another piece of the puzzle

Another random thing I thought of regarding Asperger's is the fact that I hate the telephone and love the internet. Most people I know say they hate or have trouble with email and IM because they can't pick up on or convey tone in typed words. This, of course, is why emoticons were invented. But I've always preferred email because I had so much trouble with the phone. I really have mostly trained myself to understand facial expressions (compulsive sketching of faces, anyone??), but what I still have TONS of trouble with is vocal tone. This is why I always think people are yelling or angry when they're not, or, conversely why I always yell when I think I'm not. And this is why I hate the phone. I feel so disoriented talking to a disembodied voice, and I never really knew why before. By contrast, email is the great equalizer. NOBODY can understand tonal subtleties through most email, without the benefit of vocal inflection or facial expression. So they dislike it, and I like it. I like how there are certain signs clearly associated with how I want the other person to know I feel. When I see :) I am reassured, and I only wish there were something like that for the telephone. XD

Anyway, yeah. I think I get it!

pop culture break

Adam Lambert, whatever.

Yes, the pants are tight. But frankly I am more concerned with how DANGEROUS those greaves and shoulder pads look. I mean what if one of his love slaves stage dancers accidentally made forceful contact with one of those things? Not too mention his own face. Oh dear. Also, as from someone who loves gay things with spikes, I still think this outfit is ugly. Good idea, bad execution.

But what I'm interested in is the horrified reaction this gets compared to the passé response to the female equivalent. Ladies appear on stage with mile-high cleavage and no pants all the time. All the time. And yeah, it's kind of gross (unless you're Gaga, but I'll talk about her another time). But why do they do it? Because the industry is run by, and therefore for, straight men. Because women are seen as objects whether they dress this way or not. Wonder why everyone does it? Because they believe have to in order to get noticed. Whether it's true or not is debatable; the point is that regardless of talent the female stars are pressured to flaunt their assets. It's perfectly okay (read: expected) for Britney or Rihanna (or - flashback! -Janet Jackson or Madonna) to risk cameltoe or a nip slip (which is almost a rite of passage in the pop starlet's world), but Adam Lambert, well, that is way over the line. Makes sense to me. Poor Adam. He's just trying to be one of the girls! Leave Adam alone!!

Oh, but Adam, I'd still consider taking some style pointers from Johnny Weir. And by pointers I don't mean giant spikes on your extremities. Although...oh my, are we conjuring fun mental images? I think we are.

muñeca del día

Dori in the bakery at the January meet. This is her favorite outfit; it's so hard to get her to change. I love the pirate ship cake.

thinking about my atypical brain

I took three different short tests online, and they all said I probably have AS. To be honest about it I feel like I've known all along, and yet never known. Isn't that odd. Obvisouly there's no substitute for a real diagnosis, but I don't know if I care to pursue that. Maybe later.

I finally figured out how I want to use the nice journal Nancy gave me for Christmas. It's by far the nicest journal I've ever had, so I hesitated to make a mark in it. But I realized I want to write a book about the way I've seen the world and how life has been for me. From time to time in the past I'd toyed with the idea of an autobiography, but it seemed self-indulgent. To me, my life was fascinating and full of wonder, but really, to an outsider, it was just a normal ordinary life. Why would anyone want to read about an upper-middle-class white girl going to the best schools and suffering upper-middle-class angst over Roxy shirts and calories? However, now that I understand my condition, I realize that I actually haven't had an ordinary life. What many would call my fantasy life has been of equal meaning to me as the side of my life that is observable to outsiders. I used to think that putting stories about "I'm not a girl; I'm a bear" in an autobiography would be seen as an overly cute and clever self-depiction. But now I see that my experiences, with my phenomenal longterm memory, are not irrelevant. There are other people -- other girls, primarily, for the boys have been better studied -- who think as I do, and parents who don't know how to raise them. There is not enough out there to read that is anecdote-based, engaging, first-person rather than clinical. I think it would be useful for the general public to have something like this. Autobiography is the wrong word, though. It won't cover everything, and it won't be in order. It will focus on a series of specific themes pertaining to elements of AS and trace those through incidents from my experience. I want people to be able to relate to me, even if they never meet me, in a way I was able to relate to so few growing up. I want to help people, because there are so many people unaware of this condition, especially the less severe cases who have gone undiagnosed, who are suffering unnecessarily and might be comforted by the understanding.

I finally understand now why, despite having had all the advantages in the world, including the best of families, I still had such a difficult time growing up. And I feel vindicated, in a way. I know lots of people would caution me to be more private about such a thing, and I'm not sharing it with anyone except my boyfriend and my family, even if I am writing about it here. It's not the kidn of thing you broadcast. But it is something very important to me, because world makes so much more sense now. So I'm not going to be super secretive or anything either. I am not ashamed, because it's just how I am.

Now back to writing my paper. I had a minor eureka moment while looking at some Moche pots, so I think I'll be able to have fun with it until that particular angle is spent. Maybe I'll get eight pages or so out of it.

daily doll: winter pastimes

What do you do when your socks get too full of holes? Make them into hats for your dolls, of course. Lenore is modeling a kitty-ear hat that I have since sold. :)

daily doll

This is QiaoMei, model China China. I gave her new eyes (the originals were flat brown) and later a new body, though this picture predates the latter. She is sold out from 2004. I got her for a very "normal" price though, from a local collector at the January meetup. I just love her simple beauty and her cool hair. They don't make the new stock wigs as nice as the old ones.

your daily doll

Because I don't really have time or energy to make a huge post with all my favorite pics and new dolls going back to who knows when, I'm going to post one random doll photo a day. That way I won't be wasting as much of your time, either, since it takes two seconds to look at a picture. :)

Haru and his boyfriend Zero.

my little custom doll

Lishe is finished! I'm really happy with her.

this is my blog; i post what i want

I enhanced Kona's eyes so she's not so plain. I must say I'm rather pleased with the result:








Also my little Dals' wigs came today!



Who are they? ^_^ Can you tell? (Do you KNOW me?)

And speaking of ambiguously platonic twosomes, I don't know whether the new Sherlock Holmes movie is going to be any good as a movie, much less as a Sherlock Homes adaptation, but I know I'm going to love it for one wonderful reason:



Oh, Watson, this psychological disturbed state in which you observe yourself is called LOVE. Get out of denial, my good fellow! They're so super cuuuuuuute! They need to just get a room. OH WAIT they already have one. Lol.

pullips: cheaper than children!

...and prettier too, imho. Mom, this is for you because you asked for it.

Click pictures to zoom! Stock names are linked to PullipStyle for comparison.
No fair clicking ahead. First, a review of the dolls you've already met:

Sako (Rida) and of course Haru (Horizon):
Haru and Sako were high school buds together. She actually appears in my original story, but isn't fully fleshed out. Once she arrived, I learned she wants to be a manga artist. Despite her bold style, she's somewhat shy and reclusive because she thinks she's more awkward than she actually is. Like Haru, she's an orphan. Haru also has yet another new wig which came to me by chance (more on that later) and is my very favorite of all his hairdos. I also love their matchy-matchy shirts!

Jenna Celeste (Celsiy) and Bijou (Angelique):
Jenna, an eccentric and artsy engineering major, is college buds with Haru, and Bijou is her cousin, a French model. They are very close. Lookit the inverse hair/eyelids! That's all stock; I didn't plan it! :D


Now, I know I told you when I went to the dolly meetup they had discounts? So I HAD to buy one right, because, discount, no shipping, peer pressure, zomg.

So I bought Youtsuzu. Her name is Midori. But she lives a double life.

This doll is to die for. Her kimono has four separate layers and feels like silk, and her hair is super elaborate. Unlike some of the pricier dolls, she's worth the money. Plus, I just adore her face. Her lipliner is unique among Pullips. And those eyes!
BUT, how can this traditional Japanese beauty fit in with my gang of crazy kids? Simple. She's Sako's older half-sister (yes she knows they look nothing alike, and she doesn't care). She works at a trendy Tokyo establishment as a neo-geisha. It's fairly good money and all she has to do is be pretty and put up with inappropriate comments from male patrons. Perhaps it's not the most respectable thing to do, but it put food on the table while Sako was finishing high school. In her real life, she has a totally different style from her professional elegance. She goes by Dori, and she prefers girls.
ARGH, A BUNNY! Dori has been experimenting with her at-home hair. First it was natural black. Then she discovered blond does wonders for her complexion:
The blond phase lasted awhile. But this week, perhaps because she heard a rumor another blonde might be arriving, she changed it to dark auburn, which suits her wonderfully. She's one of my very favorites to photograph in all her styles!
Thennnn someone else came along. I had been waiting for Haru's boyfriend since September and he still wasn't due out for another few weeks. I NEEDED another boy and I'd been looking at pictures of re-wigged, re-dressed Butler. I came to the conclusion he was the prettiest Taeyang. Then one practically fell into my lap from the boards.

When Eli arrived, he came with a red and black wig, which did not fit his personality, but Haru wanted it. Until the wig I'd ordered arrived, I kept him in it backward:
All the straight girls are flirting with him, lol. Well, Jenna and Bijou are. Sako is trying but it's more just like ...*erm erm awkward*

Finally his coffee-brown wig arrived from Hong Kong! Much better. That's a pretty boy.
As much as I adore his face, Eli as a character is still sort of unformed in my mind. He keeps aligning himself with Ichigo, Avonne's roleplay character (also Haru's made up younger brother), and it occurred to me I should change his eyes to gold and make him into Ichi to give to Avonne for her birthday in March. I still haven't decided yet though. He's so pretty.

At last at last, my Richt arrived around Thanksgiving. He also had a bit of an identity crisis. First he was London, an invented character who is Haru's rival in streetfighting and seduction. This worked well for their introduction, which was hot.


I swear, that outift is the gayest Taeyang stock outfit ever. There were some non-Pg-13 moments which I won't post here.Instead you get a nice picture of them being lovely!
Once he had changed clothes, it became obvious that with his eyes and hair he looked a lot like Zero, Haru's boyfriend in our RP (not in the original story though). So Zero he became. Look, matchy-matchy!:
He's very handsome and I love his hair.
My three boys! Haru stole his boyfriend's gaytastic stock outfit. It suits him much more than Zero. Zero is an interesting sort; he comes from another anime and we adopted him into our RP. He's very quiet, quite the opposite of Haru. He's a student. He's also a vampire, and a vampire hunter. It's complicated. But I promise you it's far more intelligent than Twilight.

EEEEE, he's singing to himmmm!

Aiiight, so we've covered Dori, Eli/Ichigo, and Zero. Here's another one. This is my first Dal, a Monomono. (Dal:Pullip::Skipper:Barbie.) I bought her for a ridiculously good price at an auction I accidentally won, but now I'm delighted to have her. I removed her lipstick because she's undergoing some gender reassignment...

I didn't use to like Dals; I thought they looked weird. But now I love them! It's just a matter of getting used to it. And for my supersecret plan, I neede a second one. So I ordered Coco because my friend Haji wanted the outfit for her doll. Coco's wig went to Dori; now Coco is temporarily wearing Haru's black wig and panda suit while the two of them await their special wigs from HongKong. Once those wigs arrive, their identities will be obvious and their names revealed. For now they're kind of unfinished. So they don't count. Yet.
Aw, my two little ones, don't pout! You'll have clothes and hair all in good time. ;)

We're almost through the whole gang. This next girl was something of a sympathy purchase. I call her an eBay rescue. She was used and ludicrously cheap- I bid a very low bid just to boost her numbers and ended up being the highest bidder without even meeting the reserve price. Then I got a second chance deal and took it because I felt so bad! She really should be worth more than that. She's a Latte, an older doll that never took off the way some of the '05s did because she's quite plain. I've always had a soft spot for her, maybe because of her name, or because her hair color matches my natural one:

And she came with lots of extra clothing too, such a good deal. I named her Kona. Get it? HA. Her hair was super crunchy and nasty at the ends, so I trimmed it and it looks much better! Still though, the best thing about her is her hat:
Kona is kind of a modern hippie. She's from Seattle. I don't know how she got tan like that.
But she's so plain next to my other girls. I might try to give her some custom eye makeup or something.

Then finally, the newest one, Lenore. She's a Papin, a doll I've wanted for awhile but only wanted to buy nude/bald/<$60. And I got my wish! Unlike Kona, I have no reservations about owning her; she's perfect. She's on an Obitsu body, not the one she came with, so she's SUPER POSEABLE and loads of fun: The wig I put her in for now is Monomono's stock wig. It's adorable on her. I might not change it. Lenore is very outgoing and spunky. She's becoming good friends with Jenna already, and she and Dori might get a little romance going before too long.
I cannot express how wonderful the Obitsu body is. I'm totally getting one for Haru now that he's destroyed his own body. I'm going to wait though, because I've bought enough, and I'm nervous because switching the boys is a little tricky.

Here's a picture of all my girls:

Kona, Jenna, Dori, Sako, Bijou, Lenore.

Aaaand here's the whole cast! The little Dals are sitting on the sidelines.

Last and currently physically least is my custom. Here's her faceup:

I'm aware that the eyebrows are crooked, but since it's impossible to make them even without a stencil (which I might resort to if I do them again), might as well make them in a cute expression. Quizzical, perhaps.
I must say I'm quite proud of the eyes and satisfied enough with the lips not to risk messing them up again. Lips are way harder than eyes, if you believe it.

That is that. So if you count the three in-progress customs, Kona whom I might customize or re-sell, and Eli whom I might customize and give to Avonne, I have twelve dolls. If you don't count the customs (I don't!) I only have nine. And if you consider Eli and Kona are merely passing through, I have seven. Either way, it's a big number and I'm SORRY! It could have been tattoos, and you can't re-home those if you get tired of them!

Anyway, Margot will have a full house to manage when she arrives. Silly kids.