A second entry for today, and where the other one was serious and sarcastic, this one is all fluff and makeup. I guess I like to feed you all a balanced diet.
Oh, I forgot to share with you earlier: when Erik and Huy and I were heading out to dinner on Saturday, the moon looked incredible. Big and round and low. I took pictures out the car window as best I could.
Also, by the way, I have a new coat. Bought it yesterday at Crossroads for something like one-quarter of the original full price. I don’t know what it is with me and coats, but this is the third one in seven months. I can’t seem to keep away from them. In fact, I’ve just looked at the journal entries of my previous coat purchases, and it turns out I’ve bought these coats almost exactly three months apart: 27 Oct, 23 Jan, 26 Apr. Scary. And of course it’s no longer coat season, so I didn’t set out to buy a coat. I tried on skirts and pants and tanks and strapless dresses, but the coat rack was calling me. When I saw this one I had to try it on, and once I put it on and felt its wonderful cozy weight and saw how it looked in the mirror, I felt like I’d found an old friend. Sounds a little psycho, like Miriam in one of my favorite books, Bee Season, who obsessively prowled stores and homes in search of objects she felt she needed to create her perfect world. But if you’ve ever had that feeling when buying anything, you know what I’m talking about, and you know it means you’ve got something good.
So I bought the coat thinking I wouldn’t get a chance to wear it until fall, probably late fall, but this morning it was so chilly and I was so tired I just wanted to wrap a blanket around me on my way to campus. So I put on this coat. It’s knee-length black velvet, lined inside, with a wide collar and very long sleeves and fuzzy buttons, and putting it on feels exactly like putting a blanket around myself. I wore it all morning and received many compliments, and it kept me warm and comfortable and happy. So I’m completely in love with it and have no regrets about buying a long velvet coat in springtime.
I am so tired of taking photos (you’ll see why in a moment), so I just snapped some quick ones of me in the coat. Click for enlargements. In the first photo you’ll see I have no feet, and in the second I have no hands. Disappearing appendages! I massively brightened the pics so you can see the detailing better.
Anyway, enough about the coat.
Today, since it was chilly, my cohort had lunch together in the grad lounge instead of outside on the patio like we normally do. After a while people came in and started unloading boxes and boxes of books that someone wanted to give away. There were at least nine of us there, and if you don’t already know, the only people who become history Ph.D. students are people who love books so much they’d rather… well, I don’t know what, but people who really, really love books. When we saw them bringing in all these loads of free books we all went nuts. Like kids in candy stores, absolutely. Jason, the most… shall we say, accomplished… book collector among us, actually got so many books that he had to bring his car over to pick up the boxful of them. I was relatively modest about my selections: John Robbins’s The Food Revolution (yay!!!! I’d wanted to read it), Kenneth Stampp’s Era of Reconstruction (we’ll need it to study for our exams in September), a totally adorable children’s schoolbook from 1929, and a huuuge heavy tome (as big around as any coffee-table book, and weighing at least a few pounds) called Four Fabulous Faces.
As it turns out, Four Fabulous Faces is about the changing “looks” of Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, and Marlene Dietrich.
I got home this evening, after a fried-fish burger at Fuddrucker’s with Jason, and started leafing through this book, and I got so into the photos of Garbo that I just had to try and adapt her makeup for my own face. [photo links broken]
Can you believe those are her natural eyelashes?!
So I came up with the makeup, and it looked awesome. Then I tried to take pictures. I was just too tired to fiddle around with lighting and cleaning up my apartment and everything. So I wound up with a whole bunch of really lousy pictures, and then these, which are okay:
I came back to my computer and tied up my hair and got started putting the pictures up. while I had them uploading I thought I’d just take a few more shots. Go figure; these ones turned out uniformly better than the others, just in terms of clarity in how the makeup showed up. Unfortunately, none of these really show the makeup; I guess you just have to really cake it on for it to show up on camera.
Like my entrance-into-Narnia closet in the background? ;b
It’s not Garbo’s face by far, but I’m fond of it, and I had fun doing the makeup and the sort of mental process of getting into character for these photos. Oy, I’ve been “watching” (no TV, so I follow online) too much Top Model.
And we’ll finish with a few of me with my normal expressions, and my glasses!
Thank you. 🙂
[This post was imported on 4/10/14 from my old blog at satsumabug.livejournal.com.]
satsumabug.com | Lisa Hsia 