2000-03-06
Saturday it rained. B and I shopped at the mega warehouse store. Back home I read the hotter-than-hot Dave Eggers memoir about raising his younger brother after their parents both died. I'm turning pages, happily enough, but a little ways past the midpoint I'm afraid my experience of it is suffering a bit from all the hype. You know, it's good but it's not really blowing me away. Very clever, very knowing, very well-executed and I'm waiting to see whether it adds up to more than what I've seen thus far.
Lately I feel as though my standards are -- well -- high. Too high for me to enjoy much in the way of books and movies. This movie Election, lots of people really liked it. I started off enjoying it. Very clever, very knowing, very well-executed. But it just didn't add up to anything. Left me with a resounding "So what?" (I will say there were some very nice elements. The lesbian sister subplot was one of the fresher things I've seen lately.)
It's not that I could point to movies that I love, the ones that have really worked for me, and be able to articulate why they left me with something other than that "So what?" (The opposite of "So what?" being, I guess, "Ah.") All I know is that they did. This is why I'm not a movie critic.
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Lovely weather Sunday. Went for a walk with my friend K in the morning, a bike ride with B in the afternoon.
Got my hair trimmed for the first time in six months. I always wait this long (or longer) and endure the chagrin of the stylist. I recently learned that market research types refer to certain women as "beauty active," identifying them by their daily use of five or more beauty products. This got me wondering what counts as a beauty product. Soap? Shampoo? Perfumed pink shaving gel? Unless we stretch the definition to include toothpaste, I'm squarely in the beauty passive camp.
But wait, that's only four.
I wear translucent plum-colored stuff on my lips. For years it was Clinique's "Almost Lipstick," a tube of which goes for $14.50, in the very popular shade Black Honey. Then I heard that Prestige, a brand sold at Sears, makes a lipstick shade called Sheer Grape that's a doppelganger for Black Honey. Ordinarily a snob about such things, I was skeptical, but I tried it and liked it just fine, maybe a little better. Sheer Grape costs $3.99.
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