Tag: project ideas

De-colonizing and Fair Isle knitting.

Keep Abortion Legal sweater by Lisa Anne Auerbach

Keep Abortion Legal sweater by Lisa Anne Auerbach (2006).

These are old notes from 21 February 2009. I said I had lots of ideas and then didn’t say what any of them were… I think they were mostly about working with explicit symbols and words using Fair Isle techniques, like the LAA sweater in the photo (which uses Norwegian patterns, I think, not Fair Isle).

I just read several knitting books and several anti-colonial books at the same time, and I have all these new ideas about my own knitting. As happens when you read different topics at the same time, I found where they overlap and connect. An example.

From Michael Pearson’s Traditional Knitting: Aran, Fair Isle and fisher ganseys, 1984.

Pages 121-2.

[The Shetland Islands] lie to the north east of Britain and are in fact closer to Norway than mainland Scotland. … The inhabitants owe their heritage to the Norsemen who settled there in the 8th and 9th centuries, living under the patronage of Norway for over 500 years before the influx of Scottish mainlanders in the 13th century. Norse influence then began to fade and ended with the sale of the islands in 1496 by Norway to the Scottish Crown.

From this date right through to the present day the history of the inhabitants has been one of ruthless exploitation— by the Stuart family till 1615 and then by the splitting up of the islands into estates run by rich immigrant Churchmen and landowners…

The two knitting traditions that had the most resonance for me were Cowichan sweaters and Fair Isle knitting, both affected by Scottish colonialism. The more I read about Scottish history, the more it seems like Scotland has been a volcano of settlers for hundreds of years. They can’t stay home. Why? I continue to read. I want to know more about how I ended up here, descended from at least five different Scottish settler families on Coast Salish territories.

But. Ideas I got from this round of reading.

  • Folk knitting history is patchy and there are many versions of events and stories.
  • Reading books by American and British people mostly involves serious denial about colonization of any kind. It’s almost a relief to read books about North American genocide, because at least the destruction is presented as destruction. I read one book about Fair Isle knitting that presented Norway’s sale of Fair Isle to Scotland as simply a “reflection of the fact that the island was by then more Scottish than Norse.” OK, author, but how did that happen?
  • Knitting has labour politics as well as the more discussed gender roles. I hadn’t thought much before about the history of underpaid cottage industries where poor people knit clothes for rich people, for peanuts per hour. It is still basically impossible to make a living wage selling hand knitting. Like gardening, it’s one of those subsistence activities that middle class people dabble in for leisure. Not sure what to do with that right now.
  • Again, being a folk art, patterns and ideas spread whenever one crafter meets another (or even a craft). It sounds like Cowichan spinners and weavers were keen to pick up knitting from European settlers and missionaries, just as crafters. But also, English style knitting (yarn in the receiving hand) was taught in residential schools as a “civilizing” domestic skill, sometimes to produce items the school sold for profit. I want to find out how Turkish style knitting (with the yarn around the back of the neck) ended up in the Andes, when by the time of colonization I think Iberians were knitting in continental style (yarn in the loading hand). So far I haven’t found a resource that has both crafty knowledge and awareness of colonialism.

More from Michael Pearson.

Page 128.

Because of the natural tendency to identify with areas within reach, British knitters have usually assumed that Fair Isle was the place where two-colour knitting was invented.

I don’t know how natural that is. It does seem to be part of British and maybe European culture, to assume cultural dominance or sameness. Do non-Euro people have a history of that too? Assuming that everything was invented nearby just because it’s here now? (Two colour knitting, as far as I have been able to find out, first turned up in Turkey and Egypt, then spread via trade routes to Baltic and Nordic Europe.)

Embodiment and drifting.

Old half-baked draft from 11 December 2008. I kind of want that asterisk question on a t-shirt. I think I was really asking **** How do I want to talk about this on the internet after such a long break??? ****

Talking to Heather about embodiment, being in your body. She had an idea that maybe when teenagers are focussed on having sex even when it is pretty “rape-y” and risky and not beneficial or pleasurable, it has partly to do with their lack of other ways to feel their physicality and be in their bodies. No access to nature, nowhere to safely walk, not allowed to play outside unsupervised, even encouraged to eliminate or replace all body odours, etc. That’s a lot of pressure on sex for being physical.

It got me thinking about how I relate to the internet. I’m on here a LOT, in this disembodied place.

Anyway. I’ve been realizing that one of my big ways to be in my body for the last year or so has been looking at things. Sensing with my eyes, and sensing the reactions my body has to colours and shapes (and letters, boy howdy). When I got to go to the UK with my mum last fall, and we spent so much time in art galleries because it was rainy, that was the most physically altered I’ve felt since I stopped eating psychedelic drugs. High on modern art— physically dizzy and speedy and sometimes getting auras like before a migraine, from seeing enough art nouveau in one room to really experience and understand the concept of biomorphic whiplash. I made this website these colours because they do similar things to me— they are stimulating and encouraging and they make me want to write. I remember using music that way in the past. Galen would come home sometimes and be able to tell when I was working on something important, because I’d be blasting some or other personal power music. In high school— I just remembered this— I did a lot with smells. Other people’s sweaters, specific incense, open window when it rained.

*** where does fucking fit in?? ***

So, notably, none of this involves movement or muscles. It’s all sensing and processing and information. It’s physical to me, but it’s what a lot of people would identify as being in your head.

My forays into physical activity are marked by a lot of head time, too. Office bike— the exercise bike I can pedal while I make websites. Wing chun— if I have to punch and kick to learn which way shoulders bend and how momentum works, I guess that’s alright. Fucking— “erotics is the process through which sex acquires meaning.” I think I get bored, otherwise.

I’ve been casting around for some more physical motion in my life, to make me stronger.

I have high hopes for a bastardized version of this pretentious French art thing, the dérive, or drift. Walking to nowhere. OK. I do not like walking for the sake of walking, even though I love walking. Growing up, my parents were all about taking a walk, but not so much about negotiating where to walk or talking about what they feel like on the walks or whatever, so I have a lot of stored up experience being deeply bored with walks.

Walking to nowhere: ok. Just paying attention to see where you want to walk the most: ok. Also, paying attention to local geography and how it feels, that can go on forever. I think this could be useful in trying to figure out more of how I relate to being a settler on colonized land.

So yeah, I’m glad I’ve practiced walking by myself, home alone from various locations. I’m glad Victoria is a mostly non-threatening place for me to walk around.

Plant dyes, having a smell, odourlessness in general.


Lump indigo (blue)
Old recipe from Outer Hebrides

Boil wool with onion skins till clear yellow, then let wool dry. Have an old pail filled with urine at least two weeks old, or until skin forms on top… Put lump indigo in a muslin bag, heat the “bree” by placing a hot stone in it. Squeeze in the blue bag. Wet the wool and place in the liquid. Cover the vessel and place where it will keep warm… For navy blue, 11 to 21 days are required. Fix with boiled sorrel roots as rinsing water.

— Dye Plants and Dyeing, Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record, 1964.

Books about natural dyeing have a lot of lore I hadn’t foreseen. So many smells! Boiling weird fungi, soaking fiber with onions (“It will take at least four washings to eliminate the odour”), fermenting urine. One book detailed an argument between the author and her editor about whether traditional Harris tweed, dyed with lichens, smelled “musty” or, less judgmentally, “earthy.” I had no idea that tweed used to have a smell. I am fascinated by this, and want to dye all my clothes with different plants to get to know the smells.

Why don’t I expect my clean clothes to have a smell? Not a laundry scent, but a part of their nature. I can remember talking about the smell of my clothes like a normal thing, all the time. Wool sweaters smell sheepy if I get wet in the rain. A couple of weeks ago I told someone (who?) that I liked the smell of raw silk, because I was knitting with a silk blend yarn. I can recall the scent of cotton in my mind’s nose: wet, dry, or hot. Why did I still think of clothes as odourless?

Heather wrote once (or maybe we spoke) about why people are so obsessed with genital odours. Do they smell right? Do they smell too strong? How to keep the smells in control? She suggested that this was partly because we have come to expect the entire rest of our bodies to have no odours at all. Healthy hair, feet, armpits, mouths, and skin in general all have smells, too, but between washing and deodorizing they’ve been redefined as ideally odourless. It’s total fantasy, bodies still smell, but we expect odourlessness. (Like my clothes!) Compared to that, genitals are almost getting smellier by contrast.

Thinking about the more familiar politics of body odours makes me even more interested in knowing what smells are required to make the colours in my clothes. These plant dyes seem like an opportunity to make experiential connections, to know things by observation. To have know what clothes smell like and why, instead of not knowing what shocking petrochemical smells are happening at distant textile factories. It feels grounding. Educating my mind’s nose. I have some pondering to do, regarding wood smoke and other smells that have been banished from modern, civilized, classy life.

I think I will start slow, though, with tea and lavender dyes. Fermenting a bucket of my own urine is going on the “someday I will peek behind this curtain” list along with attending a pig or goat slaughter. Someday.

In praise of experiencing underwear.

Fifi, by Strumpet & Pink

Willow, by Strumpet & Pink

Hunting Through the Ruffles, by Strumpet & Pink

Garden of Delights, by Strumpet & Pink

From the Strumpet & Pink website, a goal I can get behind:

Our knickers are experiential and focus
on feeling rather than objectification.

Years ago, my friend Logan talked so much about wanting velvet underwear with the pile facing inwards that someone finally made him some. Fuzzy on the inside.

Apologies for all the skinny, pale-skinned bums. I thought the ruffles were worth it. I am imagining my future undercrafts.

I’m noticing how gardening books can be colonial.


Edible gardens have been part of human culture for thousands of years. Along with harnessing fire, developing the wheel and domesticating animals, cultivating food is one of the benchmarks of human advancement. Growing plants that provide food and learning to store it for times of scarcity were advancements that allowed humans to develop civilizations.

— First paragraph of the introduction to The Canadian Edible Garden: Vegetables, Herbs, Fruits & Seeds by Alison Beck.

It’s been awhile since something like “the benchmarks of human advancement” would have slipped by me as a neutral measurement (when you define everyone’s progress by how similar they are to you, you can assume have problems with privilege), but I think I am noticing more assumptions now about the value of civilization and technology. I’m also noticing that the author’s list of “advancements” that allow humans to create civilizations skipped over colonization, slavery, militarism, genocide and all that.

I recently read Endgame: The Problem of Civilization & Resistance (thanks for the tip, Sarah), which is a thorough take-down of the assumption that civilization is an advanced way of living (vs. unsustainable and terrorist), that the point of technology is to become advanced (vs. to maintain a relationship with your landbase), that agriculture is an efficient way to gather food (vs. temporary and destructive). I think that was the book that got me reading about destroying agriculture. I’ve been reading a lot of books at once; it’s hard to keep track.

I am seeing this garden book as much more oppressive than I would have before, with a Eurocentric, anti-indigenous, environmentally unconscious position.

This is good, it gets me thinking about my love of gardening. I’m realizing that what I care about is getting to know plants and soil and living systems, resisting consumerism and capitalism by gathering my own food, and taking time to physically experience and love a patch of the outdoors. None of that actually requires a garden. I could be wildcrafting, or working more with local plant permaculture and forest gardens. Those are difficult when land is privately owned and violently policed, and wilderness is mostly destroyed and constantly under threat. Wild forests don’t need me in there taking all my food right now. And it’s hard to conceive of perennial ecosystems on temporarily rented space.

So… how could I be talking with my neighbours about guerrilla permaculture and land reclamation?

I hope this ends well.

I posted this on Craigslist today (personals > strictly platonic?).

Can I poop in your composting toilet?

Date: 2009-03-25, 12:34PM PDT

Or even just see it and ask you a couple of questions?

They seem so cool in theory, but I would like to try one out in person before I get too excited about the “convenience” and “lack of smell.”

Thanks in advance for sharing your humanure revolution.

  • Location: victoria
  • it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

Nighttime, trees, rocky beaches…

She moves only by night and on a south wind, by Pamela Phatsiimo Sunstrum

She moves only by night and on a south wind, by Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum.

I’ve been going through some old photos that my mum brought me. They show a lot of crouching at the beach. This collage looked familiar in two ways then: the beach crouching from when I was small, and the nighttime trees from my neighbourhood now. I think this new combination will add something to my night walks.

I’m ready for my telepathic computer now please.

New device reads minds pretty well.

Whenever I read articles about advances in computer mind-reading technology, they focus on the benefits for paralysed or locked-in people. Fair enough, but I am also waiting for my generic mind-to-computer input device. Could you not then basically send telepathic messages to your friends? If a computer can read my mind, and computers can already talk to each other… that means I can send telepathic email at least. It makes me laugh. It’s such a clunky, budget vision of telepathy, but I think it’s good enough.

A few years ago, after seeing a documentary about a locked-in man’s telepathic computer, I had elaborate fantasies of starting a company to manufacture open source, recyclable, telepathic PDA things. It would be such an interesting device to design interfaces for. In my elaborate fantasy, there are mind-reading headphones that whisper interface feedback to you.

Being apparently more environmentalist than the average geek, I barely even buy any electronic gadgets, but I am so compelled by the prospect of adjusting my music volume up and down with my mind that I thought I might have to move somewhere cheap and kidnap an engineer to make it happen.

I have since chilled out, but I note with delight that these articles are showing up more often.

Orange and brown, knitted mitts

Endpaper mitts by mozilla on Craftster

I’ve seen many versions of Eunny Jang’s endpaper mitts online, but this is the first pair that made me want to knit some. Good colours! I previously experienced that diamond pattern as kind of fussy and fancy, but the orange and brown version is more my speed. Geometric and, you know, orange. I would knit these, and then I would make kung fu hands like craftster mozilla in the photo there.

Further evidence that I’m not really in a target demographic for normal businesses


Name shack

Last night at a screening of short films, I was being introduced to a new guy who kept claiming bad hearing and getting everyone’s name wrong.

(1) This would be a good gimmick for business men who obsess about remembering everyone’s name. You’d have an excuse to repeat the names a lot, plus you could “jokingly” get them wrong and everyone would find you charming. (2) This guy’s misheard names were way better than our normal names (Sarah = Sierra. Jessica = Destiny. Galen = Hayden. We are instantly teen idols or brands of vodka!).

I think he should go into business in some way. Maybe you could call him up and tell him your ideas for naming your pets or the characters in your new novel, and he could just repeat them back to you through his auditory filter of awesomeness. Maybe he could deliver some sort of televised oral history newscast.

Surprise! Hope you’re more vain than paranoid!

Two nights ago, I was talking about web design rates with my friend Michael, who is making a site for a private detective. His ladyfriend Erin suggested he just trade services, and then we were all sort of hoping to be the subject of Michael’s bartered private investigation, just so we could get some weird surveillance photos of ourselves. And now I think that should be a business of its own: just the surveillance photos.

Real detectives probably don’t take big, black and white glossies anymore (nope), but my non-investigative, non-incriminating surveillance photography service sure would. And we’d make a special effort to get shots of the subject holding up her collar against the wind while stepping into a taxi, laughing in a restaurant with an unseen dinner companion, or generally looking over his shoulder all the time. If surveillance is going to be biased and weird, it might as well be biased towards glamour and intrigue.

I can’t stop thinking about what a great (weird, confusing) birthday present that would be for an unsuspecting friend. “It’s… is this a threat?”

Internet wish: find likely pornographic typos

Any page offering advice on choosing a domain name will insist you consider common typos and misunderstandings. No need to end up the latest sexchange URL (lawyersexchange.com, editorsexchange.com…). And nobody wants to end up a typo away from hardcore porn. Especially if your website features Christian hymns.

So why can’t I find a tool to check these things?

I just got an email from a web design client (who really does make Christian hymns) saying that one of their customers had accidentally found porn while trying to type in their website address. “They probably just made a typo.”

But darned if I can figure out where this typo porn actually is. None of my misspelled attempts are registered domains, and I can’t find a tool that suggests similarly spelled URLs that exist.

There are lots of tools to find websites with similar content, but none to find websites with similar addresses. This second tool is what I wish for.

Namin’ names

  • Someday, maybe I will start a sysadmin dance band called Deee-link.
  • I hope someone starts selling eels or eggs online, before it becomes completely gauche to add ‘e’ to the front of a word, to denote online commerce. eeggs.com would be pretty awesome, probably.

A project I’d like to make*

I’d like to collect stories and descriptions of people’s epiphanies. How they snapped out of depression, or figured out their life’s work, or fixed their relationships, understood parenthood or life or sex or death or generally how to deal with reality. People’s answers to “What’s the secret?”

I’ve been thinking about this for awhile, occasionally stoked by articles like this one, but I had assumed it would be hard to find enough stories to make a worthwhile collection. Talking to Andrea at our small-business breakfast yesterday, we both had potential contributions to this topic. More than realizing I could find enough contributions, I remembered how totally compelled I am by people solving problems and figuring things out, and dealing with basic tragedies like the fact we’re all going to die. I want to go hunting.

*I can’t believe I don’t post daydream projects more often. It’s my most common conversational topic and constant preoccupation.

Elephant memory

Panty salad

A really long time ago, Justin Hall told a story on links.net about watching his girlfriend Amy collect underwear to pack for a trip. “I have enough underwear here to make a salad,” she said.

Panty salad. Lodged in my brain forever, alongside all the names Rebecca and I have come up with for our fictional lingerie store over the years. Pantymonium, All Tomorrow’s Panties, the usual. I get more excited about the scope of our inventory than the name. We would fit everybody! We would cover a huge footprint on the matrix of fashion and comfort! We would host events. Etc etc.

But on laundry days I make panty salad, not pantymonium, out of all my “lay flat to dry” items.

Panty platter

Jellyfish couture

Jellyfish Many months ago, I borrowed a video about jellyfish from the library. Lucky me, it was one of those upper echelon nature documentaries produced by a specialized research centre with a high budget and a celebrity narrator, in this case Leonard Nemoy.

Dr. Spock narrated in a mesmerizing hypno-voice throughout, and at the exact point in the film where the photography jumped from average jellyfish to mind-bending footage of rare aliens of the deep, our hypnotist narrator compared one especially ruffly, colour-changing, pulsating specimen to an elegant woman, trailing her veils and skirts across the room.

Since then I’ve been percolating on how, exactly, I am going to dress like an elegant jellyfish. Many-layered underskirts? Ruffly legwarmers? Tutus trailing ribbons? Could I knit something? Around Christmas I settled on a ball-shaped skirt, such as you’d see made out of feathers and sequins in the 1920s. Skirts that puff out, then cinch back in. Dresses made from piles of ruffles.

Imagine, then, my delight at finding these diverse, jelly-like creations in the recent catwalk photos at Style.com. (Imagine my delight at finding catwalk photo galleries in general: endless, silly desktop wallpaper.)

Balenciaga

Jellyfish jacket by Balenciaga

Jean Paul Gaultier

Jellyfish dress by Jean Paul Gaultier

Kenzo

Jellyfish dress by Kenzo

Martin Grant

Jellyfish dress by Martin Grant

Alexander McQueen

Jellyfish dress by Alexander McQueen
Jellyfish dress by Alexander McQueen
Jellyfish dress by Alexander McQueen
Jellyfish dress by Alexander McQueen

Pearl of Civilization, private collection

I’ve just finished sewing my own jellyfish dress— out of materials from the Closet of Stash no less. The dress is my surprise contribution to Rock Club tonight (the theme is complicated this time, and involves bringing some kind of art to go with our song). Once it has been officially unveiled I’ll post photos here.

I am very excited. Jellyfish dress!

Today

I started my weekend on Friday, and spent all of today goofing around with Rock Club, and Zoe is coming to visit tomorrow so I know that will be a write-off. I can’t separate my slacking from my fever-induced laziness. I want to be so productive, and not get stuck on predictable tasks, like whenever I have to do the part of design that involves making something pretty, or presentable. I rock the functional part, but the decorating is really hard. Yes I know they work together. I’m stuck on visual stuff on two different projects right now. Three, really. It’s painful. I’m so full of ideas, honest. I can work so hard. Honest. I don’t know how to make the pretty things come out of my head.

This has to be the year that I learn to draw. Studying colours and type and alignment helped, but if I’m aspiring to something other than boxes, I need to have less clumsy hands.

Party in my head

Robin wants to make a porn magazine for straight women. I could get on board with that, mostly because Robin is awesome and has interesting hobbies and ideas. She volunteers with an anti-violence project and a sexual assault centre, and a sexual health clinic. That is all the shit that I should be doing, since I’ve styled myself a purveyor of sex education info. I spend more time thinking about sex as a head trip, and arty possibilities and altered states brought on by orgasms. Porn show’n‘tell discussions with Robin would be reasonable and worthwhile, I imagine, and also fun and out-of-bounds a bit.

I’m really interested in private publishing right now, and I think it would be extra interesting to make this porn magazine for personal consumption only, instead of mass production. Fame and attention is the background of practically everything on the internet; purposely private media is something I haven’t explored a lot. I’m compelled by the idea of publishing and working and producing for my friends only. That’s a very human scale with different social consequences, completely different from international online communities. I’ve been finding Rock Club a lot more intense than other websites that I make, and also more casual. Just like everyday friends. I like it.

When I imagine this porn magazine, it would involve pals bringing some item that they were hot for this week (or this month), to put in the magazine, and then we could talk about the contents while we craft the magazine. That is a real snapshot of my daydreams; Galen would laugh. EVERYTHING IS ALLOWED: THE CRAFT PROJECT AND MEDIA THEORY EXPERIMENT.

Eventually maybe we’d get the magazine figured out enough that it would be fun to publish it for real. Right now I want to call it Perv Unit. Today and yesterday I am an unstoppable daydreamer, coming up with names for porn projects and planning the tiny urban estate of my future family. (I’d like to keep peacocks in the front yard, because they are regal and completely ridiculous, and know how to kill snakes.)

power jam

costumes. costumes are a productivity tool.

this morning, on my way between breakfast and the bank, i saw a business man running full tilt down the street. a business man like from a children’s book: in a conservative, navy blue suit and tie, with dress shoes, holding an open umbrella upright above his head. running fast, with long steps making his trousers flap. his tie might have been over his shoulder, but that seems like an embellishment that i would add.

i used to want to organize some kind of annual soccer game where everyone would wear power suits. navy vs. brown (i.e., bankers vs. car salesmen), or white shirts vs. blue shirts. (i also like camping in skirts and mary janes, or just generally taking control of my office wear.)

but the connection that made me realize what an excellent, if obtuse, productivity tool was available to me in costumes was remembering, when i saw the business man running, how much better i like doing housework if i’m wearing a tiara and carrying a wine glass. the glass could be full of water or hot tea for all i care, but carrying it around makes dusting or scrubbing a fun time. an event.

i’m sure you understand right away, what it is like to do housework in a tiara and carrying a wine glass (or a martini glass), because i tried explaining all of this at the sara marreiros show tonight and everybody caught on right away. “you should get some of those slippers with the fluff on the front.” and the thing is, i had some and i ran them into the ground doing housework. we are all on the same page here.

i’ve been thinking about running stairs lately anyway, because it seems like a weird and efficient urban exercise option, and i think if i got a washable power suit i could really get into running. you can wear running shoes with a skirt suit, i think. that’s a classic commuter move. nylons would be best but i have to draw the line somewhere (and they look really weird with my furry legs).

a lot of self-employees and telecommuters make a point of getting properly dressed to work at home, because it gets them into productivity mode. i do that too (my key items are a bra and real pants). i’d like to figure out a home office costume that goes one level further, not just into productivity mode but into like, titan of industry mode. what is the word for one of those pillars of society who wield massive business powers yet are admired for their philanthropy and preferably also some type of artistic skill? genius? character? sarah’s imaginary friend? i want to get into like, gomez addams mode. mon sauvage!

contenders for my new work outfit.

  • a clerical cloak of some type
  • a green bookkeeping visor and crisp shirt
  • power suit
  • my old default: the tiara and the wine glass
  • sassy underwear (possibly combined with the clerical cloak?)
  • dresses with hosiery and jewellery. and footwear.
  • cleanroom spacesuit.
  • specialized garment, like a lab coat or a utility belt
  • monochrome outfit of any kind

i think part of what is holding me back from my ultimate productivity-sauvage costume is that all the glamorous titans of yore were dudes, and the lady workers did not have cool 3-piece suits that suggest timeless power. this is an unforeseen feminist battleground.

fuck

I want someone to write one of those comprehensive, cross-disciplinary books about the pure joy of the word fuck. I’ve been getting a lot of satisfaction in the last few days. My favourites, overall:

Now with more catcalls.

About four days ago I decided to make an effort to look more hot, since that’s a pursuit I usually neglect. This basically involved buying a second pair of pants and making a point of brushing my hair.

Results: astounding. Even in the depths of my teenaged depression I was able to appreciate my body as it was, so I’m used to feeling generally happy about my looks. More interesting is the way that every day since my resolution, at least one stranger has complimented or catcalled me.

It feels a little conspicuous, like ““movie stars get their hair cut every day so no one will notice and make fun of them, like at our school”:http://www.kithfan.org/work/transcripts/four/gavpreach.html,” but I can ride it out. I like seeing cute people out and about, so it’s pretty fun to contribute my own cuteness to the neighbourhood. It makes me happy about our neighbourhood that my take on hotness can fly here.

Since I haven’t always been successful at this mission, I’d like to catalogue a few points in case I get off track again later.

  1. Spending money on my hair is always worth it.
  2. Exercising: also worth it.
  3. Clothes that fit. Give the other ones away! I’d rather wear the same awesome skirt three times a week than rotate through a selection of almost-good clothes.
  4. More than one of things. One scarf solves a problem, but two scarves is more fun. Further, both will last longer.
  5. Newer clothes look better because they aren’t worn out.

Generally, my barriers to hotness are laziness and being a cheapskate.