Girl Anachronicles

Yesterday I found a website that trumps all other nostalgia websites I’ve come to know so far:  I’m Remembering. It’s a blog built on a Tumblr engine, its theme is specifically 80s and 90s nostalgia. I Love the 80s never had it so good and so right. I found things in there that I had forgotten about in the longest while, and others that I remembered but I couldn’t find elsewhere on the web.

Some examples:

Sea-pony whose only power is to blow bubbles underwater, yay...

I owned this exact My Little Pony seahorse, with the clamshell stand that would never stick long enough to the bath tiles… goddamned doll also looked like it was always dirty. It had a blowhole to blow bubbles, but being the little motherfuckers we were, we used it as a squirt-horse instead.

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..he stares at you from his perch while you're sleeping..

This one came from nowhere. I suspect it was a hand-me-down toy, like many others we had – our youngest aunt was only 9 years older than me, not enough time to deem the toys obsolete and throw them away, so I inherited tons of them! I loved this Rowlf puppet so much that I salvaged him time and again from the trash bin and many charity collections, and is now probably slowly dying in a room in Mom’s house.

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..creepy little clown to live on your nightstand. Whose idea was that? ..

This was obviously a pre-”It” item. I barely even remembered him until I saw him in the imremembering.com site. Then it was like opening the memory floodgates: the lamp in its full glory, then how it came apart little by little, until at last the only thing that remained were those immortal plastic balloons.

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..plastic lasts forever..

I was amazed when I saw this pic. We had these exact two cups at home (among a myriad of other assorted plastic cutlery pieces, such as Transformers bowls and He Man dishes). I still keep a plastic Hello Kitty cup from that time. These things indeed last forever!!!

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...all it was missing was the alternative of an alien head.

This was another hand-me-down from my aunt, but boy, did I have fun with this! This was the one piece that got me drawing fashion designs as an occasional hobby. Of course, by the time it got to me, the color pencils were long gone, so I had to make do with a carbon stick.

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MUSIC! FUCK YEAH!

This was one fucking useful toy! I used it every day: I played the Read-along vinyls, I played my Rainbow Brite record, I played just about anything that would fit into that record player. I would play things time and again until I made my mother nauseous. I’d put on plays for the whole family – and would force them to watch, god forbid they turned away! I was such an attention whore when I was a kid … I dunno what happened…

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If only I had been able to shrink tiny enough to play IN this castle...

I almost went into tears when I saw this: my favorite toy ever! This castle was a Little People castle, but it eventually became the “anything goes as long as it fits” castle. This castle was under siege by the GI Joes, it became soon the reign of She-Ra and friends, He Man knocked at its drawbridge! Even the Thundercats visited every once in a while…

And as a bonus:

RUN AWAY!!!

Not a toy, but a fixture in our local McDonalds playground. This tree reminded me of a talking tree featured in one of my favorite local children’s show – Titi Chagua. Talking trees were this thing I adored and abhorred at the same time. It eventually turned into indisputable adoration, until I was at last transfixed by the Ents. I <3 talking trees.

So, if you’re already over 21 and like going on a nostalgia binge … http://imremembering.com

pink freed ballet shoes, originally uploaded by Laura Walker.

I was born to a life-long ballerina: this guaranteed that I’d be enrolled into the ballet-frenzy early on in my life. I still remember my first ballet lessons. I must have been around 5 years old, and I had a black leotard with tiny white dots, and a simple ruffle around the hips. After I while, I adopted the pink leotard with pink, gauzy, tie-around skirt uniform.

However, I was always fascinated by the grandiosely stiff tutus adult ballerinas wore, and even more than that, I was enthralled by the pointe shoes. I dreamt of going pointe. I used to swipe mom’s old pointe shoes from their storage place to put them on and play adult ballerina in my room, away from judging eyes, nearer to my bed in case I should fall.

I never went pointe. My mom, who used to take me to my ballet and jazz classes and spend the whole day taking her own dance lessons in an adjacent studio, broke her ankle and had to swear off dancing. It followed that I would have to quit my lessons too ….

Years later, when I turned 19, I enrolled in jazz classes in the ballet studio my stepmom used to work for. It didn’t take long for me to realize that, whatever illusions I had taken with me as a child that I could move gracefully, I couldn’t dance worth a dime. I quit a few months thereafter.

Later on I worked up the courage to ask my mom: “Mom… did I dance well when I was a kid?”.
She laughed a bit and said: “Hell, no! You had two left feet!”.

Hindsght is 20/20. Unless it comes to how happy and talented you were …

I haven’t created a new look at ShopStyle.com for a long time now (it’s an incredibly fun timewaster, though, but I don’t have all that much leisure time anymore). However, I’ve lately found myself revisiting this style more frequently:

It’s all in the boots, people. I first became enamored of Doc Martens-style boots at the age of 15. I was in public school, and rules on footwear were much more lax than they’ve become in later years. I bought my first 10-eye-Doc Martens-imitation pair at a Payless Shoe Store and wore them daily: to school, to hang outs … I have to confess that I even lost my virginity with those boots on my feet. They lasted more than enough, considering the wear and strain on them, and they were cast into the dark oblivion of my closet as soon as the sole went unglued. Later on, moths did their final work on them and they were rendered irreparable.

Later on I fell in love with another pair, this time off a Delias catalog. They were 14-eye with a raised toe, slightly glossier than what I was used to. They were incredibly uncomfortable at first, but I broke them in, and after that they were a total hit in my life. I loved those boots until their fiery demise five years ago.

I haven’t owned a pair of proper boots since then. I guess I thought I had outgrown the boot-wearing phase, but this sudden obsession has proved me wrong. I bought a pair of knee-high boots the other day at Hot Topic:

They look incredibly cool, but I realized today they’re not that awesome for walking long distances or for extended periods of time. Part of the boot-craving is to have a good pair of shoes to massacre on my upcoming trip to NYC. These boots do not fit the bill for such a purpose.:-(

So I’m back to square one on my quest for some nice, comfy Doc Martens boots. Maybe I should cut the crap and invest on the real deal. I think I’m ready to commit to boots again.

It’s been nearly a year since we visited San Diego to attend the yearly Comic Con. Right after our return, I diligently posted and discussed my experiences there, specifically in San Diego in general, as well as in the San Diego Zoo. But I never said anything about our experience in the Comic Con itself, the main reason of our visit to SD. I think that it has taken a long while for the experience to sink in and get digested: it was so rich, so vast, so powerful… we spent 5 days dawdling around in a convention center, and it’s amazing to believe that those 5 days changed our lives a little bit.

However, I’m gonna have to postpone the review of the whole deal in favor of the highlight of the visit, which deserves its own blog entry.

Mr. Peter S. Beagle
The man who made me believe again

This happened on the fourth day of our visit, as we were walking around the show floor looking at the different booths and just gawking and being amazed by the variety of it all. But something caught my eye then, an echo of my roots; more than an echo, a stark beacon. If you look closely at the photograph above, you will see what I saw: two big posters at each side of the booth, one of Lady Amalthea, one of The Last Unicorn.

The Last Unicorn is a story that has been in my conscious since I saw it when I was a small child, so this wasn’t an “Ohmygawd, so LONG since I saw this last, I had forgotten!” kind of moment. I just wasn’t expecting it there, among all the Supermans and sci-fi characters. It caught me by surprise so much that it brought tears to my eyes, and the guy at the booth caught me at that, crying a bit, with a wide smile of amazement on my face. So he seizes the moment to start driving his sale (they were selling DVD copies, as well as books by the author), but then he twisted it around a bit and starts telling me about a legal situation the author has been going through, regarding unpaid work, including being cheated out of payment for his collaboration in the making of the The Last Unicorn movie (you can read a bit more about it here).

And then, the moment of brain-shock, he tells me that the man who wrote this wonderful story was right there. Just then and there, I started bawling my heart out … and let me explain:

Little Diana was brought up surrounded by fantastical figures, either inherited from her aunt’s toy collection or things that popped up in the toy and entertainment market. Her world included gods from the Greek and Roman mythology, unicorns, mermaids, pegasus, horses, mammoths, faeries, spirits and the occasional princess from a fairy tale. These characters had sprung up from books, drawings and movies. And one of the movies that introduced her to the unicorns was The Last Unicorn.

The unicorn, as a figure, would accompany Little Diana for years to come, until adolescence would render the unicorn incompatible with her interests and beliefs. However, in the time she allowed it so, she surrounded herself with unicorn plush toys, rubber figurines (Hasbro’s My Little Pony had a lot to do with that as well), drawings, posters, notebooks, books, movies … all things unicorn came hand in hand with as much as she could find about mermaids (which was much less, since this was before Disney bastardized Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” and provoked the deluge of mermaid merchandise afterwards).

Little by little, all unicorn things were shed, and only a distant memory remained of the legendary horned beast. The steadfast belief that unicorns existed gave way to a good-natured indifference … until she met with the one who made her believe first.

Mr. Peter S. Beagle, author to The Last Unicorn, creator of the world that in its turn helped me create mine, came over to me and hugged me, and talked to me, and embraced me in his words. During the time of our conversation, I was enveloped in a warm cocoon of stories, lullabied by a soft, flowing voice that spoke of the roots of my world, of the nutrients that gave life to that humongous tree that was the fantasy I knew. He reached into my heart and blew life back into that dormant seed that was Little Diana and her steadfast beliefs.

At that moment I felt more alive and more eternal than I had felt in decades. I still choke up when I remember how it felt to be before the man that helped shape what I’ve become. No other worlds existed at that moment, only him, and me curled up around the fluid stream of flowers, magic and music his words made.

I purchased a different book from the one I already knew by heart: The Unicorn Sonata. It sat in my nightstand’s shelf for a few months, but as soon as I read it, it became water to the seed Mr. Beagle had brought back to life. As soon as I finished it and closed its covers, I realized: once again I believed in unicorns with all of my heart.

At the beginning of this week, at some point while I drove, I had the distinct feeling of being back in 1999. How does that happen? Was it the smell? I’ve been aware for about ten or eleven years now that one of my favorite senses is the sense of smell. Contrary to taste, it hasn’t been as deeply crippled by my smoking vice. My eyesight is not the best either (I have a mild case of progressive myopia and astigmatism, a trademark for computer professionals). I think I might have also lost some of my hearing at one point or another, since I can remember having problems with it as far as 11 years ago. And hell, I can’t go around touching everything I please! Haha! So … smell!

Smell is what drives me around my world: with a whiff of fragrance I’ve been able to recognize someone faster than by a look to their face. I get hungrier by the smell of BBQ’ed steak than by the sight of a juicy meat cut. The fragrance of apple/cinnamon incenses and candles has been irrevocably associated with my stepmother. Same applies for the smell of perfumes like Shalimar, Ciara and Anais Anais (each one represents an era in my mother’s life). Some smells have haunted me for years as well, like for example the aroma one of my friends exuded, which I was never able to identify as any cologne, soap or perfume I knew. Others, I will never forget, like the smell of puppy breath.

I can better determine how dirty my house is by the smell that welcomes me in the afternoon. The tiles can look clean as whistles, but if I can smell mop water, I know it’s time to clean up a bit.

It’s safe to say then that each era in my life has a set of smells inherent to it. Perfumes on the trend are primary examples of how this works, and then there are also the smells of friends and places (years 1995 – 1997 had a high incidence of fun fair smells – musty oil, vomit and cotton candy).

But what happened to me earlier this week, I’m sure it wasn’t a smell. Smells are just the perceptible face of the deal. When I felt like I was back in 1999, it wasn’t the smell of business office lobby that triggered it. It must have been the feeling of impending doom, of sunlight bouncing off mirrored windows from offices in buildings towering overhead. It must have been the realization (and in a way, coming to terms with) that I am what I feared I’d become. Thankfully, that same morning I decided to take control of what I could to change what I didn’t like in my life. I’ll start with the small things … like the smell of my car.