Day: November 12, 2005

…if you consider the Mississippi River one of the coasts. (name that movie!)

Standing outside tonight, I was reminded of a time a therapist asked me what I believed in. What :could: I believe in. The answer I gave her was, “The wind.” For me, the wind is symbolic of a force you can’t see, you can’t take a picture of it, you can’t follow it, per se, and it changes the landscape wherever it goes.

I know what it’s like to stand on the edge of a beach, the roar of the water, the horizon and sky disappearing and merging together, and certainly those places make one feel small in relationship to the world around you.

That same feeling is right in my driveway on evenings like this, all the trees around me bare, waving their branches and gyrating against the deepening blue of the night sky. The rushing noise of the wind surrounding me, dry crunchy leaves swirling and leaping while the next gust built force and then poured in around me, as big as a wave. I turned my face to the wind, coming from the south and the west, and saw the first star of the night. I thought about how we humans consider ourselves at the top of the heap, but in that moment I was as inconsequential and small to the wind as one of the oak leaves at my feet.

There’s something beautiful about living near the plains; we know it’s not fancy or glamorous, and the only ships we have are oversized SUVs and semis hauling ass on the interstate. I’ve even seen a tumbleweed or two zip across the road out on the highway. But we got wind, baby, we got biiiig wind. And there are three things that get me wistful, philosophical & filled with the world around me: a landscape blanketed in snow at twilight, the smell of an Iowa corn field in the heat of summer, and big wind through the night sky.

-Shoes
-Black Shoes
-Makeup
-Watches
-Earrings
-Skeins of Yarn
-Knitting Patterns
-Purses
-Gadgets
-Good Friends
-Naps
-Orgasms

Did I shock ya? I was paging through the latest Sephora catalog, and almost fell over myself. (You know how reactionary I get with the physical comedy.) There is a makeup set called “Multiple Orgasm”. Don’t believe me? See it here. Now, I’m all for makeup sets & making oneself attractive & all the fun of being a girl (or drag queen) and playing with makeup. But even me, Miss Jaded & Seen It All, never thought she’d see makeup named as such, and described as giving one The Look of Multiple Orgasms. (They did so in the catalog, not so much on the web page.) Mind you, I’m not rallying the Parents Against Everything On Television, and it made me raise an eyebrow and chuckle at the same time. I think it’s such a funny dichotomy in which we live, where we are bombarded with sexual messages & imagery at every turn, YET, one lonely nipple on the Super Bowl gets everyone’s wardrobe in a bunch and censorship gets another surge. Maybe it’s not you or me in particular getting wound up – it’s more those political chumps. But tell me those same chumps don’t have a stack of porn in their nightstand, or get their kink out by wearing women’s shoes & hosiery. It’s going to take a long time, I guess, to get over our Puritanical roots and fears. That said, it’s my opinion that some of the people in the media’s eye should just walk around naked and be done with it (Paris Hilton, Li’l Kim, Christina Aguilara) – they’d probably look less trashy than they do in their outfits designed (I use that word loosely) to titillate and tease.

I guess it’s my own sensibilities, shaped more by my father’s influence than society – perhaps because I was raised without television, or even Cosmo magazine for that matter. He cautioned me against excessive makeup and perfume (“no one should know unless they are VERY close to you”) and that maintaining a little mystery was more attractive than putting it all out there, so to speak. Maybe that’s a little Puritan, maybe it’s just tasteful by our societal standards. All I know is that there’s a line – in all of us, and in society, the fine balance between repression and expression. (Just as there is between good taste & bad – yet it is all subjective.) We can take some of our discomfort and see it as a reason to examine our own issues, why something would make us uncomfortable, or sometimes, it’s just reason to roll our eyes at how ‘out there’ or blatant something is. My reaction to the Nars makeup was more along the lines of leaving a little mystery. To me, things like “pouting, bee-stung lips” or “warming blush” are sexier descriptors than the clinical, albeit straightforward, “multiple orgasms”. But hey, it sure worked to catch my eye on the page – and then spend time writing a blog about it!

And really, it all boils down to one question: is that the makeup look I want to wear to the office? (and THAT makes me laugh.)

(yeah, and what the hell is up with getting up at 4 a.m. on a Saturday? I absent-mindedly & completely skipped my daily coffee/Diet Coke fix yesterday & had a junkie’s withdrawal-headache wake me up this morning. So you know who’s nappin’ today!)