Red Velvet Cake

I used to love all of Philosphy's combination shampoo/shower gels in foodie scents like Cinnamon Buns and Pumpkin Pie.
True, their advertising angle and the copywriting are annoying - "calorie-free sweet treat," "indulge without guilt" blah blah blah, yeah yeah, we know we're fat and we should be starving ourselves and if we're over 25 we need anti-aging goos... shut up and pass the Botox syringe. We've read it all before, we've heard it all before; it's insulting to the intelligence. Jeez.
But then I got into Lush handmade cosmetics and forgot about Philosophy.



Their limited-edition Red Velvet Cake might bring me back! I haven't even smelled it. I've got a weakness for anything Valentine's Day-ishly colored and themed, though. I've never had red velvet cake, actually. A co worker of mine baked one for another co worker's birthday a few months ago, and it looked amazing, but I could not partake, because the cream cheese frosting was covered with chopped nuts of some kind, and I am deathly allergic to tree nuts.
They're sold out of Red Velvet Cake shower gel at Sephora, but it's available at Nordstrom.
Also, there's a whole real red velvet cake for sale (they'll ship it!) here. I pulled that cake photo off their site. Beautiful, isn't it?

...And Yet -

And yet, I can imagine one of the ubiquitous hipster twenty-something girls who live in the Mission District of San Francisco looking awfully cute in that way that they do, riding a one-speed bike, wearing cuffed up dark blue jeans, red Converse sneakers, this "Mesa Red" Vera Bradley bag, and Bettie Page-style bangs...

The World's Ugliest Bag

Okay, it's official. Vera Bradley really does make the ugliest bags on the planet.

Witness.

I saw this lady tasting yogurt at the Ferry Plaza Farmer's Market in San Francisco. She swung her big Vera Bradley tote in "Windsor Navy" over her shoulder to get a taste. She also caught me taking her picture. I just smile when that happens, and pretend I'm a tourist. It's cheap of me, I know, but don't I deserve for racial stereotypes to work in my favor sometimes?

Eeew. Gross.

Dov Charney, creator and CEO of American Apparel appears in their ads in nothing but a pair of pink American Apparel briefs, wth suggestive text, blah blah blah, old news, right? He makes inexpensive basic clothing right here in the United States, paying factory employees higher than minimum wage. He has comical facial hair and a laughably wimpy physique, making him appear harmless. But he's has several sexual harassment lawsuits filed against him by ex-employees; what's that all about? It makes the "funny" text of this ad, featuring Charney, rather yucky indeed.

I've gone back and forth with American Apparel - I was introduced to it very late in the American Apparel game by a coworker at a previous job. She was wearing an army green zip up hoodie that fit her well, with a more shapely cut that other basic sweatshirts I'd seen. I asked her about it, and she told me where she'd gotten it, and I went and got a few. They hold up well through lots of washings in a front loading machine (I can't say the same for top loading washing machines; they've ruined plenty of my clothes - I'm all about the front loaders!) That was a few years ago; later I started reading about American Apparel's infamous scandals. Basically, the whole garment industry is tainted with sweatshop labor and exploitation; maybe American Apparel is the lesser of various evils. I like the sweatshirt (as much as someone can like such a basic and un creative piece of utilitarian clothing) and hate the sexual harassment. That's not cool. It creeps me out.

Cafe Mam, Eco Farm and Biodiesel

I've returned to my home two days early from the four-day long Eco Farm Conference 2007, which I was supposed to attend for all four days. It's a wonderful opportunity to learn, to meet farmers and other people in the organic food industry and sustainable agriculture movement, and to enjoy life by the beach for a few days. However, I was felled by a severe cold-ish flu thing that is spreading like wildfire through my company. Last Sunday, there were four warehouser workers out of seven scheduled absent, and through the early part of the week there were many people out sick, in addition to many bringing their sick, coughing, sneezing selves to the office despite being sick. It's no wonder I caught it, too.

Before I succumbed to chills and fever and decided to come home, I went on an all day tour of several farms, a native plant nursery, and an ultra- humane, unltra-clean, organic micro livestock ranch. I also attended an amazingly interesting lecture on up-and-coming alternative fuels - alternatives to petroleum. I heard about and took copious notes on ethanol, celluslosic ethanol, bio methane, and biodiesel. Apparently, there are enough farts from the dairy cows in California to fuel all the vehicles in the United States. Isn't that amazing? I will blog about all these interesting things in greater detail in future posts.

In the bright wintery cold, listening to a lecture containing scientific principles a bit beyond my grasp, in a chilly wooden seaside chapel, a big mug of hot coffee from Cafe Mam was comforting and delicious. The Ecological Farming Conference, though supported by many sponsors, one of which is the company I work for, still feels remarkably homespun, pleasantly hippie, and un-corporate. Cafe Mam is fair traded, organic coffee from a cooperative of native Mayan coffee farmers in Chiapas.

Dracena

To replace the schefflera which I inadverdently killed (but composted - not wasted!), Dear Daniel bought me a dracena.
This is a wise choice - I have a taller dracena which I've kept alive and thriving for four years and through three apartment moves and two repottings, so I know I can do well with dracena. The taller dracena really started to take off when my cat Cougar died. He loved to jump up and claw and chew on the lower leaves. When each row of lower leaves got shredded, I would pull them off and the plant would continue to make new ones at the top. It got taller and taller, and the stem got longer and longer. Now that Cougar's not around the strip off the lower leaves, the plant is fuller. Each leaf of my new plant is long and narrow, with stripes of red and yellow; I chose it for this interesting color. I love plants with variegated leaves. My older one is all green.

The Glitter That Went the Way of the Dinosaur

Tony and Tina "Cosmic Lights" loose glitter is no more, because Tony and Tina cosmetics is no more. I liked their packaging and I liked their product names like "Trancendence" and "Valkyrie" and "Spirit Guide" and "Unmistakable Love". At one point I had iridescent white that looked sort of green and blue in certain light, gold, silver, blue and pink. I liked their glitters because they were make of such fine particles and came in such awesome colors. It was subtle - not tacky or outrageous. My mom, who is generally very tailored, even liked them so much she bought herself and me a bronzey one when we went to NYC together a few summers ago.
I just ordered two pots of silver from someone on Ebay. I hate using Ebay, but sometimes it's the easiest way to find something discontinued or rare!

The Russian Cat Pin, Finally, A Year Later

Near my apartment is a Russian gift shop.
I should back up and say that I live in San Francisco, and San Francisco is a tiny city divided into tiny neighborhoods or areas. The city is divided up economically, ethnically, etc. The neighborhood closest to me is largely Russian and Chinese. So, it's not that unusual to find a Russian bakery, mini-grocery, or gift shop. There's also the Holy Virgin Cathedral Russian Orthodox church, with its surreal gold domes, which you can gaze at as you wait for seating at the popular dim sum restaurant across the street.

Last year I bought some awesome Russian greeting cards at this Russian gift shop. The cards are kind of cartoon women representing the seasons of the year. Summer is holding a basket of berries and there are flowers at her feet and the grass is green, and spring is pale blonde with a blue dress and a scarf and some spring bulbs growing near her. "Cartoon" makes it sound kind of silly - they're actually really pretty. So I went into the shop again the other day and the proprietor yelled at me while I was looking at the cards, saying, "THOSE ARE IN RUSSIAN LANGUAGE."
I told her I noticed that they were in Russian, but I l still enjoy the images. I ended up buying two cards, and then I asked her if she still had these handpainted cat pins I saw a long time ago there. She said yes and started digging around in stacks of boxes behind her. She pulled out this dusty case and showed me the cat pins. Each pin was supposed to be $25, but she said there was a one day special for me only and sold me this pin for $15. Then she yelled at me for not having a jacket on, saying it was really cold. (I told her I parked literally right outside the store.) It was kind of a weird experience, which is fitting, since it's kind of a weird pin. I don't often wear pins, but I like this one and I wore it the next day on a plain black top.
I put the pin next to a compact so you can see what size it is.

MAC Cosmetics' Chinese Dress

In 2006 MAC Cosmetics did some silly "tribute to the Chinese dress" - painting nude models to look as if they have exquisite dresses on. What a tired concept - Chinese dresses are exotic (yawn) Asian women are exotic (YAWN) and NUDE Asian women painted to look like they're wearing Chinese dresses are doubly exotic (burp). The only thing remotely interesting about this project is that it's so much work for something so temporary, but environmental sculptor
Andy Goldsworthy pretty much has the market share of THAT particular art concept, doesn't he? MAC Cosmetics brought their naked Asian, Asian American and Asian Canadian models painted like vases, fans and lily pads to Nordstrom San Francisco yesterday, which is what brought this whole annoying thing to mind.

Frankly, I'm sick of orientalism, sick of the exoticizing, sick of being exoticized, sick of being nothing more to corporate America than a lily pad or a cloisonne vase or a way to sell some fucking lipstick. I'm sick of the rigid box that Asian American women are shoved into - why are we always an immigrant, a whore, a laundry worker, a Chinese restaurant waitress or a self-hating banana holding hands with a white guy? That's all we are ever allowed to be. Oh, we can be medical students, too. Aww fuck it... I'm off to go comb my straight, dark bangs and, uh, start swinging some nunchucks around.


MAC Cosmetics' Chinese Dress

Candy Floss Pink Flats

Marc is our caterer at work; he's from England, and it's funny when he does an "American" accent. He usually does this when he makes something sort of traditionally American. Then he'll tell me what it is in his mocking American accent, which sounds like a cross between Clint Eastwood and James Bond with a touch of Beavis and Butthead. Wrap your mind around that.

One of my favorite Marc activities is making him tell me what the English words are for things we say differently in the United States. I know this is truly obnoxious and so typically American of me. Does the fact that I'm Asian American give me some leeway? I bank on that.

Everyone knows that "cookies" are really "biscuits" and "french fries" are really "chips," but does everyone know that "cotton candy" is really "candy floss"? Marc told me so.

When I was in sixth grade, attending public school for the first time, and just starting to think about fashion, I desperately wanted a pair of pointed flats like teenagers wore. (Please, my mother still had me in white tights with black patent leather Mary Janes. Till sixth grade, I was small, nerdy, and went to Catholic school where we wore uniforms.) I wanted silver ones, like this very cool 8th grade girl I admired who wore all black and carried a huge silver hobo bag and wore her silver pointed flats and giant silver hoop earrings.

My mom compromised and bought me a pair of candy floss pink round-toed flats. I remember they were Calvin Klein and at something like fifty dollars they were wildly extravagant; we were really struggling financially then. I didn't ask for the shoes - I rarely asked for things because I knew my mom was stressed about money. But I admired them, probably drooled. Not only were they wonderful grown-up, pretty shoes - they meant a great deal to me because my mom gave them to me.
Ever since then I've rarely been without a pair of similar shoes. I'm sure a therapist would know what it all means.
I got these cute, soft comfy ones in Los Angeles, along with a second pair in black. They're from BC Footwear in the Beverly Center, and were delighfully inexpensive!

BC Footwear online...

A Thursday Off?

I have half of tomorrow off! It's because I've been working every Sunday. Some weeks I've worked six days, and it's been okay but this week I'm trying to make it 5.5. I plan to work on some neglected projects, like this scarf I'm crocheting for someone who actually commissioned me to do it! It's a simple crochet stitch, very repetitive but in a soothing, hypnotic (rather than boring) way. Usually, I knit. There are times when it's fun to knit something challenging and complicated, requiring you to concentrate, count, rework, and, uh, do math that involves fractions and division, but there are other times when it's more a sensual pleasure to knit or crochet with a fun, pretty yarn that feels good, and nice wood or bamboo needles or hook. This scarf requires no counting, and the colors in the soft yarn are mesmerizing.

Dragonfruit

Dragonfruit is naturally this wild, magenta color; there's no dye here! Its taste is mild, kind of like kiwi. One of the fun things about working at an organic produce distributor is always getting to taste and see unusual produce. Some things, like sapote, lychees and dragonfruit, come and go so quickly. Dragonfruit is covered with spiky petal-scales like an artichoke, green and hot pink, and when you but it open, it's soft pink or lavender-rose inside, with tiny black seeds.

Coral Matches

I found this awesome box of matches the other day. Why is it always more fun to strike a match than to use a lighter or an Aim-n-Flame type thing?

Modern Candlelight

Around ten years ago, a college friend of mine got married and I helped her open and catalogue her many gifts. She and her husband received many beautiful things, but the object I admired and coveted the most was a simple glass bowl with swirls of color suspended inside, like the swirls in a child's favorite marble. I remember thinking it was a shame it wasn't mine! I took careful note of the name on the white box with simple black writing that it came in: Kosta Boda.

Kosta Boda is a Swedish glassmaker which has been around longer than the United States has! The design I love is called Atoll and was designed by Anna Ehrner.

I got a pink Atoll votive candleholder and always regretted it. I chose pink because at the time, my bedroom was all done in leopard and pink. Obviously, it was before my modern phase. It was the girliest, vampiest bedroom I've ever had, and maybe the girliest, vampiest bedroom I've ever seen. Pink is a color I love, but in small doses. I can't live with too much pink in my home. I gave the pink votive to a friend, who in turn gave me a wonderful gift of THREE of them, in Christmas colors: red, white and green. The white is on my living room coffeetable, and the green is on the coffeetable in our den, where I have bright green and bright yellow abstract lithographs from the 1960's. The red is the most beautiful, and it's usually in my bathroom, where I have deep orange-red towels. All three of them are in places where natural light illuminates the glass and changes the colors and shadows as the day passes.

For Porny Lips...

My pal Meagan gave me a MAC cosmetics haul for Christmas last month, and one of the items was this Prep + Prime lipbalm/lip primer. I've never been into the concept of "primer" - it makes me think of smoothing out the dings in battered cars in an auto body shop with horrible caustic spackle stuff, or laying down a coat of grayish matte paint before painting the walls in your house the color you really want them. But this MAC Prep + Prime lip primer goes on very smoothly, like a vanilla-scented lipbalm, and it must have some kind of silicones in it, for it fills in the natural creases in your lips so that when you apply lipstick or gloss, your lips look HUGE! I was very surprised, because MAC doesn't advertise this product or write about it as a "plumper," yet it's by far the most dramatic plumper I've ever encountered. I feel like Amanda Lepore.

Searching for Mercy Street

Over the weekend I read the memoir Searching for Mercy Street, by Linda Gray Sexton, daughter of poet Anne Sexton. Her story (Linda Gray Sexton's) is intense and incredibly sad; she tells of her life with a mentally ill, suicidal genius mother whom she deeply loved and also feared and dreaded. She was abused, neglected, and terrorized, and she was also inspired, deeply loved and immortalized in poetry by her mother. Linda Gray Sexton didn't mean for her memoir to do this - but I put the book down with a really bad feeling toward Anne Sexton, even though I also think it's terribly sad how she suffered with her mental illness and depression her whole life.

My friend lent me the book, saying, "In my circles you were either an Anne Sexton person or a Sylvia Plath person." That made me chuckle. If I were stranded on an island with the collected works of only one contemporary American poet, it would be be neither of theirs: it would have to be Adrienne Rich's!

Eboy

I headed over to Arch drafting supply the other day to get some pads of Rhodia paper, and bought a sheet of decorated paper that caught my eye. It's a pixellated futuristic and rather silly cityscape, populated by workers on horseback, sunbathers, a puffy cloud-monster drifting overhead, and lots of buildings that look as though they were made with Legos. The image above is their poster "Venice" - not the one I bought, though it's similar. Click the picture to see it in greater detail.

Some later research revealed that this is an Eboy design. Eboy is a group of graphic designers in Berlin who do a lot of this kind of stuff. They've worked with a huge list of top-name clients, like Adidas, Monster.com, Nestle, Nike, and Microsoft. That lessened the excitement for me - you know, finding something you think you just discovered, only to find the whole world knew about it before you did. Still, their site is worth looking at! There's something about those Lego-like pixel images that appeals to people my age; it's a nostalgia thing, I think. We remember when computer images really were pixellated, like the Atari games we loved - Pac Man, Spacer Invaders, and Dig Doug - and we learned how to "word process" on those little tiny IBM computers whose screens were only black and amber...And dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and trilobites filled the primordial seas...

Mon

This is my family mon (or ka-mon), or Japanese crest or emblem. We know, because it is on my great-grandmother's mother's kimono; I think that was the last time anyone in my family actually had a kimono. My family has a bit of a confusing history - mons are usually patrilineal, but we had the unique situation of a male person marrying into an all-female family of higher social class and taking the woman's family name.

I asked my Dad for an image of it twice, once was a hundred years ago when I was around twenty, and a particularly ardent Japanese American boyfriend declared his intention to tattoo both his family's mon and mine over his heart. Thankfully my forgetful and spacy Dad never sent it to me! I asked him for it again a few weeks ago. I'm getting into seals and sealing wax and my calligraphy teachers know an artisan who makes hand carved custom wax seals. I think it will be sort of awesome to have my family mon as a wax seal. The practice of applying sealing wax to letters to ensure authenticity and privacy is as old as writing itself.

Mons or ka-mons are usually some kind of nature-related imagery, but stylized and symmetrical, like birds, flowers, trees, vegetables, fish. Ours is a moth. A friend who works for Louis Vuitton customer service told me that the classic Louis Vuitton pattern was based on the Japanese mons.

The Green Thumb

I killed this once-beautiful plant.

My grandpa had a green thumb. My mom has a green thumb. Suposedly I also have a green thumb. I learned a lot about houseplants, roses, orchids and garden ornamentals from them. I'm no organic vegetable farmer, but I know more than your average city-dweller. And yet, for reasons unknown, I always manage to kill this plant; it's called Schefflera, it is supposedly an easy houseplant to grow, and this is my third tragedy. At a previous job, we had a huge one in a pot beside my desk. "Is this an easy plant?" I asked Suzanne, the plant goddess of that office, and she assured me that it was. Indeed, I sat beside it for months and it seemed to never diminish, maintaining its waxy, glossy green perfection from the day Suzanne brought it in till the day I quit that job. It never dropped a leaf, in the eight months I sat beside it. And it hardly got any natural light; it was in a bland, terribly lit office, the kind of office you see in comedic films about boring offices. There the Schefflera flourished.

I had a big one at my old apartment that died. I blamed it on the apartment. I blamed it on the chemically pre-fertilized soil.

Now this little one has died, or almost died, despite good organic soil and judicious watering. I took it off "life support" and composted it before it could worsen. Now I'm listening to the all-time saddest song in the recent history of American rock (Philadelphia - Bruce Springsteen) and looking out the window at the fog rolling in and the sun disappearing...
Bleh.

Sanfaustino Water

Before we drove back to San Francisco from Southern California, we bought snacks and drinks to eat and drink along the way. If you've ever driven up or down Highway 5, which runs top-to-bottom through California (down the middle) you know that the only stuff to buy along the way is gasoline and fast food. There might be three drive-through Starbucks in 400 miles. Ordinarily I snub Starbucks, but when on Hwy 5, we start looking for one desperately, as if it's a cool oasis in the middle of Hell.

Anyhow, one of the drinks I purchased before our departure was this Sanfaustino sparking water, with raspberry and lime. (I have never had this water before and purchased it solely because I was impressed with the pretty label. In fact, I usually like plain sparking water better than flavored, but the rose-colored label won me over.) There was snow in the Tehachapi mountains and I thought it was a good time to drink something bubbly. I opened the bottle and the air that escaped smelled like sulfur... like a Toni home perm from the 80's... and I do know what that smells like; my mom gave me one when I was in elementary school. Anyhow, it was disgusting.
I'm not sure if I got a bad batch of water or if it was supposed to be that way... but, sadly, this got us searching for the next drive-through Starbucks again.

Seven Greyhounds

I just got back from my mother’s house. She lives in rural Southern California. The town is so rural in fact that tumbleweeds roll across the roads, and people can have horses, llamas, goats, broken-down cars, and weird makeshift sheds on their properties, not to mention countless dogs. Next door to my mom’s property live some people who apparently have seven greyhounds (there may only be six in the photo). I’ve never noticed the greyhounds before, because I would always park on the old driveway, which is on the other side of the house. My mom added a new driveway on the greyhound side of the house, and I was startled to see all these greyhounds come to the fence whenever I got into and out of my car. Greyhounds are really skinny, with big, intelligent-looking eyes. I don’t dislike them, but it really freaks me out that these people have seven of them. Who needs that many dogs? And why?
I like the country and the mountains, and there are certain things I love and miss about the desert, but overall it's just a depressing and weird place to live. My mom's house and property are immaculate, landscaped, and every plant, tree and blade of grass is manicured. It's almost like some kind of optical illusion between the two neighboring properties. Weird.