hope in a jar

I. 

Virtually the only blog that I allow myself these days, one of my very favorites, is called "Into the Gloss."  It's all about makeup and skin care and fragrance and it runs the gamut from can't-be-bothered French editors who profess to wash their faces with Dove and their hair (if ever) with drugstore shampoo and to care only about their nail art, to this glorious bit of indulgence.  I really cannot afford half the products mentioned, or the treatments that they swear by, but it's always fun to see what other women use, or profess to use.  (Even those can't-be-bothered girls seem to have a lot of miscellaneous product in the background.)  On occasion, I've bought something after seeing it in the blog.  (One time, two years ago, my ex and I were in Newark Airport and I literally stopped and grabbed his arm and shriekily gasped, "Do you know who that woman is?!" as a displeased-looking blonde woman passed by.  "She's Julia von Boehm" - blank stare from him - "the woman who's as pale as me who was on that blog and she mentioned that MAC shade that I bought in Berlin after buying chalky, orange-y makeup for a decade!"  Second blank stare.  And then we flew through Heathrow and they confiscated my MAC c-1 for fair skin anyway.)

The chance to peek into other people's bathrooms aside, I find the blog fascinating for the same reason that I buy and use makeup.  It's the affordable luxury of the $10 lipstick that will change your life, the old hope-in-a-jar.  What you're hoping to find in that jar tends to change, of course.  As a young girl, you often hope to look like someone else - I remember being thirteen, fourteen, and absolutely starstruck by early photos of Kate Moss, I think that they were by Mario Sorrenti; and she was so impossibly skinny, her eyes outrageously far apart, her mouth voluptuous and innocent, as a child's would be, and I sat the magazine on my own, rather meatier thighs and wondered, "How can I ever look like that?"  The cruel irony, you realize as you age, is that eventually you hope to look like no one so much as yourself - only a bit younger, better-rested self, the way you looked way back when you were hoping to look like someone else.

II.
My lovely flatmate got me a miniature terrarium for Christmas.  What do you get during the winter for the girl who lives nowhere for long and who loves to garden?  As you can see, there is an adorable bit of green scruff inside, I've not found out quite what, and a small blonde dancing woman (apparently meant to be me), all neatly topped with a polished-smooth wooden globe to contain the moisture.  At first I thought that I would call this post, "Home in a jar," because that's really what a terrarium is: a portable garden, one that I can use to root myself wherever I go in this unknown year.  Home and hope together: a promise that I can always make some sort of home, somehow, somewhere.  The question is whether that is enough for me: it is a question of nature(s).  We make our own luck, I keep hearing - maybe not our own misfortune, not all of the time, anyway, but always our own luck.  Luck rewards the ready, not the patient or the passive.  So my little terrarium is something between home and talisman, then: it is its own sort of hope, it makes its own sort of promise, it says: If you want a garden bigger than my little jar, you're going to have to build it yourself.