Darkschunt 
Saturday, November 18, 2006
After having not even looked at my own blog in ages, I realized that there's something wrong with my tagboard.
I don't know what, I'm kind of lazy about finding out, but if I do, I will fix it. :)
On other news, I was scanning through an article about keeping a diary the other day. A REAL diary. Not a blog or a livejournal or a myspace blog or any other Internet diary or diary for all to read, but a private, good old-fashion, pen-on-paper kind of diary. The kind of diary you keep locked up with an ornate little key and carry around with you to record your deepest, most secret feelings (and not just random rants like most of us bloggers are fond of boring other people on the Internet with) and, um, the kind that Lindsay Lohan lost at the Maritime Hotel in New York and caused a huge tabloid flurry over?
(Speaking of which, I just typed Lindsay Lohan's Diary in Yahoo Search to find out the exact name of the place where she lost her diary and got 23,700 returns. Who knew?)
Anyway, back to the diary. Not Lindsay's, just diaries in general. I love the idea of having a diary. To have something tangible in your hand, nothing you type on a keyboard. Something you can smell, something you can hold, something you can make personal with your own handwriting (in contrast to using, say, Helvetica or New Times Roman font), and flip back through in later days.
I've just done a lot of flipping through magazines and found the article on diary-keeping. It's actually one of William Norwich's Talking Fashion - Norwich Notes columns in this month's edition of American Vogue. Here, he writes about how certain people - a Greek princess, an art dealer, a biographer and a a fashion designer - records their personal observations and reflections in their diaries. This is the sort of thing I'm talking about - that personal touch, that quality of realness that comes with keeping a diary rather than, say, a public blog.
I've always tried keeping a diary when I was younger but it just doesn't work with me. I have too much to write, I get long-winded, I try to write down every single thing and I just don't have the time in the day to write all that down. Besides, my hand gets cramped with writing so much. And then, there's the same problem I have with blogging - every so often, I get lazy and forget to write for ages before coming back to it again. And then there's the worry that if I do write regularly in a journal, I would run out of pages before long and buy a new journal and then another one and then I'll have piles of journals gathering dust in a cupboard or somewhere and I wouldn't know what to do with them. Shall I burn the incriminating pages or keep them for memories and my children? But if I keep them for my children, what do I do with them in the meantime? They're gathering dust. They're taking up too much space! When/If I move to another house, they're going to be another extra-heavy item(s) to cart around!
Who knows? In spite of all this, maybe I might try to keep an actual diary. If I do, I know what I want. There's a journal in Borders. It's gorgeous - red and gold faux leather-bound cover that wraps around the soft creamy pages half-over the front, supposedly with a crimson ribbon page marker which I didn't find when I gave the pages a cursory flip and inhaled the fragrance of crisp notebook paper. It's also frighteningly expensive for a notebook of some hundred-odd pages.
Maybe I'll just stick to starting a personal journal on my laptop (not a blog, but something in a password-safe Microsoft Word Document). But although a keyboard will make things go faster when it comes to making my super-long entries, it will also take away some of that special personal touch that keeping a journal should come with. It will lose something, take away a bit of pleasure that I have in keeping a journal. And no, I don't want any create-a-font-that-will-resemble-your-handwriting technology. I like cream pages, my own messy handwriting, the soft scent of crushed flowers pressed between the pages. So until I figure something out - keeping a personal diary is something that probably won't happen for a while more. Of course, there is always hope for the computer diary - According to Norwich, Isaac Mizrahi keeps a Hermes diary plus entries on his computer. So there's hope for all. Hope for all.
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I don't know what, I'm kind of lazy about finding out, but if I do, I will fix it. :)
On other news, I was scanning through an article about keeping a diary the other day. A REAL diary. Not a blog or a livejournal or a myspace blog or any other Internet diary or diary for all to read, but a private, good old-fashion, pen-on-paper kind of diary. The kind of diary you keep locked up with an ornate little key and carry around with you to record your deepest, most secret feelings (and not just random rants like most of us bloggers are fond of boring other people on the Internet with) and, um, the kind that Lindsay Lohan lost at the Maritime Hotel in New York and caused a huge tabloid flurry over?
(Speaking of which, I just typed Lindsay Lohan's Diary in Yahoo Search to find out the exact name of the place where she lost her diary and got 23,700 returns. Who knew?)
Anyway, back to the diary. Not Lindsay's, just diaries in general. I love the idea of having a diary. To have something tangible in your hand, nothing you type on a keyboard. Something you can smell, something you can hold, something you can make personal with your own handwriting (in contrast to using, say, Helvetica or New Times Roman font), and flip back through in later days.
I've just done a lot of flipping through magazines and found the article on diary-keeping. It's actually one of William Norwich's Talking Fashion - Norwich Notes columns in this month's edition of American Vogue. Here, he writes about how certain people - a Greek princess, an art dealer, a biographer and a a fashion designer - records their personal observations and reflections in their diaries. This is the sort of thing I'm talking about - that personal touch, that quality of realness that comes with keeping a diary rather than, say, a public blog.
I've always tried keeping a diary when I was younger but it just doesn't work with me. I have too much to write, I get long-winded, I try to write down every single thing and I just don't have the time in the day to write all that down. Besides, my hand gets cramped with writing so much. And then, there's the same problem I have with blogging - every so often, I get lazy and forget to write for ages before coming back to it again. And then there's the worry that if I do write regularly in a journal, I would run out of pages before long and buy a new journal and then another one and then I'll have piles of journals gathering dust in a cupboard or somewhere and I wouldn't know what to do with them. Shall I burn the incriminating pages or keep them for memories and my children? But if I keep them for my children, what do I do with them in the meantime? They're gathering dust. They're taking up too much space! When/If I move to another house, they're going to be another extra-heavy item(s) to cart around!
Who knows? In spite of all this, maybe I might try to keep an actual diary. If I do, I know what I want. There's a journal in Borders. It's gorgeous - red and gold faux leather-bound cover that wraps around the soft creamy pages half-over the front, supposedly with a crimson ribbon page marker which I didn't find when I gave the pages a cursory flip and inhaled the fragrance of crisp notebook paper. It's also frighteningly expensive for a notebook of some hundred-odd pages.
Maybe I'll just stick to starting a personal journal on my laptop (not a blog, but something in a password-safe Microsoft Word Document). But although a keyboard will make things go faster when it comes to making my super-long entries, it will also take away some of that special personal touch that keeping a journal should come with. It will lose something, take away a bit of pleasure that I have in keeping a journal. And no, I don't want any create-a-font-that-will-resemble-your-handwriting technology. I like cream pages, my own messy handwriting, the soft scent of crushed flowers pressed between the pages. So until I figure something out - keeping a personal diary is something that probably won't happen for a while more. Of course, there is always hope for the computer diary - According to Norwich, Isaac Mizrahi keeps a Hermes diary plus entries on his computer. So there's hope for all. Hope for all.
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The Joys of House Cleaning and 'Particular' Housemates.
The other day, my housemate tried to put it to me in the nicest - and which came off as most annoying - terms that she is a very particular person when it comes to the bathroom and in short, my cleaning is not up to standards with her, um, standards. We all take turns cleaning the house and bathroom each week and my turn was this week. She didn't pick a good day to explain this to me either because I had come home from one of the crappiest days of my life and was in no mood to hear things about bathrooms.
Now, I will happily admit I am a slob. I often have much more better things to do than housework and I can usually live happily in a mess. Now, though I am a much tidier person than I was in high school (room was always in a disaster zone, anyone prone to asthma should not walk in there, Mom was always in distress over it as she is a neat freak). Thanks to the joys of independent living, I do my best to keep my room in relatively good shape. Now that my new rented room is tinier than Marlene's kitchen in her 50-square-feet city apartment, I am a master of minimal-space interior decorating and am forced to keep things neat due to tiny space and a beige carpet that shows every speck of dust that falls on it. Not to mention that my new landlords are clean freaks as well. Well, the girl-half anyway. I don't think I fall into slob category anymore and the unfair bit was that I have been doing my fair share of the housework and didn't really appreciate what my housemate was trying to tell me. Besides, she (or the other one, I don't know) doesn't really clean the mirror and the sink counter properly when it's her turn and one of them has been leaving icky little hairs in the shower which are really gross, all of which I have not said one word because I am, in a word, tolerant, and in seven words, not a very 'particular' sort of person.
Well, no matter. She wants clean? I'll give her clean. Last night, I grabbed three different kinds of chemicals, two used toothbrushes, a rag (which later turned out to be another housemate's face cloth, which happened to be hanging on the same rack as the correct rag and looking kind of icky and like a rag itself. Oops. Note: must buy her new face cloth) and a sponge and set to work scrubbing down every tile and every grout line in the bathroom and toilet. I think I nearly died from chemical inhalation. (Note: must also buy rubber gloves). Then I mopped everything down with a fourth chemical. The floors are so clean now that I nearly slipped on them this morning. If she tells me they're still not clean, I might - I don't know, throw all four of those chemicals in her face or something.
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The other day, my housemate tried to put it to me in the nicest - and which came off as most annoying - terms that she is a very particular person when it comes to the bathroom and in short, my cleaning is not up to standards with her, um, standards. We all take turns cleaning the house and bathroom each week and my turn was this week. She didn't pick a good day to explain this to me either because I had come home from one of the crappiest days of my life and was in no mood to hear things about bathrooms.
Now, I will happily admit I am a slob. I often have much more better things to do than housework and I can usually live happily in a mess. Now, though I am a much tidier person than I was in high school (room was always in a disaster zone, anyone prone to asthma should not walk in there, Mom was always in distress over it as she is a neat freak). Thanks to the joys of independent living, I do my best to keep my room in relatively good shape. Now that my new rented room is tinier than Marlene's kitchen in her 50-square-feet city apartment, I am a master of minimal-space interior decorating and am forced to keep things neat due to tiny space and a beige carpet that shows every speck of dust that falls on it. Not to mention that my new landlords are clean freaks as well. Well, the girl-half anyway. I don't think I fall into slob category anymore and the unfair bit was that I have been doing my fair share of the housework and didn't really appreciate what my housemate was trying to tell me. Besides, she (or the other one, I don't know) doesn't really clean the mirror and the sink counter properly when it's her turn and one of them has been leaving icky little hairs in the shower which are really gross, all of which I have not said one word because I am, in a word, tolerant, and in seven words, not a very 'particular' sort of person.
Well, no matter. She wants clean? I'll give her clean. Last night, I grabbed three different kinds of chemicals, two used toothbrushes, a rag (which later turned out to be another housemate's face cloth, which happened to be hanging on the same rack as the correct rag and looking kind of icky and like a rag itself. Oops. Note: must buy her new face cloth) and a sponge and set to work scrubbing down every tile and every grout line in the bathroom and toilet. I think I nearly died from chemical inhalation. (Note: must also buy rubber gloves). Then I mopped everything down with a fourth chemical. The floors are so clean now that I nearly slipped on them this morning. If she tells me they're still not clean, I might - I don't know, throw all four of those chemicals in her face or something.
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Things I enjoy about my very first real-life permanent job:
1) The great position (who lands the role of editor straight after graduation?
2) The challenge (how on earth can I do a good job of being an editor, being a completely fresh graduate?)
3) The clothes (Yes, as you all know, clothes will always play a big part and it's completely fantastic figuring a working wardrobe that's chic and professional and creatively unique. Mmm)
4) The learning (being thrown into the role of editor right after graduating from university is like being thrown head-first into a pool of icy-cold water without being taught how to swim - and mind you, I still don't know how to. Swim, that is. - but it was fantastic because I had to learn so much in so short a time.
5) The social life. (Well, basically I have no social life now, since nearly every second of my free time is spent reporting on this, covering on that and writing up the stories plus editing and laying out, but you do get to go out to all kinds of events and meet all kinds of people that you'd otherwise never see or meet. I've been places to Perth over these few months that I've never been in the past two and a half, almost three, years I've lived here.
6) Did I mention the wardrobe yet?
:) Yes, it's been a long hiatus from the World of Darkschunt but I'm baack again! (One ventures to wonder how long, since I always have a bad habit of never keeping up to date with my blog, but never mind that, I will TRY to blog as much as my work and dying social life will allow me).
Cons of my job? Oh, there are quite a few too. I won't mention some of them (this being a public blog and all, and keeping in mind the history of career-killing blogs like Queen of the Sky and Jolie in New York, although Jolie in New York actually quit her job before the news broke as to who she really was) but as you can guess, the long hours, stagnant social life and pushed-to-the-point-of-breaking-down-and-burning-out bit is all a part of the cons. But, hey, journalism is never easy, right? I know my facts and figures (well, kind of, since numbers always fly out of my head the moment the subject's changed) and journalists can pretty much never hope for an ordinary nine-to-five, five-days-a-week kind of job. We're like real estate agents, our weekends are more often than not solidly booked. It can be exhausting but hey, if I'm going to spend long hours at work, at least I do it at events where I meet people and take photographs rather than at the office, doing filing or accounting or whatever.
I saw The Devil Wears Prada the other day - the first movie I've seen in ages. (SweetRhapsody, the Duchess, whatever happened to our never-missed Tuesday movie afternoons? I miss those!) I feel just like Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt, only they lead much more glamorous workaholic lives than I do.
Mom is proud of me. This hardly ever happens. The daughter that she feared she would lose to laziness and procrastination has become a workaholic! Tell everyone in the family, including the workaholic cousins! This is a cause for celebration!
But now she fears I work too much and may commit suicide like some other workaholic daughter of a friend of hers. I'm always being compared to daughters of Mom's friends - although being compared to a suicidal one is a new one. Yay for me.
"If I'm too lazy, she is worried. If I work too hard, she also worries," I told the Gutter Philosopher. This is why I should not have children - I will probably worry too much over them. Or, more likely, I will not worry about them at all and worry about the fact that I don't worry over them as I should.
Speaking of family, Mom and Dad and my little brother are probably landing in Italy right now as I type. How groovy is that? Since I've left home, they've been to Spain and Italy. It's not fair! Both me and older sister are jealous. Well, I think she is. She should be if they're going to Italy. She'd be dying to shop there.
Speaking of which, I took her out to the Oyster Bar a few weels ago. The food was fantastic, all except the swordfish which wasn't up to grade. My first time in the Oyster Bar, and also as the One Who Pays For The Dinner. The bill came to over a hundred *gulp*. But it's okay, she's taken me out tons of times for dinner and this is my first time taking her out now that I've got a job and regular paychecks and all that. I tried to take the Gutter Philosopher out for dinner as well but, being an old-fashion male and all, he was having none of that.
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1) The great position (who lands the role of editor straight after graduation?
2) The challenge (how on earth can I do a good job of being an editor, being a completely fresh graduate?)
3) The clothes (Yes, as you all know, clothes will always play a big part and it's completely fantastic figuring a working wardrobe that's chic and professional and creatively unique. Mmm)
4) The learning (being thrown into the role of editor right after graduating from university is like being thrown head-first into a pool of icy-cold water without being taught how to swim - and mind you, I still don't know how to. Swim, that is. - but it was fantastic because I had to learn so much in so short a time.
5) The social life. (Well, basically I have no social life now, since nearly every second of my free time is spent reporting on this, covering on that and writing up the stories plus editing and laying out, but you do get to go out to all kinds of events and meet all kinds of people that you'd otherwise never see or meet. I've been places to Perth over these few months that I've never been in the past two and a half, almost three, years I've lived here.
6) Did I mention the wardrobe yet?
:) Yes, it's been a long hiatus from the World of Darkschunt but I'm baack again! (One ventures to wonder how long, since I always have a bad habit of never keeping up to date with my blog, but never mind that, I will TRY to blog as much as my work and dying social life will allow me).
Cons of my job? Oh, there are quite a few too. I won't mention some of them (this being a public blog and all, and keeping in mind the history of career-killing blogs like Queen of the Sky and Jolie in New York, although Jolie in New York actually quit her job before the news broke as to who she really was) but as you can guess, the long hours, stagnant social life and pushed-to-the-point-of-breaking-down-and-burning-out bit is all a part of the cons. But, hey, journalism is never easy, right? I know my facts and figures (well, kind of, since numbers always fly out of my head the moment the subject's changed) and journalists can pretty much never hope for an ordinary nine-to-five, five-days-a-week kind of job. We're like real estate agents, our weekends are more often than not solidly booked. It can be exhausting but hey, if I'm going to spend long hours at work, at least I do it at events where I meet people and take photographs rather than at the office, doing filing or accounting or whatever.
I saw The Devil Wears Prada the other day - the first movie I've seen in ages. (SweetRhapsody, the Duchess, whatever happened to our never-missed Tuesday movie afternoons? I miss those!) I feel just like Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt, only they lead much more glamorous workaholic lives than I do.
Mom is proud of me. This hardly ever happens. The daughter that she feared she would lose to laziness and procrastination has become a workaholic! Tell everyone in the family, including the workaholic cousins! This is a cause for celebration!
But now she fears I work too much and may commit suicide like some other workaholic daughter of a friend of hers. I'm always being compared to daughters of Mom's friends - although being compared to a suicidal one is a new one. Yay for me.
"If I'm too lazy, she is worried. If I work too hard, she also worries," I told the Gutter Philosopher. This is why I should not have children - I will probably worry too much over them. Or, more likely, I will not worry about them at all and worry about the fact that I don't worry over them as I should.
Speaking of family, Mom and Dad and my little brother are probably landing in Italy right now as I type. How groovy is that? Since I've left home, they've been to Spain and Italy. It's not fair! Both me and older sister are jealous. Well, I think she is. She should be if they're going to Italy. She'd be dying to shop there.
Speaking of which, I took her out to the Oyster Bar a few weels ago. The food was fantastic, all except the swordfish which wasn't up to grade. My first time in the Oyster Bar, and also as the One Who Pays For The Dinner. The bill came to over a hundred *gulp*. But it's okay, she's taken me out tons of times for dinner and this is my first time taking her out now that I've got a job and regular paychecks and all that. I tried to take the Gutter Philosopher out for dinner as well but, being an old-fashion male and all, he was having none of that.
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