldn't hold any more stuff if it were repaired, it would only be more convenient for the humans, and what did that matter? I remember my puzzlement when a neighbor friend talked me into painting my battered old bedside table; the idea of making a household item prettier and cleaner was a revelation to me.

The rice pot--I've mentioned that rice pot--had no handle on either pot or lid. We used the pot a few times a week, but why should a handle matter? Handles are for people. Closets exist to hold as many hangers and garments as possible; the people who might want to use a tiny subset of those garments are just there on tolerance. I maintained a running battle against my room, organizing the junk into the drawers and closet and making the room look civilized for a brief moment, only to have it revert to chaos again in days. It never occurred to me to keep less junk; that would, again, just make the room more convenient for me.

I'm casting all of the issues with my childhood home as being about hoarding; I know that there were other issues, there were relationship issues, there were two adults who were too unhappy with their lives to do anything about the stage on which those lives were acted out. I sometimes wonder if I'm just nursing petty grievances.

I do feel grievances. I couldn't dream of having a school friend over to the house. My parents never, ever had people over; I reached a pretty advanced age before I realized that adults had friends. We were so isolated that I was well into my school years before I was able to speak to a stranger to order my food at a restaurant; for years, my parents had to order for me. That fact apparently didn't worry them. Neither did the fact that, aside from a neighbor or two, no friends visited my home or invited me to visit theirs. I often wonder; should it have worried them?

But I had heat, functioning plumbing, clean clothes, and safe food. It was possible to find a flat surface to do homework on. By the standards of the average life of a child of a hoarder, I was in heaven. Sometimes I think I should be grateful; sometimes I think I should be furious.

Image: By Christina. Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Scentless Saturday, and Whining

The garbage disposal is broken and not draining, meaning that the sink is nonfunctional five days before Thanksgiving. Himself made a flurry of phone calls and drove out to get a new disposal and we should have a sink soon, but it's worrying as the dishes pile up.

On the same drive, we took my Mac in to get it fixed, because it broke and now I'm writing this on the very old one that has a battery that's good for about forty seconds because I abuse my batteries. So I'm tethered to the wall.

My head hurts and my sinuses are cranky and I feel like I'm catching a cold and the Co-op no longer carries the chewable echinacea pills that used to make me feel better when that happened. Or used to give me the delusion that I felt better, and that's almost as good. So I'm chewing Airborne zinc tablets with echinacea instead and they taste absolutely dreadful. I want my old echinacea tablets. Now.

Monday we have to drive out and get a turkey. Sunday we have to find the cooler to put the turkey in. We may or may not have guests for Thanksgiving. The house is a mess. I'm pretending that we know we have guests, because I want the motivation to make it not a mess. I don't have the faintest idea what to give anyone for Christmas.

I'm way way extremely very much behind on NaNoWriMo.

The weekend is already half over and I didn't relax yet.

Morning Glory no longer has fried chicken on the menu.

I'm almost out of milk.

These are all minor trivial fiddling little problems, but I still want to take a nap until everything shapes up.

Image: By Osm agha. Wikimedia Commons.

SOTD: Parfumes de Rosine Rose Kashmirie, and Tastebud Rambling

For the first hour or two, Rose Kashmirie reminds me of candied orange peel. I don't mean that it actually smells like citrus. But like sugared citrus peel, it has a strong bitterness paired with, but not really tempered by, an equally strong sweetness. And I don't like bitterness; its presence usually distracts me from all other notes. I keep trying to like bitter roses--Paestum Rose, Une Rose, No. 88, Dark Rose, Incense Rose, the list just keeps going. I like the idea of a sweet flower made darker and deeper and more interesting by contrasting notes, but I just can't stomach the bitterness. Gasoline? Yes. Mothballs? Great. A little touch of bitter? Eeeeew!

As it turns out, Rose Kashmirie sweetens over time. After an hour or two, it becomes a very warm female scent; it feels like furs and velvet and quirky old-fashioned hats. Around the sixth hour it's almost all sweetness, mellow and powdery and deep, a perfect comfort scent without the sticky-foody aspect that dominates so many comfort scents. I love this final drydown so much that I'm tempted to buy the perfume just to have access to it.

When I read other reviews of Rose Kashmirie, I don't see much made of the bitterness--it's acknowledged, but no one seems to get, or at least be bothered by, the teeth-on-edge feeling that I get. It's rather like my reaction to red wine; for me, all the sweet or raisiny or other flavors are drowned by a gritty bitterness that most people either don't perceive or actually enjoy.

I've read more than once that small children are picky eaters not because they're unsophisticated little monsters who want nothing but sugar and have spent too much time at Krispy Kreme, but because they can taste sharper flavors much more strongly than adults. Perhaps as a survival characteristic--many poisonous things that a toddler might stuff in her mouth have those unpleasant tastes--small children are wired to reject bitterness. Over time, those extra bitter receptors go away. 

In fact, over enough time all of our taste buds go away, one by one, until when you're very old almost the only thing you can taste is sweetness. My father, late in his life, was often only willing to eat meat when it was accompanied with cranberry sauce, and he couldn't understand why he no longer liked green beans. I proposed the sweetness theory to him, and he largely rejected it, while at the same time being quite pleased with sugar-glazed carrots. I suppose old habits are hard to break, and I rather wish that I had broken them for him and made him some sugar-glazed green beans to try. Sugar and soy and garlic might have made them perfectly palatable to everyone at the table. I'll need to remember all of this for when I'm older.

There's also the phenomenon of the "supertaster", a person who even in adulthood has an enhanced response to certain tastes, including bitterness. My taste preferences seem to run along the supertaster scale, and I'm using that as an excuse for why I was a terribly picky eater as a child. I also blame the cuisine of the parts of the southern Midwest where I grew up - vegetables in those areas were very thoroughly cooked, or canned and then again very thoroughly cooked. In the water from the can. And then they were served in the water from the can. Salad, too, was often served in a pool of water that diluted the Wishbone dressing. I'm not sure why all produce had to be accompanied by dampness.

I remember my amazement when I ate a package of Green Giant Boil In Bag Chicken A La King (and I find myself wondering why we had one--it was surely pretty expensive for Mom's frugal habits) and ate a pea that was still colored green. Bright green, not gray-green. And sweet. Peas have sugar; who knew? I realize that many people can taste the sweetness of canned peas; my father used to love the tiny Le Sueur ones. I've never gotten any flavor but "can" out of canned vegetables; maybe it's another supertaster thing.

So my introduction to "fresh" vegetables came from frozen food; that seems vaguely sad. It's not that Mom was a bad cook, but her talents lay in thoroughly cooked meat dishes--spaghetti sauce, fried chicken, pot roast. Himself goes into rapture over restaurant pot roast that makes me say, "Yeah? Tastes like Mom's." Sadly, Mom doesn't remember how she used to make the pot roast, because she doesn't make it for herself; I'm going to have to figure out out myself. All she's sure of is that it involved a packet of onion soup mix, and all I'm sure of is that it involved chunks of beef, not a full-size roast.

Er. Where was I going? Acquired tastes, that was it, and bitterness specifically. Red wine is a lost cause for me, and so are bitter salad greens. I'm fond of olives, though I prefer the butterier, blander ones. I like my chocolate with extra cocoa but also extra sugar to counter it. The puzzlement is why that preference, which is surely about tastebuds, should extend to smells. I'd like to acquire a taste for bitter perfumes, but along with red wine, it may be a hopeless cause.

Image: By Bilby. Wikimedia Commons.

Writing: Daring to be Long

I write short things.

I thought about this while I was considering the possibility of writing 2500-word posts for NaNoWriMo, but this post isn't about NaNoWriMo, it's about why I write short things. At least, I write short things when they're going to be "published"--in other words, blogged.

One piece of standard advice for blogs is to write short things, so that the reader doesn't get bored and run away halfway through. But if I took blogging advice, the title of my blog wouldn't start with "chickenfreak", and I'd be on a self-hosted Wordpress blog with a fancy expensive theme. I'm not big on advice. And the short post advice strikes me as being as valuable as the workplace advice to avoid writing long, detailed documents with actual information, and to instead compress the information on a nice PowerPoint slide with no more than twenty words on it. Who wants to be informed when they can look at something snappy?

And there are successful blogs that do have long posts. Really long posts. I just measured the latest post on Author! Author! and found that it's more than four thousand words. Often the opening mood-setting anecdote on that blog is longer than an entire post on mine. And I'm not naturally concise; I can babble endlessly in forum posts or work documents. I clarify and analogize and clarify the analogy. I go on a lot.

I suspect that my blog posts are short because a long piece of text takes itself seriously, and I hesitate to be seen doing that. It's like my motive for not dressing up--someone who's all dressed up hopes that they look good, and I'm afraid that if I appear to have that hope, people will point and laugh. So today I'm wearing a Lost Boys tee shirt and my last post was less than seven hundred words. Not, of course, that I don't love the Lost Boys tee shirt. It's fabulous; it pretends to be from the Santa Carla boardwalk, and it doesn't say a word about the Lost Boys movie itself.

Also, I don't like my serious writing voice. It rhapsodizes or pontificates or both, and while I'm sometimes pleased with the piece immediately after writing it, I cringe within a week and stay that way. I know that a voice for a serious piece doesn't need to have those flaws; Calvin Trillin, for example, can write about the most serious of subjects and still maintain his comfortable, readable voice. And I have, many times, picked up an over-serious post and scrubbed out the unnecessary gravity, always hoping that I was leaving in any necessary gravity.

On top of that, long posts often require me to have a point of view, and communicate it, and defend it. Apparently I'm not so sure about doing that. I have plenty of opinions, and will argue at length on forums, but, again, this is my blog. You know it's me. People on the street in my town could, in theory, know it's me. So I'm happy to praise things that I approve of, but praise is often brief. When an issue gets thickety or messy, I run away. Again, it's about the point and laugh factor. "Look! She's excited! She's passionate! She has an opinion! Bwahahaha!"

Can you see them all rolling on the floor, while I hide under my keyboard? Of course you can.

I advise others to take risks, because it costs me nothing. I used to love Threads magazine, the sewing magazine from Taunton, when they were still catering to the experienced sewer. They had extreme projects, and once in a while one of those ideas would fall flat on its face, and that level of risk was why they were good. Similarly but more impressively, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival here in town takes the risk of falling on their face many times every single year, and the risk never goes bad on them. They push, they balance on the edge of the cliff, and they never fall.

I don't do that. Cliff? I want a climbing harness and a net. But if I want my writing to progress, I'll have to give up the harness and write about things that I take seriously, like the Lord-of-the-Flies-with-blackboards nature of public schools, or the way that the mental health profession is dead wrong about the nature of hoarders and hoarding, or the dysfunctional parts of my family.

But today, I suspect I'll be writing about perfume. Or food. Or both.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

DCOTD: Books

Dang.

It turns out that Wednesday's box of fancy gardening magazines wasn't taken from the driveway, it was rescued by the neighbors when it looked like it was going to rain. However, they're not re-entering the house; I'll toss them in paper recycling before that happens.

Meanwhile, a friend took a dozen of the outgoing books Thursday, so, woohoo!

Friday, er, nothing went away. Hey, that's not true; another friend took one more book. So there.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

DCOTD: Magazines

I just cleaned the kitchen. The counter was full of groceries, so I took the canisters out of the cabinet, on the theory that canisters are tidier on the counter than miscellaneous boxes and cans.

Then I found the groceries in the backpack. Now the counter is full of groceries again. Also, the toilet paper is stacked on top of the Swiffers, and the paper towels are on the boxes of straws. A sixpack of cider is on the floor because the fridge and the shelves are full.

I need to accelerate the decluttering. So I'm moving the old Declutter Of The Day posts from that abandoned blog to this one. (That is, I'll be entering new DCOTD posts here.) The rules are that a DCOTD is something that left the house. Not something sorted and boxed and ready to go, not something listed on Freecycle, not even something on the driveway with a free sign or in the trunk waiting for the next trip to the GoodWill. It has to be Gone, irretrievable, never to be seen again.

So today's DCOTD is a file box full of garden magazines that someone took off the Free end of the driveway. Yay!

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Books: Wanting Sheila Dead, by Jane Haddam

I rarely trust a novel that mentions the current President by name, or demonstrates an awareness of the latest movies. I'm not saying that an interest in current events is bad. I'm not saying that brand new novels are bad. I'm saying that the combination of the two makes me suspicious. I've read, for example, books from the early eighties that seemed to think that "Hey, wow, I've heard of this Internet thing!" qualifies as a substitute for plot and characters, and I don't like to repeat that experience too often.

So when the jacket of Wanting Sheila Dead revealed that much of the novel is based around a reality TV show, and when the first page contained a side reference to Oprah (who, admittedly, isn't exactly a new phenomenon), I normally would have put the book back on the shelf. But the first page also said:

Sheila Dunham's voice came into the room like battery acid over a bullhorn. That was a metaphor that made no sense. Olivia didn't care. It fit exactly.

That's not something that would come from someone who's saying, "Hey, wow, I've heard of this reality TV thing!" at least not at the expense of the book. So I bought it. I bought it used, so sadly I won't do the author, Jane Haddam, a bit of good, but I liked it so much that I can imagine buying one of her books new. In paperback. There is almost no level of desperation to get my hands on a story that will cause me to pay for a new hardback. So I'll have to wait a while for her next book, though there's a huge backlog of past books that I can work my way through.

The book reconfirms a theory of mine: I like male protagonists, but I like them best when written by women. In my admittedly limited experience, male protagonists written by men tend to be too uncomplicated, too strong, too clear in their purpose. They don't muse. Unlike Haddam's Gregor Demarkian, they wouldn't speculate on how and why the sidewalk in front of the church was washed, or think about their decision to initiate, or not initiate, a handshake with a woman. I like Gregor Demarkian; he seems to be full of stray thoughts.

And I liked the book. There were two mysteries, so the whole book wasn't about the reality TV show, which was a good thing--there's a limit to how much even a good author can do to overcome my severe lack of interest in that topic. But I was engaged by the TV plot, and all of the annoying young woman tied to it, so imagine how much I'd like a Jane Haddam/Gregor Demarkian book without either one.

I recommend the book, and I probably recommend the author more than the book. Which is just as well for the author, because Wanting Sheila Dead is already down to bargain pricing, and the next book is still in hardback. And some of you might buy hardbacks. Maybe. I realize that getting the author paid isn't my problem, but, well, sometimes I think about it.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.