Things of Happiness: Halloween!

Halloween is, in fact, the best thing ever. Sadly it's gone downhill for me in recent years, but this year I am returning to the good Halloweens and am determined to make it a good one. My dad is way into Halloween, and our house has always been kind of epic. None of those inflatable pumpkins and hokey things for us--dad likes to go for the legitimately creepy. I generally hate all things horror movies, haunted houses, hayrides, and things like that because I am scared of everything (not exaggerating). But it's different when it's your house. Dad scares people, and it's so gleeful and fun to watch!



Costumes though, are the real reason Halloween is the most fun. My mom is insanely talented at sewing (no, really. She once made me a spandex unitard-don't ask- and it fit perfect the first time I tried it on. I've seen Project Runway, that is something impressive!) and my costumes were always glorious and amazing. My favorite was from kindergarten, I was a pink unicorn, as I wore my costume just about every day for years after Halloween:




It is amazing. The tail and such are covered in sequins shaped like stars and moons, and I remember being very cross at a kid dressed up as Frankenstein because his head was a cardboard box and he kept dropping things behind me in line so that when he went to pick it up, his monstrous head got stuck in my tail. I was not happy.

The year Batman Returns came out I was Catwoman. This was another costume I loved, and it was awesome. I was a hardcore six-year-old Batman fan, and this was just the best thing ever.



Sadly, I have a shortage of pictures of the costumes for the rest of my life! I can remember every one, and most of the time I was some varient of cat. These are my favorites though! This year, I'm going as an 18th Century-esque chick, which I know is not terribly original, but I just couldn't get all those Marie Antoinette parties out of my head! I will of course take pictures and document the event properly this year, since it's a comeback year!

Miles of Memes.

(Oh no! I disappeared again, this seems to be a bit of a habit! Let's just ignore it, shall we?)

In the meantime, I was tagged by the absolutley divine and wonderful Thumbelina:

Six Random Things About Me:
1.I spell things on stairs. I've done this for about as long as I can remember, which I guess is since I could count and spell, and I also discovered that my dad does the same thing. Each stair is a letter and usually I spell my name. Most of the time I can't finish it, because there aren't enough stairs and when I hit a new set of stairs I have to start over again. I usually spell going up and count going down.
2. There certain fabrics that I absolutely cannot deal with. This is sad, because they are always pretty ones that I would like to love. They bother me because there is a certain feeling one gets when one rubs them so that the fibers touch the under-parts of your fingernails, or the noise that nails along them make. These fabrics include, but are not limited to: velvet, flannel, and certain silks.
3. I am deeply socially akward. Most of the time I ignore this, but it tends to come out in odd ways. Like, I sort of go through life hardly talking to anyone, and then when someone makes the mistake of approaching me I tend to blather on and on and wave my hands around like a strangely animated bird. I am also an odd paradox of loving being alone and hermity and feeling a great need for all sorts of companionship.
4. I don't eat the middle of things. Mostly this applies only to sandwich type foodstuffs (burgers and the like). I don't like the middle, I like the edges. Part of this is because the crust is the best part of the bread but mostly it has to do with ratios. I am very particular about food ratios. The ratio of bread to meat and things must be right, or else I can't eat it. Generally speaking, the middle of sandwich type things have more insides than bread and this is a problem for me. However, most of the time if I am eating just bread (at say, a restaurant) I don't eat the squishy middle.
5. Sometimes I get so involved in a book or a movie, or something along those lines, that I try really hard not to think about the regular, real world and it really upsets me when I have to. It happens a lot, and it tends to feel—to be dramatic—like a kind of depression where I am sad because the world I live in is not like this one or that one.
6. Similarly, I spent most of my childhood looking for the hidden doorways, portals, magic incantations, partitions in the air and even just a secret garden or place, only to be terribly disappointed. It's my great tragedy (heavy on the drama today!) and I think it's a horrid unfairness of childhood that people always say that if you believe hard enough you'll find it.

Six Random Things I like:

1. Tootsie-rolls.
2. The neatness of unopened boxes.
3. Notebooks!
4. Tiny, tiny figurines of animals.
5. Putting on nail polish.
6. Hallmark made-for-tv movies.

Six Random Things I don't like:

1. Horror movies.
2. Incorrect pronunciations of 'caramel'.
3. Self-conscious pretension, although I think that phrase is an illustration of it.
4. Driving.
5. Being/getting/knowing drunk(people).
6. Zucchini.

Six blogs that I will tag:

1. The Life Aesthetic
2. The Capricious Club
3. The Girl Who Married a Bear
4. A Cat of Impossible Color
5. Fröken Lila
6. Ambiguous Alliterative Abomination

(I am dropping parenthesis like mad, but no fear! We will be back to regular posting this week lovelies!)

Comfort in Skirts and Chocolate.

First, the most humongous thank you to all the sweet-hearts and love-birds who sent happy blog wishes my way <3 You are all gloriously wonderful and keep me buoyant through dreadful midterms and stressful days! I am so so crazily glad! For ages and ages I never wore this skirt, and now I can't get enough of it. It makes me feel terribly lucky that it sparked my interest in the first place, while strangely suspicious of all the things I haven't grabbed and kept hidden away for months and are now homeless or unloved somewhere. A parade of dejected blouses and skirts. I've been resisting the urge to expunge some chunks of my wardrobe as of late. My closet broke, again, and I've been guiltily subjected to all kinds of things I've never or hardly worn. I always feel a terrific dichotomy going on: on the one hand, I want to toss everything out of the window (and into the pool), and on the other I want to pack-rat it all away like a mad clutter fiend. It's a tormented result, although it seems to resemble the latter part of that sentiment.

I also find, on a totally different and pointless note, that I am much more excited by makeup in the cooler months than any other. I haven't worn quite so much eyeshadow and all in ages, and it's kind of a nice change. I just love little make-up pots and strange containers. I'm such a sucked for packaging, especially things masquerading as functional when really it's just for strange's sake. I also eat a lot of candy. A lot. Most people, when they truly wittness this because I am not exaggerating, are astounded. I have a giant sweet tooth and it is trying to eat all the candy in the world.

Blogger Birthdays!

All This Happiness is one year old today! Last year I started posting without very much in the way of a mission besides a desire to share a love for clothing and fashion along with things that inspire me, with some poetry thrown in for good measure! Since then the little blog has grown a bit, although mostly I am very happy to have met so many other bloggers and to finally have been able to join in all of it! Thank you to everyone, you are all so wonderful, and even though I am a lazy bum and don't reply to all comments I love you dearly!

<3

Handfulls of Pumpkins.

We have our first pumpkin! They might be my favorite thing (I love things that are orange!), or at the very least they are one of many, although I don't particularly like carving them because I don't like the pumpkin guts. The actual carving is quite nice though! Thankfully, this one has been spared being chewed on by squirrels.

Dressing is getting harder again. I am trying very hard not to buy new things--this hasn't been going according to plan--and instead work harder at making the things I already have work. It's not too much of a problem, except when I see something I love or that piques my interest in some way out in the world, and I start visualizing and cataloging all the things I would wear it with. When that happens it is usually only a matter of time before I end up forking over the money and donning what seemed, for a moment, to be the outfit of my dreams. It's all so fickle!

Anyway, since I am somewhat behind the times and spend ridiculous hours clicking on my disorganized favorites and bookmarks list, I've hopped on to Blog Lovin'! Follow my blog with bloglovin´!

Things of Happiness: Lord of the Rings.

In case anyone missed it, I am an enormous dork. Evidence, of course, is leaked all over this blog in the form of literary inspired fashion, poetic quotations—or those taken from theoretical articles and citations, and inspirational book covers. Not to mention that these days it is decidedly uncool to trot around a college campus or mall dressed up like a French school girl, librarian, tea-time visitor, or other preciously quaint and whimsical identities. But I'm also a dork of a totally other kind. I'm not really entirely sure where to begin this kind of thing because there are so many dorky facets of my life and personality that picking one as a defining characteristic is a daunting task, not to mention impossible.

I'm an enormous fan. My whole life I have had rabid hopeless obsessions with things. Weird things like Victorian wasting diseases (who doesn't love a good one of those?), musicals, 18th century novels, fantasy (always), historical persons or events, cartoons, movies, books and book series, the color orange. I think one of my first obsessions was Les Miserables. I was eight and I saw the Tenth Anniversary Concert on the local public station when they were doing one of those drives, and was hooked. I tried to read the book when I was a pretentious 13 year-old, made costumes, bought every CD I could find, and spent hours on the internet. I was also uncannily good at roping uninterested companions into playing my current obesession games. This habit has not changed. It's been Les Miz, CATS (musicals were especially enthralling), Sailor Moon (hmm), Titanic, Tamora Pierce books, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and many other things I can't even force myself to remember. These escapades involve a total immersion for months, sometimes even years at a time. Sometimes I miss the totality of these kinds of things. It's like a love affair in a way, but I'm not going to force that analogy farther than that. One of the important bits about these phases is that they resurface throughout my life. In recent years there have been very few new ones. Instead I notice the resurfacing of the old loves, although now they are mildly bittersweet and somewhat detatched.

This is getting long. I don't know that I care! The thing is, like anything else these phases are so strongly associated with my aesthetic and emotional memory that my reactions to them are visceral. I'm being melodramatic. But that's the idea anyway. It's that whole bit about how a certain song can transport you through memory to certain feelings in your stomach and head, smells, visions, just those intangible feelings of the state of body! I've been avoiding my point here. I'm experiencing a revisiting of my Lord of the Rings love. My boyfriend, not realizing I was in possession the the extended editions of each film, suggested we have a marathon of the films (that was a bit of a struggle). Since then I've had them on in the background almost non-stop, just as I did back-in-the-day. I'm a big fan of the cast commentaries on these in particular, they're sort of awesome and in some ways usurp the films themselves.

But do you know, they just thrill me? They make me so happy I think I just want to cry, or pretend, or something. The first, Fellowship, has especially strong memories for me and it's definitely my favorite. Oh, but I can't describe it! It is the very pinnacle of my dorkish sensibilities! The feeling it gives me is simultaneously one that I would have gotten anyway just from the experience, but then also doubly of that I had when I was a sophomore in high school and my best friends were equally obsessed. Late nights with movies, websites, food and weird inside-jokes about LotR are so dear to me that the whole thing almost breaks my heart.

Of course, the costumes are endlessly fascinating—since it seems necessary to bring this back around to questions of style (although, honestly, it's not a stretch as for me, and I think for most bloggers, it's something we almost always notice. I am sorry, coma, to abuse you thus)--and make me envious. Of course the male costumes are wonderful and interesting, but to tell the truth the women's costumes tickle my fancy! They're sort of nostalgic in a way, reminiscent of all the kinds of dresses princess seemed to wear in stories, and the kinds of outfits I always doodled in my notebooks: improbably fastenings, long sweeping sleeves, trains, delicious embroidery and braids! I love it, the sort of regal Medieval look. To be fair though, it does touch on something much more Pre-Raphelite—which of course is so inspiring and exciting and pretty that I think I might pass out.





"In the middle of the table, against the woven cloths upon the wall, there was a chair under a canopy, and there sat a lady fair to look upon, and so like was she in form of womanhood to Elrond that Frodo guessed that she was one of his close kindred. Young she was and yet not so. The braids of her dark hair were touched by no frost; her white arms and clear face were flawless and smooth and the light of stars was in her bright eyes, grey as cloudless night; yet queenly she looked, and thought and knowledge were in her glance, as of one who has known many things that the years bring. Above her brow her head was covered with a cap of silver lace netted with small gems, glittering white; but her soft grey raiment had no ornament save a girdle of leaves wrought in silver. So it was that Frodo saw her whom few mortals had yet seen; Arwen, daughter of Elrong, in whom it was said that the likeness of Luthien had come on earth again; and she was called Undomiel, for she was the Evenstar of her people. Long she had been in the land of her mother's kin, in Lorien beyond the mountains, and was but lately returned to Rivendell to her father's house."

-Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien






This one has nothing to do with anything, other than it's my favorite Waterhouse (which, I suppose it sort of works. He's sort of vaguely Pre-Raphelite, no? I seem to remember there is some debate over that. Oh well!) ever. I love it. I need to have this dress, it is constantly in my dreams!

The Meeting of Dark Lips.

Yet only your eyes moved, following smoke
into darkness, composing
a study less domestic than occult,
until the room was like Rembrandt's portraits:
golden in the center and either very deep or strangely empty
in corners of the canvas.
-Richard Howard

I had the perfect quote for fall, the best little bit of poetic prose--I've been saving it for months--that I need to remember to use, but it just didn't fit right here. There is little point to this moment, other than a little provision of inspirational darkness, or something-or-other. I found Lula today! I have been searching for the silly thing for ages, and then there she was. I suppose it's a heads up then, my dears, the pages have reached us in the states and we may now grab them with our grubby little hands!