Thursday, January 31, 2013

Spring Fashion Fabulousness

Author's Note: I wrote the draft for this post in my diary during a slow day at work. I had to pause in it several times because of actually, you know, working, and I think that's why this is all over the place. Definitely not my best work, I admit, but thanks to computer issues, I am behind schedule, so I am posting this as is. Enjoy.

Can I just say that I am loving the mod, Sixties-inspired fashions that are in right now? Marc Jacobs' graphic prints for Louis Vuitton and Prada's poppies are so much fun! Not that I could afford Marc Jacobs or Prada, but I practically devour their pictures in the fashion magazines every month. Not necessarily for the trends, since trends aren't for everyone (peplums are seriously hard to pull off, for example), but well, for a lot of reasons, like lusting after fabulous shoes and clothes (and hot models and cover girls), picking up beauty tips, and because I feel fashion magazines do a great job of documenting current culture, particularly from an artistic perspective.  Fashion is art, after all. Plus the magazines are fun. Especially Cosmo, my favorite.

Anyway, as I was saying, I love seeing the high fashion items of the moment, and the Sixties styles are quite adorable. Particularly since I have just recently gotten into the TV show Mad Men, which is an incredibly well done show, btw. I just finished season one, and I love it, the amazing fashions included. The characters all look so well put together, especially Joan, my favorite.

Bold colors and prints, winged eyeliner, these are things that look great on just about everyone. A mod bag shows off a playful personality, and the black and white prints are an excellent way to look chic and sophisticated. For me, it's all about the black and white. Black is my favorite color, after all, in part because it's slimming. Plus it's the color of my soul.

I'm looking forward to more spring fashions.

XOXO
Gossip Ghoul

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Big-ass Nashi

Another great thing about the Asian supermarket I work at is that we have a great selection of produce. I've read up through a lot of cookbooks and still can't name all the different vegetables we have. When someone comes in looking for Gai Lan, I just direct them to the produce section and point to the seemingly never-ending rows of different green, leafy things. Most things in the store's inventory I know pretty well, but the sheer variety of vegetables can leave my head spinning.

What fruit we have is more seasonal. The few times a year we do get in lychees I jump to buy a pound or two. Sometimes we have apples, sometimes clementines, sometimes pineapples, sometimes melons, sometimes persimmons, and so on. It all depends. The three fruits we do have almost all year round (besides lemons and limes, which for some reason we keep with the veggies, but whatever), are kiwis, mangoes, and Korean pears. Kiwis are amazing fruits. They pack a ton of nutrition, including Vitamin E and a lot of Vitamin C, and I try to eat one almost every day. Mangoes are one of my favorite fruits ever (mangoes, pomegranates, and blood oranges, btw), but I don't buy them that often because they're more pricey and kind of a bitch to peel, unfortunately.

Korean pears are a category of fruit all their own. Also called nashi, these are very juicy fruits and very sweet with a taste that's like a cross between a pear and an apple -- except sweeter. If any of you readers have ever gotten an "Asian Pear" from a grocery store or farmers market, they're kind of like that but bigger. Way bigger. One of these pears is the size of a large toddler's head. Possibly even bigger than that. These things are enormous!

On a rare occasion, we come across a pear that's been damaged. Most of our customers take great pains to select the most perfect pears, so we can't really sell the damaged ones. For example, once a pear was punctured by moving the packaging, so there was basically a big chunk missing from the side. Once one had a discolored patch, and another time a third of one was covered by a black bruise. When fruit is supposed to be thrown out, I like to salvage what I can. Why not? After all, it's free for me, and on weeks when I'm struggling to buy groceries, slightly old fruit is still a good, healthy meal. Getting to take one of the damaged pears is always a treat. They're so huge that even if part of it is bad, there is still a lot of edible, juicy, delicious fruit.

Plus these things are freaking expensive -- six bucks a pear! No way am I going to be able to afford to buy one on a regular basis. That's why I love the few days when I am able to get a Korean pear. The most important lesson here is that, while I am a bit of a cheapskate, I strive to eat healthily on a budget. Another little bit of fluff I could add is that it's good to take enjoyment and see the positive in bad situations -- the still delicious part of the bruised pear.

Yeah, whatever.

XOXO
Gossip Ghoul

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Word of the Week: Circumambient

As a writer, it is very important to me to work constantly on expanding and improving my vocabulary, so I am introducing a regular feature to this blog: the word of the week. I will randomly select a word from the dictionary and provide its spelling and definition, and the challenge is for myself and any readers out there to incorporate the word  in a sentence at least twice a week. Submit your sentences in the comments or on Twitter @ak_gossipghoul.

This week's word, taken from Dictionary.com

circumambient
adjective
surrounding; encompassing
 
Origin:
1625–35; < Late Latin circumambient- (stem of circumambiÄ“ns). See circum-, ambient

circumambience, circumambiency, noun
circumambiently, adverb
 
Example:  
It was a strain to see through the circumambient veil of snow.
 
Good luck with your sentences!
 
XOXO
Gossip Ghoul

Monday, January 28, 2013

The Odd Girl

Gossip Ghoul here. A little tidbit about me: I work an overwhelming amount of hours each week at an international grocery store which focuses mostly on Eastern Asian Food. I do almost everything: answer the phone, stock the shelves, reorganize shelves and displays, price-check and reprice as needed, assist customers on the floor, clean, fetch carts, sometimes help customers carry items to their cars, and bag, all while working two registers as cashier. It isn't that large of a store, and not every shift is super busy, but it certainly is an interesting job.

I mask my true nature with a sweet and friendly smile, except for first thing in the morning. Before my coffee's kicked in, I am way too tired to make an effort to be nice to people, particularly the customers who show up ten or fifteen minutes before we open. Because it is such a niche store, there's definitely an odd mix of customers. Being the only caucasian employee -- let alone the only white, American girl employee -- at an Asian supermarket certainly comes with its trials. In other words, I have to put up with a lot of crap from people. Customers will often outright ignore me when I greet them or ask if they need help because I address them in English; and an unfortunate percentage have a very difficult time trying to communicate what they want because they don't speak the best English, while I don't understand Korean/Mandarin/Cantonese/Japanese/Vietnamese/Thai, etc.

The Americans can be even worse.

"What brand of Asian are you?" a man once asked me, after pulling my hair, while I stared at him blankly with my facial features of obvious Polish and German descent.

"How can you work here if you don't speak Chinese?!" a woman exclaimed with a shocked gasp. "Isn't that such a disadvantage?"

"Well, it's a Korean store, so not really," I replied, and I turned every item of hers I scanned to the easy to read English labels.

There are so many examples, but the worst was this middle-aged woman with a Kentucky accent who came in a couple years ago. She was looking for an ingredient for a recipe that a friend gave her, but she had forgotten the recipe, and she didn't know the name of the ingredient. After establishing that yes, I did work at the store (I wasn't stocking bottles of Lee Kum Kee Oyster Flavored Sauce for kicks, after all), I offered to help her. She didn't know what it was she was looking for. I asked which nationality it was to try to narrow it down. She didn't know. Was it a sauce, a paste, a noodle, a powder, a vegetable? She didn't know. I was getting impatient, especially when I asked her to describe it, and she had no idea. Then she got upset and demanded to speak to a Chinese employee and grew angrier when I informed her that no Chinese people worked that day, so she insisted on speaking to the owner.

"He's Korean," I replied, deadpan, "and he's not here."

"How could your owner possibly leave with Chinese people here?!" she shrieked.

Long story short, I have therefore learned that I would have an easier time at my job if I were Chinese because then I could psychically intuit what people are looking for.

No, really, I've learned not to make assumptions about people. Some people might seem standoffish and ignore you at first but then turn out to be really nice people after you talk to them a few times. Some people might appear friendly at first but then act like a jerk for completely unnecessary reasons, which is why I refer to asshole customers as asstomers.

Just not to their faces. I need my job to pay the rent.

Until next time.
XOXO
Gossip Ghoul

Sunday, January 27, 2013

So I'm Writing This Blog Thing

For the past maybe five years or so, I've wanted to write a blog. I have been trying to become a novelist for the past nine years. The big problem with this aspiration is that I'm never taking the time to write. School used to get in the way, and now work does, and by the time I get home from work each night my brain is too fried to come up with anything slightly intelligent, let alone good. The solution I came up with? Start a blog. That would force me to get into the habit of writing at least a few times a week and should hopefully get my creative juices flowing. At the very least trickling. That was the brilliant idea I came up with -- five years ago, as I said.

I ran into a few problems. Lack of Internet connection for more than a year is one example. It's just a bit difficult to write a blog if I can't actually, you know, post it. The biggest problem, however, was subject matter. From what I've seen, blogs that have a particular focus, like Cake Wrecks, tend to be some of the most entertaining and successful. Every time I came up with a great project to limit myself to, whether it was cooking or makeup or book discussions or whatever, I would inevitably discover that someone was already doing it -- and doing it better.

So I gave up for a while. I fell into a rut with work and spent every day in a depressed half-existence. Now, I'm going to say I woke up, like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty. I'm going to write because I want to, and who cares if I'm not the best? Being a perfectionist hasn't gotten me anywhere. So what am I going to blog about? Whatever the hell I want!

This is Aurora Knightsblood, alias Gossip Ghoul, welcoming you to my world, my views, my interests, my words.

XOXO
Gossip Ghoul