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On a kayak out on the Willamette River, near Ross Island. I am doing all the right things, thanks to my first kayaking lesson, although you can’t tell from this angle.
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There is a bald eagle in this picture, I swear. Can you find it? Hint: look for the white head.
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Tying myself in. The corset has a series of hooks and eyes up one side of it, so that you can put it on and take it off easily without having to worry about the laces until later. Not only that, but there are two rows of hook-and-eye connectors to ensure for an even better fit. Bonus.
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The front view. The fit really is nearly perfect, I have to admit, although in the future, I might order something that’s one size smaller, because there is just a small amount of give even when I tie it as tight as it will go and use the tighter row of hook-and-eye loops. Either way, it’s incredibly comfortable. There is velvet trim along the edges that mean the fabric doesn’t rub, and the bottom swells out enough to fit my hips.
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Front and back view. While the corset does fit around my breasts (meaning there isn’t so much room between skin and fabric that I could carry a drink in there, unlike most other corsets), there’s still more room than I’d like and thus the velvet piping on the edge kept furling over just a little.
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Overall? Corset was a serious hit. I wanted to link to it on the Lingerie.com site (not just because I think it’s a great corset for the price, but also because I wanted to plug them as a thank you. Plus the fact that I like how many sizes they offer, including a wide range of plus-sized stuff), but this corset doesn’t seem to be available anymore in the size I ordered. I do believe this is the same one in the plus-size, though, which looks awesome.
In a few weeks, I’m going to my first official Kink Party, and I have to admit that I’m likely going to wear this… If I can just find something to cover my bottom half!
Cinching up your brain and body, one hole at at time, s.
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The delightful and gorgeous corset, donated by Lingerie.Com
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Black silky material. Embroidered flowers. Lace up the back. A promise that it was a corset made for real women, not for some skinny model with balloon boobs. Something just my size, with stays that would be strong enough to pull my waist in, but not so strong that I couldn’t breathe…
Can I say that I was just a little excited, waiting for my corset to arrive? Oh yes, yes I can.
The corset — a gift from Lingerie.Com (thank you, ten times over!) — finally arrived and I have to admit that I just looked at it for a while. It was so beautiful, and seemed so well made. I knew that I was going to be incredibly sad if I put it on and it didn’t fit. Or if it looked bad. Or. Or. Or.
In the box it was perfect. On me? I wasn’t sure yet. So I waited days before I finally, finally tried it on…
The beautiful lace up the back.
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Star wars corsets. Geek-a-rama
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I have always loved corsets. I love the way they look on women, the way they accentuate their curves and highlight the hourglass of women’s bodies. I think the material is often so beautiful, the patterns and details, the buttons and eye-and-hooks and lace-ups. The way they feel, not just to wear, but also to touch. I think they’re incredibly sexy, no matter what size and shape the wearer is.
Despite my passion for corsets, I’ve never owned one that I loved. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever even owned one, not even one of those cheesy mall-buy corsets. Why? Mainly because they never fit right. I have something of an hourglass figure already (wide shoulders, skinny waist, big butt), but I think it’s the small breast thing that screws it up. No matter how hard I cinch the suckers, my chest doesn’t fill up the space that’s left behind. Obviously, there are corsets that go under the breasts, but for me, I really really love the ones that go all the way up. Various friends have said, “Well, you just to have one that’s custom made.” But custom-made corsets are incredibly expensive.
So, in an attempt to find a corset that fits me right off the rack, I did a little research. Turns out, more and more corsets are being made to fit women of all sizes and shapes, and it’s getting easier to find something that will fit you even if it’s not custom-made. Score.
Things that I discovered you should pay attention to when choosing a corset:
Next step: The corset that I got and whether or not it fits me. Woot.
Tightening your laces one step at a time, s.
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Riiiight. So this color thing is harder than expected. I used two books to try and come up with my colors/seasons, and I’m not sure either of them helped. I did learn that I’m probably a summer or a spring. But the next step was to discover whether I was warm or cool.
It’s hard.
Warm is: You look better in gold, you have golden hair, you have brown or gold flecks in your eyes.
Cool is: You look better in silver, you have ashy hair, your eyes have silver or white flecks, your veins tend to run toward blue.
Riight. Almost helpful. Except. My hair is golden, my eyes have silver flecks, and my veins are blue. And the colors that people typically say I look great in (coral, peach, chocolate) are warm colors. So, hell.
So what I did was take a bunch of pictures, all of them in the same spot in the same light, just with different colors on. I’m not sure that helped either, to be honest.
Chocolate Brown
Moss Green
Raspberry
Peach
Cream
Turquoise
Yeah. Helpful? Not at all. What did I learn? I learned that I need to have someone do my colors for me. Someone who actually knows what they’re doing. Since my face looks the same to me in all of these.
I feel a little like MythBusters. Myth of colors? Busted.
Also: Help!
Learning nothing, one shirt at a time, s.
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I don’t always dress very well. This is something I’ve known about myself for a long time. I am, for all intents and purposes, a t-shirt and jeans girl. Sometimes this works for me. Sometimes it makes me look like a farm girl (which I essentially am, but I now live in the city, and therefore feel like I should sometimes actually look like I live in the city). On the whole, I don’t really care how I look. No, that’s not entirely true. It’s more of an equation or ratio. I care how I look, but only to the extent that I can stand to do something about it. It’s a cost-benefit ratio, I suppose. If it’s not fairly cheap and easy, then I’m not going to do it.
A perfect example: I love love love my current hairdresser. Why? Because she believes me when I say, “I want my hair to look as good as it can without me doing anything to it. If you give me a cut that takes more than 30 seconds to do something with, then you’re wasting the cut. Seriously, I wash it and I put it in a bun until it’s dry. And then I shake it out.” Every other person who cut my hair was like, “Yes, but if you just blowdry it…” or “Yes, but if you use these three products…” It was like I was talking to myself. My current hairdresser is the first one ever who said, “Okay, I can work with that.” And she does. It’s fantastic, and so is she.
Seriously, I want to be one of those people who always looked immaculate and perfect. Who never has cat hair on her cashmere sweater. Who wears cashmere sweaters (makes me itch). The kind of person who looks like the world’s perfect designer picks out her clothes every morning and then follows her around, making sure she never has a wrinkle, crease, stain or splotch. Buutttt… yeah, I’m not.
Over the years, I have become a better dresser, however. I now understand how my body shape can be accentuated or destroyed by the clothes I wear. Sometimes I even take advantage of that learning. Most times I find something that’s clean and I put it on. What I really want is someone who will come to my house with twenty outfits and eight pairs of jeans that look absolutely fantastic on me and are my size and who will say to me, “Yes, those pants make your ass look fantastic. Let’s get three of those in different colors.” I would pay big money for that.
Since I don’t have that, I flounder through the dressing thing. I shop mostly at thrift stores — cheaper, environmentally friendly, more unique — and I can pretty much choose things that flatter my shape (except for jeans — I swear I’ve never bought a pair of jeans that didn’t either sag around my ass or smush it into flatness).
So, in an effort to dress myself like a big girl (without assistance from smart-mouthed friends or Garanimals (yes, I loved those!)), I’ve spent much of this week learning my “Colors.” Colors are a thing out of the ’80s, I believe, when women were really into Color Me Beautiful and knowing what your season is.
So far, I’ve gotten my books out of the library and I’ve been draping myself in colors in an attempt to discover my season. Pictures to come tomorrow.
Have you ever had your colors/seasons done? If so, what are you? Do you have a picture that illustrates you wearing your “best” colors? I’d love to see them/share them here!
Coloring the rainbow, one stripe at a time, s.
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And on the way home yesterday, day four of being on the bike after the ankle break, it happened like this:
I was sitting, stopped for the red light. Riding the bike is easy. Stopping and starting are not. My ankle moves round and round and round and does not complain. What my ankle does not do is bend so that I can put my foot down on the ground, toe-first, and lean my weight on it. It does not like that very much at all.
So my stopping is awkward, at best. It’s a slow-slow-slow down and then put my right foot down and lean. And then slide forward off the seat, carefully, carefully, putting my left foot down flat when I’m low enough to the ground to do so.
Starting back up is the same way. Only in reverse, of course.
So the light changes. I do my reverse, slow-motion mount and begin to peddle through the intersection. I cross the intersection, and begin to speed up, just a little. I’m two, maybe three blocks from home. I’ve done some good writing at the coffee shop. It was raining earlier, but it isn’t now. I have lunch to make and a class to go to.
There is a parked truck on my right. I begin to pass it. The driver’s side door opens, hard and fast. There is enough time to say, “Jesus!” (this is what I say — I don’t know why) and then enough time to think (or maybe not think, maybe just act) “protect the ankle, the foot, the left side.”
And then the bike is down and I am down. And my ankle aches, but only a little. And my right arm hurts, but only a little. And I can tell there’s a gash on my arm, just below the elbow. Somehow, even though I have two layers of clothes on over it, I know the skin has been ripped.
A middle-aged black man leans over me and says the kind of things that people say in that moment. Something like: Are you okay? And: I didn’t see you. And: I looked in the rearview mirror. Or maybe: I didn’t look in the rearview mirror.
I can hear him, but I also can’t hear him. I am, at the same time, cursing the universe, which seems to have it out for me in a very serious way lately. And checking my body for disaster, beginning with the ankle. I am standing and saying something about being okay and I am walking, limping, but only slightly, out of the road and over to the side. I am thinking, “Stupid asshole for not looking before he got out,” and “fucking universe for dishing out all this shit back-to-back-to-back” and “I should have taken Fremont instead.” I am thinking of all the near misses I’ve had in the last few years — e. coli, Lyme disease, a broken ankle, a door-int0-bike event, and I am wondering if something in the world is out to get me. Or if something in the world is watching over me, considering I am still here and still alive and still, mostly intact. As I’m walking away, limping toward home, I choose the latter. And I offer thanks.
Last night, there was a ride from a new friend, a master class with an amazing writer, an unexpected and sweetest-ever bit of protective posturing from my friends/housemates, and a caramel pecan dessert that pleased the tongue almost as much as the serving of conversation that went with it.
This morning, there is a bruised wrist and a likely-to-be scarred forearm and some rather purple bruises on the inside of my right thigh. There is a bike that needs tending — a broken spoke and a rotated brake lever. Easy fixes, all. There is writing that needs finishing, stories and words that will come if I sit down and put my brain to their needs.
And then I am in the shower, and I am standing without pain on both feet and I am letting the water beat against the new cut on my arm. In that moment everything — me, the shower, the sky — everything, is crying for the beautiful, fragile thing that I am.
Busting your brain and my bones. Daily. s.
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I was originally going to call this lesson Healing. And then I realized that healing felt too passive for the process I was going through. What I was doing was rehabilitation. I’m not just healing — I’m moving forward into the world in a way that is (hopefully) better, stronger, and more positive.
I looked it up and realized that at least two of the definitions of rehabilitation (and possibly more) in some way fit what I’ve been doing these past few weeks (I’ll let you decide which ones I’m referring to!):
So, I’m learning how to rehab. Mostly from the broken, torn, sprained, strained ankle. But also from other things. Mental things that I’ve carried with me for a long time, hidden deep inside their lock-box of secrets and fears. But that box was getting heavier and heavier, and I realized something this week: When I was doing everything on crutches, I had to put everything in my backpack in order to get around. And there just wasn’t room for that lock-box anymore. It was too heavy. And it was useless. It didn’t help me do the laundry on one foot. It didn’t help me hobble from place-to-place. It certainly didn’t make my rehab — or my day-to-day life easier.
And I had an epiphany: I’m strong. I can carry this damn lock-box every day while I’m healthy. I can lug it all over hell and barely notice. But do I want to? The answer was a quick and resounding no. I put the box down. It didn’t make my movement on crutches that much easier, but every little bit helped.
The second epiphany I had was an obvious one for most people. But, apparently, there are a few lessons I need to learn again and again. The “Don’t Push it or You’ll Do More Damage” is one I might have to learn a hundred times. My options were: push my injured foot and ankle so that I didn’t have to ask for help, look stupid, impose upon friends, ask for rides, etc. OR rest, rehab, grovel and beg, let go of my independent mentality and stance, crack myself open and let people in.
Doesn’t seem like THAT hard of a choice, does it? And yet I almost screwed it up. If not for a few friends who essentially said, “We ARE coming to get you,” I might have still mussed it up.
But in the end, I did choose. I spent my time doing hydrotherapy in the bathtub (hot and cold, hot and cold, to get rid of the swelling and to keep the healing blood flowing), giving my foot massages to move the swelling and bad stuff (yeah, that’s about as technical as I get) toward my organs to get rid of it, doing Ankle Alphabets and circles and stretches, lying on my ass with my foot up a lot and feeling so fucking grateful for my amazing, helpful, incredibly gracious friends. I am in debt to them — and I like this feeling. Because I know that should something happen in their lives, I can go and force them to take my offer of help (wicked laugh).
As it turns out, rehabbing the ankle and rehabbing the mind are similar things, aren’t they? Or, rather, they’re tied together. Part of that lock-box of fears and secrets has to do with asking for help, with feeling inadequate, with being afraid of relying on someone other than myself, of not moving fast enough and far enough.
It’s been almost three weeks since I stepped off the stair and borked my ankle. Three long, anxious, boring weeks of stress and worry and oh-my-god-I’m-losing-my-mind because I can’t move my body. In the past few days, things have changed.
I have taken off the casty-thing. I switched from two crutches to one. I have gotten back on my bike (in low gears, biking is recommended for movement therapy). I have slowly and carefully gotten back off the bike (the biking, as it turns out, is easy. the walking? not so much). And then, finally, yesterday morning, I realized I was making my way to the bathroom. And I realized that while I had the crutch in my hand, I wasn’t using it. I was actually walking (Of course, as soon as I realized that, I did kind of a Wile e. Coyote “Oh my god, I’m running on air!” thing out of fear and nearly fell down).
The results of rehab so far are tangible: I’m closer to walking fully again. And I’m closer to my friends who have helped out. I’ve let down some walls, put down my lock-box. Before I know it, I’ll be leaping, running, hugging, holding, shoving, hitting (uh.. no wait. Let’s pretend I stopped at holding there…)
My next step is to get to the point where the crutches aren’t necessary at all. I’m very much looking forward to that moment when I can return them to Fred Meyer and get my deposit back. Not because of the money, but because of what it will symbolize: my movement toward various forms of health. And my understanding that it’s okay to lean on things when you need to: crutches, walls, doors, your own strength, the kindness of strangers and friends.
I wonder if they take lock-boxes at Fred Meyer?
Hobbling forward, one half-step at a time, s.
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“Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.” ~James Arthur Baldwin
Chapter 38 
