scent of a woman

i love perfume. in fact, i'm a little mad for it. and i have a rather obscene amount of it. just in the past few months, i've bought:

1. tom ford - white patchouli
2. vera wang - bouquet
3. mac - creations hue: turquatic
4. calvin klein - eternity summer
5. burberry - summer
6. chanel - no. 5 eau premiere
7. kenneth cole - black
8. mont blanc - individuel
9. michael kors - island

part of it is because i am too frequently in a duty free. and it's not because the perfume is necessarily cheaper there, it's more because it's there in such a decadent, sinful array. they have it all (even the juicy couture now, monica). and no one is snotty to you like at the department store perfume counters. you can try everything (i cannot wear the juicy couture, for example and both me and everyone who had to sit near me on a recent flight to singapore wished i hadn't tried it). and you're quite unaccosted and unmolested by sales people (except in singapore, where they must be on commission, but you can deflect them by walking around on your mobile phone), which i like. i want to see what catches my eye and spritz it on myself, not have someone else trying to force something on me. i must have my own opportunity to commune with the perfume. to bond with the pretty bottle. to swoop myself in the heady scents. 

ever since my summer voyage on the volga river from kazan to moscow, in which i was wearing white linen breeze, i've realized that perfume and memory are intertwined. to this day, when i catch a whiff of white linen breeze, i am instantly transported to the volga. so, what is now quite possibly an unhealthy obsession started innocently enough. 

when i started my last job, i went on a familiarization trip onboard an LNG carrier. i knew i would want to remember it, so i fittingly bought ralph lauren's blue, since i would be sailing on the blue of the mediterranean. on my first trip to korea and the shipyards, i was so excited that i bought kenneth cole's black (the one i replaced in the past couple months, because i love love it so much) in order to trigger a scent memory later. it worked like a charm.

so, it seems that whenever i've gone somewhere special, i've bought a new scent. sometimes i get one because it's a small size and will fit nicely in my makeup bag for traveling.  somtimes it's because i've read about it in that infernal sunday lifestyle magazine. but mostly, because i'm a bit obsessed.  

what are you obsessed about?

the spirit is willing...

....oh, ok, i admit it, the spirit is also very weak. in theory i want to live more simply, not have so much stuff, not define myself so much by the stuff. i love the IDEA of that. however, i'm trying to put together a brand new kitchen here. like the kitchen of my dreams. and that involves stuff. pretty stuff. stuff like this:

hans j. wegner's classic "y" chair

i know, we already have 4, but we need 8

we're gonna have guests!

and this tom rossau lamp was just so gorgeous.

so i heard myself say, "give me two."

oh. and one of those, please.  in red, to match my retro smeg fridge.

and i do so adore a good café latté. 

and it has that retro feel to go with the...

yes, i believe i already mentioned the smeg fridge.

what is even more worrying is the high i get from such an expedition. the sheer elation that infuses my being when i acquire (or even just order) gorgeous, high quality kitchen and dining room items (disturbingly close to the happy feeling i had last week when i bought my iMac and brought it home and just gazed upon it, caressing it ever-so-lightly). it makes me SOOOoooo happy! like jump for joy, do cartwheels right there in the middle of shop (luckily i did not, as they have a lot of breakable things), engage in insane happy dance kind of pure happiness. i will appreciate these things in my new kitchen. we will use them every day. because they are good quality, they are an investment in sabin's future as well (ok, that smacks a little bit of self-justification, I GET THAT).

as soon as the house is done, we're totally on track towards a simpler life...i'm sure of it.

thoughts wrestled to the page

earlier this month, i bought a beautiful fabric-covered binder in (yes, you guessed it) bookbinder's design. actually, i bought several. it's a disease with me, i know. but, the purpose of this particular binder was to hold printouts of my blog postings from this blog (there were others for the other blogs!). to bring them out of cyberspace and onto the page. i have already printed and put all of the earlier postings into the binder. and i decided that i would make a monthly ritual on the last day of the month of printing the postings and putting them into the beautiful binder. and today is the day!!

it's a very satisfying feeling in some strange way, holding that stack of my thoughts in my hand, punching holes along the side and inserting them into the beautiful binder, between dividers the color of the rainbow, on which i've stamped the months. thinking back on the hours i spent composing the words (and some of the ones where i didn't spend much time, but just dashed them off). rereading and tracking my state of mind somehow made tangible there on the page in ink.

when i'm writing, i'm often surprised at where it takes me, often it's not where i thought it would when i sat down at the keyboard. there are days when i wrestle my thoughts to the page and others where they simply flow out my fingers in some automatic, almost organic way. but, it's one thing to see them on the screen and quite another to line them up in my beautiful purple binder at the end of the month. i can highly recommend it, you should definitely give it a try.

have i mentioned that i adore the blogosphere?

the right response?

so, i've been pondering ways of living a simpler life. i've put thought into what's important to me and to our family. i've made lists of those things. and yes, it ends up being things, doesn't it? because we are in a decidedly thing-oriented world. if we all stopped wanting all those things, the global economy would grind to a halt. all those ships wouldn't have anything to carry in all those containers. and since shipping is my industry, it does give me pause...would we actually HURT ourselves if we got off this consumer train? furthermore, is it even possible to do so?

my response to thinking about living more simply is to read about how other people are doing it. of course, one can do this online and that i have done. however, my impulse is to go to amazon.co.uk and starting nosing around. what i found there arrived on my doorstep today:

1. Choosing Simplicity: Real People Finding Peace & Fulfillment in a Complex World, by Linda Breen Pierce
2. Timeless Simplicty: Creative living in a consumer society, by John Lane
3. Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping, by Judith Levine
4. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Our Year of Seasonal Eating, by Barbara Kingsolver
5. Radical Simplicty: Creating an Authentic Life, by Dan Price
6. The Spirit of Silence: Making space for creativity, by John Lane
7. A Handmade Life: In Search of Simplicity, by Wm. S. Coperthwaite

if you put these together with Oliver James' Affluenza, which i ordered a month or so ago, it is a total of 8 books on living more simply. (sigh) i'm behind before i even begin. i can't even THINK about living simply in a simple way or without buying something. i somehow think i need EIGHT books to help me do it--and i think this to the extent that i actually ORDER eight books. this is the depth of the problem we're facing here. and i don't think it's only me. it's a general cultural malaise.