Back from break

Oh my gosh, internet, have I been busy lately! Since last we met, I've been to Wizard World Chicago, where I--along with a group of similarly Buffy-addled women--helped celebrate James Marsters' 50th birthday.

Yes, Spike is turning 50 tomorrow. (But we forgive him, don't we? Because some of us are even older.)

Then I went to New Hampshire to eat lobster visit my family. I visited with my mother and various in-laws and talkedtalkedtalkedtalked. For up to eight hours at a time.

Needless to say, I didn't feel any real need to communicate, so I wasn't reading blogs. And it didn't even occur to me to post anything.

I got home today to find a couple of sample boxes have arrived in the mail.  I'm also test-driving a new Vitamin C product.

Garnier Skin Renew Dark Spot Corrector

So far, I like it. It has that Vitamin C stinginess that convinces me that it's burning the age spots right off of me. We'll see.

Meanwhile, the teenagers start school on Wednesday, and I'm doing everything I can to enjoy the final days of summer. I have a thick stack of fall fashion magazines to work my way through, and a lot of Pinterest pins to fall in love with. And a lot of blogs to catch up on!

from the archives ... A Quiz: Are You Fat?

I haven't been talking about it, but I've been hanging out at the gym a lot lately. Something like five or six days a week. I've also been watching what I eat. And to get a sense of where I'm coming from, I've been re-reading my own old blog posts about dieting and working out. I thought this one was pretty good, so in celebration of my 8th blogaversary, and because I've picked up a few readers since I first published this in 2007, I'm reposting it.

The weird thing about getting fat is that it seems to happen overnight. You're going along in your usual not very exciting, certainly not very dramatic way, and someone takes a picture of you at BlogHer, and boom! You're fat.

And you think, "What the hell happened?"

Trust me. You didn't get fat overnight. No really, you didn't. You know how long it takes to lose weight? Well, it takes just as long to gain it. You have to have been doing a lot of wrong stuff for a long time before you get to be 40 or 50 pounds overweight. Ask me how I know.

So how does this happen? ("Sleep-eating?" she asked herself hopefully.)

No, not sleep eating.

So here's today's insight: just as alcoholism is a disease of denial, so is fatism. Fat people have all the body dysmorphic problems that teeny tiny little anorexic people have. You know how Mary Kate Olson looks at herself in the mirror and thinks she looks hot? Well, fat people do the same thing.

We think we look fine, even cute, when hello? We're fat. We think we don't really eat that much, when hello? We do.

Yes, we really do eat that much. Trust me on this. Spend a single day on Weight Watchers measuring every bite of food that goes into your mouth, and you will discover two things: the first is what being hungry feels like. The second is that you have been eating massive amounts of food.

To help you escape the cloud of unknowing that you may have wrapped around yourself like a puffy down comforter made of blubber,* here is a quiz! It's extremely scientific, having been tested on a well-known blogger whom I shan't name, because I've done myself enough damage, OK?

1. When someone starts to take your picture, do you flip them the bird, even if your hair looks great?
2. Do you have to lie down on the bed--and possibly use various non-clothing-related household implements--in order to zip your jeans?
3. Have you accused your dry cleaner of shrinking your clothes?
4. Are you convinced that your clothes dryer is running too hot?
5. Do you remain faithful to your spouse in part because it's impossible to remove your wedding ring?
6. Would you describe yourself as big boned, voluptuous, or buxom?
7. Do you have no idea how much you actually weigh?
8. Do you suspect that your actual weight is completely unrelated to your driver's license weight?
9. Are you considering a new career as a department store Santa?
10. Do you want fries with that?

If you answered "yes" to any of the questions, you are my new best friend and are now a dues-paying member of the Poppy Buxom diet support group.

* What a metaphor! That, my friends, is two degrees in English literature talking.

Happy Blogaversary to me; or I can't believe it's been eight years.

You know, back in 2004, when I first started blogging--eight years ago on August 10th, in fact--blogging felt far freer than it does now. Self-publishing on the internet (which is all blogging is, when you think about it) was a new frontier. But there were a few unspoken rules.

The first, of course, was that you weren't supposed to blog under your real name. Hence Poppy Buxom, a/k/a Poppisima (a variation provided by my pal Joke--and that's not his real name, either.) It wasn't a privacy issue so much ... well, OK, a little bit of it was for privacy. But picking a blogging name was like picking a new handle for an email account: it was a chance to be creative. To play with your identity.

Also, bloggers started off as writers. Maybe not published writers, but blogging was about the words. You could put up post after post with no photographs, and nobody would complain. Can you imagine? (No photos in this post--I'm kicking it old school.)

Another rule--at least amongst the thirty-something female bloggers I was reading and/or emulating--is that you were supposed to convey a sort of artsy, slackerish image. This is probably because blogging was invented by Generation X, which has been chronically underemployed for decades now. (I realize this is supposed to be the Baby Boomers' fault, but don't look at me; I was a slacker before the term was invented.)

Another rule was honesty. You could be as confessional as you wanted. We were encouraged, nay, expected to blog about our depression, infertility, and marital woes. Which meant that a lot of bloggers were constantly whining about their problems, personal and financial.

Later we got BlogHer and advertising and domain names and twitter and Facebook pages and giveaways and sponsored posts and search engine optimization and whatnot. People started blogging for a living. But way back when, it was pretty much me talking to myself, in the company of a small circle of similarly-pseudonym-ed cronies.

Because of the general poor-me 30-something zeitgeist, I worked hard to conceal the amount of privilege I enjoyed. After all, some of the biggest names in what would be called  mommyblogging were struggling financially. It seemed in bad taste to blog about my latest Mother's Day shopping spree at Neiman Marcus when bloggers I admired were putting tip jars on their blogs.

And really, what was with all the shopping, anyway? Was I completely shallow?

I suppose I was. And am. A better woman wouldn't get so much pleasure out of amassing large amounts of high end crappe. But I am no better than I am, so I do. And I gloat over my pretties like Gollum with his Precious.

This is why I stopped blogging about my personal life, and became a beauty and style blogger for middle-aged women. A lot of my real-life friends read my blog, and I was fine with that. But the game had to change when the kids at my kids' school discovered my blog.

I didn't want to stop blogging, but it behooved me to find a different subject. Something that didn't revolve around my kids. Something that wouldn't embarrass them. Something that would bore the pants off the playground bullies. Something I knew really well, like ... makeup. 

Now, I realize that as we age, makeup has diminishing returns.  I can spend 20 minutes putting on primer, foundation, concealer, highlighter, contour, blush, eyeshadow, eye liner, mascara, brow color, lipstick and lipgloss, and my 15-year-old daughter will swipe on some lip balm and look 100 times more beautiful than I do.

But age has some compensations. When I was a teenager, I lived and breathed fashion magazines. Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Glamour, Mademoiselle, and Ingenue. (Does anyone else remember those last two?) They were my bibles. I couldn't afford to buy anything in them, but I pored over them.

I knew that one day I'd come up with the money, and I'd go to New York, shop at Bonwit Teller, get my hair done by Kenneth, and eat lunch at La Côte Basque.

Oh, well. I guess it's too late for any of that. But by God, I can still buy Chanel makeup.

You may be wondering, what's with the navel-gazing, Poppy? It was Perilously's Pale entry into the Most Expensive Face competition.

Anyone who's hung around here for any length of time realizes that I love high-end department store makeup. For me, makeup is a luxury, and I really prefer it to feel luxurious. I'm not opposed to drugstore brands, but the packaging rarely thrills me.

No, I long for the stuff you buy at Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, and Saks. I love the the advertising campaigns, the way the department stores set up the counters, the packaging, the loud snap of the compacts when you open and shut them, and those smells. I love it all.

But I still feel a little guilty about my deep interest in such a shallow subject, not to mention the vast sums I spend on what is, after all, just makeup.

And that's why I get a vicarious thrill out of reading about how someone else spent over $3,000 on one day's face products.

With my Garnier moisturizer, L'Oreal mascara, and Maybelline concealer, I'm nowhere near that figure. And when the blogging sans-culottes go looking for beauty bloggers to take to the guillotine, I might just squeak by.

Links for a lazy weekend IV: When the light bulb goes off, and other stories

As I was reading the article about whitening creams on the Fashionista, I thought, I should write one of these, too! But I read on and realized that this article can't be topped. Finally, someone has taken on the subject of dark spots, why all the cosmetics companies are releasing lines designed to deal with them, and how they work. Also, it explains why my expensive Chanel Le Blanc serum, cream, and cleanser have been doing zip, zilch, nada to clear up the giant sun spot on my left cheekbone.  And why I should just buy another bottle NuFountain Vitamin C serum instead.

Don't they?

We've all been subjected to numerous photographs of "arm parties"--that stacked bracelet craze that's been around for a couple of years now. And frankly, a lot of the time, the stack looks kind of tatty. I don't know whether people want their bracelets to tell a story, but I see stories that look like "OK, here's my watch even though I really use my phone to tell time, and a beaded friendship bracelet that my daughter made for me, and a bangle that my husband gave me when we were dating, and a set of three costume bangles, and a double wrap leather bracelet." And they're all higgledy-piggly, and look a little sweaty.

So here's District of Chic showing us How It's Done.

It doesn't hurt that there are two Hermès bangles in the mix. Or that she's carrying a Chanel flap.

In other news, I am entranced with a lot of the new styles that are coming out for fall. I'm at a stage in life where I occasionally need to wear a dress. And not an empire-waisted, one-shoulder dress six inches above my knee accessorized with platform sandals, the whole outfit designed to make me look like an adolescent giraffe. At least, that would be the end result if I were seventeen years old.

Therefore, I'm absolutely in love with the stuff I've seen coming out for fall. I had to dig around a bit on line to find it, since the stylists for the catalogs are doing their bewildering best to cobble together outfits that look like the sort of thing I'd throw on if my house were on fire, and J. Crew, I'm looking at you.

Here's a thought: don't. Unless you really, really want to look like a fashion blogger.

And don't think I'm not aware of your lapses in that respect, NORDSTROM. Blame your catalog stylists for the fact that I went to the Anniversary Sale on the first day ... and didn't buy anything but makeup.

Anyway, I'm in love with the longer lengths I've been seeing for fall. Ditto the paucity of platform shoes, which have started to look really dated even to me--and I cling to my favorite styles like a terrier with a bone. I'm pleased to see that waistlines appear to have headed south from the supposedly-flattering empire waist that has bedeviled me (and my Balcony) for the past several years. And I love the peplums. Although these are not great for those of us with Hips. However, they are helpful for those of us who have developed Elephant Ass, adding much-needed fullness to our meager side view. 

Not to toot my own horn ad nauseum, but you can see the stuff I've been admiring on my Pinterest board.

I mean, honestly--what's not to love?

Meanwhile, I'm sort of on a spending moratorium until I have time to hit the stores and check this stuff out in person.

In parting, I'd like to wish you all a wonderful weekend, as we wind our way into August and the end of summer. Get outside, eat watermelon, have a drink or two on the porch, find a large body of water and gaze at it. And you'll never guess what I'm doing this weekend, so I'll tell you. I'm dragging Mr. Buxom to a dance studio in Chicago to learn Balboa swing dancing. Check it out:

I mean, seriously. Look at those shoes. How could I not want to do this?