Just you wait there in the dark.

[FYI, if you wanna, just mosey on down and click play on that jam before you read.]

[Theory bomber + Wildfox Couture t-shirt + AG Legging jean + Jeffrey Cambell booties + Low Luv x Erin Wasson chain and bone cross earrings. Stalked this t-shirt for months and it was worth it.]

From my Keel’s Simple Diary entry for Feb 26, 2012:

Your day was ( ) history  ( ) well exposed  (X) shallow.

Explain why: hungover (prrrrt), on-call shift a no-go, rejuvenating sunny walk thru Fan to 8 1/2 for sammy, fat nap, saw cats in sunshine.

Someone you miss: [I crossed out the ‘-one’ and wrote ‘-where’] The Keys (of ’88, not ’12)

Most people are: too quick to blame

The key to a convincing answer is never to include this dumb word: “obviously.”

Compare your life with others’: (X) you don’t like comparisons ( ) you can live with it  ( ) yours is better  ( ) theirs is definitely better  ( ) you are not cosmopolitan enough to answer that.

This morning I remembered my answer to that last question in a flash. Just as I was going through the motions of busily sipping coffee, reading an article about new Google web history privacy changes, and about to click “Delete All Web History,” I was stunned at the entire first page of my inputted image searches: Blake Lively, times, like 3,000.

From someone so quick to avoid the 4 seconds it would take to look inside and answer the above question with a bit more raw honesty [although I note to myself my good fortune on many levels, numerous times a day], I had certainly spent enough of my own glorious free time clicking from photo to photo gauging relative legginess, arm circumference, turgidity of upper boobage, and, regrettably, how the poor girl looked naked. [Guess there was a scandal I missed.]

It was like I’d fallen into a well.

[Scenes from last week: celebrating a night of work in the wine cafe with a hard-earned Jever in the kitchen, listening to Exile on Main Street.]

I know where the well-peering turned into well-diving, though. That glorious day we had on Friday? I wanted to spend it on a blanket in Scuffletown Park, reading something. I stood dumbly at my bedside table looking for something that didn’t require a power cord, and grabbed the most recent ELLE.

I still subscribe to a few of these tomes—BAZAAR and ELLE, because I liked their collage-y pages better than VOGUE—but I haven’t looked through one in over two years. I’m being serious.

Years. I have to tear them out of their plastic so they look better stacked on the shelves.

[Keith and Anita, just being cool.]

And I quit anything to do with celebrity gossip years ago, too—it was like I had maxed out my allotted intake for the consumption of useless crap in a lifespan, with large chunks devoted to the Olsen twins. At times I have felt out of the loop, but other times [with regards to my sliver of television intake—Top Gear on BBC], quite smugly superior. But this article about Blake swallowed me whole. The hottest girl on the planet? It was like I took that word as gospel, but ever a skeptic of religion [the church of fashion notwithstanding], had to back up this claim in some self-fulfilling prophecy of superficiality.

And when you rope this airbrushed photo binge together with a curious, highly observant 31-yr-old noticing abrupt changes in her appearance in harsh winter morning light…. well, I probably should have been tossed into surveillance in a padded room somewhere.

It’d been a long time since I took that particular drug. I realized there was a reason I’d quit that s**t cold turkey.

My rejection of fashion magazines—printed, digital, and otherwise—has felt negligent at times, as an increasingly slack ‘journalist’ of the fashion medium. But magazines are simply counterproductive to my cause. Maybe some digest this stuff well, but for me, it blocked out my ability to process what my own style was. And why. Whereas some get energized and excited, getting from cover to cover literally drains me.

Once I figured that out, things fell into place. I’m not placing blame, but when I stopped with dog-earing pages of glossies, I was happier, less jealous, less obsessed with shopping and with what I didn’t have… even the fact I’d spent 3 painful years with an eating disorder seemed incomprehensible. [As opposed to, I don’t know, viewing it as a misguided, but A-for-effort, means to an end? Yikes!]

All my interests expanded. I was finally comfortable in my own skin. A little late to the game, I started cultivating a little nest for myself that was 100% from me. I found that music influenced my style more than fashion; a state of mind determined how I wanted to dress. Inside v. outside. Oddly enough, my boyfriend at the time shined a big huge spotlight on this shift. At least, I see our sitting around listening to vinyl records—and his patiently telling me the story behind every album, who produced it, who collaborated, who inspired who, the enduring presence of the Delta blues, listening for certain notes or echoes of other melodies, the legends of the artists—as a pivotal point. He taught me to value other things, and let those things shape and guide me.

I’m not saying those who read these glorious things are all like me. I don’t know how to explain it—it’s like how I have to turn the music down when I park a car. My focus is painfully tight, but nearly impossible to train. Like I have a tiny porthole on the world and thus have to choose my view carefully.

It’s taken since around 2005 [2004 being a peak of the sickness] to scrape off all the barnacles of years prior: dressing myself to look like someone else [someone taller, someone wealthier, someone thinner]; a closet full of seriously disjointed, overpriced designer items I felt I needed, and acquired either through tedious saving or simply because they were on sale; and, creepy, hoarder-style glossy pages stashed everywhere, falling out of books, folders, drawers, plastic bags. I remember my bedside table drawer jamming and reaching under to pull out a little wad of carefully clipped images of beaded Fendi baguettes. [I’m putting a serious expiration date on myself here.]

What the hell was I going to do with all those scissored out threats to my sanity? Scary.

It was like, if I could just get them all in one place, glued in one bound book, I’d have the puzzle solved. All the loose ends of what I coveted between two covers. And I had no earthly idea who I was.

[I could reference Keith’s autobiography in every post, but refrain. However, reading that he would pick up his old lady’s clothes from the floor and wear them hit a nerve with me. Boom, you’re an icon.]

Delicious irony and hypocrisy, these sentiments in this context. I think that’s what I like most about this blog.

Big grin.

-C.