Oooh-la-la-Lush!

I don’t usually write reviews on things that require a reader to spend money, but I’m going to make an exception and tell you about one of my new favorite websites and my absolute favorite new products. Because I like to help spread good in the world.

First, let me tell you about persuasive rhetoric. Advertisers are fantastic at what they do. They know what words to use, what trigger very specific responses in our thought process based on our culture and experience. They know which colors work best to push their products. Did you know that red and orange are hunger inducers? Watch to see how many food advertisements and commercials use these two colors. Ads that work best are the ones that work but make you think that you are purchasing something because you really want to. You’re being manipulated daily.

I’ve taken a lot of classes that work with these ideas. I’m fascinated by the manipulation of the human population. It works. You can’t fight it. I know how it works and that it exists and even how to do it, and I can’t fight it. Images are the most powerful for of persuasion ever.

So what works on me? Luxury bath products. It really doesn’t matter if a bath product is luxury or not, if it’s ad makes it seem like a luxury, I’m in. There’s something about turning my bathroom into a spa, with lotions, glitter, powder, pampering, and sparkly clean bath water that makes me go “aaaaaaah, I’ll take it!” It’s not a surprise that one of the biggest reasons I wanted the house we ended up buying was because it had a whirlpool tub in the bathroom. I want to feel pretty, pampered, and romanced.

I’m especially sold on organic, hand-made items. The idea that someone is slaving away somewhere in a studio to put together lip balm and bath additives to make me feel buttery smooth makes me weak in the knees. So when a friend of mine said “You’ve got to check this out” about a website that centers on luxurious pampering items, it wasn’t long before I was putting in my first order.

Lush is not a lovely secret, it just took me a long time to hear about it. Many large cities even have stores, but not mine. I have to shell out the money for shipping, but it’s so worth it. Their bath items are divine. Last night I dropped half a Butterball into my bath water and ooh-la-la. Even sick, the scent made me relax and the heat of the water helped make my congestion open up. The Butterball made my skin silk smooth and yummy. No lotion needed, one bath with the Butterball and a season of ashy skin is gone.

My other favorite item is Honey Trap, a lip balm that at first I didn’t think I’d like. The scent was super strong and the balm was too cold to use because it had been sitting on my frozen stoop all day. Once it warmed and I slipped it on, I was in love. It made my lips smooth and the harsh dryness that has been following them all winter disappeared.

Many of their bath bombs have hidden surprises, like making your bath water glittery, luxuriously pink or filled with rose petals. How delicious is that? I’m currently trying out their deodorant that they sent as a sample and so far? No stinky. We’ll see how long it lasts.

I love feeling girly and luxurious and Lushdoes it for me. I’ll end up sinking large portions of my pay check into their online shop, and you should too.

Too sick to work, too sick to write.

I got my proverbial ass handed to me this week by a sinus infection. It pretty  much wiped me out starting on Monday and lasting until this very moment. Thank all that is blessed in the world for antibiotics that make my sickness short lived. I’m already tired of feeling like crap.

Unfortunately, essays do not edit themselves and this week has been a loss as far as getting any work done. I could barely spell my name if asked let alone write anything worth reading. I did spy a few more publications I’m going to submit to, so that’s pretty exciting. If I could, you know, edit anything to save my life.

The office has also been temporarily put on hold until I’m feeling better. Painting? Manual labor? Yeah right. My husband has been forced to take care of dinner for the last two nights while I permanently affixed my butt to the couch under a pile of blankets and tissues. Ah CSI, how I love thee.

The mean streets of editing, part 1

I’m preparing for my first essay contest in March and so far I’m discovering a new, dark, furious side of writing I had never considered before.

Son, I’m talking about the mean streets of editing.

 I’ve never had trouble editing before. It was just not a problem. I knew who my audience was (teachers, other students) and I knew what was expected of me (excellence). I wrote the essay, I edited it and if I was proud of it or if it was a particularly important essay, I would hand it to one or two people to give a good look see. Usually my husband, though I suspect he was never honest and brutal enough for my own good. But the process itself? Not a big deal. I’d hone in on the spots that needed polishing and rewrite.

 Now? Well now things are very different. I have a goal in mind (winning) that was not in the cards before. I was never fighting the other students for the Best Essay Ever award, I was just fighting with myself for an A. Editing for publication, for importance, for excellency is paralyzing. I have found my weakness.

Like kryptonite, I’m staring blankly at my first paragraph, feeling like it is too cold and withdrawn though unwilling to give up the awesome opener that, I suspect, would sound better on the head of an op-ed piece. I regard the ending with a far away look as it is too soft and squashy. Too soft hearted for the witty, tongue in cheek, funny body that came before. I feel as if they don’t mesh, they don’t mold and melt together. Yet I am unable to change it.

Yesterday I did a little rewriting but regarded the important parts with weak disdain. Today I am going to attempt to rewrite the beginning, just to see how something else might work. I’m nervous. I have until March but really? I feel the loom of the death-deadline settling over one shoulder, digging claws in, whispering Poe poetry.

Editing is making me a tad over-dramatic too. A symptom of pressure, I suspect.

Office project

It was Virginia Woolf who is famous for saying that a writer needs a room of ones own, but I’m sure she wasn’t the first to come across this famed idea. Every writer needs a space that is theirs, that allows the thoughts to move and speak. I used to think this meant a dark room with lots of books and dust and a healthy alcohol problem. As it turns out, you just need a room that inspires you.

Fortunately for us, our home had three bedrooms. One of the bedrooms was particularly poorly suited to be a bedroom because of it’s small size and odd door placement. It was, however, a very good idea for a very nice office. We originally chose colors quickly, wanting to paint the rooms and get it over with. The room was originally an aquamarine that you could barely look directly at. So the blues we picked were an improvement, but not a very good one. They were too dark, and had no actual personality. It didn’t look like we tried and the truth was, we didn’t. We were also using a couple of bookshelves that were cheap to begin with and had seen one too many moves already. The shelves were bowing under the weight of the books and a stiff breeze could bring them both crashing to the ground.

We moved our huge desk to the basement and started working from there. The space was not very good for inspiration though and I found it hard to be creative there. In the mean time, the old office became a store room for old mail, artwork needing to be hung, wedding crap, craft crap and books. Everywhere. First thing was first, we started clearing it out.

Here, my husband and cat Lola go through papers and CDs. I encourage him to get rid of the CDs he has only looked at in the past three years when he unpacked them. He got rid of about 3 of them. Oh well. I tried.

This is a view from the doorway. The two doors are huge in the room and take up a lot of space. I took the doors off and I’m going to go and purchase two bi-fold doors for the room that will take less space. Hopefully I can install them correctly.

My favorite chairs in the world are two of these cobalt chairs. I love them so much. I picked them up from a girl who needed to get rid of them. I paid $25. The color in the picture does not do them justice.

Riff & Reciprocity*: Neighbors

Neighbors

Neighbors never talk to neighbors anymore, unless it’s Get Off My Lawn and You’re Making Too Much Noise I’m Calling The Cops. There are rarely block parties and rarer dinners shared in gossip and communion. If you’re lucky you can still borrow a ladder or sugar or drill bits. If you’re not, your neighbor is an Inconsiderate Uneducated Blowhard with a tree that drops leaves in your yard, owns a vicious dog that jumps the fence and terrifies your wife, or mows his lawn at 6am. Let’s not forget the loud music playing neighbor, the mother with undisciplined, wild children neighbor, and the best friend neighbor who thinks you two have a bond, borrows your things, never returns them and mysteriously vanishes when you need his help. Gone are the days of casserole Sundays, homemade cookie exchanges and beers on the back porch. Or are they? On moving day, three neighbors came to introduce themselves. The way they shook my hand and gave the 10 second Readers Digest version of their lives bordered on desperation. Don’t we all secretly long for companionship as we slip further and further into isolated, suburban hell? If casseroles connect people to people, shouldn’t we cook all day long? One can never have too many casseroles.

The Internet

Bringing everyone together in harmony and free knowledge exchange, the internet breeds isolation and loneliness. People reach out to touch someone but only through keyboards and electrons because intimate contact is absurdly terrifying. We remain anonymous but we blog about everything. What we had for dinner, who we are in love with, why we feel so alone, and an uncomfortable, alarming amount of personal too-much-information. We want to hide and skulk in our pajamas at 2am behind a monitor but we want everyone in the world to know we are there and what we are wearing. We search MySpace, scour Facebook, blog LiveJournal; all in a desperate hope of finding, connecting, conspiring and forging friendships, relationships and familiarity. Cold, emotionless technology, The New Intimacy, fondling data, caressing keyboards, getting to know the real you which has almost no connection to the you in real life. That real life person is anonymous, isolated, numb. Not on the internet, though. Reinvent yourself. Change your name, your sex, your dreams, your body type. It is all acceptable because it is all anonymous. Perfectly isolated. Frighteningly comfortable. Hungry.

S.L. Wiegert

-A Riff & Reciprocity is a type of ultra-short double essay where two completely stand-alone pieces speak to each other as if in dialogue.

-Essay written for Modern Familiar Essay, published only at http://www.rhetoricwizard.wordpress.com/, though will find new life in a full length, published, essay Coming-Soon.

-(c) S.L. Wiegert 2007-2008. All rights reserved. You may not copy whole or in part (unless reviewing) and you may certainly not republished for free. No stealing, borrowing, rewriting, or thinking about stealing- by the might and majesty of the Thunder Gods of Copyright.

When you know you need to go to grad school…

Sweet jesus, I’d give my eyeballs for someone to talk rhetoric theory with. Or lit theory. Or pretty much any academic theory, whether I know anything about it or not.

 That, I suppose, is when you know you  miss school. No one seems to understand how hot you think theory is. Worse still, no one is interested in interpreting poetry or reading feminist theory with you. Life outside of academia = fail.

This is how you experiment on the world.

Even on the internet, everything is a popularity game. But designers and artists almost always win.  

Sometimes it seems like all great websites come to us from the ether of this slippery concept called: word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth is uncontrollable, for the most part. Only a few people in the world have the know-how and face-currency to play the viral marketing campaign. Stupid people (or people being stupid) find fame on the internet this way. Sometimes eccentric and talented people do as well, but as a rule of thumb, the more ridiculous or obnoxious you are, the better chance you have of becoming internet-famous by word-of-mouth. Just ask the Jewish “Sexy” of “So you think you can dance?” fame.The reason that I am pointing this out is that I have stumbled across another fantastic design website and it got me thinking about how I find them (or any cool website for that matter). Usually it is by word-of-blog. Someone I like posts something I’d like and I I therefore spread the love by posting about it and thereby keep the chain going. Other times, someone I like posts something I might like where I discover a link to something that blows me away. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Today I’m introducing Coudal Partners  (http://www.coudal.com/) to the whirligig of word-of-blog chainlinking. I found them by crazy change: I was becoming frustrated by WordPress putting extra spaces between paragraphs that I absolutely detested as far as page design goes, so I went shopping on the WordPressForums for an answer. Another girl, whose blog seems to be abandoned or at least has become the product of a busy blog-owner, had a fun user pic that I liked. I clicked, and one of her two entries was about her participation on this website. I love how things like this happen. To the eye, this website more closely resembles the front page of a newspaper, with its serif fonts, headlines and subheads. It is easy, familiar, and pleasurable to read. There is a sense of active news happening right. here. and now.There is lots of information everywhere, which is both good and bad. It is good because you can navigate all over the place easily. It is bad because you can navigate all over the place too easily. I lost the home page within a few minutes of finding the site and had a hard time getting back. The “About” section is woefully inadequate considering how much information is tied into this site and how many side projects the site is involved with. Who are these people and what do they do? Bloody hell if I know. But what I can find is pretty awesome.The writing is grand. Not too glittery or adjective heavy, not too dependant on sounding hip and edgy. The news pieces are to the point but interesting and full of personal voice. But this is not a writing site, it’s a design and art site that dabbles in, oh, just about everything. They seem to rely heavily on active participation by artists from everywhere, which leads into their current title project, Layer Tennis.

Layer Tennisis an art project where two people volley a piece of design work (most probably done in Adobe Photoshop) back and forth adding their own flare each time. It is a match over who can best the other artist at being the Most Awesome. I can’t even imagine participating in one of these matches because to be honest, they blow me out of the water. I’d be embarrassed to show my face anywhere near these guys. Do you think you have what it takes?

Another excellent section of this site is their Museum of Online Museums. There are featured online exhibits that are really neat and might be missed if not compiled here. My favorite is the Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies  because I remember using some of these art supplies in elementary school. The MoFAS rushes me back to tiny, noisy metal desk with flip top access where I’d rub Elmer’s glue on my fingers and peel my fingerprints off or get high on the Rubber Cement. It is when my second grade art teacher scolded me for not putting perspective on my self-portrait’s hair at a time when I couldn’t even spell “perspective.” Rubber cement? Check. Old boxy Apple computer? Check? Bendy metal ruler that breaks skin when used as a weapon? Check and check.

The Payphone Project (of Nebraska) is cool because, I, well, live there.  The Gallery of Girls in 60’s Car Ads is also a fabulous blast from the past. I love how beautiful those women are. Curvy too!

The Swap Meat is a part of their site that shows off some of the crazy stuff fans have sent them. I love how the people who work for Coudal Partners really put their own personality into their work and it’s not just the good stuff that makes sites sell. Another section, Verse By Voice is a project where they had people read poetry on their answering machine while Field-Tested Books is a sort of year in review of books, though that appears to not have been updated since 2006? It’s a little hard to tell. I really love the site and really hate it for its serious navigational short comings and the ease at which one can get lost and be unable to scratch your way out.

Finally, I always like to clip a bit from a site’s “About” section that defines a website’s purpose from the mind of the creators. It’s important to know what their goal is and know if they lived up to their promise (or went in a different direction and seriously need to update something, somewhere). This is what they have to say about themselves:

“The idea is to showcase the agency’s abilities, provide a forum for creativity and experimentation in writing, design and commerce and to test new technologies and tools. The site requires modern browsers, with all the usual plug-ins. We use Safari and Firefox.”

It is short and to the point, which I like. But there is such a thing as being too short and too to the point. I feel like this doesn’t quite cover all the crazy-ass (that’s a professional use of “crazy-ass” right there) stuff they are creating and experimenting with. There are 16 different sections of the site in the only vaguely permanent navigational feature (it disappears on some pages). There are hundreds (maybe thousands) of other things they’ve done, things they’d like you to know they’ve done, and things they want everyone to know they set in motion. Two sentences does not do them justice. They really do provide a place for creativity and experimentation and they are doing wild, wild stuff here. Like I said, woefully inadequate “About” section. Woefully.

Nevertheless, I have to hand it to them. This site makes me feel creativity down to my toes. It makes me want to try out my own limitations and experiment with breaking them. I am inspired and I could waste (or kill) days of my life exploring this site. I could potentially be undone by this site’s possibilities because how can I work on my own creations if I am wasting away locked in the labyrinth of theirs?

“Losing my helvetica” has never felt so good

Because this blog isn’t just about how awesome I am, I think it’s high time I told you about how awesome someone else is. For a change. My husband will be proud that I can be selfless. Well, once in a while.

I stumbled on Strange Attractors Design a while back but I had a hard time getting through the site. It’s sort of like going to an internet rave, all that’s lacking is bad poppy-thumpy X-addled music. Wherever your mouse touches, colored graphics appear shooting in a half dozen different directions, getting bigger and noisier as they go. I suspect that Andy Warhol would have been proud.

The site itself makes me feel like I have motion sickness (which I don’t) but I can’t get past the fact that it sure feels edgy. I half expect there to be a button that says “Buy Party Drugs Here” or at least sport some high fashion, heroin chic models lounging around the “About” button. I hate the constant movement and overlapping colors, the extended menu often covers the graphics I’m trying to see, and I find that it sometimes crosses over edgy into absurd and back again one too many times. That being said, once I get passed the sensation that I’m tripping out, the designs this company is producing are startlingly fabulous.

I am giddy over this design, probably because it plays on fonts and a bit of tongue in cheek wink toward another fun subject. A lot of their designs look like this, very young, hip, and graphical. There is a tangible quality to all of their designs that literally feels like it jumps off the page (and into your heart, awe) and I like that. They hail from New York and the Netherlands, so I can’t be too surprised by how the designs make me feel. They seem to be the kind of company that Urban Outfitters would rip off. I am a little surprised by the discomfort that the website induces in its viewers, which I would assume would turn potential customers off, but hey, maybe it works for their clientele.

Here’s one more jab at them that I can’t help, being that my expertise is in writing and not design: Their “Studio Info” is just too much. Someone had a lot of fun with their thesaurus, but instead of successfully turning us on with words, it makes me cringe a little. Like someone who uses the “facetious” or “touche” as often as possible to prove how well spoken and academic they really are. The truth is, they don’t need to weave extra fun words together to sound hip and visually inspiring, their work speaks for itself!

“Our work acts as a bridge, giving form, representation and physical tactility to the tangible, conceptual, digital and ephemeral. Craft, calligraphy, ornament and abundance in concert with technology, history, theory and criticism comprise the common tools we utilize to reach this goal.”

Ouch. The lists just go on and on and on and on, don’t they? This may sound like smooth alternative magazine talk, but honestly it doesn’t really say anything useful about their artwork. People get lost in lists, use them sparingly. Adjectives are the friend that will offer you wine after spiking it with arsenic if you’re not careful.

One of my favorite designs is that of Little Yellow Writing Hood, a short film for ‘FiFFteen’ an exhibition for FSI FontShop International. It is a story about fonts, comprised of 300 fonts, and its a visually orgiastic fontapalooza (love).  An expert from their website describes it fiercely:

“When Mom sends Little Yellow Writing Hood away to surprise her busy Grandmother with a pen, a little pot of ink and a new python script, a wolf tricks the innocent girl into taking a roundabout way. Little Yellow Writing Hood finally arrives at the foundry and realizes that her Grandmother’s pixels seem a lot bigger than she remembered…”

Oh pleasure! Oh rapture! Now that’s fine writing, right there. If you have problems with seizures, I would stay away, but otherwise check out what else these people are capable of!

Praise to all the horrible teachers!

The Woman with Six Toes
and other essays on graduating with a
degree in English and having no idea
what to do with it

by Sommer Wiegert

Praise
for all the
horrible teachers!

Here let us praise the horrible teachers who crush the dreams of tiny children too good not to listen to their elders.

Let us praise the horrible teachers who give up on girls who struggle with math,
and boys who struggle with writing.

Allow me to sing the glories of all the teachers who say “A geneticist!
Medical school is very long and expensive. How about a nurse?”

And let’s hear it for the ones who look down upon Bobby, or Joey, or Mark and say “A nurse? Wouldn’t you like to be a doctor?”
-

Back to the age where writing an essay meant answering the all-important “What I want to be when I grow up?” and we believed that teachers could make it happen.

Small like sponges and susceptible to all kinds of influences, we listened to your sage advice and considered our options.

I drink to those teachers who taught the subject of our dreams but couldn’t be bothered to inspire or encourage, though we modeled ourselves after them.

To all of those horrible, timeless teachers who lived forever and got grouchier with time.

To all of those instructors who mentally categorized their classes into “those that can learn” and “those that will work at a fast food restaurant.”
-
And here’s to Mrs. Seagull, who stooped when she walked and appeared to sag beneath the weight of the massive hump perched lopsided upon her shoulders.

Praise to Mrs. Seagull who, after reading my essay dedicated to my future aspirations as an author,

stuck her finger beneath my nose and said “You can appreciate literature but you will never write it.”

To you madam, who coughed up the rhymes of Shakespeare like phlegm rather than poetry, who couldn’t pronounce half the words

and offered no remarkable interpretations but rather dismissed his body of work with a sigh and moved on to Hemmingway.

-

We can be proud to know that if it weren’t for the evil stepmother, Snow White would never have moved out of the house or made new friends.

Without the old witch, Hansel and Gretel would never have learned to stop bickering over petty “Gretel got the bigger piece of pie at dinner!” troubles.

Cinderella would never have learned humility, kindness, patience and what-not-to-wear if it weren’t for her shallow step-sisters.

And if it weren’t for you, the horrible dream-crushing teachers, we’d never be determined to prove you wrong,

becoming engineers, doctors, nurses, geneticists, journalists, graphic designers, star athletes and authors.

-

Thanks to you, Mrs. Seagull, for lighting the fire under my college career, graduating with a degree in English, a resume of freelance journalism,

creative non-fiction essays submitted for publication and an ambition for cultivating a talent you couldn’t recognize if it bit you in the ass.

It’s probably good you’ve never met us, the students you tried to dissuade from pursuing favorite dreams, alone in a dark alley,

I know I’d teach Mrs. Seagull how to both appreciate literature and write it too, with my diploma in one hand and sharpened words in the other.

For all those horrible, dream-crushing teachers who told us no don’t do it, be practical, stay away from the arts, boys shouldn’t do it

and girls can’t be smart enough, or tough enough, or brave enough, I’ll waste no more of my hard earned words on you.

Praise to you but Good Riddance!

S.L. Wiegert

-Essay written for Senior Capstone Project, published only at http://www.rhetoricwizard.wordpress.com/

-(c) S.L. Wiegert 2007-2008. All rights reserved. You may not copy whole or in part (unless reviewing) and you may certainly not republished for free. No stealing, borrowing, rewriting, or thinking about stealing- by the might and majesty of the Thunder Gods of Copyright.

Books, books, books!

This morning I signed up for 2d Drawing and Design I at the local community college for the spring quarter. I’m pretty excited. It’ll mean that Mon and Wed nights I won’t get home until almost 10pm, but I’m excited to take a drawing class and get some formal training. I also miss school terribly, so I am hoping that this helps.

Last week I finished my second book of the new year, Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood. I love Margaret Atwood on a fundamental level. I dare say, if I ever had the pleasure of meeting her, I might cry in the way 12 year old girls do when they see their rock star hero. She is so well written, with lovely giant ideas that I can get lost in. Alias Grace was just as good as her other books, though based on a true story. I’m not sure how I feel about that, it seemed more exciting when I thought she had pulled it out of her ass.

In any case, I am on an “awesome female writer” kick which has brought me back to Atwood with a couple of her non-fiction essay books that I plan to devour. A library can’t go wrong with some Atwood stacked high. I am also looking at some novels by Flannery O’Connor. I’ve read some of her short stories but none of her novels and I think it is high time. Finally, it’s The Yellow Wallpaper which is not a novel, but a story I’ve meant to read for a long time, but something has always staid my hand.