Good night. And don't worry, I'm not turning into Suzi Orman. I hope. Or Imelda Marcos. Or ...

[fflo]

... whichever "Sex in the City" character most loves shoes.

One of my fellow Cancers sent me our horoscope for this week. It said all kindsa great things to which I thought "Yeah, right---so far the full moon's meant my basement's flooding and I'm feeling crazy isolated." I don't remember what it said, but I feel good stuff now. Real good. McG called as she was leaving work, late. She came over. We looked at the moon a little and then had a shoe party. I had several pairs of shoes in a big box in my living room, waiting for me to try them on. It's free! It's free to try on for size, that is. The cats thought it was fun, too. Everybody partied.

Nice shoes are a most interesting concept. Nice things in general---it's so fraught. Not just with my familial inheritance of caution and frugality, Depression-era worrywort Mom. Also with class issues. There's something wrong about spending lots of money on things that aren't needed and cost a lot, especially if they don't seem to need to be so expensive. You shoulda heard me going on to bigfinedaddy about the obscenity of $300 sunglasses that aren't even prescription glasses---that was one of my early (adult) outrages, when there are people starving. Such a business to negotiate, it is---how to be, in relation to money. It's as hard as how to be a woman, or how to be with women, or men, or neither, or both, or many.

Anyway I'm already doing this acquiring of a painting this coming weekend. I'd show you here, but I think you're gonna have to come to my place to see it. I think you are. I think I'm going to have to have a party for it or something. Will you come? You're invited. I'll tell you later when.

So, yeah, I'm gonna buy this watercolor I saw in a café, as I wrote to John today, "like a nut, all cavalier & non-utilitarian, here in these difficult economic times." And there's something about that. Money is very freakin' tricky, and there's something about that. Something liberating, and maybe not only okay in a selfish American way. And now, as I sit here writing to you in the middle of the night on a school night, I don't want to take off my shoes and go to bed, cuz I don't want to take off my shoes.

These shoes feel so good on my feet, I cannot tell you. These are some freakin' comfortable shoes. I can tell already that they will be forming themselves more and more to my feet. And guess what. No, guess. No, really, actually, truly, don't bother guessing, cuz you'd never guess this. Olja is going to be jealous of my shoes. I'm telling you. She is. That's so unreal, it's 3-sets-of-italics unreal.

Plus I'm probably keeping at least one other pair. Maybe two! HahaHAAAhahaahaaaaaaaaaa!!!!

"All God's children need travellin' shoes."

I googled a quotation today that turned out to be from "30 Rock." And that part of the evening turns out to be among the very best.

If Venus retrograde has anything to do with any of this, optical illusion from our earthly POV that retrograding is, maybe she's bringing unusual opportunity as much as a possible mess. Or maybe it doesn't matter what's happening, when you remember how to be into it, that you can be into it.

I dunno about that, really, whatever the hell I'm saying there. But I know I like my new shoes.

Comments

[squirrelykat.livejournal.com]

sorry about the basement. the place where i'm dogsitting flooded, too. doing some moppin' there. but, on the flip side, shoes rule, as does new art! glad you're decorating the walls, and wanting to make your surroundings beautiful. good sign. and wasn't the moon beeeyutiful!?

[fflo.livejournal.com]

the moon, she was loverly, behind the scraggly bare tree

orion, still hangin' abooot, was crispy fine too

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Venus in Retrograde means it's a crescent in a telescope. A beautiful sight, really.



Either with a telescope, or with binoculars. People with phenomenally good vision can even make it out naked eye.

Best viewed just after sunset, before it's completely dark.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

thanks, Peter. i like them crescents.

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

i'm ready for jealousy! :) i like seeing pretty things on people, especially if i like the people, too :)

i like pretty things, but i never pay a lot of money for them. i'm learning even more now about how little i have in common with all these people who are 'suffering' now because they aren't shopping they way they used to. now their dignity is compromised because shopping was it. when they reported on the radio that the recession was affecting women in particular, the clip to go with it was about some women who can't go shopping every week and have a new outfit. it wasn't computing for me.

i also pay up to $15 for sunglasses because i lose them easily. but i always buy pretty ones because i do care that way. i just like prettiness in things.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

they just emailed me to say these are now available in my size (presuming i could get them over my calves):



they're pretty pretty, no?

here's a poem with pretty in it i have dug today.


Collage

Sometimes just to make something
Pretty prettier than
What's around in the mind to
Dominate
So there's first the sequin red or other . . .
Remembering favorite
Paper dolls a dress strapless
Sheath of blue sequins
At bottom a pink tulle flounce
Of course I later hated that stuff
I mean I
Like the one sparkle next to a piece of
Torn gold foil
This collage will be a ragged experience
I've never found beauty harmonious
It tears at our lack of harmony
You you are the wound
Says anyone to anyone
This infantile mob this molesting song of yours
Your individual-getting-rocks-off feeling
But in the dime store's beauty that's where and there's
Meanly a lace of no doctrine or power to tie
Around the neck or wrist or thigh
Well of course not I'm lonely tie it for who
Tie it across the sky and its expansive provincialism
Telling us the length of our eternites
Glue it to the sky of the paper
And I was narciss recess young
Poignant enough to be something that
Another element in the collage an
Arrowed green line on chewing gum wrapper
Youth was knowing before becoming then being
Interestingly hurt by becoming
So did girl know as much then when less bent as now
Being more bent and knowing
But she didn't know what I know
She's beauty and I . . . I don't know what am I
Add something else torn but black cloth soft
With hard and fake a yellow "topaz" the
Most beautiful thing I've ever seen
Because the best is always now and some paint my
Old gold ink
And diamondlike pieces of shattered car window
The really ruined world

-- Alice Notley

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

i like those boots! i think they'll go over the calf--they are made pretty 'generously' so it shouldn't be a problem. i've been meaning to get a pair like that, esp here where you have to walk through slush quite a few times.

the poem is interesting--it does strike me as a poem of this country, though. it's about the right to beauty, which hardly anyone here feels they have, unless they are very rich, of course. i always wonder if that's because the initial rabble moved here before it was clear in europe that everyone should have the pretty, that it is for all to have, and that it can be had.

here it always feels like it's about resentment--knowing that there is pretty to be had, but that it can only be had for a lot of money and that it isn't meant for everyone. the sadness to me is that it kind of stands for 'good life is not for everyone'. so noone learns that you should expect it, and that connects you to most others and that's why those who can have it seem like such seeds of discord.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

the first lens (beyond the literal) that i read it through is about a claim to the right/experience of beauty as holding all the uglies, too, and the temporal variation. but i certainly see your point. ;)

and we'll see on the luxury of (beautiful) mud boots. (the usual take is that "we'll see" is a parent's way of saying no without saying no, but i'm not saying no to me yet. still have to finalize my rejection decisions and ship back the shoes i'm not keeping, see where i stand with that there.)

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

[[the first lens (beyond the literal) that i read it through is about a claim to the right/experience of beauty as holding all the uglies, too, and the temporal variation. but i certainly see your point. ;)]]

i thought you were doing that too, and that for me was also one part of the 'training' here that i was either deprived or spared of: those years of schooling in which it is decided who is pretty and who needs to feel ashamed. that is only now coming to the lands of my people, with the advent of the media and the new rules, but it feels like the kids are still capable of maintaining some semblance of sense about how they may have meaningful lives beyond their "beauty" at 13. somehow people there don't get crushed as madly, and i'm glad i was spared for as long as i was.

get the boots! you'll wear them and they'll make you happy :)

[fflo.livejournal.com]

ha---i was thinking more the ugly realities (of the world, the life, the interacting with the people) in with the beautiful ones, vs. people/women and appearance, per se, but the tendency to want to embrace it all (as having beauty, aesthetic fullness) is probably part and parcel of the same thing---that is to say, not unrelated to my exposure to how it supposedly is. with the beauty and the looks and the "i feel pretty oh so pretty."

it piques my interest, this not being so crushed that way you speak of.

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

it's a long story, but mostly about high school days, i think. when i first came, people i met were still relatively close to hs years and everyone was telling me what a trauma that was and how they couldn't wait for it to end.

i had never heard anything like it, but i had never been in a place where *everyone had to do the same thing. the savages still haven't learned their obligations, and i think that's what saves the kids. i obviously haven't learned yet either.

i spend some time on saturday with my new 'friend' from the department, or the closest thing to a woman friend i can have there. she's white, of course, and every time she says anything honest, she has to say 'and i say that because i'm a bad person.' i couldn't say i was tired of it, so i said she could always say such things to me because i have bad person's thoughts all the time.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

sounds like you're talking about the version of dogmatic "pretty" known as "nice." or the transgressing against it.

obligation's a minefield.

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

it was a more mixed bag over there. the two who thought they were pretty were also the meanest bitches in the universe. we knew when we were 15 and 16 to stay away from them, and they were not happy we wouldn't indulge them.

one ended up converting to heroine use with a boyfriend; the other opened a car dealership and got rich with a boyfriend. both left boyfriendless, unmarried and without a degree.

the more properly attractive ones were not nice either, but that was part of their attraction. all of them finished college. some more decent ones were told by boyfriends they didn't need degrees but have gone back in the meantime.

meanwhile, everyone was practicing their own version of 'dressup' and noone was particularly concerned with 'nice.' so i guess the gender iconography doesn't align the same way. the same one i was spending time with on saturday was telling me that i would be ok because i was 'nice in person'. another thing i've never heard in my life from anyone i thought had any brain.

p.s.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

the savages still haven't learned their obligations

this here line is an epigraph waiting for its poem. its prose poem?

Re: p.s.

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

perhaps :)

it has been suggested to me before that i should do 'prose poems'. it was suggested they should be in english, and at the time i wasn't sure i would know at what point my prose would start being poetry. but i'm still contemplating the idea.

i still have the title of my collection settled, but no actual pieces.

Re: p.s.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

i look forward to seeing the title. on the ms., perhaps? or will i have to wait until the bound copies?

Re: p.s.

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

i thought you already knew my title:

last week when i was french

it might be going out of fashion--the whole joke about identity politics--but *the people* might like it. none of the pieces would be about identity politics, of course.

Re: p.s.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

of course!

and of course. :)