Glamorama

Did you know that the Girl Scouts offers a fashion and makeup badge? Actually, I think now they call it the science of style badge, which is cool, because hurray science and it's important to know how much lead you're swallowing with your lipstick.

So much lead.

I didn't earn my fashion and makeup badge. My first Girl Scout leader was a pro-body hair hippie and my second leader was more interested in giving me the skills--or lack thereof--to burn $200 worth of bras last Xmas. Neither of them ever gave the troupe the option of spending the afternoon at the Liberty House makeup counter, learning how to bring out the color in our eyes.

I've gone through periods of my life where I'm anti-makeup. I just got through a five-year stretch of not wearing any except for weddings, conferences and ballets, because I don't think it's fair that women are judged on their appearances by every sticky mouthbreather on the G train. My body isn't public property. If you don't like the way it looks, you can go screw--I don't exist to give men something pleasing to look at.

In Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel, "Persepolis," she talks about life as a woman in Iran under a repressive theocracy. "The regime had understood that one person leaving her house while asking herself, 'Are my trousers long enough? Is my veil in place? Can my makeup be seen? Are they going to whip me?' No longer asks herself, 'Where is my freedom of thought? Where is my freedom of speech? My life, is it livable? What's going on in the political prisons?'"

To paraphrase: People who have to think about stupid shit aren't free to think about important shit. So no makeup for Big Island Rachel. I have important shit to think about.

Of course, that's only about half the time. The other half of the time, I realize that I'm constantly thinking about monumentally stupid shit--Batman, cats, eggs for brunch, how dumb squirrels are, the angle of the slope of my apartment floor, Star Trek puns, where my Avengers tshirt went, why I didn't finish that ebook before it expired when I'd been on the waiting list for six months, that time in kindergarten I made my friend cry, what brand of Scotch my tumblr-pal in New Zealand drinks--and honestly, I can take 5 minutes out of all that to put some damn eyeliner on.

I'll revisit "Persepolis," as one does with the stories that really stick with you, and I'll notice that Satrapi herself was desperate for the freedom to wear makeup, fashionable clothing, or even just a pair of red socks to school. Her oppression didn't come from the veil itself--it came from her lack of choice of whether she could wear the veil or not.

And then the pendulum swings back the other way. Yes, Big Island Rachel, you don't have to wear makeup if you don't want to.

So... do you want to?

BAM! New lipstick. Red as the blood of my enemies. Also, it kind of smells like cake frosting when it goes on.

The New Year is off to a great start.

Horse Day!

Today was Horse Day!

Every April, the institute brings a couple of horses onto campus for the students to draw. I can't pretend that Horse Day isn't one of my favorite secular holidays. Look at them.

Seriously--look at them!

I got to pet them and feed them hay and brush their dusty coats and you can and should be jealous!

A little known fact about Hawaii is that we have a big cowboy culture, and not just because of all the scenes in romantic movies where the couple goes riding on the beach at sunset. The Hawaiian cowboy, or paniolo, actually predates the American cowboy, or at least that's what they told us in middle school one year when we had a paniolo-themed May Day.

First black president. First cowboys. New Yorkers are right, why the hell did I ever leave?

My family never owned any horses, but we always knew people that did. Horseback riding on someone's ranch was an annual or semi-annual activity, along with the Naalehu Rodeo. And one time I got to hand out the ribbons at a quarterhorse show! That was a lot of fun, although I accidentally left the gate to the ring open and a runaway horse ran through with a teenager on its back, and I feel really bad about it to this day, even if no one was hurt.

(Maybe that post I wrote about almost losing my finger in the subway makes a little more sense now.)

A lot of my riding was done with the Girl Scouts, and I probably have a badge or two in horsemanship lying around my mum's storage boxes somewhere. If I do, they should be revoked. I'm a hopeless failure as a horsewoman.

My OKCupid picture is photoshopped! PHOTOSHOPPED!

You see, I like horses. But I like horses a little too much. As soon as I get up on the back of a horse, I go all soft and melty inside, because I love their soft fur and their warm flanks and the smell of their manes and their soft, soft noses when they nuzzle my hands for carrots. I'm a pushover for horses, and they can sense that. Horses are smart. Perceptive. And kind of lazy. They know I'm not going to be mean and make them work. So I get up on their backs and they immediately walk into the bushes and start eating.

This happens literally every time I go riding. I always have to be rescued from wooded thickets by the trailmaster or the trailmaster's kid because I cannot control a horse, and their animals, so they take advantage of me and do what they really want to do: stuff their horsy gobs with weeds. I like to think they're sweet, precious creatures whose domestication represents simultaneously the march of civilization and the call of freedom in the wilderness. But really, they just want to eat and not have to work. They're like enormous cats with better-smelling poops.

The last time I went riding, in the winter of 2012, my horse was such a jerk that she didn't even eat the soft, pretty ti leaves--she ate reams of nasty hitchhiker vines and whipped their seeds all over my legs, so I had to spend the next day in the driveway with a butterknife, scraping the stickers out of my jeans and shoelaces. She didn't even have enough respect for my authority  to stay out of the brambles. I'm lucky we made it back home and she didn't just ditch me on Kaloko Road and make me walk back to the ranch.

So really, it's better for me to experience horses the New York way: at art school, in the rose garden, with the sleeves of my blazer pushed above my elbows so I don't get too dusty on my lunch hour. 

Why does it hurt?!

I'm a little pokey on the keyboard today because of what I did to my thumb last night.

When I was cutting onions for a stew, the knife slipped and cut through my thumbnail, right to the pulpy stuff underneath. If it hadn't been such a dull blade, I probably would have sliced the tip of my thumb clean off. Did it hurt? So  much, gang. So much. It felt like a bee was stinging my thumb--and the bee is made of adamantium and is on fire.

Took the Internet less time to find an image of my pain than it did for me to inflict that pain.

 Once again, I am an exceedingly lucky Big Island Rachel, and once again, I realized that I am a terrible Girl Scout. I determined at first glance that nothing had fallen off and I probably didn't need stitches, so I grabbed a dirty kitchen towel, wrapped it tightly around my thumb to soak up the blood, and then bend over with my hand between my knees, thinking, "I'm doing the right thing!"

Later, when I came to my senses, I realized that the dirty towel probably wasn't the best move, and the bending over definitely was not. Bleeding parts should be elevated, so gravity helps keep the blood inside you. And bleeding parts shouldn't be wrapped in the same cloth you use to wipe plant-water off the counter after you water the bonsai.

Hey, new season of my radio show starts next week! Huzzah!

The Great Christmas Bra Burning of 2012

I burned all of my bras recently.

It's not what you think.

Bra burnings are a myth, by the way. The image of the militant feminist ripping off her bra and setting it on fire to symbolize throwing off the chains patriarchy and oppression is powerful and pervasive in our culture, but the tactic was never actually used by second wave feminists in the 1970s. The myth that feminists burned their bras at protests and demonstrations was started at a 1968 protest at the Miss America pageant, where a small group of women picketed outside the pageant and threw things like make-up, high heels, girdles and bras into a trash can.

A tradition is born!

A then-contributing editor for Ms. magazine, Lindsy Van Gelder, came up with the term "bra burning" to give the burgeoning women's liberation movement more credibility by linking it to the Vietnam War protest tactic of draftees burning their draft cards. But the mainstream press pounced on the idea of a bra burning as an easily-lampooned caricature of the ugly, screeching feminist demanding to be taken seriously as she destroyed her undergarments in public.

Some traditions are overrated.

The only statement I was making when I burned my bras is that my Girl Scout leader may have been mistaken in awarding me me a fire safety badge. Or that my apartment is just really, really small.

When I do laundry, I never dry my bras in the dryer. I re-shape the wet bra cups on my knees and put the freshly cleaned and molded garments on this plastic drying rack that I prop up on the stove. The heat from the pilot light dries the bras very quickly and leaves them feeling crisp and warm against my skin. Few pleasures equal this.

Very few.

I've been drying the bras, and other delicate garments, over my stove for as long as I've lived in this apartment. Frequently, I'll leave the clothes drying while I leave the apartment, never thinking twice about all that plastic and polyester resting inches above the gas burners.

But two days before Christmas, I was putting the freshly washed sheets on my mattress and suddenly heard a bubbling noise, like my electric kettle had come to a boil. But it wasn't yet time for tea. I turned around and poked my head out of my bedroom door, and saw that all the bras were aflame! My first thought was my fire extinguisher, but it was hidden deep in my kitchen cabinet and I didn't know how to work it. So I grabbed the closest thing at hand and began beating the flames to smother them. The melting plastic rack with the burning bras slide to to the floor, and the apartment was flooded with the overwhelming fumes of burning plastic.

The potential for disaster in this situation was great. I was barefoot on a wool rug, hitting a plastic-and-polyester fire with a quilt while surrounded by heaps of freshly laundered bedding and couch pillows. All of my windows were locked for the winter, and because the building sags to one side, the windows sit crookedly in their sills and are hard to open. And I'd removed my smoke detector from the wall just that morning because I'd burned my breakfast toast and didn't want it making noise.

But, as you can probably tell by virtue of this post existing, everything worked out. I'd smothered the fire by the time the bras hit the ground, and the melting plastic splashed on the couch pillows instead of my skin. I opened the windows before I suffocated and cleared the smoke out with the ceiling fan before the neighbors called the fire department. And I put out the last of the fire by doing what I should have done in the first place, which was to pour water on it instead of beating at it with the precious hand-stitched quilt my sister made me for my 17th birthday. My sink even has the hose attachment that could have easily reached the stove if I'd thought about it for two seconds instead of panicking like I did.

I'm a fraud. A fraudulent fraud!

The only bra that survived the inferno was my marvel of modern architecture stripper bra that I wear with my Catwoman costume and my formal wear.

Not mutually exclusive categories.

So as my Daddio said, "I bet you learned something, didn't you?" I'm going to take my power drill and mount my fire extinguisher on the wall, and review the instructions so I actually know how to use it the next time I set a fire in my apartment. I'm going to avoid setting fires in my apartment by not drying things on the stove anymore, even though I'm almost certain that the fire was started because I accidentally turned one of the burners by bumping into it when I put my laundry cart away.

And I'm going to approach bras with a bit more caution, because those suckers when up like fireworks, especially the push-up bras with the little gel packets in the cups. They melted quicker than butter on a hot biscuit. This is what women put against their skin every day of our lives. Think about that the next time you're cooking something, and remember Big Island Rachel's advice: always take your bra off if you're doing something with open flames.

No, I don't know what you'd be doing bra-less around open flames. I'm not here to judge, only advise.

Happy New Year!