floating heads and fancy ladies and a definite golden glow
Okay...so... um, yeah. Haven't really been big on the bloggity thang lately and can't in all good conscience blame it entirely on gardening, because you know...obviously I haven't spent every minute of the past week gardening or even doing gardening related things such as wandering about garden centres, frowning and glass-eyed with deep concentration, trying to select appropriate plants for appropriate microclimates within my backyard. Nope. And I haven't been up to my eyeballs in work or exciting creative endeavours or anything either.
I've just been capital D Distracted. I sit down to type in an entry, surf for a couple of minutes and find myself drifting elsewhere, vague as a ghost, my brain teeming and tumbling with unorganized minutiae, snagging for a moment or two on one inane distraction, then another. A small sampling of the crap that's been occupying me of late:
Distraction the First : My Floating Head. Ontario takes it's Health care system very seriously and issues ID cards that look like driver's license cards, only green and prettier. Recently, for reasons unknown, I've become quite obssessed with my photo on my health care card. This is because I have just noticed that the photo makes it appear as if my head is floating in mid-air, completely unattached to anything resembling a body, or even a neck. Just my round pumpkin head floating in a white void. And I'm wearing a weird expression on my face, a look that can only be described as smug and smirking. Like I've just swallowed something I shouldn't have, like a canary or something. In fact, I have this almost irrepressible urge to paint a little poof of yellow Tweety Bird feathers tumbling from my lips. If you examine it very carefully, you can see the faint outline of a turtleneck sweater. It's actually my powder blue sweater, one of my favourites, but in the photo, it's completely over-exposed and fades almost seamlessly into the white backdrop. The effect is quite comical and weirdly mesmerizing.
Distraction the Second : The Fancy Lady The Fancy Lady (formerly the Dog Lady because she has two German Sheppards that we frequently see her walking) lives in one of the townhouses directly across the street from us. I'm not sure how old you have to be to qualify as a "Lady", and whatever the required age, I'm sure the Fancy Lady isn't old enough to qualify being like 30 tops, and truthfully, she's not even all that fancy. Most the time, she looks like Avril Levigne's underfed older sister. But I've been becoming more and more intrigued by her.
It started a couple months ago, when a delivery guy dropped off an absolutely enormous, stunningly expensive floral arrangement featuring some of the most spectacular orchid blooms I've ever seen with me because the Fancy Lady (the intended recipient) was not home when he tried to deliver it. It sat on my kitchen table all afternoon, bundled extravagantly in cellophane and tissue and complicated raffia ties, the gift card clearly, oh-so-temptingly visible but secured beneath so many layers of packaging, that I didn't dare attempt to peek. This is precisely the kind of thing that drives me batty. I wanted desperately to know who that arrangement was from and I concocted many an elaborate tale involving affairs with rich, very married, jet-setting executives who looked like Pierce Brosnan and such. The reality, of course, was significantly less intriguing. They were from her mom, she told me when she arrived on my doorstep to pick them up. For her birthday.
After that, I started paying closer attention to her comings and goings. She likes flowers a lot, that much is obvious. She spends a good deal of time tending to the front of her house, filling the great big black urns with seasonal delights. She has two buddhas hidden amongst the foliage and a sophisticated black bistro set on her front porch. her door decor is always tasteful and shifts with the weather. I became convince that she was a florist, or maybe her mother owned a flower shop. But a couple days before Mother's Day, I was chatting to her next door neighbour and fond out that in fact she owns a dress shop, a very shi-shi dress shop where a little belt, "one of those skinny little belts that's not even leather" costs over $200. This is where she became Fancy.
So that Saturday morning, I'm standing in the front window, all sleep-creased, sipping coffee through my unbrushed and still fuzzy teeth while watching rain run down the glass, and she steps out the front door onto her doorstep arrayed spectacularly in white and pink, looking like she ought to be in an ad for Channel or maxi-pads with wings or something. She looked positively airbrushed and immaculate and little white blossoms where shaking from the tree in her front yard. Her ensemble consisted of a long white trench coat and long pink scarf over a white top and pink slacks which matched the scarf EXACTLY. She also held a blush pink umbrella and a pink dotted totebag out of which sprouted real, dewy, perfectly pink tulips. Something like this, only you know, 3-dimensional and stuff.
Distraction the Third : My Newly Acquired Tan Somehow, quite unexpectedly, I got a tan. A REAL tan. I'm absolutely golden people! I could do a Bain de Soliel ad. It's utterly astounding. It's amazing. It's the first time ever. Nevermind that Jack insists on saying stuff like "Um, well, you're more beige than tan, honey" or "well, you've got a little colour"... to my mind I'm astonishingly BRONZED and this is totally unprecedented. I'm naturally a very white girl, a deathly white girl and I totally suck at applying self-tanners despite careful exfoliation and application and much reading of instructions. The closest I've ever come to that much sought after baked potato look was a couple summers ago when my arm freckles suddenly, spontaneously multiplied and merged leaving a patch about four inches long that was utterly sunkissed.
But somehow, through the course of recent days, I've acquired a new hue, a golden glow. I've never ever been tanned to this degree before and I've become obsessed with finding the right clothing, make-up, hairstyle, jewelry and moisturizers to enhance my new skin tone. I practically had an anxiety attack the other day when getting out of the shower, I thought the skin on my right forearm and all it's succulent golden-ness was peeling off. You cannot imagine my relief when I realized it was just bits of towel fluff rubbing off as I was drying myself. I'm totally enamoured of my tan. And it is a tan, goddammit. No matter what Jack says.
And so on.... The distractions are many and they are frequent. Surely you can see why I've been a little delinquent with the updates now. Surely you can forgive me. Right?
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