March 21, 2015, Part I.

12 something to 1 am: Coming home from SNP’s, fuck this ice pit snow weather. I should have stayed in LA longer. I needed to run away. This week has been garbage, i feel like garbage. the only good garbage is the eau de toilette from comme des garcons and I bought that this week from a friend in paris just as a cosmic joke for myself. I can’t wait to smell it. I hope it makes me flinch. All the things i love do. Case in point: I just bought 1996 by byredo, it smells like a leather lipstick case, or a rude and wise teen girl, the kind of girl who isn’t a girl at all. The calculating kind. It’s the smell of someone who can manipulate girlhood against you to get herself off. The imaginary monster girl, the best rereading of Nabokov.  A girl who can never be caught.  I love it a lot, it’s not something i would expect myself to like: the juniper berry opener makes me twitch, but then inexplicably I am seduced. i think it would be interesting on SNP but I doubt she’d ever try it. In my free time I think about the perfumes my friends wear, this is the perfect time since my phone is dead. Durga wears Marni and I didn’t expect that, but I learned it tonight. She leaned in and told me to smell her neck because I was so surprised. This is basically better than making out, IMO. Smelling a friend is like a precious secret: even better when the smell has such private sillage and you really do basically have to embrace to be able to taste the smell. Isn’t it delightful?

The entire room smelled like paperback books and wine and a perfume with powdery bloom. Powder is such an interesting smell, it’s very visual. It’s like a grey fog in your nose and behind your eyes! Here is a cool thing I read about fog the other night in California: Grey is not a color but a surface, fog is boring and harnesses grey to repeat itself chemically. Boredom is a rhythm too, though overused and tired of being so available. Color and boredom and chemicals — this is weather theory but I think of it in perfume, too. Roses smell pink, or a dark red. The powder in the room smelled grey and kind of shiny. Perfume is a friendly hallucinogen. I couldn’t figure out who smelled like powder, in that room, since it wasn’t Durga, but someone else was wearing Dries Van Noten for frederic malle. It’s one of my favorite smells. It doesn’t change depending on who wears it, so it is not as romantic as I’d like, but the uniform of this particular fragrance is so lovely you forgive it for it’s utter modernity.

Oh look, the trains arrived.

1:15 I spend the entire train ride staring at my Rick Owens jeans and wondering why other designers can’t be so thoughtful. These jeans are too big for me even though I bought them in my normal size. I can’t even complain about them because the thought of saying, “ew, my rick owens jeans are too big for me” sounds totally repulsive since the average Rick Owens wearer is like a 9 foot tall alien who weighs like 5 pounds. old, alienated wealth. Not me. regardless of them being a bit too baggy, the way they are cut on the thigh is so intuitive and thoughtful. most if not all other jeans you buy are cut in like a straight(ish) tube, you know? your legs just go in like walking sausages. the average ill fitting pair of jeans dimples on you or flattens you out and the jeans end up wearing you rather than the other way around. not so with these. even though they are oversized, the way the thigh section is cut makes it so the fabric is intuitive to your leg movement, particularly when you are sitting down. i don’t know how to describe it other than he predicted the fall of the fabric on your leg, and made it part of the design rather than a consequence of it. that is good design.

sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep

9:30 i am awake and i want to die.

11:30 nope, still want to die. bury me right here.

1:15 fine, god. i’m up. my breakfast is 2 chocolates from Sweets Candies that I brought back from LA this week, an aspirin and garlic bread and 2 bottles of water. i really want dimsum and old school chinese buffet but the trek to chinatown might as well be ten thousand miles. i’m not leaving the house, no fucking way. i am tired of other people and most especially myself. i just want to smoke a lot of weed and read about beauty in my lingerie and snuggle my cat, and not talk to anyone at all. i love my friends and going out but i think i have been so desperate to avoid the void that winter drags along at night that i have overextended myself the past 2 weeks and now i just want to be alone, for a long, long time. i miss my apartment in LA already for this reason. i am alone in my room here, but i live for the moments when i’m alone in a city, or at least in an apartment by myself. this happens so rarely for me. i had a few days of it in LA and before that, a week of it in italy. (I love how luxurious my life sounds in this! I’m sorry, it’s really not that dramatic most of the time). Traveling alone is my favorite thing in the world, though. You are your only companion and everything feels more intentional and slower. More luxurious, even. Walking around in complete silence, naked. Nobody to watch, nobody to drop by. nothing. You and your own singular experience, no one to build off of it or inform it in any way. it’s delicious. i wish i had that so much more. I don’t want to see anyone at all today, I don’t want to leave my room. I wonder if I can survive on half a bottle of water and a box of chocolates for the next day and a half without having to poop. Probably not.

until the next thing: I tidy up my room a little but it doesn’t need much, since I’m a KonMari convert. I unpack what was left of my LA trip and put my latest perfume samples in their acrylic storage shrine. i put six away, from the scent bar. One of them is a serge lutens, the most leathery one the brand has to offer. It looks like holy water next to all of the slightly hued tiny vials of everything else. I like that i picked out the most leathery smell out of the serge lutens collection out of instinct. it is coincidentally the only one I like.

2:30 I interview a really talented makeup artist for work and also discover that burger king is going to release a japan only fragrance. email it to my coworkers. i must have it. i ask my friend in tokyo to buy it for me when it comes out. burger king perfume and garbage perfume — you probably think i smell disgusting. good! don’t even breathe in my direction. all this air and space is mine.

2:45  God, I still have a headache. When I found out that the presence of artificial sandalwood — sandalore — in the air helps heal skin abrasions 30 percent faster on humans I nearly cried. And the fact musk was invented accidentally during experimentations with TNT, I was so thrilled when I found out that I told strangers in the street. All these strange and smelly molecules are like magic to me. Perfume is my favorite drug.

3:30  Last night before bed i told the internet dot com that i would buy bras for queer and trans children using my store credit on this site and i woke up to endless emails from queer babies in need, so i spend half an hour answering emails and buying bras for strangers.  i realize a lot of them could be lying just to get free bras, but i don’t really mind. my purchase history for the site is pages long by now of me ordering lingerie for other people. this company probably didn’t bargain that someone would somehow accumulate more than five thousand dollars worth of store credit through referrals and commission — i mean, it is totally absurd even to me. i figure me taking advantage of their store credit promotions for the greater good is an impact of capitalism i can totally support. for every bra i buy, two other people buy a bra through me so i will probably never run out of lingerie or people to give it to. i like that at any given party with my friends (including you, ARS!) i can be sure that someone’s boobs are being cradled by lingerie i bought. it makes me feel smug and proud to be able to take care of people i love.

4:30 i text meredith about finding a place to live together. she texts back in two seconds — she’s the most reliable texter i know. i would prefer to live alone (see above) but i am not ready, not rich, and we both need to find a place to live. i have fantasies about not having to walk a mile to get to the train on a regular basis. these are my wet dreams. convenient public transportation. what is it that hilton als said? what really gets women off is cheap rent. he’s right. that being said, i have no fucking clue how to move — the logistics of it. the money isn’t that concerning to me, it’s everything else. not even the furniture. i’m more than happy to sleep on a naked mattress or on a pile of my own clothes as long as i have a bathtub and i’m not a mile from the subway. i think about how much time i waste walking to and from the train every day. twenty minutes each way. we spend hours on trains — a week of waiting is a full nights sleep. I hate the math of that. Every time I’m on the L now I think, I could be sleeping right now. But actually I never sleep more than six hours no matter how hard i try. i can’t ever convince my body I’m not late for something. The more sleep I get, the harsher my nightmares. on my sleep app on my phone I rate my sleep after every night as it relates to the hours I’ve gotten, and it’s a joke. Anything more than six hours and i often wake up screaming.

When I sleep with Ashley I don’t have nightmares, but she sometimes does.  We love each other deeply so she doesn’t mind, but I do. I still don’t like the emotional sacrifice the kind of intimacy entails. I don’t want to transfer my fears to someone else.

4:45 I finally decide to wash my face and be a person. By being a person, I mean I put on pants. This is not even real progress because my house is so cold that if I did not I would probably pee out icicles. What a cool visual — that would really give my old nickname of Ice Princess real value. Anyway, here is my skincare process for mornings:

Even if I am drunk/tired/stoned/crying I always take care of my skin. Actually, I do so to a really horrific extent. When I got alcohol poisoning in college I asked the hospital nurses for a wet wipe so I could remove my makeup before I threw up. I have my priorities.

5: I made dumplings, literally the only thing I know how to cook. I want to date professional chefs if only so they can teach me how to cook and then fuck me when I manage not to burn water. It would be cool to fuck someone who has an actual island counter-top in this city. Do you know anyone with square footage enough for a granite kitchen island in New York City? Even the old moneybags I know aren’t arrogant enough for that, and I want to fuck the arrogance out of a guy as my contribution to the feminist agenda.

530: I get a message from a man who is trying to collect me — and I’ve let him try for the novelty, which is embarrassing on my part but *Selena Gomez voice* the heart wants want it wants. I ignore it and spend the next two minutes staring at a picture of Rihanna on my wall and meditatively apply a dozen layers of chapstick, which is not by coincidence called Durga. It is my good luck charm.

From then until 7:45, I have no idea how I spend my time. I think it is mostly spent on writing this down and also on tumblr. I have watched this vine like ten times in a row and it’s still funny. I feel like I’ve been watching it for an hour straight. Just consider 8-9 PM Potato Terror Prime Time.

9:14 I am convinced my room smells like death because of the evil squirrels that live in the ceiling (I live in an attic) so I light some sage and walk around my room and think about what I want out of next week. I light sage every sunday and take a bath. It’s my lazy but sincere moment of religion. I don’t pray to anyone but my own dreams though. This is enough for me.

9:18 I’m painting my nails and what do you know, the polish is called Solstice. We’re having a solstice right now and it’s dragging me to hell. I am a believer in astrology to the nth degree. I love science but not as much as I love astromama.

9:24 It smudged. God has abandoned her people and the stars have turned against us. We are alone. We will perish and die.

9:30 Fixed it! Started from the bottom and now we are middle class and taxes are stressful as hell.

I have nothing else to do because I refuse to work or socialize today and reading about beauty is a bit too much like courting work, so instead I will play a game. Today it is their angelical understanding. I really like Porpentine’s games, someone introduced me to them the other week and I have been visiting them since. I think we are a lot alike actually. I contemplate emailing her but to be honest I am exhausted by people so instead just think about her intensely and shoot her rays of light via my heart. The universe is strange enough that the people I really like and think about often tend to float into my world at one point or another. I have no doubt it will happen with her, too.

11:01 Oh, I’m sad. She really is so much like me. How sad for both of us. the angelfucker and the sacrifice of faces. Angels are monsters too.

11:11 It ended in disaster. I didn’t expect anything less. How comforting though.  I play three more games on the site and eat the rest of that box of chocolate.

11:28 i am going to find some wine and take a bath and watch a terrible horror movie. goodnight, my little eye. goodnighhhht.