You haven’t killed a darling until you’ve regifted lipstick

I can’t even tell you how bad I wanted this to work for me. Look at it.

Look at the packaging.

Look how it works with other primary colors.

Look how it graces a cup.

But it didn’t look anything like this on me, it didn’t look good at all, so I called my friend Amy. She’s raven-haired and aqua-eyed and blah blah. I was like, ok, that perfect red you keep saying you want? I think I have it. My mother-in-law gave it to me for Mother’s Day. I love her so much and I love that she risked a color, a red, a perfect red called “poppy,” and I love the packaging and how the natural waxy-wax smells but I can’t. I just can’t. It’s everything wrong for me. It’s like when I pierced my nose a few years ago. I wanted that to work so bad. Looking back, I think what I really wanted was for my face to rearrange around some new point, like a new pin on a map, so I would look on the outside the way I was feeling on the inside. I mean, I was in an MFA program at the time. I was writing a lot, I was carrying around one of those recycled Rolling Stone purses with Lenny Kravitz on both sides. That kind of thing.

2008. You see what I’m saying.

Nothing like that happened. I still had my regular face plus a stainless steel dot. Nothing wrong with that, it just wasn’t what I was going for. After a few weeks I thought maybe it would work if I had a ring, not a stud, so to be cautious, instead of wasting money on an actual nose ring, I gave it a test run with a hoop earring. Which, it turns out, was a geometry problem I hadn’t thought about in advance. Nose piercings are at a different angle than ear piercings. I guess. So it went up into skin that wasn’t previously pierced. Handily, I backed out and re-bent the wire. This went on. It must have been a Friday night because I remember thinking, upon waking the next day to the right side of my nose ballooned and pink, and just really bad-looking, I remember thinking ok, I’m gonna need the entire next 48 hours in the bathroom with peroxide to get to not looking like a public health hazard. I did it. Then I gave all my nose jewelry (not the hoop earring) to my sister-in-law Julie whose stud looks perfect and always has. Whatever. I got through it. This is always the right thing to do.

So Amy got the lipstick.

It looks perfect on her like I knew it would.

Then she started talking about the work she needs to submit for an upcoming writing retreat, and what should she do? Should she submit new stuff, or reworked stuff the instructor has already seen and liked? It’s a common dilemma. I knew what she wanted to hear. This is where I got to level the score.

No, I said, you don’t get to submit the same stuff because that’s just so you can get the nice thing of being affirmed. You can’t even submit similar stuff. You have to get risky and submit your fringe, an untested story or voice or whatever, and see what the instructor says, see what the group has to say. See what you get out of that. And you’ll probably end up having to let go of a thing you loved, a whole story or a crafty-craft technique you’re really excited about, probably something you love because you thought it would flatter you or rearrange you or whatever, but it doesn’t, and the more you hang on the pinker and more infected it gets. So get rid of it. Give it up and be better off. Amy seemed unconvinced so I read her cards.

Then she’s like, mmmm hmmmm, still not convinced. I left her sitting there at the Coffee Hag. That was a couple hours ago, and I AM NOT KIDDING YOU she just now sent me this:

Spoilers redacted, obviously, because we’re even. I mean she has my lipstick but all is well. Some people look supercute in extreme altruism, some look good in red.

BONUS: Here’s the Tarot interpretation Amy didn’t ask for but got. Applicable to all writers and wearers of makeup: 1) The World, reversed, means fulfillment turned upside down. Wrecked. A tidy thing undone. I guess that’s me upending Ms. Lipstick’s plan. 2) The Devil, reversed, is willing bondage that’s not doing you any good, any more. Time to let go of your plan and perhaps a rhythm that’s comfortable but kind of limiting. Confining. Limiting in a willing bondage kind of way. Which, in this case, isn’t working. 3) The Emperor, upright, means it’s time to move. Change. Something material, your home, your sense of home. Or, obviously in this case, your lips.

Border Protection won’t let me give you the good stuff

Jun23

The last thing I did before I left South Africa this week was buy all this great food to bring back for everybody. Tasty stuff. Ostrich pâté, springbok pâté, crackers called Salticrax which aren’t exotic but the name is funny even if you’re sophisticated, like me. Supersophisticated. Look how poised I am while the manager at the duty-free shop takes back all my stuff once he realizes I’m American, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection doesn’t allow meat. And the Salticrax aren’t that funny on their own.

This left me torn between sadness over not having any treats to bring to work on Monday, and excitement over looking non-American enough that I got away with buying this at all. If that’s why it happened. I’m pretending it was. While I sort that out, here are some hassle-free souvenirs:

For Claudia, an undead flower.

For Brian who’s been painting and posting the most contagious black lines in search of his Black Madonna, a tavern wall.

For the Black Madonna.

For all my artistically risky friends, and the regular risky ones.

For my friends who worry about size of their ass or anything else.

For my friends who brew their own. This was in the yard of a microbrewery where Scott accidentally ordered a popular lager and the proprietor said, man, you’re at a microbrewery, you’re being insulting. We re-ordered. The head was impassive.

For Jacob who enjoys a roadside skeleton.

For Rachael who is macabre.

For Amy who thinks about decorating her rafters.

For Goth Mom whose shadows are delicate yet terrifying.

For Launa who would wear these quite well.

For Shandy, the only woman in the Western world to wear a baby as stylishly as Africans do. Check this out, with a bath-sized towel. Every mother there does it just like this. I don’t know how the baby doesn’t fall out backwards or why this looks so right.

I don’t know why I’m cursed with hair that won’t turn into soft dreds.

It’s possible that I haven’t surrendered enough, yet, to something. A shampoo-free life. Something.

This is for Scott and Becky who showed me a version of surrender, the version where Scott drives an hour in a traffic jam to a city that’s closed.

To see the lights.

Hello from Gandhi to Jake.

Also for Jake.

And here’s a little take-home for me so I remember how it felt to spread out my pencils in front of a breathtaking tableau and then remember that I can’t actually, like, draw. I can’t draw big things.

I tried anyway, of course, artistic risk and blah blah blaaaah. That was enchanting for only so long. About this long:

I was so blank in the face of that, I went up to the edge of the pool and took a picture of that instead. Like, fine. If the sky’s going to be that way I’ll just see what’s in the pool.

The pool was at Glen Garriff Lion Farm in Harrismith, where I also got to see this. I watched and watched and watched.

To simulate my experience, imagine that it’s chilly but the sun is relentless. Imagine smacking sounds and tearing sounds, longer and more luxurious than noises you can make yourself. But you can try. After a while you maybe can’t help it. There you are in the sun and the stillness, watching this, not a single canned thing for miles and miles. I mean hectares. Just this, and this is everything, and it stuck in my eyes and ears and now I’m giving it to you, and Border Protection can’t really do anything about that.

Ann’s Office Outfit Makeover: Amy Kortuem

Mar1

Amy Kortuem slings hot copy.

Right, she’s also a concert harpist and she’s a rising literary starlet and blahblahblaaah. Everybody knows all that. It’s what she does in her day job writing catalog copy that’s the real juice, the real thing to envy. The thing you can’t do. For a whole lot of hours a week, Amy starts with nothing and turns it into this:

And this:

Amy Kortuem, I got your destiny right here.

Let’s start with some lucky color. I get what you’ve been going for, wearing tasteful black to work, because how else do you class up a cubicle? That’s what you think, yet the actual effect is just that you coordinate with that paper sorter. You can do better than that. If you dress right, you can turn the cubicle itself into a hot leather patio couch. I think that’s the big bold something fortune wants to hand you, and it’s going to require primary colors and a bare midriff and a cigarette.

I know you’re asthmatic. I know they probably don’t allow halfshirts in your workplace, whateverwhatever. Not your problems; your problem is figuring out how formidable champion greatness can overcome you and those plastic gray partition panels.

Get to work, Amy. I’m only coming to your March 16 pub concert at the Emy Frentz Arts Guild if you’re wearing primary colors, smoking a cigarette and dazzling with the unmatched fleeting greatness of hot scripty strength from deep within. Beret would be good too.

Next makeover: Libertarian gun-toting fire-brimstoney writer/editor Chris Fisher. This is Ann’s Office Outfit Makeovers and we are not messing around.

Ann’s Fashion Tarot: The Star

Dec18

Kit White says “style is the by-product of saying what has to be said in the most appropriate way a maker can say it.” Ann’s Fashion Tarot says if you dress like your dreams, they have a much better chance of coming true.

So for instance, if you’re an art professor like Kit but your deep down dream is to be an aerobics instructor (which, to be clear, I’m not suggesting this is his deal, I don’t know), then today you need to lecture in track pants and a sports bra. If you’re an aerobics instructor but you want to teach art, today you should lead class in tweed leggings and a beret.

The Star says today is the day to spread your tiny fragile dreams out in front of you and take a very honest look. Give them some air. Give them some credit. Then get dressed in a way that shows you’re ready for them to be real.