Genie Jeggings!

Oh, yeah! I saw an ad for these on t.v.

Ever wonder if those "As Seen on TV" products for sale at the local drugstore are worth the money? Me, too! I've been wearing a lot of leggings and jegging-type pants lately because I'm more muscular then ever, which means additional mass on a petite frame like mine, that's still rather recent for me (read: MMA training and other physical arts). 

Sounds miraculous and life-changing at $12.99 a pair!

It also means most rough, stiff jeans are so chafing to me as to be almost unbearable, and they really haven't ever been flattering on a woman. They're designed for a man's frame. I know I've always looked better in dresses and skirts, and that's a lot for an active former tomboy like me to admit, but it's the truth. I have a fully mature woman's body. So, what else is there to wear?

They're actually double layered leggings:grey tights over spandex.

Enter a t.v. ad for a certain type of leggings that look like jeans (called "jeggings"), but are way more comfortable than the tight fit of a denim waistband that also presses a large metal button deep into your body, leaving grooves all over your body, especially when you sit in them for long periods of time. Aha! Genie Jeggings! I saw the ad, and went online to investigate. Uh oh. 

Oh...that's rather low.

I found users complaining about shady "scammy" type of behavior, with bad reviews, and/or poor customer service, no product returns, or not answering product-related emails and phone calls. Not a good sign in business, and besides that, if it's a bad deal, I don't want three pairs of the same shoddy product! So when I saw them on sale locally at a drugstore chain packaged as a single pair, I figured I'd try them out. They'd either work or not, just like any other pair of leggings or tights at a similar price. 

Ugh: the dreaded plumber's crack. That's not good...

And they do, if you like really low-waisted, tight leggings. In other words, you gotta have the body for it. They are not "miracle slimmers" as advertised on t.v., but for the average gal running around town doing errands, they're just fine: just don't wear them like ordinary jeans, with a short t-shirt. Treat them like a double-layered pair of leggings with a long shirt, and you're done! Because the inner layer looks like grey flannel, I'd also wear them in the Fall and Winter with boots and a long sweater, not in the damp heat of Spring and Summer.

...and you have to be in good shape to pull them off as replacement jeans.

Good luck, gals! It's a jungle out there, so give yourself a break today during your daily fight for truth, justice, and the American way. 

Wear something comfortable! You totally deserve it.

Definitely not like the box or on t.v.: no high slimming indigo waistband.

Ah! Much better when worn with a longer shirt.

Yep, better with coverage. I won't be followed around town!

Meltdown!

As the countdown to warmer weather continues (thus reenacting an ancient seasonal arc throughout human history), we begin to see the snow and ice finally recede, until one bright sunny day when the last bit of it is finally gone. "MELT, MELT, MELT!" Bye-bye snow and ice. See you next year.

Canadian Geese and Large Tree.

The annual snow-melt has officially begun: it's over 40 degrees!

Love is in the Air

Springtime has long been the traditional time for romance, a time when a young man's fancy turns to love. It's no different for me, except in lieu of an actual man, I bought this heavily discounted Valentine's Day toy from a local drug store chain. Sigh! I love his accent ;) Enjoy the warmer weather today, New Yorkers. It is so on for Spring!

What the...what the heck is that?!

Is that what I think it is?

Oh, yeah! It's the Pepe doll I bought on sale at the drug store. Weird...it's staring right at me. Yeesh. That's kind of jarring, first thing in the morning.

http://www.nonstick.com/sounds/Pepe_Le_Pew/ltlp_001.mp3

Dr. Martin's Mix

Much like my Mom's poor attempts at her half-baked feminism and her angered infrequent bouts of cooking that she rebelled against when I was growing up, (preferring instead to replace them with compulsive cleaning chores like laundry and washing dishes), her recipes also reflect her deluded, fractured sense of self that is so inherent with her disorders and her generation.

Much as I find her "I Hate to Cookbook" a sometimes silly relic of yore that is more akin in tone to old Russian satellites falling out of the sky than it is to reality, I found a family gem among her favorite recipes, as evidenced by the splattered pages of this well-worn recipe for "Dr. Martin's Mix."

Recipe for "Dr. Martin's Mix" from the " 'I Hate to Cook' Book".

My mom was drawn to it because she likes to pretend that she is a doctor (giving herself the name "Dr. Diane" when we were kids, like a commercial advertising a fake character called "Dr. Mom", made for selling cough syrup), given her science background and the many, many hours she is forced to consider her own challenging illnesses that were fed by a constant, steady pop culture diet of t.v. shows about similarly fake doctors popular in her time like "Dr. Kildare", because she also has open crushes on "out" actors like Richard Chamberlain, also a weird reflection of the warped sensibilities of her youth.

It's not real, but the food I make from the collected shards of her self that I put together on my own certainly are, such are the strengths that a "Master of the Arts" has always had, no matter who we are with, or where we are, out there in the larger world.

Hey, what's cookin'? Oh! Yum!!

Blessings and encouragements to you this week as you fight your many, many battles. That's the fun of life on our planet! Enjoy your time here, my peoples, because it goes by so, so fast.

Stick to your ribs food: perfectly filling on a cold, wet winters' day.

Countdown to Spring!

That's A LOT of snow, dude!

Well, folks, it's that time of year when we become totally fucking sick of the snow, like, so over it, you want to punch someone in the face just for not shoveling, like any decent human being would. Yeah, it gets that bad here sometimes. 

That'll melt sometime in April, maybe. Yay...

Luckily for us, we live in the most bitchin' place on earth that is New York, New York City, and the greater tri-state area (including Canada and New Orleans as my territories:), a place so in balance with nature that each season is a beautifully perfect and brilliant three months long*, so just when you want to die from sweat during the hottest, most doggiest days of August, the month of September rolls in like the coolest, sweetest breeze that's ever kissed your face.

 

Just ask any remaining member of the 70s group Earth, Wind, and Fire. They wrote the song about it!

Spring Countdown

(Click on me above)

*http://www.nps.gov/gate/planyourvisit/weather.htm

Turkey Neck

Love the light on this "selfie"....OMG, I have a turkey neck!!

A few weeks ago I was watching my typical Sunday morning program, when I suddenly found myself adrift in that desert of afternoon programming that is daytime network t.v. Oh. That sucks. No "Kung Fu" theater, no monster movies, not even a funny workout program that I can mock, or maybe roll out my mat and follow along with. Like, nothing but ads. 

Oh, well. It was kinda funny. Rght after this fundamentalist preacher sales guy (supposedly, like, wayyyy holy and stuff), was a paid advertisement for neck cream. Yep, you read that right: in New York, in 2015, some weirdo guy pretending to read the bible goes first onstage, and then it's "Fix your neck with expensive snake oil, you silly old hag" time. Huh. Kinda jarring, you know? Or, was it?

It seemed strangely analogous to my explorations as a female artist who uses themes about the self through a series of ongoing self-portraits. Oh! Uh oh. I think I have it. I think I caught "aging", maybe in some public place like the library, because I'm 45! Maybe I need a surgical face mask to protect me out in public, like an Asian fearing SARS would, or I need to coat myself in way more hand sanitizer. I don't know. Maybe t.v. will help me!

But, no. That cream just for your fucking saggy neck costs an arm and a leg. I mean, that's totally why you work so hard all week, right? To buy some fucking neck cream that'll make an on-air doctor rich! Oh, wait....no, that won't work. I'll be broke and still 45, and he'll be totally rich, with or without the snake oil neck cream that enacts a miracle cure for all life on this planet earth that we live on.

It was eerily similar to the slick carnival barker of a "Suthin" preacher who came before him in the Sunday programming line up. So, put that in your pipe and smoke it, dear reader, but first, send me a check for $45 made out to....at the following address....

It's cool. If "AMTM" has taught me anything, it's that you have to use your muscles when you pose. Done! Buh-bye turkey neck!

I practiced stretching my "Gobbler" from both angles, just in case a photographer catches me out in public unaware! Wait, that seems crazy...who cares?! I can't live my life like some out-of-it celebrity. No one will come up to me on the street from just the side, or underneath my neck. I think I'll go back to my regularly scheduled programming. Whew! The crisis is now officially over.

Come on and excel, human! Get with it!! I don't want to be alone anymore, because no man is an island.

Thin Wispy Clouds in Wintertime Sky

High thin clouds meet thick fluffy clouds in the clear blue sky.

Wispy clouds, snow, and sun in wintertime(Pearl River-February 2015).

Nut Job!

What the...?!

Our town undertakers (Bluebell the Bulldog and Highway the Golden Retriever's dad and granddad) own several properties around town, the most dominating one being the large old brown and yellow house that plays host to families in their time of grief, with one spectacular oak tree growing resplendent in the front lawn, a visual symbol of our area's shared genetic history.

Naturally, it also plays host to an enormous variety of wildlife, including one very large bird of prey that is the young Peregrine Falcon, a murder of loud noisy crows, as well as many other types of birds, and the fattest, happiest bunch of squirrels I have ever seen. I think this place is "Heaven" for them, their only foes the birds flying around the treetop, but food scarcity is wholly unknown as a factor in their lives.

Ohh...the squirrel that just ran away unearthed his stash. Nice!

As a result, I spied with my eye one chubby little squirrel take advantage of last week's brief afternoon thaw to dig out his trench of buried nuts that ran in a neat orderly row in the soil between the sidewalk edge and the line of snow that's shoveled. That critter actually knows where the soft dirt demarcation line is in that tiny zone, and plans for it way in advance. Genius! 

$ucking brilliant, dude. Look at all these nuts!

Wintertime fatness in an animal is a sign that it has planned well for scarcity, not a small feat in this fiercely cold clime that we live in, and something amateur housewives of yore learned the long hard way, hence the abundance of glass Mason jars and canning artifacts known to this part of the country. Squirrel is winning at the "Game of Life", and I think it knows. I love you, fat bastard!

"Fat Bastard" is smarter than some people I know. Kudos, squirrel friend!

Ash Wednesday

It's all uphill from here.

Last week, we celebrated Ash Wednesday on a beautifully sunny and bright winters' day. My life has been rather simple lately, and so, in the easiest, simplest way known to man, I actually walked (yes, I walk, for exercise and sometimes through economic necessity. I know, so weird!) my way to church for ashes, which was a journey in of itself, like so many of my daily walks are. See you soon, neighbor.

Blue glass garden ornament.

House with wrought iron ornament.

Hanging icicles, a bare shrub, and one large beige house.

Old wooden fence.

Yellow shed with ladder.

White houses on a snowy hill.

Old rusty garden fountain and spruces.

Me, Ash Wednesday* 2015.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash_Wednesday

“Quiching!”

The perfect hot, bubbly, cracking crust of a quiche.

The grocery store had an amazing special on eggs last week: a full 18 pack with no broken eggs for $1.88 that I couldn't pass up. Would you? Could any halfway decent chef with half a brain walk away from a bargain like that, right in the middle of a really harsh winter? No, and  "%uck no!" So, I did what any respectable artist would do, by brainstorming meal ideas, first at my mom's house with her old feminist cookbook about hating cooking, which she urged on me along with her old taped-together-as-a-binding green cookbook with horribly outdated ideas. Of course, I already knew exactly what newspaper clipping I was looking for in her recipe box, because I remembered it as the essence of simplicity in a recipe, and here it is:

A humble, simply perfect quiche recipe.

Since my days currently revolve around simple as a life concept, I knew right away that this recipe was the basic standby I recalled from my childhood, because it seems like something my grandfather would make. Norman people are not typically fussy, overblown drama queens, nor are our shared recipes.

I gilded the lily (just like you would with any basic template) by adding mushrooms, onions, and good cheddar cheese, poured into an also-simple, easy pie crust from a box that just needed water added to it, with as few ingredients as you can make a pre-made, powdered concoction to be.

The perfectly flaky pie crust that crumbles into layers....from a box!

The result was perfection, and it occurred to me as I sat, stood, bent over, and alternately stooped achingly over a stainless steel bowl of egg whites, that I had just made my quiche into a sport, so athletic are cooking exertions without the messy clutter of stupid gadgets that don't ever work as well as one healthy, talented human being. 
Behold, human! I have made "Quiching" into a sport, and it is good.

I ate three pieces of quiche after it came out of the oven.

The Perfect Studio

Ever since I was a child, I wanted to live as any artist would, either in some old Parisian attic atelier, or a big city loft, or a large one room studio. In my mind, it simplifies life down to the necessary essentials (with way less cleaning involved), plus there's plenty of Romantic tall windows pouring in natural light, which define my lifelong scholarship: the study of light and optics within the natural world as it relates to the human condition. 

But, time and money conspired greatly against me: I either had a family member to take care of, or I couldn't afford it on my salary, or some man and/or a college friend wanted to muscle in on my living situation, such is my ability to properly house myself on less.

And so, many, many years after I originally conceived of it, I finally realized my lifelong dream of "aloneness" and oneness in one simply beautiful, humble studio space that I can share with you all. I can finally say with a sigh of relief that I spent my mid-years according to my ideals of comfort, style, and simplicity, and that I willingly left my "Bachelorette" years behind me just as I foresaw and designed them to be; on my terms and on my home turf. I can have the luxury of saying to my loved ones, at the end of all my years here on earth, that I ended my bachelorhood as splendidly as I entered it: perfectly beautifully. See it here, for yourself.

 
 

The Perfect One-Room Studio (Pearl River, N.Y., 2015).