Current Mood - Digest
Welcome to Current Mood!
Someone I follow on instagram creates a weekly post to outline certain thematic elements of their week, and I felt I should follow a similar template. From here forward I hope to consistently spend some time sharing my present interests within the categories of: food, drink, self care, art/aesthetic, listening to, reading, research. Please recall that my sense of humor might be dry, awkward, or include idiosyncratic language.
Current Obsessions
Food
From Paper Cake Shop
Drink
I love H Mart, I love matcha lattes, and H Mart is the place to be to find all kinds of drinkable delicacies. Naturally, they have an extensive selection of teas, including Tien Xi powdered matcha. I've been making oatmilk matcha lattes with lavender syrup every morning ever since. I love checking out their refrigerated section as well for unique flavor sodas and adult beverages.
Self Care
I signed up for Ipsy, and I don't regret it. I had no idea you could ask for little to no makeup! I don't need a lot of makeup and some of their deluxe sample sizes are the amount of makeup I might use in about a year. I could go on and on about the products I've found, but to keep this in the self care category I have been especially grateful for all the skincare.
Especially youth-giving and emollient products that have make my smile wider and my eyes brighter:
- Elemis Superfood AHA Glow Cleansing Butter
Like a smoothie for your face, literally like mango butter, and it's so refreshing. - SOME BY MI Retinol Intense Advanced Triple Action Eye Cream
I always look tired, I always have look tired, I look much less tired now. - Nena Skincare Overnight Lip Mask
This actually makes it so that I don't always need chapstick with my chronically dry lips, I actually wake up and my lips aren't shriveled.
Art / Aesthetic
Where do I start? I originally heard of "sacred adornment" through Bustleworship, a maker from the midwest now in Colorado. Though in my current lifestyle I don't have a lot of need for fashion, I've been really preoccupied by celestialcore and classical art depictions of mysticism / spirituality / witchcraft. For my etsy shop I've constructed two rosaries with swords in lieu of crosses, and it makes me respect the time that other makers have spent in creating their own unique forms of "sacred adornment". This aesthetic in itself has led me down paths to do more reading on the history of what is largely women in craft and the hours of manual and technical labor put down simply for clothing. It inspires one to consider the difference between a celebration of capitalism/fast fashion or true grassroots artistic invocation of handmade femme power and culture. Another great powerhouse in this area is the lace artist and historian, Elena Naomi Kanagy-Loux.
Listening
This one is kind of a cheat because I was "re-watching" Los Espookys (sewing and listening to the Spanish while occasionally looking up) and I often forget how iconic and goth the soundtrack is, and it is equally in Spanish, so it's both rockin' and a bilingual experience for me.
Watching
Following the above theme, I think Julio Torres has the most bizarre kind of talent, so I've really appreciated his new show Fantasmas, and I look forward to watching Problemista as soon as it's available to stream on Max.
Reading
My two most recent "reads" have been skimming and scanning Gem Trails of Washington (I want that quartz!) and Plato's Symposium. Up until recently I had no idea that Plato's Symposium was about a number of philosophers drinking at a party and discussing their choice of paramours. I was pleasantly surprised by the general amount of gayness, and I did a lot of highlighting whenever Pausnias spoke, though I felt as his staunch authoritatiran position suggesting that gay love is the best, most "heavenly" love was intentionally subversive and very clever, I believe we should all love who feels right, and for him it was the purest form he knew. May we all seek the most heavenly love.
Research
I've been researching vintage 90's trends that I grew up with lately, both collectors items and compiling pins on the things I remember from my pre-adolesence on. One of my strongest areas of research has been vintage Windows emulators on Virtual Box and troubleshooting iso files so that I can play through some of the old school games I know. In particular, I'm really interested in the "girl games" category of games from the late 90's/Y2K period. Some of the most popular games for "girls" my age were created by Mattel, Purple Moon, Girl Games Inc., and magazine companies like Cosmopolitan and Teen Magazine. My personal favorite was always Rockett's New School by Purple Moon, and I've been trying to find or create a flawless iso from the game, but I think there's a coding conflict for most Windows emulators and this game. I've also found that the emulators are less likely to accept an iso originally designed for/from an earlier version of Windows, when "back in the day" things adapted more smoothly and I could run my CD roms for years after I bought them. The endless frustration with running certain iso files or debugging Windows platforms is real, but that's also part of the fun, like a puzzle.