4 AM : Awake and frustrated...

For the last two years I’ve had the same choice raise it’s frustrating head over and over again. I kept making the same decision, giving the same answer, and each time the choice faded into the background for a while. I regretted my decision more and more each time, thinking ‘this is 80% of a good thing’. A good thing I really, really want. Frequently enough to notice, each time I declined, circumstances tended to cough up a concrete example of why it was still not a good idea. Those examples helped, but didn't completely quiet those persistent whispers somewhere behind my eyes that I might be making a mistake. It felt like a duel. I kept standing, with my back to the decision, not walking away, but not turning to face it and take the chance either. I kept telling myself that the 20% that was left was definitely made up of deal breakers, that if I did an about-face and turned around, that the result would be a bullet to the chest. I’d come to the conclusion that all I could do was to walk away from it, completely, and that it is going to hurt to leave it behind…a LOT. I’d muttered to myself. I’d reassessed priorities. I’d doubted and questioned things I thought were rock solid. I told myself I was done screaming my frustrations into my pillow.

Suddenly it looks like the choice will be a non-issue and will likely be closing the door all on its own. I had gotten to the point that I was angry I hadn’t been able to let the idea of ‘maybe’ go. I had also gotten to the point that I wondered if that 20% wasn’t made up more of my fears than real deal breakers. For the last two weeks ‘What might have been’ has kept popping its head in the door and asking if I’m sure… until I want to gag it, weight it with a cinderblock, and walk it off the nearest short pier. I furiously and quite suddenly wanted to think, that if given the choice again, I’d have trussed up that choice right along with my doubts when prepping that cinder block. I wanted to believe that I might have just stood there, reveled in the splash, and gleefully watch for the last bubbles to surface. Instead the last few weeks have hammered home that its more likely that I will stand there all right, still clinging to ‘I think it’s a bad idea’, watching it disappear, and will probably want to sob. Dirt, I hate this feeling.

Ridiculously trivial, but I love it

So I was sitting next to someone last week and they mentioned they were wearing Drakkar cologne. I used to love Drakkar. Yes, it was the ‘it’ scent for a few years, just like Cool Waters by Davidoff was before, and Polo before that. I don’t know what it is about scents, but when a man walks by wearing something that smells good (in an appropriate quantity) I swear my head gets dragged by my nose into following his progress through a room.

I remember being little, 3-4-5ish, and loving the smell of my Dad’s suits on Sunday. He was a farmer, there were plenty of other smells throughout the week, but on Sunday he just smelled good. I remember walking into his closet and his suit coats on their wide padded hangers were just long enough to touch the tops of my shoulders. I’d tug open one lapel and step into the space, folding the other lapel around me and just stand there in my self made ‘suit tent’ and sniff. It smelled soooo good. I laugh now because now I know the only things my Dad ever wore were Brutt and he shaved with an old fashioned shaving mug, brush, and an Old Spice lather bar. They may have been cliché, but even now they evoke fond memories and good feelings. Safety, comfort, quiet, wonder.

My Mom, when I was little, wore Lady Vanderbilt. A little powdery, but it was always the smell of her. When I was a teenager and we were living in Alabama she started wearing Tea Rose and even now, I connect the scent not so much to her as to that place and that time. It started me running though my own catalogue of scents.

My first fragrance obsession of my very own, Eternity. Next Baby Soft’s Love, then Alyssa-Ashley Musk (more for the name than the scent), Teen Spirit, Curve, Clinique’s Happy, Cacharel’s Anais Anais, Warm Sugared Vanilla or Apple body spray, and the list goes on. At some point as a teenage I realized I REALLY liked the smells of things. I started buying small samples of scents, to be worn once and only once, for special occasions. An example, I wore Incognito to my senior prom, and even now the smell of it brings back that nervous happy feeling. The first few years of college were filled with the smell of Lucky. There was a 6 month period in there were I loved Cherry Vanilla (which smells a lot like a cherry Swisher Sweets cigar), but I pinky swear, people kept asking if I’d started smoking, so that one went fast. Long standing favorite of my internship in New York, Sonia Kashuk’s Tuberose. My first years back in Kentucky always smelled like Cacharel’s Amor Amor; then to Bath and Body Work’s Japanese Cherry Blossom and finally Victoria Secret’s Mood.

Through the years I’ve often bought scents in small quantities as my tastes change, I move on, or my mood shifts and I want to make new memories. After all that thinking about good smelling things I was feeling a little inspired. I reasoned, I’m an adult now, I don’t have to keep my fragrance purchases under $20 any more, and I kid you not a smile lit my face. I trolled the isles of Ulta and Sephora picking up every pretty bottle that caught my fancy. There were things I liked, but once they were on me for more than 10 minutes, nothing that I loved. I decide to branch out. I went online looking for niche perfumeries that wouldn’t be caught dead selling to a boutique in Kentucky. I ordered inexpensive grab bag samples of scents I could never afford to purchase ($495 for .75 ounce, shudder) and my nose was in heaven, but I hadn’t found anything that fit.

I had just 45 minutes last night between leaving work and picking up a friend for softball and I stopped to check my mail which included an envelope of perfume samples I’d forgotten I’d ordered. Eureka. This year’s new scent? A company name that makes me laugh, Juliet Has Got a Gun, and the scent is Lady Vengeance. It’s a side company for the fashion designer Romano Ricci, whose mother was perfumer and fashion designer Nina Ricci of L'Air Du Temps acclaim. Something that smells so good to me, I’m channeling my cat with catnip, and the urge to roll in it came out of left field. Something that dredges up food words like – Yummmm. Is my head saying this was a ridiculous amount of time spent on something really trivial? Oh yeah. My nose is telling me it was totally worth it.