Dear future self

Reread this when you're more awake.

Love,
PAST ME

[perfume] Bulgari Black

That One Lady brought her bottle of it along this evening for me to make friends with.

I think it is important that I tell you that normally, she eats spiky. She eats spiky and turns it smooth and sweet and smiley and lovely. Vetiver won't hold on her. Nothing will hold on her.

This is not, in general, at all true of me.

Nonetheless, on TOL Bulgari Black ends up somewhere that she describes as "High Femme Drag".

About this perfume, rydra_wong says:

... this doesn't seem to be stocked in department stores at all here, but is splendidly cheap to buy online. And it has a marvellously tactile bottle, simple and heavy and coated in matte black rubber. And it's another fun one for bizarre reviews; it's notorious for its "burnt rubber" note (anyone who secretly enjoys the smell of petrol at gas stations, this is your scent), but the intense smokiness is derived partly from tea (Lapsang Souchong), and it's also extremely wearable.

In many ways it's close to Dzing!, but the burnt rubber/smoky tea is more upfront (versus Dzing!'s discreet Bandaid note, its ginger/saffron strangeness), and it then turns into a plainer, richer vanilla (whereas Dzing! has vanilla in it but dries down to more of a thin sweet wood/musk). Leather coupled with rubber, obviously. Comfortable kink.

And vass adds to the conversation. The notes of this perfume are, in theory, lapsang souchong, rosewood, bergamot, cedar wood, oak moss, vanilla, amber, sandalwood and musk.

On me, it starts out smelling unabashedly and unavoidably of vodka. No, really, someone opened a bottle of really expensive vodka and let it infuse the air.

And then after five minutes they tipped a bottle of cheap vanilla essence into it.

After ten minutes, it is briefly acrid and smoky, and after half an hour? Pure unadulterated vanilla biscuits, warm out of the oven and satisfyingly buttery, all the way down. Forever.

I WISH TO FILE A COMPLAINT THIS IS NOT HOW THIS IS SUPPOSED TO WORK ;_;

Learning as performance art

I have dealt for a very long time with perfectionism: judging myself by my (perceived) failures and discounting my successes; struggling to ask for help or admit lack of understanding; in short, being terrified of being seen to learn.

( Read more... )

[poem] Saw this & thought of you

We build lives moment by moment
out of memories and our grandparents' faces
of stardust and algebra
of the constellation of futures condensing
    into the supernova of expanding now--

out of hope and thunderstorms of tears
and seedlings and saplings and five-century oaks
with history solid beneath us
and our foundation of quicksilver rivers--
    moment by moment, we are building our lives.

---

This is in part for poetree's Stitch In Time fest.