2005-05-31 - 12:14 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Brand New Day", from "The Wiz"

Sunday, May 29, 2005

From last week sometime:

Poindexter: What are you doing? You're supposed to be getting ready for bed!
Evelynne: I thought of a comeback and had to type it in
Poindexter: No wonder you like that thing [LJ]! You can just wait until you come up with a comeback!
Evelynne: Yep, no wit of the staircase here!

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Yesterday when we were out with my parents, I saw a HOT GUY IN A KILT! A red plaid one! With a black t-shirt and black boots! And you know what the best part was? IT WAS HEMMED TO MID-KNEE!!!!! Wooooooooooooo! I cheered and clapped my hands, I was so happy. I had noticed that I liked some guys in kilts better than others, and it had nothing to do with their looks, and finally figured it out when mentioned that kilts are supposed to be hemmed at the knee.

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We went to Fork, and I had duck with a red wine reduction. And you know what? The fucker who wrapped up my leftovers DIDN'T GIVE ME ONE DROP OF REDUCTION! ARGH! This makes me CRAZY! The whole reason I will order a dish is because of whatever sauce or jus or reduction is on it, and yet the STUPID FUCKERS in the kitchen are INCAPABLE of making sure that stuff is in my to-go container! Sometimes even when I SPECIFICALLY ASK, they STILL don't do it!

I've had it. From now on, I am putting my leftovers in the to-go container myself. I don't care if it's not the restaurant policy (some servers have actually told me that). It's MY FUCKING FOOD and I'm going to have my damn sauce!

ARGH!

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In closing, here's a couple outfits I've either worn or "played" in the last few days.

Here's what I wore out with my parents. That is the 13-dollar brocade jacket that I got on clearance at Mandee:

The idea of the cuffed jeans with the ankle-strap heels was borrowed from MyStyleDiary user Blyve:

Here's a close-up of the belt, which was my grandmother's (as were the red beads and the bangle):

Monday, May 30, 2005

Along the same lines of my rant yesterday about servers/busboys not giving me my sauce in restaurants: Another problem I have is that when I really like a product, they change it (for the worse), quit making it, or my local stores stop carrying it. It's very distressing. I wish my tastes were more in line with the market majority.

For example, we are fans of the Ka Me brand hoisin sauce. I used to be able to get it all over the place in Philadelphia. Then it began to be edged out by the Asian brand, which we do not like -- it has a completely different flavor, which is bad when you are making a dish (a staple of ours) called "Hoisin Chicken". Just recently, the last bastion of Ka Me brand (Shop Rite) quit carrying it and has switched to Asian as well. Yet the Ka Me company did not seem to have gone out of business. I recently discovered via Tino that the store itself doesn't decide or keep track of what it stocks; it sells shelf space to product vendors. So I guess it's possible that the Asian vendor is somehow giving the local supermarkets a better deal than Ka Me was.

Fortunately we have a decent supply of Ka Me sauce (I kept buying extra, thinking I was showing the store how popular the stuff is) but I'm gonna have to either order only or hope the big oriental grocery in South Philly or one of the smaller Chinatown stores has it.

I actually wrote a letter to some people once -- the Old Cape Cod salad dressing people -- when they changed their DIVINE low-fat honey-dijon to an icky fat-free honey dijon. I asked if I could have the recipe or a case of the last batch of the low-fat. You know what they said? They said, "Try our other varieties, you'll find something you like." AAAAAARGH!!!!! MOTHERFUCKERS! *strangles letter writer*

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I've been a bit frustrated lately because I've been admiring a particular type of style and am having trouble nailing down what it is (if I can break it into its components, then I know what I need to buy to achieve it for myself).

One example of the style is visible in Miss Katherine A's StyleDiary. In particular, I like the following outfits not necessarily each individual piece, but the overall effect of the outfits:

Cuffed jeans with tweedy knit top and suede pumps
Tank and peasant skirt with printed sash and long necklace
Fitted black outfit with interesting black-and-white accessories
Jeans with silver top and shoes

I looked at all the pictures in her StyleDiary and tried to figure out what it was about the outfits that made me like them so much. They are mostly neutrals, which surprised me, because I'm very drawn to colors. Here are the little notes I made for myself about them, trying to break it down:

- One or two pieces with strong visual interest (silver top, brown tweed top, belt, bag, or boots).
- Fits well, accentuates curves.
- Visual interest: Textured fabrics, prints.
- If multiple visually interesting, simpler color scheme (black&white)

One thing I got out of this is that I seem to be very interested in textured natural fabrics at the moment (cotton and linen). I realized this with some consternation, because a lot of my summer wardrobe consists of solid-colored knits, which are the only things that consistently fit comfortably over my T&A. So when I try to put outfits together, I end up with monotonous brightness, like this:

The outfits look very Garanimals and monochromatic and boring to me, even while the colors themselves make me very happy.

See, another thing I've noticed I'm interested in trying to do is pair colors that don't match exactly but are complementary. Like, today at Zara I saw a girl wearing olive-drab fitted crop pants, gold slides with heels, and a gauzy loose-fitting sleeveless top in a cream-and-dark-red print. I would *never* have thought to pair those colors together (well, maybe the olive and gold) but I loved how it looked so much that I kept looking over my shoulder at her trying to take in all the details of the outfit for future reference.

So the kinds of things I'd like to try doing are very experimental right now. Fortunately, I found another thrift store and have a lead on two more, so I am looking forward to being able to try some "risky" (for me) ideas without spending a ton of money on them. In particular, I want to try some more prints -- NOT the damn cabbage-rose prints I'm always drawn to, but something a little more abstract -- and I want to try some unusual (for me) pairings of colors. My instinct is to go for a monochrome look (brown-tan-gold or shades of blue or shades of pink), so this is tough. On my list of color combinations that I had to see someone else use because it never would've occurred to me:

olive and red
camel/khaki and red with white

Um.

Suggestions welcome! :)

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

I've been saving up little pieces of conversations or snippets of thoughts in a file I unimaginatively call "temp.txt". I'm not going anywhere with any of them, so I'm going to dump them here without lead-in, segue, or wrap-up. Take it or leave it.

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Back when they were having hearings about performance-enhancing drugs in sports, Poindexter and I had a few conversations about the idea. He is not convinced that they are intrinsically bad for the sport, and [edited out something I remembered wrong] told me some other way that baseball is different now than it was then. Maybe it was about Roger Maris and the asterisk because his season was longer than Babe Ruth's. So out of nowhere one day, before his STUPID FUCKING COMPANY took away his instant-messenger capabilities (*&$%&*#$$@#(*&!!!), we had this conversation:

Poindexter: My point!
Poindexter: "But if baseball players are cheating, is everyone else, too? After all, Americans are relying more and more on a growing array of performance enhancing drugs. Lawyers take the anti-sleep drug Provigil to finish that all-night brief, in hopes of concentrating better. Classical musicians take beta blockers, which banish jitters, before a big recital. Is the student who swallows a Ritalin before taking the SAT unethical if the pill gives her an unfair advantage over other students? If a golfer pops a beta blocker before a tournament, is he eliminating a crucial part of competition - battling nerves and a chance of choking?"
: BETA BLOCKERS!?
: I COULD HAVE TAKEN BETA BLOCKERS!?
: GODDAMMIT!
Poindexter: LOL
: THAT IS SO TOTALLY UNFAIR!
Poindexter: when did you have the jitters?
: Before piano competitions.
Poindexter: hm.
: Jitters to the point of having shaking hands, which makes it hard to play.
Poindexter: indeed.
: Hey, I could've taken X's anxiety drug. Ativan.
Poindexter: yup.
Poindexter: And been a cheater.
: Yep.

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What's frustrating to me is that walkable places are extremely expensive and in extremely high demand (think Old Town Alexandria, Dupont Circle, etc.), and yet developers do not really understand how to build places like this. Even in the city, I am horrified to see people build stuff like the Constitution Center, which has a big huge unused lawn (some people were harrassed when they tried to picnic there) and blank brick walls that span an entire block. These people have NO FUCKING CLUE what it is that makes a city work and they are RUINING it.

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I don't want to think about the big picture. I want someone to describe the big picture and then leave it to me to fill in the details.

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If you're trying to cut down on sugar, but hate plain yogurt, try this: Buy fruit on the bottom type yogurt, but DON'T MIX IT. Just eat the yogurt and leave the gooey sweet stuff on the bottom. Some of the sweetness will have leaked into the yogurt, giving it just flavor to be enjoyable, but you don't have all those extra unnecessary sugars.

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Evelynne: Am I a nag?
Poindexter: [Short pause] No.
Evelynne: Are you sure?
Poindexter: Yeah, why?
Evelynne: Well, you know how men are always complaining that their wives are nags. They don't let them do things they want to do...
Poindexter: You make me do things I don't want to do.
Well, what I mean is, do you feel like I restrict you in any way?
Poindexter: No, I think if I wanted to do something it wouldn't be an issue.

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And finally, here's one of the outfits I pulled together when I was playing with my clothes over the weekend. I like this one a lot. The pants have gold and bronze stripes ($24.90, H&M) and the sandals (KMart, $6 on sale) are also bronze. I like my gold and bronze metallics! Everybody's so into silver but it does NOT work well as well with my skin tone as the warmer metallics, so I'm very happy that gold and bronze are so easy to get these days.

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