Diary of Russian Fortune Cookie

2010-01-29T22:52:00.002-05:00

<3 to everyone who commented on my last post.

Seriously, I posted in this blog (instead of the makeup blog) because I know this one has a much smaller readership, and I really just wanted to vent to myself. I didn't expect to get any comments at all!

I think I'm feeling a bit better. My attendance record for this past week has been a personal best :D I also bought tickets to Atlanta to see Denis over my spring break. It happens to be that his spring break is the week after mine, so we're flying back together. Aside from catching up on some much-needed cuddle time, I plan to take the time I'll be in Atlanta to interview/chat up some professors. You know, charm them in ways that my application can't...

Personal first for me that I can't seem to express myself in writing. My applications to all my schools are currently in a state of suck.

I think once I get my GaTech app out the door, I'll feel much better. I can't stand having it over my head, like Damocles' sword. The worst part: I have a final tomorrow; it's a make-up from last semester because my last final was cancelled by snow. I can't seem to work up the motivation to study for it, but I probably should. Also, I'm hungry. It's going to be a long, long night.

2010-01-27T01:02:00.002-05:00

I feel like there is something wrong with me, but I can't quite put a finger on it.

I don't want to do anything and I don't want to even talk to people. I'm not sure why, but the idea of throwing myself deeper into my schoolwork seems more and more appealing these days.

This semester, I'm taking two 400-level biology classes, a lab, and 2 literature classes. Between the two literature classes alone, I have around 300 pages a week of reading expected. As the two 400-level biology classes... well, let's just say that I somehow discovered that a work ethic and consistent attendance in class do wonders. I got an A over my winter term, and surprisingly didn't put much effort into it. Simply keeping up with the work was enough to prep me for the course - whodathunk?! Maybe I am cut out for this biology thing after all.

I think this is the first time in my life that I've actually felt engaged with the field of biology. I WANT to go to class, and I WANT to listen to lectures. I've been struggling with the idea of going to grad school these past few months, because I figured that since I didn't do well in undergrad, there's no way I'd do well in graduate school. I'm starting to see things differently, though. Now I'm all for going to grad school, but panicking about whether or not my applications will be well-received. The part that blows my mind the most: my instructor over winter term emailed me after the term was finished, and told me that he thought I'd make a great grad student. Seems like a lot of people have the kind of confidence in me that I wish I had for myself...

I think, mostly, my problem is that I'm not dealing very well with Denis being gone. I miss him. He misses me. We do call each other often, but it's not the same as him being here. We've never been apart for longer than a week since we've started dating. Having him in Georgia is very... different from what I'm used to. I both simultaneously crave and fear human contact. I went drinking with my ex-roommate last weekend - she says I get inappropriately flirtatious when I am drunk. And it's true that I make friends with males a lot more easily than with females of my own age. I guess I'm afraid that without Denis around, I'll cross some invisible line of impropriety and...

... nevermind. I do get irritated a lot because I want to be alone more often (I don't normally spend a lot of time with anyone other than Denis) but I also get annoyed because I just don't have anything to DO anymore. Other than homework, that is. I've resorted to taking my car apart -- I'm planning to install a stereo system sometime this weekend. By myself. Already did all the wiring for it. I probably would've been good at the engineering thing if I felt inclined to pursue it.

I wonder if I've spent so much time building up my dislike for biology, feeling forced into it, that I've lost all sight of the possibilities that I do have open to me. My dad said to me earlier, "I don't expect you to do anything beyond your ability to do -- but I do want you to do them to the best of your ability." Maybe it's time for me to rethink my approach and look at the future afresh.

BUSTED.

2009-10-18T20:25:00.002-04:00

Hi Professor Kahn,

I took your BCHM463 course over the summer, and I think I did okay in the class (I managed a B+, which actually came as a surprise to me) so I'm thinking of taking BHCM464 and 465 next spring since I enjoyed the subject matter.

I'm a bit concerned, however, about whether I'd be ready for the course even though I'll have technically fulfilled the prerequisites. I know BCHM463 is already an abbreviated form of 461 and 462 smooshed together, and on top of that, rushing through the subject in 6 weeks doesn't make for great retention. I'd like to have your opinion on whether this would be a good idea, or if I'd be better off taking another course to fulfill my requirements.

His response:

Hi May,

Thanks for writing, and congratulations on doing well in 463. Dr. Julin did mention that you might have done better if you had come to class more often...

464 and 465 are actually fairly independent of 461/462/463. If you remember what a protein is, what an enzyme is, what a binding constant is, you should be okay for 464 and 465. Note that they are not easy classes -- they are intended for Biochem majors. (In fact, you may or may not be able to get into 464 -- the majors certainly have preference.)

Damn. Didn't even know they noticed. I sat at the back of the class for a reason!

And it was really only the last 2 weeks of the class I stopped showing up...

Trying out a new sleep schedule

2009-10-02T05:37:00.003-04:00

-Get home from school
-Sleep until 2AM
-Wakeup and do homework until school
-Go to school
-Repeat

This has the upside of preventing adderall from messing with my sleep cycles (as it tends to do if I take it after 5PM) but also preventing me from procrastinating. I have this nasty habit of coming home and then planning to do homework, but not ever actually getting around to it because I feel like I "deserve a break" after a long hard day at school.

Hopefully this works out. Problem is that I've been waking up at 4:30, not 2 -___- Need to start setting alarms.

2009-09-18T03:19:00.003-04:00

I don't want to admit that I've wasted the past two and a half year of my life on someone who was just really, really good at telling me what I wanted to hear.

I'm gonna go have a cigarette and think about it.

The Art of Negotiating: Boyfriend Edition

2009-08-27T20:03:00.009-04:00

Denis: "I'm going to a stripclub."
Me: "Ok. For why?"
Denis: "Dave and all the guys from work wanna go, so I'm gonna go with them too."
Me: "Oh, okay. Which one?"
Denis: "Probably Hustler, don't know."
Me: "Ok."
Denis: "I'm gonna look at boobies."
Me: "Ok."
Denis: "Lots of boobies."
Me: "Ok."
Denis: "They're not going to be yours."
Me: "Ok."
Denis: "And probably vaginas too."
Me: "Ok."
Denis: "I might get a lapdance."
Me: "Ok."
Denis: "And there might be alcohol."
Me: "Ok."
Denis: "And I might go home with a stripper."
Me: "No."
Denis: looks relieved "Ok."
Me: "Were you just trying to get me to be jealous?"
Denis: "....maybe."
Me: "You know I don't mind if you just look, just don't cheat on me."
Denis: "But what if I can get a blowjob for really cheap? Like $20?"
Me: "Ew, no. You don't know what she has. She might give it to you, and then you might give it to me."
Denis: "But... but... $20! My inner Jew! I can't resist a bargain!"
Me: "Orrrrr... you could use that $20 to buy me a week's worth of smoothies and I'll give you blowjobs for the rest of your life."
Denis: "... okay, my inner Jew likes that better."

2009-08-27T10:35:00.002-04:00

Dear Tooth Fairy:

Here is my wisdom tooth. I got it out yesterday. (I have another one, but the surgeon cracked it into pieces getting it out.) You owe me something good for this one. More Vicodin, perhaps?

Sincerely,
May

A quick diversion

2009-07-22T21:29:00.006-04:00

... this is pretty disturbing, I have to say. I was messing around on MorphThing.com, and they have an option to see what your baby would look like.

Well, I always told Denis that I was pretty sure our babies would be green eyed, given that his eyes are blue-green (depending on the light) and mine are light brown bordering on hazel. So, I morphed together these two pictures:

(This is a tremendously unflattering picture of poor Denis taken on my cellphone.)

and

And the result? ...

You tell me that's not really goddamn disturbing.

In other internet diversions, my friend sent me the link to Anaface.com, which purports to analyze your facial beauty using some arcane algorithm. (Seems to be some combination of facial symmetry and some pre-determined proportions - probably based on the Marquardt Beauty Mask.) I am personally quite iffy on how accurate this is, but I ran several of my pictures through it, and they've all been pretty consistent - all within +/- 0.5 of each other. I took that very unflattering picture of Denis and ran it through the facial beauty analyzer, and it popped out a score of 9.25/10. For comparison purposes, I also ran a picture of Brad Pitt through it... he scored a 6.99. Denis has been gleefully declaring himself "hotter than Brad Pitt" ever since.

Oh, and my score was not as high as Denis'. (Apparently my face is too long and narrow, my nose is too wide for my face, and the distance between my eyes is too far. However, I do have great horizontal symmetry!) He very much enjoys rubbing that in.

Dear MUA,

2009-07-22T19:00:00.003-04:00

... are you *all* on crack?

I asked the MUA makeup board to guess my age. I gave them a bit of background that I was older than most of my college classmates, but often mistaken for younger-- and asked, based on that picture, how old I appeared.

As of 7:02 PM,
- 2 people guessed 23
- 4 people guess 24
- 6 people guessed 25
- 1 person guessed 26
- 7 people guessed 27
- 2 people guessed 28
- 3 people guessed 30

... I mean... for serious? People really think I look 30?

(Proof: here)

2009-07-15T08:20:00.002-04:00

OH THE AGONY!

10% above class average (which is where the professor set the B/C line) and I still get a B in Orgo 2 :(

Oh well. Still have biochem and statistics left this summer. Maybe I'll do better with that, even if I seriously can NOT understand my statistics professor. I swear to god, he has the most heavily Russian-accented English I've ever heard. I'd probably be better off if he just taught the course in Russian.

I have no sense of fashion, but...

2009-07-12T18:22:00.004-04:00

Okay, so next month Denis's cousin has a wedding, and I am pretty much obligated to go. I don't have anything appropriate to wear to a wedding, so I started poking around on ebay for a nice vintage dress that would be classy but not matronly. I found one.

... and then I was outbid by 50 cents in the last 9 seconds of the auction. On a scale of 1-10 of disappointment, 1 being the kind of disappointment you feel when your boyfriend eats the last Skittle, and 10 being rejected from your dream college (Caltech, for me), this was a solid 7.

I was in looooooooove with this dress - it was a sapphire blue dress from the 50s. I saved the pictures from the ebay auction, and scoured the internet and vintage shops trying to find something nearly as nice. I failed. Then my friend Aly suggested I go to a dress maker and get a reproduction of the dress-- and incidentally, she had one to recommend, one who had made two of her prom dresses. So I called the dressmaker today, and tomorrow I will see her to hash it all out!

I'm super excited - most off-the-rack clothes don't fit me perfectly because I tend to be a bit 'hippy', and it's a feature I try to avoid emphasizing. Mostly, anything that fits me in the hips tends to be baggy around the waist, which is actually a feature I like on myself.

Anyway, a quickie preview of the dress (I hope!) to have made:

I was told by another dress maker that this is was almost certainly designer, an architectural cut and very hard to duplicate - the pattern making would probably take at least 20+ hours. After factoring that plus material in, the dress would be at least $150 to make. And you know what irks me the most?

... It went for $22 on ebay.

random - hair, nails, room, etc. (x-posted)

2009-07-05T20:46:00.001-04:00

Yes! It's a procrasti-blog!

First, let's start with my hair. This is my natural color -- look near the hair line and at the roots. Yes, that's fairly color accurate.

And this, is what my hair looks like now, after dyeing it red:

As you see, it only dyed the areas that were virgin hair. And this, kids, is why you want to lift your old dye before you put in new dye. The look is actually starting to grow on me, though. The color is Ion Color Brilliance in Dark Intense Red Blonde 6IR-66.66, used with Ion Color Brilliance Creme Developer. I used a 1:1.5 ratio of color to developer and processed for an hour, though you're really supposed to use 1:1 and process for up to 45 minutes... but I know from experience my hair doesn't take color well, and requires a bit of extra coaxing.

Also, I am still in love with my nail color:

You can see some tipwear, but that's to be expected after a day at the beach. plus this manicure has been going on 4 days now. I do put on a new coat of top coat though, whenever it starts looking dull. My nails currently hate me after a week of polish remover abuse, so I think I'll probably keep this for a while.

Also, toes!

I LOVE this 89 cent polish. (I'm currently into bright creme shades.) It's Surf's Up by Sally Girl. Two coats over 1 coat of Sally Hansen Hard as Nails for a base, plus Poshe top coat. It is my personal belief that all manner of horrible nail polish formulations can be remedied or at least compensated for with a good top coat.

Also! I mentioned I had been busy cleaning my room lately, right? Well, here's a "before" shot of my room:

(Okay, technically, that's a "during cleaning" shot, but I assure you, my room wasn't much better.)

Here's an "after" shot:

Quelle difference!

I found some absolutely incredible things during this massive clean-up project. For example, this thing:

I defy any of you to find a more hideous sweater vest on the face of this planet.

Alright, enough rambling. Here's a random FOTD for good measure:

God, I love those Guerlain kohls. The end!

HOLY CRAP!

2009-06-19T17:55:00.003-04:00

A kindly reader brought this to my attention:

From 19 June 2009

Yup, that would be the front page of mtv.com. A promo for Twilight, of all things...

Geez. That stock photography picture sure is making its rounds. Now I totally wish I did that shoot for pay and not just pictures, since the photographers probably made a buttload of money off it by now.

I know a school that's not getting any alumni money from him...

2009-06-16T19:22:00.002-04:00

Denis is taking a summer class here, ENME271 (Matlab programming). Summer classes here are open to everyone, including to people from other schools, which is why he's managed to squeeze in at least one engineering class here at Maryland. He had a test last week, and today he found out his grade: 100%, top score in the class.

Denis: "Obviously I'm too good for this shit-ass engineering school anyway. So I guess I'll go to Georgia Tech instead, which is more worthy of my presence. I mean, it's not like I'm even challenged here."

(Yes, he was being semi-sarcastic. He's not really THAT pretentious.)

Seriously, UMD. You're not letting THIS GUY in because he retook a few classes? WTF.

As for me - I'm retaking Orgo 2, and doing OK. Above class average right now, hoping to be in the top 10% of scores by the end of the week provided I ace the upcoming quiz. I REALLY WANT AN A, DAMN IT. Getting into Emory is a huge source of motivation for me.

Georgia on my mind...

2009-06-14T08:59:00.003-04:00

So apparently there was a bit of a SNAFU at UMD: they sent Denis an offer of admission to their Engineering school, and then on the day of his orientation, told him that somebody had made a mistake and he hadn't really been accepted. Oh, he was accepted into the general school, alright, just not the Engineering program, which had these gateway requirements for admission. They had a problem with the fact that he had retaken a few of the gateway courses more than once, and now he was stuck with being a physics major here.

Denis has no intention of becoming a physicist. He wants to be a mechanical engineer. After a few rounds of talking to everyone he could possibly talk to and petitioning everyone he could possibly petition, they all told him the same thing: no, he would not be admitted into the engineering school, no, he would never be admitted into the engineering school even if he did really well here for a semester, and no he was not allowed to take engineering classes while he made plans to transfer to another school.

In short, UMD screwed him over and is now refusing to do anything about it. Right now, it's too late to apply to any other schools, so they are essentially wasting his time and setting him back a semester, all because someone in the admissions office didn't do his/her job and actually READ his application. Seriously -- even if they had screwed up, they had PLENTY of time to rectify their mistake, considering he was accepted in APRIL. How fucked up is it that he found out on the day of his orientation?!

So now, he's making plans to transfer to Georgia Tech. I'm pretty sure he has a reasonably good shot at it, and if everything goes well, he'll be going to Georgia in the spring of '11. (On the bright side, Georgia Tech is nationally ranked #5 for Engineering, while UMD is #17. "That means it's like, 3 times better!" says Denis.)

I will be graduating next year and am currently looking into law school-- which means that I'm now looking at the very real possibility of moving to Georgia and attending one there. I've got my eye on Emory... I'd like to go to Emory, but I definitely need to bring up my GPA first.

All these things looming up on me in my future are more than a little intimidating. I actually never thought I'd see the day that I would graduate from college, considering my past academic history, much less going on to any sort of post graduate education. Also, I've lived in Maryland all my life, never more than hour away from my parents, so just the idea of moving so far away is a pretty scary prospect as well. (But also pretty exciting -- they have IKEAs in Georgia, right?)

If everything goes well, Denis will be at Georgia Tech in the spring of '11 and I'll join him maybe over the summer or in the Fall of '11. I'm only looking at two schools in Georgia, both in Atlanta, in order to be close to him at Georgia Tech: Georgia State U and Emory. We'll probably move in together -- that's pretty serious, isn't it? But that's scary too. I can't help but wonder what would happen if we don't work out, and then what? But then again, we've been together for over two years, and we still hold hands when we go out together. I should probably have a little more faith in our relationship.

The more I think about this, the more I realize that at 23, my life is finally starting to take shape for me. I have a pretty good idea of what to do, and a pretty good idea of how to go about taking it. (I'll be taking the LSAT in December, for one. I'm practicing for it right now.) I have a boyfriend I'm pretty serious about, and we're planning our futures together, since so far they seem to be inextricably linked. It's a lot to think about, and unlike Denis, I've never had that firm grip on knowing exactly what I wanted to do. But seeing it start to take shape now is pretty exciting. I don't regret that it's come so late for me.

2009-06-11T19:52:00.007-04:00

I know materialism is unflattering, but...

Wow, happy birthday to ME, courtesy of Denis.

(Just got it today - had to be resized to 4.5 in order to fit me. Of course, being the hopeless romantic he is, Denis also "accidentally-on-purpose" gifted me with a GINORMOUS HICKEY on my neck at the same time.)

Holy crap! He does have a sense of romance after all!

2009-06-10T01:17:00.001-04:00

Me: I told my dad we're going to Paris next year.
Denis: What'd he say?
Me: ... he asked me why. Didn't seem too happy about it though.
Denis: Why not?
Me: Dunno, maybe he's afraid we'll elope while we're in Paris?
Denis: !!! ... you want to?
Me: Why the hell would we do that?!
Denis: ... but it's Paris! How appropriate is that?
Me: Well, for one, your mom is going to wonder why she wasn't invited...

My Russian Sucks and I Seriously Need To Get Crackin' On It

2009-06-01T04:14:00.003-04:00

As far as I've managed to gather, the guy in this video is an aspiring singer/songwriter, and most of his videos on youtube are "addressed" to a current popular Russian musician, with an original song in their style. He's really VERY VERY talented, not to mention Cute with a capital C. (Blue eyes + dark hair + a guitar = a win in every girl's book, no? At least he's totally my type.)

So I just spent the better part of an hour laboriously putting together a 6-sentence email to him, in Russian, of how much I enjoyed his videos and music. Seriously, 6 sentences. Simple ones, too. My fluency in Russian hasn't progressed enough for me to be comfortable with compound sentences and clauses.

Now, I know my Russian is awful, given that every time I get an assignment back from my professors, they're all marked up with red pen. I pretty much wrote the Russian equivalent of "I am student studying of Russian language in America, your videos I liked much! I do enjoying them much, you can has many talents. Sorry if understanding is difficult, I have only learned a few Russian! I am wanting more of watching your videos!"

(Why, yes, Denis has compared my grasp of Russian to a LOLcat's grasp of the English language.)

The nice part: he responded in 6 (six!) minutes, with a very nice, tersely-worded note composed of 3 short and grammatically simple sentences saying that he appreciated the sentiment and that he plans to make videos in English in the future, so I should have no problems understanding him then.

The sad part: I still had to run his response to me through AltaVista's Babelfish to make sure I understood all of it.

Why does this matter? Well, Denis and I have tentative plans to go to Paris around this time next year with his dad, and I am worried about how I will I communicate with my (likely) future father in law. (I mean, I can't spend the whole two week trip pantomiming everything... or can I? Hmm.) I don't have problems communicating with Denis' mom, because she speaks English well - plus my knowledge of household Russian ("What's for dinner?" "Chicken and potatoes!") is good enough to get by. But Denis' dad? His English is pretty limited, and I'm told his Russian is heavily salted with Hebrew and Belorussian. I can't see this ending well.

(Actually, I spoke with him on the phone once... kind of. I said, "здравстуйте", and he said a bunch of stuff to me in Belorusso-Hebraic-Russian that I didn't get AT ALL, except some passing comment about my accent. I'm sure it was something along the lines of, "well, that's strange, how did you get a Polish accent?" since my main instructor in Russian for the past year was Polish, and I'm told by the native Russian speakers in the class that her accent was quite heavy, though clearly understandable and fluent.)

Oh god. I really need to get cracking on my grammar and fluency and vocab... I have a long, long way to go with studying Russian.

Наутилус Помпилиус - Тутанхамон

2009-06-01T01:57:00.001-04:00

"Tutankhamun" by Nautilus Pompilius. I have no idea why I like this song, other than the really funky boing-y noises in the beginning.

(Whew, can't even spell "Tutankhamun" in English -- had to look it up.)

2009-05-23T16:26:00.002-04:00

Ever since I finished my exams, I have had absolutely no motivation to blog, not even about makeup. (I've been wearing the same look for the past two weeks now. I'm in a rut.) My life is boring. Things I've done since the end of exams:

Monday: cuddled with Denis
Tuesday: cuddled with Denis, went to Baltimore to pick some stuff up
Wednesday: cuddled with Denis, had a barbeque and went star watching. (We saw Saturn through my telescope!)
Thursday: cuddled with Denis, went go-karting, and saw Terminator: Salvation
Friday: cuddled with Denis, went to a friend's graduation party (sans Denis, who was being lazy). Drinking, beer pong and debauchery was had by all.

Today's Saturday, right? Yeah, I didn't even bother getting out of bed until 4PM. Think I'm going to spend the day watching TV and eating and getting fat. Life is awesome.

Oh, yeah. It's that time of year again, where I confront my mortality - my birthday is coming up in about a week. Yuck.

Fuck you Chevy Chase, Fuck You Paypal

2009-05-14T10:13:00.002-04:00

After my recent saga of overdraft fees, all of a sudden I'm BACK in the red.

I mistakenly sent a $50 payment to myself using Paypal, and then realizing what an idiot I am, cancelled the transaction immediately afterwards. That should've been the end of it, but no.

First Paypal tried to get the money from my bank. No money, so I got hit with an overdraft fee. I got that one taken off, but...

Then, despite the fact that I cancelled it, Paypal tried to take the money from my account again today. ANOTHER OVERDRAFT FEE.

And of course, Chevy Chase is like, "tough shit. Cancel your account, we're not waiving another overdraft fee for you."

So, yeah. Negative balance again. Fucking wonderful.

Expect to see a blog sale in the next couple of days.

The Russians Did It Better

2009-05-12T03:52:00.002-04:00

Мы будем вместе, всегда
Let's be together, always
Оу, е! Скажи только: "Да"
(Oh, yeah) Say only "yes"
Мы будем вместе, всегда
Let's be together, always
Оу, е! Скажи только: "Да"
(Oh, yeah) Say only "yes"

(Yup. Two semesters of Russian, and that's the only part I can translate.)

Compare to The Beloved - Sweet Harmony, the original:

In other news, I'm going to go for that Russian minor, but I'm planning to take Russ202 over the summer, while skipping 201, which I plan to study on my own. The only reason for that is because the other classes I want to take conflict with the time the Russ201 class takes place, and I want to be in Russ301 by Fall '09...

Bank Overdraft Fees

2009-05-08T10:03:00.002-04:00

So I knew I was broke, but apparently I'm REALLY broke.

The other day I checked at bank account online and found myself with a -$12 balance. "Shit," I thought to myself. I immediately gathered up my Giant Jar of Change (which has accumulated over 3 years of digging out loose change from my pockets before doing laundry) and deposited it into my bank account, hoping it'd put me back into the black before the pending charges went through and gave me overdraft fees. I knew my account was low, but I didn't expect to go into the negative.

The next day I checked my account balance again... and this time I had a -$117 balance, mostly from 5 $35 overdraft fees. Five overdraft fees of $35 for very small purchases like a burrito at Chipotle, or $6 for enough gas to get me home makes you REALLY, REALLY question your worth as a person.

"Goddamn it," I said to myself. "I am such a fucking idiot." $117 is a LOT of money to me, and even though I have a check coming in from the photoshoot... it wouldn't put me back in the black. You think modeling pays well? HA! Okay, maybe for the supermodels, but I'm obviously no supermodel.

Anyway, most banks are somewhat lenient. Usually, if you call in and speak to a customer service representative, they'll remove an overdraft fee as a customer courtesy thing. So I did, and while the lady on the phone was very nice, she said she could only remove ONE of my overdraft fees. Alternatively, I could write a letter to Chevy Chase and petition them to remove all of them, but that might take a while and also, they could refuse me, and there's no appeal process to that.

Even if she removed one overdraft fee, I'd still be over $80 in the red. I could only choose one or the other.... what to do? I decided to take my chances, and I told her I'd write in. So the next step: google to see what else I could do. The answer: seeing a branch manager, who have a surprising amount of power when it comes to these things. I figured the worst that could happen would be that the branch manager would say no, in which case I'd be back to square one and I'd just call back and ask them to take my one overdraft fee off again.

So today I go to the branch of Chevy Chase at my school, and asked to speak to someone about getting overdraft fees removed. After a mild lecture about being more careful with my accounts, and giving me a little checkbook register so I could keep track of them from now on, the branch manager removed all 5 of my overdraft fees and sent me on the way.

Score! So now I'm back in the black. Sure, my balance is still low, but at least I don't owe $140 in overdraft fees anymore! This is good, because I was about to start selling my makeup... and at this point, I don't have anything I particularly want to let go of.

Moral of the story: even a little bit of persistence can yield surprising rewards.

2009-05-03T23:09:00.003-04:00

Me: I wanna have kids before I'm 30... but I kind of don't want to.
Denis: Why?
Me: Because I have so much fun with you, and I don't want to share you. We can have kids after I start getting bored with you.
Denis: Oh, don't worry about that. I just won't pay any attention to the kids at all, then!

Photos!

2009-05-02T01:45:00.004-04:00

I haven't gotten my official copy of the pictures from the shoot yet, but I did get a few preview shots already. I can't wait to see the rest of them though!

This is probably my favorite shot out of all of them.

That's Aly in front, and me hiding way in the back and out of focus :D

Four guitars. I mean, SERIOUSLY? You ever see a band with four guitars?!

Denis: "That's a good picture. Your mouth is open and it looks like something belongs in it..."
Me: "..."
Denis: "...LIKE MY DICK!"
Me: "I don't think I like this picture very much."

I really ham it up in front of the cameras... maybe a little too much.

.... and of course, the cheesiest stock photography pictures ever!

"Upon the Hills of Georgia"

2009-05-01T00:09:00.001-04:00

На холмах Грузии лежит ночная мгла;
Шумит Арагва предо мною.
Мне грустно и легко; печаль моя светла;
Печаль моя полна тобою,
Тобой, одной тобой... Унынья моего
Ничто не мучит, не тревожит,
И сердце вновь горит и любит - оттого,
Что не любить оно не может

Dark falls upon the hills of Georgia,
I hear Aragva's roar.
I'm sad and light, my grief - transparent,
My sorrow is suffused with you,
With you, with you alone...My melancholy
Remains untouched and undisturbed,
And once again my heart ignites and loves
Because it can't do otherwise.

Alexsandr Sergeyvich Pushkin

(I like the last two lines best.)

Delicious Breakfast Noms

2009-04-30T07:37:00.002-04:00

(A post dedicated to Seppi McSepsalot)

My new favorite breakfast concoction, now that my dad has gone to China and is no longer around to make me breakfast in the morning:

Honey Bunches of Oats with dried peaches + strawberry flavored kefir = WIN

Finals are coming up in a few weeks. I better start eating healthy now, because I tend to forget to eat and lose weight when I'm stressed. I've taken to bringing Boost nutrition shakes to school in order to be sure I'm getting all the calories and nutrients I need. My dad is pretty much convinced that I am going to starve to death between now and when he gets back, in June. He'd be right too, if it weren't for the Burger King down the street from my house...

(Apparently their Steakhouse Burger has 1020 or other ridiculous number of calories. AWE-SOME. There is a direct correlation between number of calories and deliciousness of any food.)

2009-04-29T19:49:00.002-04:00

Just updated to Jaunty Jackalope yesterday. Didn't I just update to Intrepid Ibex like, last month? Man, I'm behind the times, though at least this time I got on the bandwagon within a week of the official release...

Only part I hate about upgrading my system is having to recompile my wireless drivers every time. Six months exactly the amount of time it takes for me to completely how to use terminal. Being a Linux noob, I have to go and look up directions on how to do it every time. Bleh.

At least this time around I managed to get my Russian/Cyrillic input thing working again. Denis tells me he plans on taking RUSS101 next semester, even though he's already a fluent native speaker. He doesn't know his alphabet very well, and consequently can't read beyond a first grade level, and can't write in cursive either. I'm lucky that I had formal training in Chinese, even though I still maintain that I learned the vast majority of my Chinese from watching Chinese soap operas with subtitles -- seriously, that's how I learned to recognize most of my characters! I definitely have a problem with writing when it comes to pen and paper, but as long as I have some form of pinyin computer input, I'm golden.

Looking back at my Russian studies though, I'm surprised at how far I've come since September. (My god! I've only been learning Russian for a bit more than half a year!) Our last test was straight up translation - my professor gave us a situation ("President Obama is speaking on the phone with Russian President Medvedev... translate for him!") and I seriously think I have a better grasp of the requisite vocabulary and structures in Russian than I do in Chinese. That's a pretty scary thought - I always thought I was fluent in Chinese, but apparently I'm not fluent at a highly-educated level.

The Russian program here is focused on professional level fluency (as it's part of a governmental critical needs languages flagship program), and even though I'm only doing a minor, it's still quite a lot to take in. I spoke to my professor about how long it would take for me to acquire fluency. She told me that according to most government studies, an intermediate level of fluency in Russian takes at least 750 contact hours, and a typical undergraduate program only gives about 300 to 400, and that includes work outside of class. As far as students go, I'm pretty motivated, I guess. I'm definitely not the best student in my class, but to be fair, everyone else in my class is either a Russian major, or doing a major that requires learning another language. I'm doing this for shits and giggles while tackling a pretty hardcore science program...

But anyway, my professor says that my pronunciation is good, and one of the study abroad programs she's involved with will take people who aren't undergrads, so I might end up studying abroad in Russia after graduation -- we'll see.

In other news, I'm pretty convinced my English professor has quit reading my essays entirely, probably out of frustration with how long and wordy my papers tend to be. He recently lectured the class about spelling and grammatical errors and how much he hates them, and how harshly he grades papers that have them. I wrote my last essay for him in about 2 hours after an all-nighter, finishing it about 15 minutes before it was due. I didn't bother to proof it. For some ungodly reason, he still gave me a 15/15, A+, with the comment, "as always, a pleasure to read." However, when I reread my essay, I found an embarrassingly large number of typos and errors. "A pleasure to read" my ass. That was definitely a C- quality paper.

Well, can't complain. An A is an A, right?

Ghosts of Stock Photography Past

2009-04-29T02:53:00.004-04:00

Photoshoot today! I enjoyed myself, though it's been a while since the last time I did a photoshoot and did the full-on hair and makeup thing. No pictures yet, but I will post them when I receive them. I'm not very good with hair, but I think I managed to pull off the rockabilly pompadour... it only took half a can of hairspray to shellac my hair into submission, anyway. Coupled with my no-fail smoky eye, I think I made a pretty passable rocker overall. It's been about 5 years since I last worked with this group, and they all commented that I had lost weight. Eesh. "You look good, BUT... you gotta get yourself to the dining hall and chow down!"

Stock/commercial modeling is very different from glamour - in stock, you're just part of an entire image. If you look like an idiot, well, sucks for you! In glamour, the focus is on YOU and making YOU look good. The shoot seemed a bit rushed to me, and working with three other models I didn't really know, I didn't think the group dynamic was that great. I'm pretty sure the other models have backgrounds in glamour modeling as opposed to stock/commercial, since nobody really seemed to really get *into* it, just "pose pose pose & look pretty for the camera". Granted, it was hard to feel punk rock when they're playing friggin' Alicia Keys in the background... but I did have two of my friends with me, so overall the shoot was pretty fun. I can't wait to get the pictures back!

Anyway, I was poking around on Getty images and I found some old pictures from the last photo shoot I did with these people, along with some more recent ones that they shot with my parents. The photographer commented that I had lost my "youthful teenage roundness" but my new thinness is "becoming". Geez, I hope so... I'm trying to IMPROVE with age! Anyway, for your amusement, a selection of shots my parents and I have taken with these guys:

The theme was "beauty pageant". I won! Believe it or not, I was wearing NO foundation in this picture. Ugh. I hate (past) myself.

The infamous cheesy graduation picture that ended up in a Verizon ad in the Washington Post. Ha.

Yes, that's my dad. See any familial resemblance?

And that is my mom! Looks pretty good for 62, eh?

QUEST PISTOLs "Я Устал" (клип)

2009-04-27T02:00:00.004-04:00

For the life of me I can't figure out what genre this is supposed to be. It's a boy band, but it's also rock, kind of. With really well-choreographed breakdance sequences... and a random rap interlude. All sung by a bunch of eyeliner-wearing guys who are seriously channeling the Village People and seem to be adverse to wearing shirts. (Some of their other videos are ridiculous.)

Though, I will admit the Johnny-Depp-as-Captain-Jack-Sparrow looking one is pretty cute. I'd hit it, even though he has a case of the crazy-eyes. Nice teeth, nice smile. And those tight leather pants suit those long chopstick legs pretty well...

"Я Устал" = "I'm tired"

Though, my favorite song by them is "Для Тебя" -- "For You".

Can't lie. They ARE catchy.

Eliot Chang "Rape Joke + AD LIB" (CLICK HQ)

2009-04-25T21:29:00.001-04:00

I support rape!

Only by Eliot Chang though :)

Ego Inflation: 100000000%

2009-04-25T13:44:00.007-04:00

I was walking from my last class to the parking lot, an uphill hike of about 2/3rds of a mile, and which follows the main road that cuts through the center of campus. As I trudged along, schlepping my heavy bag on my shoulder and carrying my orgo textbook in my hand, I noticed the sound of a particularly loud exhaust. I turned my head around just in time to see an old, black Civic hatch chugging its way up the top of the hill.

As you all know, I am a car fanatic, so I'm always on the look out for other fellow car enthusiasts on campus. This means that whenever I see or hear something that sounds modified, I always give the car a good once-over to see what other mods might have been done to it. This time I didn't didn't see anything special (given the condition of the car, I think the loud exhaust was due more to a rust hole than anything else) but the driver damn near broke his neck staring at me. From that distance, it looked a lot like my English professor, at least in profile - plus he was wearing one of those silly beanie hats that my English professor has been known to wear. So I concluded: my English teacher drives a beat-up old Civic hatch. Poor guy, school probably doesn't pay him enough.

5 minutes later, I had finally gotten up the rest of the hill and I'm almost at the parking lot. What did I see, but that same old black Civic hatch again? This time, I realized it was NOT my English professor, but just some regular looking white dude. (Granted, my English professor is also a regular looking white dude, and to be honest, they all pretty much look the same to me.) He rolled down the window and shouted something out from across the street. I thought he said something along the lines of, "it's hot!" and I thought to myself, "no shit bro, can't you see me sweating my ass off here, dragging all this shit with me?"

"What?" I said.
"Wait a minute," he said. He pulled a u-turn and pulled up to the side of the sidewalk I was on.

"I said, you're really hot!"
At first, I was like, "Oh." Then, regaining some sense of composure, I remembered my manners. "... well, thank you!" and smiled at him.

(No, seriously, what do you say in these circumstances? "Uh, okay"? "Thanks for noticing"? "Oh, I know"?)

He smiled back, and then we spent a few seconds smiling awkwardly at each other. I honestly had no idea how this exchange would end. His mouth open and moved a few times, but no sound came out. Finally, he said something. "I'm sorry, I can't talk. Um. Uhh. I'd like to ask for your number, if that's socially acceptable."
I laughed, "I'm sorry, I'm taken."
"Oh."
"Yup."
"Well, see you later then."
"Later!" I smiled one last time and continued on my way. I ain't gonna lie, I was flattered as all hell.

Anyway, I went home to Denis (who I found in his underwear, restringing his tennis rackets) later that afternoon, and told him the story.

He said, "And you're surprised WHY? You are really hot." As if to emphasize this, he reached over and squeezed a boob.
"But kitten," I said, "This guy pulled a u-turn on a crowded street just to ask for my number. Nobody's ever done that to me before."
Denis scoffed. "Well, it happens to me all the time!"

I like patterns

2009-04-22T09:33:00.002-04:00

This morning I was driving around the parking lot and saw two RSXes parked next to each other with a space in between. So I did the only logical thing: parking lot tic-tac-toe.

Then, when I took a better look, I realized it was actually parking lot connect-4. Maybe I'm just too easily amused.

On Tenacity...

2009-04-11T21:44:00.012-04:00

Okay, this is going to read a bit like a Chicken Soup for the Soul story, but it's a true story, and, well, I just really wanted to brag.

So you all know about Denis, my misunderstood genius boyfriend. He was an unmotivated pothead back in high school with an unexceptional SAT score. Went to our local community college for a couple of years, sometimes doing well, sometimes failing courses, depending on his level of interest. (Math and science courses, usually As. English, philosophy.... usually Ds or Es.) He dropped out completely for a while and worked full-time as a mechanic at a Nissan dealership, eventually earning his ASE certification as a Master mechanic. Eventually he realized that while he liked working on cars, he didn't want to spend his entire life turning wrenches. He decided he wanted to be a mechanical engineer, and I encouraged him to go back to school.

So he went back to community college, and really started focusing academically this time around. After one semester, he applied to the University of Maryland, College Park. He knew from prior advising that he wasn't going to get in to the Clark School of Engineering (since they had very strict requirements for transfer students, and he was far from meeting them), but he was hoping he'd at least be able to get in as a Physics major. He had straight As from the previous semester, and completely rocked Differential Equations, and I was pretty sure he'd be accepted.

He was rejected. I was especially dismayed, because I was so sure that he would get in - after all, UMCP had accepted me after 2 academic suspensions at UMBC. One good semester at our local community college had been enough to get into UMCP. It seemed so unfair to me that they didn't accept him, especially when I knew how smart and hardworking he is.

So he went back to community college for another semester, and continued taking classes on the engineering track. He applied again over spring break, submitting his midterm grades, which were also straight As. We just found out yesterday...

... he got in! And not just to the University of Maryland, but also to the Clark School of Engineering, which is considered to be one of the top 20 Engineering programs in the country.

I honestly think I'm happier about it than he is (he said, with his characteristic deadpan, "meh, Clark is okay, but I wish I'd applied to MIT...") but I know that he is secretly very pleased. He was originally planning to apply to Towson and UMBC as his safety schools, because after this semester, he would've been out of classes to study. I joked that it was a good thing that he was accepted so quickly by CP - this way, he had saved himself over $100 in application fees.

I am so happy for him. I told him I'd buy him a steak dinner once he got accepted, but now I think I owe him TWO because he got into the Clark school as well. I'm super excited about going to school with him next semester. Denis has a much better work ethic than I do, and I truly believe he's smarter than me when it comes to math and the physical sciences... I know he'll do well here!

2009-04-10T01:15:00.004-04:00

Late on the bandwagon as always, but I just upgraded my distro of Ubunto from Hardy Heron to Intrepid Ibex. Last time I tried that, my wireless internet ended up completely borked. This time, it took a bit of fiddling, but I've got it working again after recompiling the wireless drivers. Pretty sweet - I'm liking Intrepid Ibex so far. Though, I am considering switching to a smaller distro because Ubuntu is getting a bit too much bloat for me. I'll probably still stick with some Ubuntu or Debian based distro, just because that what I'm familiar with. I like my computers the way I like my men: lean and efficient.

In an effort to cut down on procrastination, I downloaded an extension for Firefox called LeechBlock. You can put in a list of websites that distract and take up all your time, set a limited amount of time that you can browse them for (over a given amount of time - say, 20 minutes every day, or 2 hours every week, etc.) Once you pass your limit, it blocks the websites so you have to get some work done. My bio lab partner recommended this to me, and it seems to be quite effective! I currently have something like 8 sites listed, and have my procrastination limit set to 20 minutes every 4 hours. I'll probably have to list more sites as I find novel ways to procrastinate. Makeupalley sucks up at least 2 hours of every day... ugh, horrible habit.

In other news, my crappy causal essay got an A+ from my English teacher. 15/15. Holy crap. I am seriously boggled. His comments: "There are two key victories to this portion of the proposal: dedication to research and your choices of correlation; this could have very easily been a cliche, non-serious proposal, but you use the idea of sensibility very effectively, and communicate information that will clearly be valuable to a change in MD law down the road. TREMENDOUS work."

If it weren't for the fact that my paper is marked up with lots of blue ink and comments in the margins, I would've thought that he didn't even read my paper at all, but rather just skimmed it and thought, "eh, seems good to me! An A for her!" By my standards, this paper was totally not up to par. In order to sell me on an idea, not only do I have to be convinced that the idea proposed is the best idea ever, but that any other opposing idea is complete bullpucky. In my essay, I just gave a bunch of examples to support my reasoning, but I didn't really bother to refute any criticisms of it. But whatever -- apparently my seat-of-the-pants, last-minute approach to writing essays is working out for me, so I should probably continue doing whatever the hell it is I'm doing right now.

Perversely, he called on me in class today because he thinks I'm some sort of deep thinker that really knows how to sell an argument. He asked me to explain how my approach to my audience changed between my first and second papers, and how that ultimately affected my paper. My oh-so insightful response: "Uh... to be honest, I don't remember, at all. I was really tired when I wrote it..." Sadly, that was the honest truth. I really didn't remember what the hell I wrote. (Seriously, I don't know how to sell an argument. I've worked as a car salesman and as a stripper, both jobs that require selling an idea of the product more than an actual product, and I... really sucked at that part of the job.)

He rolled his eyes, exasperated. "GEEZ. The occasional flashes of brilliance don't match up with the classwork I get from you guys." Of course, this was after I didn't do one of the (nongraded) group work assignments for the class that was due today... so, okay, yeah.

Random: Texas lawmaker suggests Asians adopt easier names. I couldn't help but laugh. Man, am I glad that my parents had the foresight to pick a Chinese name that had an exact phonetic equivalent in English.

2009-04-08T16:44:00.001-04:00

Why do people named Phil all look the same?

TV's Dr. Phil:

and a local real estate agent, Phil Kelley:

I mean, seriously. What the hell.

Surprise! I know Russian.

2009-04-06T22:11:00.003-04:00

Today I get home from school, and my dad mentions that one of my childhood friends (who has long ago graduated and gone to grad school, and finished with that as well) is applying for a job with the FBI. She was a Chinese Language and Philosophy double major. We used to be very close, but not any more because she turned into a religious fanatic, and she currently scares the hell out of me.

"That's really cool," I said. "I was thinking about doing that."
"Hmph," he said. "You know what GPA you need to have to apply for the FBI?"
"I don't know, 3.5?"
"3.0."
"I have a 3.0."
He looked at me. "No you don't. Where did you get a 3.0 from?"
I grinned. "You know that 'Russian History' class I was taking last semester? Well... you didn't know this, but it was actually a Russian language class. And it was 6 credits. And I got an A."
"Oh," he said. And then I think his brain just refused to process that bit of information, because the next thing he said was, "we're having steak for dinner tonight."
"You know, dad... " I continued. "Russian and Chinese are both Critical Needs Languages for the US Government. Me being familiar with both of them would actually be really good for a job with the FBI."
"Dinner's going to be ready soon. You didn't eat lunch today at school, did you? I'll bet you're hungry."

Scoreboard -
May: 1
Dad: 0

Rough day...

2009-04-04T02:26:00.005-04:00

Two tests today - Cell Biology, which I was supposed to take on Wednesday, but got postponed because of a fire alarm, and Organic Chemistry. I think I did fine on the cell bio, but I definitely flunked orgo. It was so bad, I came home crying because I was just so angry with myself and so frustrated. I had studied my ass off for orgo, but when it came down to taking the test, I just completely blanked. I think my brain was fried from cell bio and all the cramming I had to do for that. I seriously contemplated withdrawing from the class.

To my surprise, my parents were actually pretty understanding about it. I think they can tell how hard I've been working since I haven't gone to bed before 3AM this week, have barely had time to eat. My dad complains that I'm looking a bit too thin... like a shoestring. Understandable, since the last time I weighed this much was two years ago, when my dad was diagnosed with cancer, Phil dumped me and kicked me out of his apartment, and I was seriously mired in academic trouble at UMBC, all within a week-long period. That was not a good time for me. I think forgot to eat for about two or three weeks.

My dad also suggested that we hire a tutor, since I'm not that far off from finishing my biology degree and it would be a shame if it was just one class that was holding me back. It drives me crazy, because I will study the textbook, and do all the problems and be okay, but when I get to class and start doing classwork, it's on a whole 'nother level. I hate not being able to just *get* things.

I'm honestly not used to having to work to understand new ideas and concepts. Learning and understanding new concepts has always been very intuitive for me. Back in high school, I don't recall ever studying for a single exam in AP Bio, yet I aced all of them, usually with the 2nd or 3rd highest grade in the class. On the other hand, I couldn't figure out physics for the life of me. I skated by with a D in Honors Physics. Now that I'm in college, the situation is reversed - I struggle to keep awake in cell bio and learn all the cellular pathways, while I enjoyed the content of the physics classes a lot more. I like physics because once you know a few basic principles, you can derive everything else, whereas biology is just a lot of rote memorization. I rue the day I decided to become a biology major.

My dad and I also discussed my summer and fall schedules, and I guess my dad realized how ridiculous of a schedule it is, and so he told me if I had to graduate spring '10... then, well, spring '10 it would be. The important thing was for me to not kill myself with overwork and maintain a decent GPA. I think he still harbors hopes of me going to grad school.

I guess reaching an understanding with my parents is a good thing, but I'm really kind of depressed because I'm behind in just about ALL my classes, especially Russian. My parents don't even know I'm taking a 6 credit Russian class - they think I'm only doing 12 credits. I feel really guilty about Russian, since that's the class I tend to skip if I'm too preoccupied with all my other classes, and I used to be able to get away with it because I kept up with the homework. But now, I haven't done homework in about a month, and I'm really falling behind in class. I skipped Russian 3 times this week. I'm not particularly talented with languages, but I'm fascinated by them and very motivated to learn, so that was what kept me afloat last semester. Hell, I somehow got an A in Russian last semester. It was pretty much the only good grade I got. All this slacking off is not looking good for this semester, though...

In other news, I've got a photoshoot coming up with a stock photography studio, and I'm actually looking forward to it. I also sent in some pictures of a couple of my friends, since they were casting for more Asian women. Apparently they were really looking for Chinese women. One of the friends that I had submitted is Korean by birth, but adopted by a Caucasian American family. I mentioned this to them off-handedly, since I figured they were just casting for ethnic diversity, and specific country of origin wouldn't matter. Even though they loved her look, they wouldn't cast her because she was Korean! I asked them about the Chinese-only policy, since, honestly, I can't really tell all the different kinds of Asians apart myself. They were like, "well, the ad agency that commissioned the shoot specified Chinese, but photographer said he liked her look and could make it work, so I guess we could work her in!..." So, yeah, it all worked out in the end.

I'm actually quite excited - Aly (the Korean girl) is in my Russian class, and we have a playdate to go makeup shopping together at a CCO on Monday. Oddly enough, I can't think of any makeup that I would want to buy, at all... maybe just some backups of things I already have and love. That's definitely a good thing for my wallet, though I think maybe I should start investing in some decent clothes instead of sweatpants and torn/ill-fitting* jeans all the time.

*Does anyone else have this problem? I buy a pair of jeans, wear them for a while, and they like, magically loosen up and get all baggy and weird on me. I swear to god, I'm not even that small of a girl, but I'll buy size 0 jeans at Aeropostale which will fit fine at the beginning of the day, but then up baggy and loose around the thighs by afternoon. I was officially sized as a size 1 by the sales associate, but those are even worse when it comes to sagginess, especially in the butt area. The (current) best fitting pair of jeans I own are by Yanuk, and a size 24, which are rather tight on me, but in a good way. Even when I weighed 10 pounds more, I could still squeeze into them, albeit slightly uncomfortably. Maybe I should just give up on mass-market denim.

2009-04-01T00:20:00.003-04:00

May: hey kitten?
Denis: yes, kitten
May: i'm pregnant
Denis: no
Denis: how
May: i dunno, but i don't think it's yours
Denis: wtf
May: happy april fools
Denis: you're a dick
Denis: thats cruel and unusual
Denis: and i'm sick
Denis: i could have died
May: i told you 3 months ago i was going to pull this on you
May: you said you were going to kill me and dump my body in the woods
May: that's why i decided to do it online instead
Denis: i can still drive up there
Denis: and i have 2 passports to get me to a non extradition country within 3 hours

Allnighter

2009-03-31T15:39:00.003-04:00

I pulled an all-nighter to write my 2nd essay on the topic of prostitution. I'm not even sure it's coherent, or that I actually ended up writing about whatever it was I wanted to write about. Took me about 8 cups of tea and 6 hours to write - and I actually wrote it all in one sitting. It could be better, but my professor allows one of assignments to be revised and rewritten and then regraded, so I'm guessing this is going to be the one. For those of you who are interested: here it is, in PDF format.

Irony: Because I was so tired from staying up, studying for my three (3!) tests tomorrow and writing this damn essay, I decided I couldn't safely drive to school. So I didn't. It was due today, and technically I haven't submitted it yet. I did email my professor to let him know I wasn't going to class because of extreme tiredness, and I attached my essay as a "promissory note" that I would be in class next time we meet and to prove that I wasn't skipping just to get more time on the assignment. Hopefully he'll understand.

Choices, choices.

2009-03-30T23:41:00.003-04:00

B.S in Biochemistry + minor in Russian = graduate Spring '10
B.S in Biology = graduate Fall '09

How to choose? Based on minimum requirements:

Biology Summer '09: BCHM461 BCHM462 BSCI223 BSCI447 STAT400? Total: 16? (13? credits)		Biochemistry Summer '09: BCHM461 BCHM462 BSCI223 BSCI447 Total: 13 credits
Fall '09: BSCI446 BSCI440 BSCI207 CHEM271&272 STAT400? Total: 14 (17?) credits		Fall '09: BCHM465 BCHEM464 CHEM271/272 BSCI207 Total: 13 credits
Spring '10: (nothing - finished.)		Spring '10: CHEM395 CHEM425 CHEM481 BCHM485 CHEM483 Total: 13 credits

Smooth talker

2009-03-24T22:34:00.003-04:00

Denis, rubbing my leg: "You're sooooo soft! Like one of those microfiber towels!... except my nails don't caught. Or the dead skin on my fingers. I hate that."

Why does everyone hate my bumper?

2009-03-23T10:08:00.003-04:00

Driving to school today, some idiot in a Celica rear ended me... my bumper is scratched up yet again. At least it didn't come off this time, though. Seriously though, we're coming off a highway exit with no merge area. Did you not expect to stop?

Jesus christ, why does this always happen to me? Last November - old dude in a Acura TSX. Last month - some girl in the school parking lot. And again, TODAY?

The guy even had the gall to be like, "it's not a big deal, some guy rear ended me in Laurel last week and I didn't even do anything." Well, that's because your Celica is beat up to begin with, and probably older than Miley Cyrus. The guy he was driving with was like, "oh that'll buff right out."

Oh really? And that's based on what, your vast knowledge of cars and body work?

It's not a major scratch, but since I was in a hurry to get to school, I didn't get a chance to see how deep of a scratch it is. I felt a pretty strong bump though - at first I thought I had forgotten to get out of gear and stalled out or something, but I've driven manual long enough that it doesn't really happen very often. I looked down and made sure that I was in neutral, and when I checked my rearview mirror, the guy looked guilty as hell. Yeah.

I took down his name and address, but I didn't get his insurance information. I hope I don't get screwed over.

I really need to get one of those "if you can read this, then you're too close" bumper stickers.

Coercion

2009-03-19T04:49:00.007-04:00

Or, "How to make your boyfriend shave, for godssakes: A Play In One Act"

Denis: You hungry?
Me: Yes. What are we going to nom?
Denis: We'll go to grandma's.
Me: Well, then you should shave.
Denis: pouting ... but whhhhhyyy?
Me: You look like a bum. Your grandma is gonna be like, "damn, my grandson looks like a bum." Plus, you're wearing sweatpants.
Denis: But shaving is annoying.
Me: You want to know what's annoying?
Denis: What?
Me: When your very sweet boyfriend is enthusiastically giving you oral sex, but you can't enjoy it because you feel like you're getting stabbed by A MILLION PRICKLY LITTLE HAIRS.
Denis: ....
Me: It's like humping a hedgehog.
Denis: ....
Me: I swear, my thighs have rugburn now.
Denis: gets up, goes into the bathroom and shuts the door. Five seconds later, the *pssst* of the can of aerosol shaving cream, and the sound of running water can be heard.
Me: satisfied smile.

[fin]

Mousetrap

2009-03-17T22:56:00.004-04:00

First, I'd like to thank everybody who left all those really sweet and sympathetic messages - it's actually really reassuring to know that a lot of people are in the same predicament or have been in the same predicament, and have managed to survive. I know that my university has counseling services, so it might be a good idea for me to start seeing them. And since I'm going to grit my teeth and get that damn piece of paper, well, I guess now isn't the time to quit Adderall either...

Second, things at home are a little better. This morning, my dad said he would LIKE for me to take the GRE, as a backup plan in case I can't find a job after graduation. It'd beat sitting around at home, at any rate. (I'm not opposed to sitting on my tush at home, but yeah, the job market is pretty rough right now.)

Problem is, I kinda know exactly how it'll play out. I've talked to a couple of college advisors, and based on my work experience and resume, and the fact that I'm consistently a very good test taker, I'll probably get into a graduate program somewhere. Probably not a very good or prestigious one, but I'd probably get in somewhere, despite my grades. (Actually, my grades are improving. My GPA at College Park is twice what I had at UMBC.)

My dad even says that graduate school might even be easier than undergrad, since that was the case for him. On the other hand, I have a friend who is a graduate student at Maryland studying aeronautical engineering (specifically, computational flow dynamics... yeah, exactly) who swears the complete opposite. You can't really blame me if I don't trust my dad's advice, right?

Anyway, he's taking the pressure off me to take them IMMEDIATELY - he's amenable to me waiting until the summer. I'm not even sure if I'll be taking the GRE, the MCAT or the LSAT. I took a preliminary practice LSAT a couple years back and got a decent score, though I don't exactly remember what it was (somewhere in the 160s). Maybe when I have some free time over break I'll take a practice one of each and see where it goes.

Oh, and in other news: I started a new blog, focusing specifically on makeup, since it's just plain awkward for me to have serious posts about my personal life and then fluffy posts aobut makeup alternating the way it currently does. Also, I figured I needed to distract myself from being so miserable, and I have some spare time, for once. It's oh-so-creatively named... the Russian Fortune Cookie Makeup Blog. Yup.

A lost cat with three legs.

2009-03-16T17:04:00.003-04:00

It is the first day of spring break, and my dad says to me, "you know, your cousin's daughter is graduating [from grad school; Masters in Accounting] this spring."

"Okay," I say.

"Your cousin is flying in from China to see her. She's so proud. And I think your other cousin's daughter is going to graduate [also from grad school; Masters in Civil Engineering] too."

"Uh-huh."

"Are you going to take the GRE?"

"I'm going to worry about that later."

"I knew you were that type... you can't even take a little bit of hardship. You work a little bit at school, and you're giving up on it already. I knew you wouldn't apply to grad school."

"Ill take the GRE next year."

"Forget it, you can't do well in school. So what are you going to do after you graduate?"

"I don't know. I'll apply for a job somewhere."

I honestly want to drop out of college. You can't say I didn't give it a fair try - I've attended four different schools in the past five years. I don't like my major, and I have no idea what I want to do after graduation. I've told my dad before that I really didn't want a career in the biotech field. His words of reassurance: "Nobody really likes their job. They just need to work to make money so they can get by. If you think you're going to enjoy your job, forget it. It never happens that way."

I've worked hard. I'm tired. Even the girl with the "barely-controlled, unmedicated ADHD" in my English class (who quit her meds because of mood swings) says I should probably get help. Yeah, right - when I brought this up with my parents last year, after a nervous breakdown and lots of screaming, they made an appointment with a psychiatrist to appease me... then canceled it a couple weeks later. "You're fine, you don't need help. It's all in your head," they said. They don't believe in psychiatry.

I've been taking prescription drugs that aren't even prescribed for me because I'm trying to do well in school. I do okay, but not well. I still struggle. Adderall fucks with my sleeping patterns, so I try to avoid taking it at night, but then I have trouble focusing. So I'll stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning, trying to get work done, and failing. Or I take the Adderall, and I finish all my work, and not sleep at all. I still have to get up at 7 to go to school. I self-medicate with other things too: coffee, the occasional cigarette. Sometimes it helps. Usually it doesn't. After the nicotine buzz fades, the only thing I'm left with is the guilty scent of tobacco clinging to my fingertips.

I don't know how I get through most of my days. Like a zombie. All I know is that I have to graduate as soon as I can, because my parents are ashamed of me. Who takes six years to complete a bachelors degree? My god, my cousins' daughters all did theirs PLUS a masters in less time than that. The quickest route towards graduation for me is to finish my biology degree, and it's not easy. Once in a while my dad reminds me that "biology is the easiest of all the hard sciences." He also likes to remind me that I can't pursue my interest in physics because I'm not good at math, and that it would be a waste of time and an exercise in futility for me to pursue a minor in physics at this point - I wouldn't be able to pass differential equations.

It's spring break. I just want to be left alone.

Denis asked me, "would you be okay with not graduating?"

Honestly, the future looks equally bleak either way. What is there that I could do with a bachelors in biology - which is all but useless in this area, unless I wanted to do the kind of lab drone work that should rightfully be given as empowering employment to people with Downs' Syndrome and/or other disabilities - that I couldn't do as a college drop out? Nothing.

I asked him, "do you like what you study?"
"Yes," he said.
"You're lucky."

I was watching the TV the other day. Little Miss Sunshine was on. There was a scene, where the grandfather is tucking Olive into bed at the motel, the night before her big pageant.

"Grandpa," she says. "I don't want to be a loser... because dad hates losers!" She starts crying.
Grandpa says, "But you’re not a loser! And your dad would never hate you, ever!"

I started crying too. It summarizes what I feel, what I've felt for my entire life. Unlike Olive, I don't have any goals or aspirations of my own, it's always been what my parents have wanted for me. And unlike Olive's grandpa, my dad walked past me sitting dumbly in front of the TV wiping the tears away, and ignored me.

Group Buy?

2009-03-13T09:48:00.004-04:00

So I have this opportunity to buy a pack of 12 MAC Microfine Refinishers (no box) for wholesale, which is around ~$110. That's not bad at all - about 2/5th of retail price. I don't know about you all, but MAC's Microfine Refinisher was my HG exfoliating product until I discovered Garnier's version - exactly the same but cheaper. Now that Garnier has discontinued their exfoliating kit though, I'll probably have to return to MAC.

Here's the thing: There is no way in hell I can actually use up 12 tubes of Microfine Refinisher. It'll take me around 6 years to finish it all. In 6 years, I will be 29 for godssakes... and I'm not even 23 quite yet. In 6 years, I will be done with school, have learned how to throat sing, finally fluent in Russian, probably married and with a kid on a way (I totally plan to be a mom before I'm 30) and god knows what else. Point is, a lot can happen in 6 years. (That just sounded like a Mirena commercial.)

So I was wondering if anyone else would be interested in going in with me on this buy? I know I'll probably want to keep 2-3 tubes for myself, and that leaves like... 9-10 tubes for everyone else. If we all go in for $10/tube, it'll cover the cost of ordering, tax & shipping, and then the cost me of shipping to you. Anyone interested?

Mongolian Incredible Throat Singing 呼麦

2009-03-13T00:41:00.001-04:00

Jesus christ this is so fucking cool.

You guys are going to be totally disappointed.

2009-03-11T13:12:00.003-04:00

It's really not very good - and it's a very short, basic essay that simply tries to define the concept of "sex work" versus prostitution. No funny anecdotes or stories, or really anything interesting at all - that all comes with the causal and evaluation essays that I have yet to write. This just... defines stuff.

Anyway, here it is, in PDF format: my ENGL391 assignment.

"You should be a liberal arts major."

2009-03-10T23:04:00.010-04:00

That's what my dad said to me the other day - we were discussing my grades. I'm not doing great in either bio or chem, but I'm pretty sure I could pull through with at least a C in those classes - I'm even reasonably confident about getting Bs in those classes, if I continue to work my butt off.

On the other hand, I am totally rocking my English class (Professional Writing). Russian, not so much. Russian is A LOT harder this semester. I have a test tomorrow; I skipped an entire week of class to cram for my orgo and bio tests, and while I did okay on the last quiz, I have a lot of studying to do for this test.

Anyway, I wrote an essay for my English class, a "definition essay". It's going to be a part of a series of essays, including a "causal essay" where we argue and establish a chain of events, an "evaluation essay", finally followed by a final proposal tying all the previous essays together. This class is intended to be very practical - "professional writing," after all. Well, knowing me, I picked a rather controversial topic: legalization/decriminalization of prostitution. My definition essay was on what constitutes sex work. It's intended to set me up for the next few essays, where I will argue that it's silly that some types of sex work are legal, while others are not. (That, and, well, I've been itching to write a SERIOUS piece on my experiences.)

I've mentioned before that my English professor is the young and hip type, and I seriously think he's way too easy of a grader. Seriously. For the definition essay, we had to submit our rough draft and meet in a one-on-one conference to discuss it before submitting our final product. My conference with him went something like this:

[Setting: Library cafe, where I've been sitting for the past 4 hours cramming for Orgo. The professor is sitting at another table; when my appointment time comes up, I grab my pencil and sit down next to him.]

Professor: Hi May. Your essay - it's good. Really good. I also found it rather, uh, educational.
Me: Oh, thanks! So, uh, what do I need to fix?
Professor: You just need to figure out which audience you're writing for, but other than that, I don't see any problems with it. It's tight, very focused.
Me: Oh, yeah. It's kind of a ... very rough draft. I know I still need to throw in my citations and list my references. I was kinda cramming for an orgo test, so I didn't really finish my essay properly... and I'm trying to get some last minute studying in right now.
Professor: Well, you don't need to go too crazy with the references, since you're really just arguing semantics. If you need more time for your paper, let me know.
Me: Nah, I'll be fine. I'll have the weekend to polish it up.
Professor: Well, then what are you doing? You're doing fine. Go study! Go!
[fin]

My final essay was basically my initial rough draft, minus a couple of paragraphs that I thought were rather redundant. I threw in my citations and tightened up a few of my run-on sentences, and then added a couple sentences at the end so that the ending didn't seem too abrupt. I think I did a fairly good job, but it's certainly not my best work... I would've given myself a solid B. Good paper, but not unusually good. It gets the job done.

Well, I got my paper back today. 15/15: A+ His comments:

From the great opener, you set a tone that is the perfect balance between engaging, voice-driven writing and convincing,founded analysis on the barriers of the definition. Normally, this topic is one that I forbid at all costs, but you've really locked on to a useful strategy that is educational and enlightening. So many of your sentences are so well-placed, often at the end of paragraphs, to really drive your points home. Not easy to do.

I like your firm grasp of how to weave in outside research seamlessly in a way that doesn't muffle your rhetoric. So many times arguments of this nature fail due to lack of dedication to the realities of the laws surrounding them, but your dedication to the intricacies (porn vs. prostitution, Baltimore's vague laws) communicate a great ethos: you've done the work, thought about it throughly, and it shows in a very appealing way.

I think your choice to target Maryland state legislators and focus on the Baltimore area was key. It allowed you to take the broader elements of the "sex worker" definition and pair it with more local concerns, which highlights the realism of the issue in a very skillful way, which anchors the arguments in your audience's mind.

Why, I never knew I was that talented. I feel like a goddamn genius now.

Though, he did embarrass me in class today, when using me as an example of a "good" paper. "Now, May has an interesting topic... she's doing the legalization of prostitution." [All heads in the room swivel, stare at me.] "But in her paper, she used a playful tone that acknowledged that her topic was unusual, but still kept it serious and appropriate for her audience..."

Oh, and for those of you who are wondering: no, I did not come out to my classmates, or my professor. All of my research was backed up with outside sources, instead of "in MY experience as a stripper in Baltimore..." though I'm sure at least some of them have their suspicions.

I ain't gonna lie...

2009-03-09T18:30:00.006-04:00

... I don't really like the MUA boards. In my experience, anyway, people on there suck. They can be really rude, and act like they know SO MUCH more than you. "ZOMG! Sodium Laureth Sulfate is so bad for you! It causes cancers!" "Oh my god! MUFE HD powder will give you silicosis!" "I can't believe you use that! Don't you care about your health???" Okay, maybe that's just me. I'm not really one of the "cool" people who are on the board all the time and in with the MUA clique.

But god! As a science major, it pains me that there's so much stupid, unscientific misinformation on there!..

Anyway, this message today made me feel slightly better about all the snubs. It's confirmation that if they're telling me that I'm doing something stupid (ie, melting a cream blush in an oven to smooth out the surface*) then they might not necessarily be right.

I mean, seriously. Dilution of a solution with water doesn't change the percentage of the solute? What the fuck kind of crack are they smoking?

*My train of thought on this: if you leave your cream makeup in a hot car, it'll melt. Lots of people depot their lipsticks into pans or palettes by melting it with a candle. So, what's the difference when it comes to, say, melting it in an oven? Anyway, when I posted this on the board I got a lot of replies along the lines of, "sure, if you want to ruin your blush" and "that's a really bad idea" with absolutely no explanation or reasoning why.

I understand I have a problem...

2009-03-08T17:16:00.005-04:00

This morning, I looked at my vanity (rather, a bureau that I just happen to pile a lot of stuff on and do my makeup on) and decided I didn't like the way I had all my makeup set up and stored. I have a kimchi jar full of change that I used to store my brushes, and then a small brush holder that was stuffed full of pencils and smaller brushes. It was very haphazard - stuff I used often sat on the bureau, while everything else was relegated to The Giant Traincase Full Of Makeup (TGTFOM). Additionally, I had a smaller traincase full of make up (STFOM) that wasn't used much, and used mostly to hold pigments and pigment samples and other various little things.

Problem with TGTFOM is that it stores a lot of stuff. You'd think this is a good thing, except I have a crappy memory. Part of having a crappy memory means that sometimes I'll forget that I own something, and it's not until I shuffle through TGTFOM that I'll remember that I own it, so a lot of my stuff ends up with little use. So I decided it was time to reorganize.

Firstly, I realized it was pretty stupid of me to not use any of the drawers in my bureau. Sure, they're technically "occupied" but only by really old clothes that I pretty much never wear, and bras and underwear that I outgrew 8 years ago. So I cleared out a drawer, and set to working on transferring everything from TGTFOM to it. Result:

One of the great things about being a biology nerd is working with micropipettes. Why? Because the boxes that the pipette tips come in make really really great brush/pencil holders. Recycling, baby:

(And yes - those green/purple/blue containers holding everything in the drawer are also repurposed pipette tip boxes.)

Along the way, I found a LOT of stuff that I totally don't remember owning. Obviously I couldn't have liked it that much if I wasn't using it so... yup, it's all going up for swap.

Finally I cleared out all my stuff, and got everything put away neatly. Final result:

Also, check out my ridiculous set up for my eyelash curlers:

... yup. That's a neodynium magnet (hidden), taped to my mirror. Apparently both Shu Uemura and Shiseido eyelash curlers are magnetic! This way, I never lose my eyelash curlers and they are always handy to have around. I actually have 3 eyelash curlers - a Shu Uemura, a Shiseido, and a mini Shu Uemura. I may be a little obsessive.

You know you're starting to let yourself go when...

2009-03-05T01:33:00.005-05:00

1. You're too lazy to do your nails, so you leave your chip-ridden dark red polish linger on your nails for 4 weeks, until you get bored during class one day and pick it off.

2. You're too lazy to keep up with your nail polish, so you apply a sheer coat of iridescent shimmer polish. When that chips as well, you throw in two layers of a glitter polish on top of your chipped polish in hopes the glitter will distract anyone from noticing the chips in the first place. (Note: this doesn't work all that well.)

3. Your idea of "mixing it up" when it comes to makeup is when you use a taupe Urban Decay eyeshadow instead of your usual taupe MAC eyeshadow.

4. You haven't taken out your contacts in 2 weeks because you can't be arsed to go through the nightly ablutions. (It's okay - these are silicone hydrogels. At least I won't have to worry about microvascularization of my corneas.) Then again, they're not really "nightly ablutions" when they are undertaken at 3AM and you have to get up at 7.

5. You start wearing your hair up all the time because either a.) you didn't wash it or b.) you washed it, but can't be bothered to style it.

6. Clothes picked up off the ground are acceptable to wear out, provided you don't really remember the last time you wore them and they look clean enough.

7. Standing in the hallway and scarfing down a Twix candy bar while your Orgo Chem lab reaction is running is an acceptable substitute for breakfast and lunch.

8. Brilliant idea: not wearing foundation means you don't have to take the time to take off your makeup every night... just scrub really well in the morning.

9. You let your boyfriend use your favorite eyeliner pencil to draw a little face on your chin so you can have a little upside-down chin puppet, like this guy:

(On me, Denis drew a pirate, complete with eye patch. Then he filmed a video of me saying "Arr!")

10. "A smoky eye" is what happens in the morning when you don't wash off your eyeliner from last night.

I am really not dealing well with the stress of this semester.

Cringe, motherfucker, cringe.

2009-02-22T19:27:00.006-05:00

So my ex recently sent me a friend request on Facebook.

That, in and of itself, is pretty weird, but he was a really weird guy to begin with. Let me put it this way: he was an Asian dude who had watched way, way, way too many Korean dramas. When we broke up (due to serious incompatibility, by which I mean, he was too dumb for me) he was all, "I promise I'll come back for you," blah blah blah "... after I graduate from UMCP and get a degree and blah blah blah." Yeah, uh-huh, right.

First off, the idiot didn't even get into College Park. Second off, 3+ years later, he's still dumb. Third, he hasn't spoken a single word to me since we broke up, so he expects that I will want to friend him on Facebook? Puh-leease.

Anyway, I click on his profile to see what's up, and why he might want to friend me again after so long. Like everyone else on Facebook (including me!) he did the "25 things about me" meme. Some selections:

1. 1. I believe the two most important things to anything are Attitude and Approach. If there were a third thing it'd be Austin to complete the triple entendre of A's.

Entendre. Are you serious? I cringed when I read this, and remembered all too well why I broke up with him. One of my biggest pet peeves: people who misuse big words in an effort to sound smart. Seriously. Entendre. Now, I don't try to date men who read the dictionary for fun. Denis is a relative latecomer to the English language, and sometimes I have to define words for him. But at least he doesn't get on my nerves by using them completely wrong.

If a sentence is like one of those children's puzzles where you have to fit a wooden shape into the right-shaped hole, he just jammed a square into a triangle's place. If this were a sound, it would be the sound of a kitten being stomped, repeatedly. If it were a smell, it would be like being trapped in an elevator with a morbidly obese old man who subsists solely on a diet of Cheese-Whiz, asparagus and baked beans. If it were a... okay, I'll just stop here. You get the idea.

8. I play World of Warcraft. I'd like to go pro at some point and start attending tournaments.

Ohjesuschrist. Let me tell you a story about this, folks: a long long time ago, when May was younger, dumber, and knew a lot less about the world, she dated a certain guy who really liked playing World of Warcraft. I mean, REALLY liked playing World of Warcraft. It got so bad that when May wanted attention, she would take her shirt off, jiggle her boobies in the guy's face and whine, "pay attention to me! pay attention to me!" and he would STILL say, "waitamin!!! I'm almost done with this quest!!! ... Five more minutes!!!!"

Ladies, if you meet a guy like this, run. Just run.

11. I consider language to be very important. Speaking fluidly and having a certain "swagger" (as people have told me) are all key. Body language is also something I'm working on as well as foreign languages.

HAHAHAHA. HAAAAAAHAHAHAHA. HAAAAAAAA!

17. People that have affected my life greatly: Mom, Dad, Alan, Will, Joey, Daniel, May...The rest is lacking because I don't feel like typing about this anymore.

Motherfu...! It was THREE YEARS AGO. Get over it already.

No, seriously, it comes across as creepy and pathetic.

In conclusion: sometimes you really have to look at how bad it used to be before you realize how good you have it now.

Oh, and I rejected his friend request, because I'm one coldhearted B. God, I am embarrassed.

Worth it to be poor

2009-02-20T01:18:00.007-05:00

At 7:47 we were still driving down Wisconsin Ave in Washington D.C, trying to find a certain "Macombe Street" to make a right onto, and then a "S Street" before making another turn onto Connecticut Avenue. Dinner reservations were for 7:45, so I dialed the number to Ruth's Chris and asked them to hold the table, since we were running a few minutes late.

"Responsible kittens is being responsible," said Denis.
"... I just want you to have your steak," I said. "I promised you steak, didn't I?" My hand was laying on top of his on the shift knob, and I gave it a quick squeeze. He smiled.

The first thing I noticed when we arrived at Ruth's Chris was that we were pretty under dressed. We waited in the lobby amongst business suit-wearing lawyer types and some fashionable older women for a few minutes while the restaurant cleared a table for us. Both Denis and I wore jeans and a sweater. I had originally planned to stop at home for a change of clothes and to touch up my makeup before heading to Denis' place, but I opted not to after slogging through over an hour of rush hour traffic... after weighing my options, I decided that I cared more about 15 more minutes with him than what other people thought about my fashion sense anyway. And to be honest, I don't have anything "business casual" that wouldn't leave me freezing my ass off.

Originally, I had made reservations during D.C Restaurant Week. As I had explained to him, "I'm a cheap kitten, and can only afford to take you to nice restaurants this way." However, when we got the menu and had the chance to look over their prix-fixe offerings for D.C Restaurant Week...

"Kitten, the Restaurant Week menu sucks. Order something good."
"Okay," he said, somewhat hesitantly. He paged through the menu, but I knew he'd get the New York Strip. (He always does... every opportunity to order a steak, and he's invariably chosen a NY Strip. I keep a running list of his preferences, and he's always surprised that I know these things.)

Our waiter, Steve, appeared. We joked about birthdays and having to be carded for alcohol, and ordered. He seemed tactfully aware of what must be a limited budget - he suggested a robust glass of Cabernet for Denis' steak ("it'd be less expensive than a Merlot, and you're better going by the glass than by the half-bottle") and suggested that we split the sides ("they're big, definitely enough to share.") I ordered the chicken with asparagus and hollandaise; Denis, to no surprise, ordered a medium-well New York Strip and mashed potatoes. The appetizer was crabmeat-stuffed portobello mushrooms. It was all uniformly, consistently delicious.

Now, Denis has this thing about steak: when we first went to Da Mimmo's for my birthday two years ago, he ordered veal. It was so good, so perfectly tender, I could've sworn I saw tears in his eyes. I have never stopped making fun of him for that. This time...

"How's the steak?"
"... Good. It's good." He carefully sliced off a small piece for me.
"How good?"
"Really good."
I looked at him, and I think I saw a little bit of shininess... "Kitten, are you going to get tears in your eyes again?"
"Nah, now I'm getting jaded."

That steak still disappeared awfully fast from his plate though - along with the mashed potatoes and the asparagus. I didn't have much of an appetite, and ended up only picking at my food. Most of it went home with me. As for him, I do believe he ate everything that was set in front of him.

(Honestly though, I'm still a bit disappointed. I had heard such good things about the steak that I was advised to bring a box of tissues and a bucket.)

We lingered a little bit before calling Steve over for the dessert menu.

"Are they big enough to share? I mean, I don't know if we have enough room..."
"Oh, definitely enough for two people! I mean, they're pretty generous. What were you thinking about?"
"The creme brulee...?"
"Oooh! That's my favorite! ... Actually, you know what? I'll pick it up."
I just kind of stared at him in disbelief for a moment. "Wha... really?"
"Oh yeah. Don't worry about it. Birthdays don't come around that often."

He even brought it out for us with a little candle. "I'm not very good at singing, but happy birthday to you," he said. It took a while for Denis to decide on a birthday wish -- "I'm trying to pick a color," he explained.

The creme brulee was very delicious, in fact. Denis had never had it before, and he was pleasantly surprised.

"You say, the French made this?"
"Yup."
"Man, I guess they ARE good for something after all."

The bill was maybe two our three times our usual bill for when we go out to eat. I was a bit surprised, because I honestly expected to be spending more. At the bottom of the receipt, Steve had left a note: "Thank you!" On the restaurant's copy of the slip, I wrote back: "No, thank YOU." I left a 30% tip, and Denis and I walked arm and arm out of the restaurant back to our car.

There are times I think that it's actually a blessing in disguise to be so tight on money. I had saved up since September for this, and right now, my checking account has just about enough to buy me a tank of gas or two. (I was planning to go shopping with any extra money I had left over, but now I don't think I will.) Aside from dinner, I also bought Denis an actual birthday present, which he seemed quite pleased with-- "Wow! You really DO love me!"

I remember I once told someone that for me, being in love wasn't necessarily being completely selfless, but rather more about making another person and their happiness a priority in your life, even sometimes at the expense of yourself. It works in reverse too -- I don't need to worry about my own too much, because I have faith that Denis does the same for me too. (And he does!)

I've thought about the things that I could've spent the money on, if I'd spent it on myself - maybe make up? Clothes? More useless crap? But it all seems so vapid, so passingly and superficially fulfilling compared to this. I think about all the stuff I've bought, then promptly forgotten about. I've hardly even used any of the MAC MSFs I own since I've bought them! Actually, most of the time I forget they even exist. In contrast, last night's dinner made me smile so hard, my face hurt, and I still smiled all day today thinking about it. I think I might even smile into tomorrow.

In Russian, there are two verbs for liking things - любить and нравиться. любить is used when you like or love something, for no particular reason: you can love Italian food, or French movies, or anything at all. нравиться is used when you like something, but you can give a reason. Translated more literally, нравиться is used when something actively pleases you. эта штука мне нправится = "this thing is pleasing to me". I may люблю makeup, but making Denis happy... нам нрабимся.

Sometimes, it doesn't hurt to have a little reminder that the most important things -- like good food, good company and good service -- are of the latter type, and definitely worth paying for, even at the expense of other things.

I've already promised to take him to Morton's next year.

I am an idiot who doesn't know how to use Twitter.

2009-02-18T00:58:00.003-05:00

As I've mentioned before, my English professor for this semester is actually pretty cool for a professor, and our classes tend to be laid back and seminar-style instead of a lecture. He's also pretty young so he's all up to date with pop culture and stuff.

As I mentioned before, again, I had googled him earlier because I needed contact information (I missed the first day of class) and I came across his blog. Whatever, he's also a professional writer, so he has a blog for self-promotional purposes, right?. Then it turns out he has a twitter feed... thingy too. He was, um... twittering? is that the terminology?... his recent experiences at a writer's conference, which I skimmed through quickly. Kinda boring, kinda funny. So I "follow" him to see what professional writers do when they're not teaching college classes. I wasn't entirely sure how twitter works, I figure if you "follow" someone, it's like bookmarking a feed so you can go and read their feed thinger once in a while. I didn't expect it to tell him that OH HAI THIS PERSON IS STALKING YOU.

Then I did the really stupid thing: I post, "is it creepy of me to find and read my English professor's twitter thing?" on my twitter page. Like I said, I'm not very good with this newfangled technology business.

And now all of a sudden his feed is protected and I don't have access to it. My guess on what happened:

Twitter: OH HAI THIS PERSON BE STALKING you.
Him: *click* Man, I really hope this is a famous editor!
Him: ... who the...? Oh shi--
Him: *deletes latest follower, turns everything private*

He's probably convinced I'm in love with him or something now, because today I lingered a bit after class because I was fumbling around with my computer (trying to copy down a phone number before I made a call) and I was the last one out of the classroom. Oh jesus christ. There was even awkward conversation about how I found his workshop on resume and cover letter writing really helpful. And then I'm the overachiever student who actually writes really long detailed posts on the class blog.

Shit. I must totally come across as super SWF. I'm not, I swear! He's not even ~~attractive!~~ my type! (I had to edit that, 'cause just in case he googles me and comes across this blog -- extremely unlikely, btw -- I don't want him to be like, "that bish thinks I'm not attractive?! F for her!")

2009-02-17T20:55:00.002-05:00

Somebody scratched my rear bumper in the parking lot today, but they left a note. I'm actually really surprised by that - most people would be dicks about it. I just called her, and she apologized profusely. I told her it was okay, and that I'd get a body shop to take a look at it. My guess is that a little buffing and $10 of paint will cover it. Incidentally, I also discovered that my rear tail lights are leaking... again. I've already had to replace them once on this car, and once on my last RSX as well. Apparently there's some sort of well-known design flaw with the tail lights.

I think I just have bad luck with this car. I recently broke a couple clips on my front bumper going over a huge bump, and now my rear bumper is borked too-- and I'd just gotten the damn thing replaced a few months ago! I should probably stock up on front and rear bumpers, since it seems like I have to fix or replace them every 3 months or so. Installation's easy when you're dating an ASE-certified master mechanic... but 10 years down the road, finding parts will be hard.

Also: First time eating Chipotle in something like 3 months. Hello, heartburn...

2009-02-15T13:35:00.003-05:00

Am I the only one who is completely 'meh' about MAC's Hello Kitty collection? Honestly I think the packaging looks downright ugly. Maybe I'm weird, but the black and white linear designs make me think of skeletons or something - it's more Halloween-y than spring-y.

I guess I'm a little disenchanted with MAC and makeup in general right now. I thought about buying some beauty powders from the collection (I collect those, just like I collect MSFs) but the packaging is seriously putting me off. Thinking back - I hated the packaging on the Barbie collection too. Seriously, the pink Barbie head outline is ugly, though the stuff inside... not so bad.

Also, is it just me or is the quality of MAC makeup going down overall? I still like all of the shadows that I have, but the last time I swatched some eyeshadows (at the CCO - yes, I refuse to pay full price for anything anymore) the pigmentation on everything seemed kind of weak. It's not such a bad thing for me, because most of the shades I wear tend to be sheer and/or neutral, but MAC is supposed to be known for its bright colors! I was recently killing time at Ulta, and I swatched some Urban Decay eyeshadows, and I was like... "whoa." So that's what eyeshadow should be like. UD doesn't have quite the color and finish selection that MAC does, but if it did... I would convert in a heartbeat.

I currently have 12 B2M empties. I really don't know what I should get. I will probably just put all 12 empties up for swap.

I think I might do a reverse sale. That is when I post up a list of the stuff that I can bear to part with, and you can email me with what you want and an offer of how much you want to pay for it. If I would rather have your money than the thingy, you get the thingy and I get your money. If you give me an insultingly low offer, I will keep my thingy and you will keep your money. Is that an awful idea? It kind of sounds like some mutant version of an auction. Seriously, most of the time I have no idea what to price things at anyway.

2009-02-14T11:53:00.003-05:00

Went out to dinner at a Thai restaurant last night for V-day, since I'm going to be staying home today and studying. I insisted on paying, and grabbed the check away from him.
He made a sad face and said, "why are you so mean to me?"
I said, "BECAUSE I SAID I'D TAKE YOU OUT TO DINNER, DAMN IT."
"... but it's the day before Valentine's day."
"So?
"Is it to make up for celebrating my birthday late?"

(Yeah, we're going on Wednesday to have dinner at Ruth's Chris to celebrate his birthday, 6 days late.)

Yes, we're lame. Our idea of "celebrating" Valentine's day is curling up in bed together and having him teach me how to solve a Rubik's cube.

I'm selling my Rx-7 because we don't have a place to park it anymore. His landlord towed the car, and since neither of us have driven the car in almost a year, we figure maybe it's time to let it go. I'm not really sure I'm going to miss it, though I'm bummed about not having a car for rallycross season this year :( I can still autocross in the RSX though, I guess, and having a little extra money definitely wouldn't hurt. We originally bought the car for $700, but we're putting it up for $1700 or best offer. Hopefully we'll make some money on this.

Oh, and the job I applied for? They called me back. I can has interview on the 24th. I could definitely stand to use a little extra pocket money.

2009-02-10T23:09:00.006-05:00

Today I learned how to say, "my head doesn't work without sugar" in Russian!

"у меня без сахара голова не работает!"

Denis: "... great. Now you're in the silly phase of learning a language, where you can say very silly and completely useless phrases in Russian. So cute! Who's a silly kitten?"

He's now taking a Linguistics course, the same one I took, and with the same professor. We've agreed to test out the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on our kids. We're planning to speak exclusively Russian to one kid, and exclusively Chinese to the other, and then see which one is better at math and science.

Denis contends that he's better at physics and math than I am by virtue of being Russian; I contend it's because he's male and has better spatial reasoning, though I'm reasonably strong in both subjects.

His birthday is coming up soon, on the 12th. I need to figure out what I'm going to do to celebrate, since he always spoils me silly on my birthday every year. I've had money put away and saved since last September in preparation for it, and I've already made reservations for the 18th at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse. (Yes, I am cheap and am taking advantage of DC Restaurant Week.) I have school on the 12th, but I start later in the day that I usually do, so I'm thinking of making chocolate covered strawberries and cherries and bringing them over to his place early in the morning. I also want to give him a thingy, like, some sort of object, but I can't seem to find the BMW M3 shift knob that he so desperately covets. Good thing I had money saved up for this, 'cause I'm one broke-ass mofo right now. I obviously know my own shitty spending habits quite well...

I also recently applied for a job, part time (~10hours/week) with an analytical DNA lab. Really basic stuff; I've done three internships that have gone into further depth. A trained monkey can run a paternity test, no lie. Still, it wouldn't hurt for me to get some extra pocket money on the side. I don't like asking for money, and my parents know this... my dad will ask me if I have enough pocket money for gas and food, and I'll always reply, "yeah, I have some." That generally translates to, "I have about $5 and plan on starving myself for the next week so I can buy enough gas to get to school." Then he usually ends up giving me about $50, which gets me through another two weeks before the cycle repeats again. I've been trying to cut down on eating at school, since the food is not very good and about 300% overpriced. I've taken to bringing protein shakes/nutritional drinks to school to stave off my hunger pangs. A girl has gotta get her protein, and I really don't want to lose 8 pounds again like I did last semester.

It's weird how I'm hungry ALL THE TIME lately - I weighed myself today at an Air Force recruiting center today, and apparently I've gained back all the weight I lost last semester and a little bit more. No, I wasn't thinking about joining the military again - I stepped in because I needed to pee real quick, and I noticed a scale next to the bathroom and took the time to weigh myself. Am I the only person who can't resist getting on a scale every time I see one?

"You weighed yourself, eh? Lemme guess," said the recruiting officer, smiling. "112?"
"Nah, 119."
He looked surprised for a moment. "Whoa."
"I'm all muscle," I grinned.
"... must be..."

(I don't actually have any muscle. It's actually that time of month, and I retain water like a mofo. He was within 3% accuracy of my usual non-bloated weight.)

My English Professor Is A Blogger

2009-02-04T01:26:00.006-05:00

So I met my English professor for the first time today. He seems pretty cool - I missed the first day of class because of traffic, and when I explained it to him, he assured me it wasn't a problem at all. I mentioned offhand that I'd emailed him (he didn't receive the email, apparently) and that when I googled him looking for contact information, I found his personal blog.

"Oh. Uh," he said. "That's kind of... uh..."
"It makes you very approachable," I said, smiling.
"I was gonna say, embarrassing. You're kinda putting me on the spot here."

In addition to teaching writing classes at Maryland, he does some writing on his own and occasionally gets published. Of course, having a personal blog is great for a little self-promotion, but I can see how it'd be a bit embarrassing when a student stumbles across your 'personal' blog. I'd be horribly mortified if one of my professors read my blog - from what they'd see on here, all they would glean from these last couple of entries is that I'm really obsessive about makeup. (I'm not -- I just don't have anything else I want to write about. Makeup is a fairly neutral topic that's not too personal.)

I think there's a line for students and teachers - we certainly respect them, but we don't really want to know any more about them than as soulless university instructors. (I personally think it's to protect our feelings from getting hurt when we don't do as well as expected in the class. I have a tendency to get a bit chummy with a few professors, especially if I get the feeling that they have a sense of humor.) He did come across as a bit stiff and teacherly during the classroom lecture, but approaching him after class, he seemed pretty warm and friendly. I think I might actually enjoy this class this semester.

In other news, I was studying at the library the other day and sat across from this fairly cute guy. Scratch that, he was a solid 8.5/10. Yeah-- he was actually really attractive. Visualize: about 6'2, lean-medium build, broad shoulders, blue eyes, sandy brown hair, All-American but not jockish. Seemed like the quiet but studious type, which happens to be exactly what I go for...

We struck up a conversation after I commented on his Chinese textbook, and he seemed friendly, not creepy at all. There was a little bit of bantering, then comfortable silence for a few hours as we each studied our separate subjects. As he was leaving, he introduced himself as "John," and I gave him my name too. He had a firm handshake. I figured I'd never see him ever again, since, well, what are the chances on a 30,000 student campus? That, and how am I supposed to track down a "John" on facebook? Looks like I forgot to take into account how uncommon my name is. Oh well.

Anyway, I log onto Facebook today, and guess who I get a friend request from? And a friendly message? It was short and sweet: "Glad I met you at the library the other day. I was thinking about your name all weekend...so pretty!"

Yeah. Well, don't get too excited... my facebook is plastered with my declarations of love for Denis, and I'm actually listed as 'married'. (And I have my last name hyphenated. Overkill? Maybe.) So I guess it took him all of about 30 seconds to assess: UNAVAILABLE. And I could tell, since his replies to my friendly chit-chat became increasingly short and brusque...

... and that's really too bad, because I was actually planning to introduce him to some single lady friends of mine. He seemed like a nice guy.

So, how long is a 'decent' interval before I delete him off my friends list?

There can only be.... 23.

2009-02-02T22:33:00.005-05:00

(Get it? You know, "there can only be one" from Highlander? Nevermind.)

The long and the short of it: I have too many eyeshadows. I have no reason to hang on to most of them because I either don't wear those colors, or they don't look good on me (but are so pretty I feel compelled to keep them), or they're otherwise really similar colors.

So I've decided that from now on, every week I'll post 3-4 looks with various eyeshadows that are up for elimination, and you guys will help me by voting on which ones get Banished To The Swaplist. It'll be kind of like America's Next Top Model, except lamer. (I guess that makes me Tyra Banks...)

Of course, I already have a few eyeshadows that I absolutely love and are thus given immunity... but the other 30+ should be nervous. We all know I have no fashion sense and can't tell when something is flattering on me or not, so thats why I need a 2nd (and 3rd, and 4th...) opinion. Eventually I will pare my collection down to something manageable. That's the idea.

Are y'all up for this or is this a silly idea?

Oh, and why 23? Because that's 1 15-pan palette + 2 4-pan palettes. I don't want to keep more than that number around.

2009-02-01T18:38:00.002-05:00

There comes a time, in every girls' life, when they decide it's time to settle down. For some girls, it's when the biological clock starts ticking. For others, it's middle age.

For me, it's at the age of 22 and 3/4ths.

I'm so totally past trying millions of new and different products. This is a list of stuff that I could wife. I could spend the rest of my life with these products, and be content.

I have a lot of products that I love and enjoy... but these are truly somethin' special to me, that I would not (voluntarily) replace with anything else.

Skincare

Murad Vitalic T-Zone Pore Refining Gel: how many times have I raved about this on my blog? I don't know, but I'm just coming to the end of my first bottle after 4 months. I already have my 2nd bottle stockpiled and ready to go. I hate that I don't have enough stockpiled for until next November's Sephora Friends & Family sale... but I'm not THAT opposed to spending $40 for 2 ounces of this. (Next F&F sale, though, I'm buying 3 bottles. Yes, it's worth it.)

Turns out, using it once a day (and sparingly!) gives the best results. Using too much just makes your skin sticky and a bit tight. Using it sparingly and throughly massaging it into your face leaves your skin perfectly smooth and plumped. This stuff is not a miracle worker, but I've noticed that every time I go a few days without, my skin starts looking duller and the texture is not as smooth. I'm not sure, but it seems to prevent breakouts for me - my skin has been remarkably clear since I started using this. I still get a blemish maybe once every two months or so, but this seems to help it clear up faster.

Nivea Creme: In direct contrast to the ridiculously expensive Murad, this is a whopping $5.99 for the 400mL tub at the Asian market. I have dryish skin, and this makes my skin very moisturized and happy. I used to have issues with dry, flaky facial skin in the winter - nothing else I've tried (including straight jojoba oil and a host of other moisturizers) has ever worked except for this.

I have also used Nivea Soft, which is similar, but find this to be better. This is much heavier than Nivea Soft, but doesn't contain silicones that disagree with my skin. It does contain petroleum and mineral oil, but I'm not sensitive to those ingredients. It's about as inert as any moisturizer can get, and I have had absolutely no problems with this breaking me out. Overapplication can get greasy, though, so I usually only use this at night.

Beyond Belief Vit-C day creme/night creme: Best. Daytime. Moisturizers. Ever. They smell nice, like orange creamsicles, and are never greasy. They sink in immediately and moisturize well. As I've said before, I have stupidly dry skin in the winter, so I'm currently using the richer night creme, but in the summer, the day creme is perfect. I only wish they came in pumps or tubes as opposed to tubs, but that's a minor nitpick. I am also a huge fan of the price: $6 for 4oz, and often cheaper since they are the Sally's store brand and often on sale.

This whole line is pretty good, actually - I use their eye cream as well, and have tried the Vit-C serum. While neither of those seemed to do much for me, they definitely didn't do anything bad either.

Kanebo Naive cleansing oil: I love oil cleansers. I don't know how I lived before I started using oil cleansers - nothing else gets off waterproof eye makeup as quickly or as efficiently as an oil cleanser. I used to have trouble taking of Cover Girl Lash Blast waterproof -- but this melts it off with minimal rubbing and tugging. It seems like oil cleansers also really clear out any/all blackheads that I have, which seems to be helping with my skin. I especially love that these can be easily rinsed off with water, though I usually follow up with a separate cleanser anyway.

Now, for the economics part. Shu Uemura's cleansing oil is $28 for 5oz at Sephora. This is $8 for 6oz at the local Japanese grocery mart. Granted, Shu's formula seems to have better stuff in it... but it's a frikkin' cleanser. It ends up getting rinsed off and goes down the drain anyway. It only stays on my face for about 30 seconds a day, and I refuse to pay an extra $20 for those 30 seconds. Both do the same thing, and both do an equally good job of it - the only caveat is that Kanebo's version comes in a bottle with a fliptop, which is annoying and messy. I poured mine into a pump bottle, and have since become a much happier camper.

Makeup

MAC Femme Fi eyeshadow: I saw this at a CCO, remembered that I heard good things about it, and grabbed it. I thought it'd be like every other white/beige/gold highlighter shade I have, but no. This is much better. This is perfection: a glowy white-beige shade that perfectly smooth and pigmented, incredibly blendable, and never garish.

I've already picked up another one as a backup, even though I've yet to make a dent in the first one, even with daily usage. I'm glad MAC repromoted this with the Blonde Brunette Redhead collection, because it means in about another 6 months or so, I'll be able to pick up another 3 of these at a CCO. Hell, just talking about this makes me want to drive 40 miles to the nearest CCO and go pick up a couple more right now, just in case. Yes, it's that good.

MAC Haux: Okay, it's not an exciting color at all. But it IS a color that I use practically every day. It's a matte, plum-toned brown that is slightly deeper in tone than my natural skin color. It's a subtle shade that makes Denis think I'm naturally pretty. Milani made a very similar shade, Taup-e-ary, which is now discontinued. If MAC discontinued this, I would cry.

MAC Peaceful Beauty Powder: This went missing for a while, and oh how I missed it. I own 3 other beauty powders, but this is the one I reach for the most. (Actually, the other three get completely ignored in favor of this. Maybe I should swap 'em.) It's a very subtle, peachy-tan shade - I think the closest comparison I could think of would be a really sheer studiofix compact in NW35. The depth of the shade is ever so slightly darker than my skintone, but doesn't look muddy. It's not a bronzer, but it warms up the complexion. I find it useful for whenever I get little sleep and am looking pale. Unfortunately, this was limited edition. I will really miss it when it's gone -- not to mention that I LOVE the tiger-striped compact. I'm told that NARS' Madly is very similar, so I'll have to check that out when I finish this off.

I am just crazy enough about this that if Madly turns out to be the same, I will crush it up and repress into this compact. Totally serious.

Make Up For Ever HD Powder (or just any sort of silica finishing powder in general): I didn't think I was going to get a whole lot of use out of this as anything but a translucent finishing powder to mattify, but it's actually really great for quickly blending creme products. I apply my under eye concealer (MAC StudioFinish, these days) with a regular concealer brush or my fingers, and leave it unblended. I dip my MAC 188 into the silica powder, tap it off slightly, and then swirl it around to blend my concealer. I think something about these being microspheres give it really good 'slip', so it makes my concealer blend seamlessly into my skin without looking cakey. It's really quite amazing - there's no tugging or dragging of bristles on the skin at all.

Then, of course, there's the added side-benefit of setting it at the same time, so my concealer lasts a bit longer through the day. Since it blends concealer so perfectly into the skin, I've found that I could actually layer concealer with this method (slap on concealer, blend with silica powder, slap on more concealer...) and get some serious but similarly seamless coverage out of it. I haven't tried this yet with my more heavily pigmented concealers, but I'm betting I could cover tattoos with this method.

MAC 188 brush: When I first bought this, I gave it a grade of B-, because I didn't think I was going to put it to much use compared to my 187. Turns out, I use this every day to blend into small spaces (see above) and now it's the 187 that doesn't see much use. If I still wore foundation, I would use the 187 a lot more - but until MAC makes a 187.5, I'll use a modified 187 for blush. (I wrap a rubber band around the base of the bristles to form a narrower, tighter head.)

Italian badger brushes: Aside from the blush brush, I use all of these almost every day. After the first week, I haven't had any troubles with them shedding at all. I don't tend to reach for the blush brush because it's not the right shape for my facial anatomy... I think it'd work better for someone who wanted to emphasize the apples of their cheeks more. I prefer my blush placement higher on my cheekbones these days. The crease and fluff brushes are great, though I do wish they made a slightly smaller version of the crease brush since the creases on my eyes aren't that big.

Honestly, after a certain point, all brushes are pretty much the same, and the quality of the makeup application lies more with the one doing the makeup. These are excellent quality, soft on the skin, and a great bargain. I'm about to put in another order with crownbrush.com, both for myself and as a prize for the smoky eye challenge on ABB.

MAC Enchantress lipglass: Six years of wearing makeup, and how many lipsticks have I finished? Zero. How many lipglosses have I used up? One. And that one is Enchantress. I've actually lost this a couple times, and every time I do, I freak out and go buy another one. That's why I currently have two of these in rotation... but I digress.

I really, really love this lipgloss. It's always perfect, and goes with everything. Sometimes it's peach. Sometimes it's pink. I don't know, I think it's just plain magic - the color shifts to flatter whatever I'm wearing that day. I actually can't think of an instance when this ever looked bad on me.

What are your married-to products? This was a hard list for me to make, because there's a lot of stuff that I really love and enjoy (like MAC Club and Copperplate eyeshadows), but could survive without, either by just doing without or replacing with something similar.

I'm still not settled down yet when it comes to my perfect mascara (I broke up with Guerlain Le 2, and am currently trying out L'Oreal Double Extend Beauty Tubes), and I'd also like to find a good eye cream for my dark circles and undereye bags. I do have a couple of lipsticks that I like a lot (Kinda Sexy, Freckletone) but I don't wear lipstick very often, so I could live without those. I also don't have a go-to, perfect-for-all-occasions blush color either, but I'm not really all that into blush anyway. Recommendations, anybody?

2009-01-27T19:08:00.003-05:00

One month away from Russian and I've already forgotten a huge chunk of all the Russian I learned last semester.

I have a new professor for Russian now - I still have Prof. Janicka from last semester for three out of five classes a week, but now I also have a Professor Martin on Mondays and Tuesdays. Prof. Martin is awesome, very enthusiastic about the language and always full of interesting linguistic digressions. She admitted to me that she never planned on studying Russian, and only took the course when the history class she had planned on taking her sophomore year was full. Somehow she ended up with a Ph.D in Slavic languages and a research interest in second language acquisition. Hmm.

You know, the Cold War may be over, but I have no doubt the Russians are still intent on world domination, one way or another. Serious. I'm pretty sure their new plot on world domination is via assimilation. An informal poll of the people in my Russian class (and keep in mind that this is an intensive course in Russian, aimed at eventual professional fluency in the language):

Out of 12 people:
-6(!) are taking the class because they're dating a Russki/Russkaya. Most of them are pursuing a major completely unrelated to Russian, a couple are pursuing Russian as a second major or a minor. One guy: "Well, I started last semester because I was dating a Russian chick... and now I'm just sticking with it just because." I fall in this category.

-2 are heritage speakers, and want to get in touch with their culture/get an easy A.

-4 are in there for no particular reason. One (my partner from last semester who has no business being a Russian major) is a Russian major, and the other three just want to learn Russian. A couple of them are choosing to continue studying Russian after taking a few years of it in high school.

Compare to the Chinese class that I took back at UMBC, where out of 8.5 people:
-6, including myself, were Chinese. Five of them were fresh off the boat (as in, barely able to speak intelligible English) from China and looking for an easy A. I was both looking for an easy A and hoping to brush up on my reading and writing skills.

-2 non-Chinese guys. One took it out of personal interest because he studied Wushu; the other was a Linguistics major who decided to learn Chinese as one of his languages. (His other language was Spanish.)

-0.5 was another instructor at UMBC who audited the class because he had recently adopted a little girl from China, and he wanted to be able to share her heritage with her.

The Russians are a sneaky, sneaky people. The Chinese need to be stepping up their game, I say.

Dumbest person ever, part two!

2009-01-21T17:46:00.009-05:00

ZOMG he sent me a reply! Do people not get hints... or something? This is actually funnier than the original missive:

For someone that's supposed to be sooo smart, that's quite a gross error made on your part. -Where the FRIG does it say that we as human beings are friggin' stinkkin' ROBOTS! Oooh like cause it's a Professional website, one couldn't or is "forbidden" to find true Love there. Wake Up dude. We're living, breathing, Creatures. NOT "Ones" and "Zeros". *GOD, I swear, the disillusionment of most people on this planet is sicking. It's all about money and crap until you're faced with tragedy THEN it's about god and if anyone can help me. Even the very "mentioning" of the word God makes you uncomfortable. Again, I say wake up. The Only reason guys contact you, is because you're attractive. They're ATRRACTED to You! Not because you'll enlighted them somehow or maybe you'll teach them something about themselves. It's because they want to Sell Your SEX. And you know it. So stop fooling yourself into thinking this is about how "talented" you are. Or smart. Or anything else. Anyone that tells you otherwise is a liar. A Con. So -Yes, I do want to sell you're sex, or better put, capture you're sexual allure and -Yes, I would love to go out with you but I'll never lie about it.

& P.S. What the HELL is so hard about typing in a frickin' "Web Page Address" to check your damn messages. -So, damned disillusioned.

P.P.S By the way, just to be perfectly clear. The disillusionment I speak of means to be removed, freed or basically deprived of illusion. Deprived, of "enchantment." And well, we know that enchantment is both a lovely and "inner" quality ones posses or one doesn't. . . -And what is a woman (let alone an entire world) if not enchanting? -A Stone. That's what, just a stone.

P.P.P.S Oh, and -you? Homosexual? *Hmpf*, I'm calling your Bullshit Card there sweety, sorry.

Holy righteous indignation, Batman! Apparently I owe this guy a date or something because he's black and I'm Asian, and we're both oppressed by The White Man. I must've missed the memo - all Asian females have to honor the "One Free Date" coupon that's currently being given out to all black men for all those years of oppression. (Click here to redeem yours!)

I've had plenty of exchanges with photographers who tell me I'm beautiful (thereby acknowledging my attractiveness) without them getting all creepy about it. You know, "hey I'm a photographer, I take pretty pictures of pretty people for a living, can I take a picture of you and possibly profit off it?" Not, "hey bebeh, I wanna make sweet luuuuuuuv to you all night long! And if you don't want to, it's because you're an emotionless robot, you uptight cunt." I also like how he completely missed the point about my sexual orientation - gay or straight, it's none of his damn business.

So what if I don't bother to check my MM messages? I have enough on my plate that I have more modeling offers than I have time -- my "I don't read MM, email me at this here address if you've got serious business" is how I weed out photographers who indiscriminately mass-mail models for shoots. I prefer to work with photographers who actually really want to shoot me and will take the time and effort to do a good job.

And this guy? Well, he's pretty crappy. Probably wouldn't produce anything that I could add to my port anyway.

Dumbest. Person. Ever.

2009-01-20T22:09:00.003-05:00

Went skiing today, so I was gone for the whole day. I'm quite beat! But I managed not to kill myself on the slopes. Anyway, I just got home, and I found this email message waiting from me:

"I sent you a message on your MM. -Check it, and if you could,. . . -please get back to me. It's terribly rude not to. And "some" people take it personally. [Yes, he underlined personally.] I don't care if it's even to tell me to go fly a kite. Ok."

So I go check my Model Mayhem profile, despite the fact that I have CLEARLY STATED on my profile that I don't bother to read or check my messages on Model Mayhem, and prefer to be contacted via email. Here's the message that was oh-so-urgent:

"Hey, you'll prob say no but I'm gonna ask anyway. (I'd "like" to have a shoot w/ you BUT that'll prob. never happen either) so I'd rather take you out to dinner and a movie and to be perfectly honest, make a little Love after. But again, I doubt you'll humor me. *Look! I'm just being honest. Now ones honest anymore. -I would LOVE to do all types of dirty things to you. -Haha. I've found that Asian chicks that come to America are WAAAY to prudish. Especially when it comes to *uh-oh, look out* -"BLACK" Guys. *Oooooh* (They'll rape you.) Even though "we" Black people were persecuted by the same "White" people that persecuted all of Eastern Asia. And a Black man is now President of These United States. But yet still an Asian woman will choose a white kid hands down over some "BLACK" dude. -And don't even get me started on you're clustering together! Why *Oh* Why do Asians ONLY hang out with other Asians?! What the Heck is going on there?! We live a in a society where we're supposed to MINGLE! and be together, why segregate yourselves? Huh? . . .So, do I have a chance w/ you, probably not -BUT ONE DAY, I "WILL" find a sweet little Chinese or Japanese or Thai girl that will see past this dark veil that's been pulled over the Asian Communities eyes by the European Cultures. And we'll sing and dance and be happy. -Thanks Pomey"

What. The. Fuck.

Well, anyway, here's my response back to him:

""Some" people find it rather rude when they are ignored when they leave a message on their Model Mayhem profile letting others know that they are choosing not to receive messages via the MM messaging system, and prefer to be contacted via email instead. If it was important enough for you to email me here, then it's important enough for you to copy and paste it into the body of an email, right? Ok.

P.S: Model Mayhem is a professional networking site, not a dating site. Where in my profile does it state, "single," or, for that matter, "heterosexual"?""

Why yes! I am feeling a bit peckish today.

In other news, I totally meant to post this earlier, but:
Shimmers54 makeup sale. God, I hope I'm not too late. I fail at this blogging thing.

Тимати - В клубе (feat. DJ Dlee)

2009-01-15T23:36:00.002-05:00

How to become a Russian hiphop star:

1. Take an American rap song, say, "In the Club"
2. Translate into Russian.
3. Take an American rap music video.
4. Dub into Russian.
5. Profit!

No kidding, this song's title is "v klube," which does literally translate to "in the club". He even does a little shout out to his hometown - Moscow.

Recent purchases and reviews

2009-01-12T21:18:00.007-05:00

Yeah, now that I finally have an actual camera, you will see that my posts will have pictures. This thing (a Canon Powershot A410) is like, 4-5 years old though, so I'm thinking of upgrading. Maybe after my next makeup sale, I'll get me a Canon A590. Technology seriously amazes me these days. I remember when I first started modeling, I worked with photographers who still shot film because because they didn't think resolution in digital was high enough, and the ones that used digital were shooting around the 5MP range. Now even a $99 consumer-grade point and shoot has 8MP, and EVERYONE has since gone digital. That's actually not that bad, since I managed to buy an old Canon AE-1 Program for cheap off ebay, and I enjoy fooling around with that.

Anyway, on to the meat:

First, my purchases from MAC's F&F:

MAC 188: B-.

I purchased this with the intention of using it as a blush brush, because I thought my 187 was too big to adequately do my cheeks, and I ended up using the 187 for foundation instead. Unfortunately, this is too small for blush. MAC should seriously just put out a 187.5 as a happy medium between the two. The 188 is awesome for blending the undereye concealer and whatever spot concealer I might use, as well as getting into all the small crevices in my face. And I could use it for blush, I guess, but it's a bit tedious given how small the brush head is -- think about the size of a quarter. I like it lots, and it looks real cute next to the 187, but I could live without it. (I will keep it, however.)

Petticoat MSF: I can't really give this a grade because of lack of class participation. I'll just say this one audited the class.

It's really really really pink - a raspberry-toned kind of pink. It's shimmery, but not glittery. It's a bit too shimmery for daytime when applied with a regular blush brush, but it's actually very cute and not over the top when I carefully use the 187. (Yup, 187 is now relegated back to blush duty.) I don't know why I keep buying these when I don't use them, but I feel the need to go buy So Ceylon now.

Stud eyebrow pencil: This is the clear winner of the three. A+!

I don't have a whole lot of experience with a lot of different brow products, but this beats the Anastasia brow powder that I tried and the Kevyn Aucoin brow pencil. Whereas Kevyn Aucoin was definitely too brown and slightly red on my eyebrows and had a tendency to wear off as the day goes on, this is perfect. It blends into my eyebrows and looks perfectly natural -- you can't tell I use a brow pencil to fill out my eyebrows at all. I applied it this morning at 6:30; and it's now 11PM. My brows still look fierce. It's not a black shade, it's more like a charcoal brown, so it's not overwhelming, but it blends in with my black hair. Moreover, I am a big fan of the price - $14.50 versus KA's $24? Fuck yeah.

Italian Badger Brushes from Crown Brush (available at www.crownbrush.com): A+

Do those look familiar, by any chance? Yeah, it might be because that's where Coastal Scents and Eve Pearl source their brushes from. I buy straight from the manufacturer at wholesale pricing, though Coastal Scents does sell for very similar and competitive pricing. But of course, you get more selection buying direct from the manufacturer. The customer service is really good - they send you a personalized email and invoice for your order, and are quite pleasant on the phone. I wrote them an email telling them how awesome they are, and they actually replied back and thanked me!

These are very soft and very plush feeling brushes.These aren't prickly at all, though they are slightly 'firmer' than your typical goat hair brush -- they have more 'spring' in the fibers. That green circle up there is MAC Wondergrass eyeshadow, which I put up for an idea of scale. Look at how freakin' HUGE that powder brush is! I swear, it weighs like a pound. That particular brush sheds a bit, but no worse than a typical brush from Sephora -- I've lost about 15 hairs since I've bought it, but it appears to have stopped shedding now. From left to right, the brushes are:

Deluxe powder - tapered blush - deluxe fluff - regular fluff - concealer - 2 small round crease brushes - lash comb/separator - flat definer.

So now you know why I sold most of my old brushes off. I have this weird thing about having my brushes match, and I was tired of all my mismatched brushes. The only brushes that I kept were MAC - the 187, 168, 190. But this was actually a great bargain-- I paid about $50 (including the $7 residential shipping) for all those brushes up there. Serious. I definitely plan to buy a few more in the future.

*Insider's hint: The next ABB contest is coming up soon, and Phil is planning to give away a travel-size set of these bad boys. I suggested the prize. Get ready, ya'll.

Make Up For Ever HD Powder: A. It's not a low A, it's not a high A - it's like a 94% kind of A.

This, I didn't actually pay for, but I thought it was a very worthwhile swap. Honestly, if I had to pay for it, I wouldn't -- Coastal Scents famously sells 100% pure silica powder for $4/oz, whereas this is something like $30 for 0.35oz. It's the exact same thing.

Anyway, I love this stuff. Well, maybe not love - I like this stuff, a lot. I don't want to declare my love for it just yet, but we're in a pretty steady relationship. We're gonna date for a while, and maybe someday in the future we'll discuss some real commitment.

It sets my makeup and mattifies pretty well, but not better than the Jane loose powder I was using before. But the most amazing thing it does for me is that it makes my skin look like velvet. This makes my skin feel like really really really smooth skin, with absolutely no chalkiness to it like with other loose powders. My skin doesn't have any irritation with it, and no break outs. When I run out, I will replace - but with the Coastal Scents equivalent.

Shu Uemura Lash curler: B+.

Okay, so I used to say that Shu Uemura sucked and Shiseido was the win. I know now that they are actually twins separated at birth. I think I just had a bad experience with a store tester Shu, which crimped my lashes, but this is actually not bad at all. It feels a little 'stiffer' than the Shiseido, and the curvature on the pad is very slightly different, but for all intents and purposes, they're the same darn thing. However, the tiny tiny difference in curvature accounts for why it curls the lashes on my left eye v-e-e-ery slightly better than the Shiseido, because I'm one of those freaks with different shaped eyes. I don't know if this is worth keeping - I might return it. Seriously, who needs two high-end lash curlers? I will probably keep it, if only so that my Shiseido lash curler can have some company.

Guerlain Le 2 mascara: A-

It's too darn expensive, but it lured me in with its pretty packaging and a free sample. As the free sample was awesome, I bought the full-size, and now I'm suckered in for life.

This is a two-ended mascara, with a regular spiky rubber brush on one end, and then a tiny angled brush on the other for doing lower lashes and corner lashes. HOWEVER. This is the first non-waterproof mascara I have ever used that both holds a curl and doesn't smudge. It's very black, makes my lashes look naturally long, and dries soft. It doesn't give much volume, but I look like a starry-eyed nymph. Previous to this, I used Cover Girl's Lash Blast waterproof formulation to hold my curl, but even that smudged whenever I was engaged in... certain bedroom activities. Miraculously, this holds up, even in the shower. (Though, my curl wilts then - but it would be ridiculous to expect anything to hold up to prolonged heat & humidity like that.)

I would probably still wear this if you told me it was made from the tears of virgin priestesses and ground-up kittens. And it's easy to remove! I don't need to rub a cleansing oil into my face for 5 minutes to get this off - just any old facial cleanser will do. This is the first mascara that makes me want to make a commitment. I used to have a bad habit of buying and trying a new drugstore mascara every couple of months, but none of them have pleased me as much as this.

I am balking at the $35 price tag, but... gosh darn it, I don't want stray. Since I usually keep a harem of 4 drugstore mascaras in rotation, it comes out to about the same money if I divorce the rest of them. Or so I keep telling myself.

Oh, and in case I missed anyone in my emails - I mailed out ALL the packages today, First Class mail. Surprisingly cost effective, though next time I need to factor in price a little better. Last time I went to a small mailing place down the street and paid $70 to mail out 6 packages (yeah, ouch...) but this time it was only around $20 to mail out 8 packages. Fuck PakMail, I'm going to the post office from now on.

Sale + whatever comes to mind

2009-01-11T23:44:00.006-05:00

I managed to sell off a lot of stuff, which was freakin' awesome. I still have a lot more stuff I want to get rid of (yes, STILL) so I'll probably put up yet another sale post at the end of this week. I noticed that I don't really tend to wear lipstick, so... why do I have 18+ lipsticks? A mystery for the ages. I don't think used wand lipglosses can be sanitized though, so it looks like I'm stuck with my 18 bajillion MAC Lipglasses.

I've been waiting on my shipping supplies to come in the past couple of days, so I didn't have a chance to mail out this weekend (sorry everyone!), but as you can see, everything is all packed up and ready to go. I'm going to stop by the post office tomorrow, and everything will be on its way:

There is a butt load of bubble wrap involved in that there pile. The shipping supplies I ordered STILL haven't arrived, as a matter of fact, so I actually ran out and bought these just earlier today. I figured it wouldn't be cool to keep everyone waiting.

In other news, I went to the National Gallery of Art today with Denis for an extra credit project for our Classics course. I don't know what to say about him other than that he is the most delectable man on this planet:

I mean, lookit him! Isn't he adorable? He still makes my loins quiver every time I see him.

Ever since I cleared out my makeup stash, I find myself trying to figure out further what I should keep and what I should sell off/swap. I have devised a quantitative way of calculating this:

[(# times I reach for a certain item per year)/(arbitrary number on a scale of 1-10 of how much I like it)]*[(price I paid)/(how much I would sell it for)]

I have determined the threshold to be at 7.0 $usages/$love. Let's give an example:

MAC Russian Red Lipstick:
#times I would reach for it per year: 3
how much I like it: 7
what I would sell it for: $12
what I paid for it: $14

So (3/7)*(14/12) = 0.5 = SELL

Another example:
MAC Haux Eyeshadow:
#times I reach for it per year: 150* -- extrapolated from me using this 3x a week.
how much I like it: 9
what I would sell it for: $8 (in it's current condition, anyway)
what I paid for it: $14

So (150/9)*(14/8) = 29.16 = KEEP

This should work, except it doesn't seem to apply to MAC MSFs. No matter how rarely I use them, I still can't seem to get myself to get rid of them. On the other hand, this is a good formula for just about everything else. I wonder how big of a dork I am for coming up with this in the first place. I suspect this next sale will involve even more stuff since I will be applying this formula to everything.

I tried to give my colorful eyeshadows one last fair shake before getting rid of them, and so I did a lime-green look:

... but I don't think I can pull off the colorful eyeshadows anymore, or even really want to. I daresay I will be a lot happier with a smaller collection, though. Also, we will ignore how haggard-looking I am, because I took this picture at the end of a 16 hour day involving school (yes, I'm taking winter classes) and I seriously need to remember that I need my concealer.

Sooo.... uh....

2009-01-06T14:37:00.000-05:00

Blah blah blah, oh yeah, I'm totally clearing out all the makeup that I don't wear anymore, I don't want to add to my collection, blah blah blah, I just want a small collection of things that I will actually use...

... sigh. So much for THAT.

MAC F&F sale going on today through the 8th. Use code MACFF9 to get 25% off your order. Yeah, I can't resist 25% off MAC. Deep down inside I am still a MAC whore, even when I have branched out to other brands.

In my own defense though, my order was very small: Petticoat MSF, the MAC 188 brush, and Stud brow pencil. All things I have had sitting in my shopping cart for about 3 weeks now, so, not exactly impulse purchases. I can justify the 188 brush (I have 2 187s, and they're just too big for blush...); the brow pencil is because I swapped away my Kevyn Aucoin pencil and I still need something to fill out my brows. As for Petticoat... uh... well... okay, fine. I should just admit I'm a collector at heart, and wanted to replace the Porcelain Pink that I swapped away. (I did manage to resist from buying So Ceylon though.)

So. Go. DOOOOO EEEET.

2009-01-05T23:54:00.000-05:00

Recent makeup acquirements ("acquirements", since I swapped for these and/or used store credit):

1. MUFE HD powder
2. Guerlain Le 2 mascara
3. Shu Uemura lash curler

Since I haven't had a chance to properly use and vet all these, I'm going to hold off on reviews for about a week, though initial impressions of all of them are really good.

So far I've done a fair amount of returning to Sephora, and I'm downright happy about it. Honestly, even if they refused to give me store credit, I'd still probably be like, "well... will you just take it anyway and get it off my hands?" So far, I've returned a Urban Decay Surreal Skin powder foundation and Primer Potion, a Stila Smudgepot, and a Kevyn Aucoin foundation. I also have a MUFE concealer that's going back to Sephora sometime soon. I'm just glad to be finally clearing all this out. I refuse to keep things around that I don't use, or use very rarely.

I think my new year's resolution is going to be "pare down the makeup collection to a well-edited collection of beloved products that I will actually use." 2008 will be remembered as the year I reached my makeup saturation point.

I have a whole bunch of random eyeshadows and blushes (my guess is about 45 eyeshadows or so and 8 blushes, all in pan form) that I don't really use either, though just about all of them are Milani or Jane depots. A couple eyeshadows were broken and re-pressed with some alcohol. Does anyone actually WANT them? Most of the blushes have been used minimally - like, maybe 4x max. I'll send a lot of 10 eyeshadows or 2 blushes to you for free if you pay $5 for shipping. Kick in another $12 and I'll send the eyeshadows in a MAC 15-pan palette. I also have these Japonesque palettes with slots for 4 blushes and 6 shadows, and I'll fill one of those out for like, $20. (These are heavier to ship - and they have a mirror inside.) The cheap Asian side of me refuses to throw them out because I've spent money on them, but the practical side of me wants more dresser space. I don't wear anything but neutrals these days anyway.

I've also got a bunch of brushes I just want to get rid of... I'm planning to invest in a new set. And the really stupid, vapid reason behind THAT is because I want my brushes to match, because that way it'll look prettier on my vanity. I'm figuring... around $25 (incl. shipping) for a Sephora travel brush set that I originally paid $55 for, and then maybe $20 for the entire lot of all my EoB brushes. I'll put up pictures tomorrow or Wednesday - I'll definitely get to it sometime this week.

2009-01-01T00:06:00.001-05:00

Heading out to New York City in about 8 hours. I am excited!

2008-12-28T07:04:00.000-05:00

HOLY SHIT I GOT AN A- IN RUSSIAN

And I don't even care that it was an A-, because that still counts as a 4.0 when calculating my GPA. And I did I ever mention that Intensive Elementary Russian is a 6 credit course? It's the main reason why I busted my ass with 17 credits this semester. (Lied to my parents and told them it was only 14; said it was a Russian history class, not Russian language. They would've complained big time if I told them the truth - blah blah blah why bother, that boy is not good for you, what, you don't want to be Chinese anymore, why are you wasting your time on such a useless endeavor? etc etc.)

Goddamn. That just pulled my GPA up to a 3.0 for the semester.

Oh, Professors Janicka and Papazian, I love you. I love you guys so hard, so much right now.

Or, as they would say it in Russian:

Ой, профессоры Яаника и Папазиан, я вам люблю. я сейчас очень, очень вам люблю. I probably just made 15 grammatical mistakes right there in those two sentences alone, but I don't care. Next semester I'll learn to correct them.

I totally don't regret saying "I'll see you next semester" to Janicka as I was leaving the examination room now. And was I just imagining it, or did she give me a knowing little smile and a nod?

In other unrelated news, my old domain name (celadine.net) got bought and registered by some chap by the name of Alistair Woods in the UK. He/she even set it up in the style of a blog, though with no entries. Interestingly enough, the only other prominent link on the page is "schedule," which was the only page I maintained for a bit after I took my site down. I wonder if he's cybersquatter hoping that I'll offer him exorbitant amounts of money to get my domain name back. Oh well. Sucks for him. Though, I am flattered that I had enough web traffic to warrant a cybersquatter.

2008-12-28T01:17:00.001-05:00

Goddamn, I sleep a LOT lately. I don't tend to wake up until 3 or 4 in the afternoon these days, though I pay for it by staying up till 3 or 4 in the morning watching TV. I'm enjoying my winter break for as long as I can - I start winter term classes on the 5th, and I don't have a break between the end of winter term classes and the start of spring classes. The upside is that Denis and I are both taking the same winter term class (CLAS170 - Classical Greek and Roman Mythology) so I'm guaranteed to see him every day.

I've been doing a fair amount of swapping lately, and I'm starting to regret it. It cost me over $70 to ship out 6 packages the other day - three of them internationally. On the upside, I am getting some good stuff, so I don't mind TOO much. I also cleared out some of my stash by returning a bunch of things to Sephora (thank goodness for their extremely liberal return policy!) and now have a $66 giftcard to spend on... well, whatever useless junk that next catches my eye. I think that would be the new Le 2 mascara from Guerlain. Tried a sample of it and liked it.

I think I have been a bit too hasty in clearing out some of the stuff, because I rediscovered how much I actually LIKED some of the products I haven't used in a while. For example, the MAC Studio Stick foundation in NC27. I forgot that not only was it a decent foundation, it's actually a pretty awesome undereye concealer, and still the truest match for my skin of any foundation I've tried. I think I'm going to be taking my backup off my swap list... and perhaps the Kevyn Aucoin Sensual Skin Enhancer will be going up instead. I only really use it for undereye circles anyway. I wish the KA SSE was a better color match, because it's the most amazingly pigmented foundation/concealer I've ever tried. I've had and used that tiny tub on nearly a daily basis since March and it doesn't even look used. Quite cost efficient in the long run.

Denis and I are still going to New York City; we're doing a 3 day/2 night trip from the 1st to the 3rd. I've been looking forward to it for so long, and I feel like such a dork because I'm actually planning out how I'm going to do my makeup in advance just so I can decide what makeup to bring. I'm so lame. Denis doesn't even LIKE when I wear makeup. Oy, but I'm so tired of being stuck in the same daily rut of Blanc Type/Haux/tightlined black liner/mascara!

2008-12-24T19:13:00.000-05:00

Oh what the hell. I should just switch majors already.

Got a C in Orgo Chem and a B in physics. C+ in Art History (no surprise there) and B in Chem lab. Don't know the grades for Russian yet, but I'm expecting a B. All in all, I'm finishing this semester with below a 3.0, which isn't good, but at least it's an improvement.

If my parents weren't so hellbent on me finishing and graduating ASAP, and I had just one more semester beyond what I currently do... I'd probably pursue a minor in Physics.

quick update on the MSFs

2008-12-24T00:23:00.001-05:00

... since that's the stuff that most people seem to be asking about anyway:

(copy and pasted from an email someone sent me asking about my pricing on these.)

MSFs: something approaching fair market value - ie, what they go for on ebay. The truth is, I'm still rather attached to them and am loathe to let them go, but at this point I do realize I never use them and would be better off with having money instead of makeup.

Shooting Star: $75
Shimpagne*: $55
Naked You*: $60
Glissade: $50

*For Shimpagne and Naked You, someone has already asked about it before you, so I can't in good conscience sell it to you before offering it to them.

I promise I'll get up to posting pics and pricing sometime soon, but I just got back from a ski trip today and I am feeling seriously beat after spending the whole day falling down slopes. Ugh. And I'm sure you all know that holidays are hectic and busy as all hell.

God, I seriously need to get rid of all this stuff.

2008-12-21T15:43:00.000-05:00

I put all my shit up for swap. Since I'm not allowed to advertise "other arrangements" on MUA, I'll do it here. If you're interested in any of my items, just drop me a line at pomegranatesix@gmail.com

My swaplist on MUA: here. Of course, I'm open to swaps too.

All my internet buddies/blog readers get first whack at these things :P Generally speaking, for all the stuff that's only been used a couple times, my selling price (with shipping included) will be around 75-80% of the original retail price, not including taxes. Seem fair?

I am evil.

2008-12-19T03:52:00.000-05:00

(But Seppi already knows that very, very well.)

So, I think I've mentioned Ferrari Guy a few times on my previous blog, but for those of you who need a refresher: Ferrari Guy was a customer I had back in my stripper days who had a lot of money. I mean, a LOT of money. (The moniker "Ferrari Guy" kinda gives it away, doesn't it?) He would routinely drop in every other Friday night after his poker game at the bar next door, then spend about $500 on lap dances with me. He was a pretty good customer: young, reasonably attractive, not grabby, and most importantly, had a lot of money that he wanted to spend on ME. Yes, he owned a Ferrari. And a Porsche. And also a pimped-out GMC Envoy. And a penthouse apartment in a hotel in Baltimore city. Simply put, he can haz lots of monies.

Anyway, he was apparently really into me, and wanted to take me out to dinner sometime. I was single at the time, and even though I had a personal rule against dating customers, he really seemed okay. (See: young, reasonably attractive.) I agreed to go out to dinner with him.

It was quite uneventful. He picked me up from UMBC in his black Porsche 911. We had sushi. The date overall was okay, but he was boring. Like, really boring. We had 0 chemistry, or at least I thought so. I decided that while being young, reasonably attractive and filthy rich made for a good customer, it didn't make for boyfriend material. I have turned down every single offer of a date, or dinner, or "just hanging out" he's offered ever since. Seems like my taste in men veers towards the dangerously sexy, sarcastic, well-endowed*, broke, blue-collar mechanic type. Pretty much the exact opposite. Anyway.

So, two years later. He's still texting me. Even after I tried to let him down gently, telling him that I wasn't interested, and I was involved with someone else, he still persisted. I finally told him flat out to quit texting me, because it was never going to happen. He said, "Oh, so I shouldn't text you anymore?"

I replied, "yes." And that was that.

That gave me a whole three months of respite before he started right back up again. I mean seriously... Clue: something this guy does not has.

Finally, last Tuesday night, I decided I was really tired of it. He had sent me a text message - "hey, you wanna have dinner in Baltimore tonight?" and instead of giving him another excuse like I had for the last 20+ months, perhaps something along the lines of, "no, I have finals to study for", I replied:

"who iz dis??"

His reply: "It's Matt... Who is this?"
Me: "lol, dis iz Sasha... lol... who r u?"
Him: "Oh... I guess my friend changed her number. Sry."
Me: "lol itz ok :)"

Was that horribly passive aggressive of me? Probably. But do I have this guy off my case forever and ever now? Yes. And it's awesome.

*Okay okay okay. One of my best friends at the club was this very cute, very bubbly girl named Jasmine (who has since quit the industry, gotten married and popped out a son) who was a true hustler. This guy was 'my' customer, but Stripper Rules say that anybody's customer is fair game if they're not at work. So apparently a few times he came in looking for me, but I wasn't there. Of course, Jasmine, being the hustler she is, takes him back in the champagne room for a few dances. She quite helpfully informs me after one such occasion...

"OH MY GOD. Jen, you know your customer, that really rich guy who gets half-hours with you all the time?"
"Yeah, what about him?"
"He has a small dick."
"JASMINE! Now, how would you know that, you little whore?"
"No no no! Nothing like that!" She giggles wickedly. "But you know like how you can feel it through their pants sometimes?... Yeah, he didn't have much there..."

We both crack up laughing.

Whew. Dodged a bullet there, eh?

(And yes, calling each other whores is a term of endearment amongst strippers. Traditional hazing ritual for new girls is to loudly ask them how many dicks they sucked that night -- preferably in front of customers or the manager. The best part is when they take you seriously and get all wide-eyed and protest, "no, I didn't! I'm not like that!...")

2008-12-15T09:31:00.000-05:00

Writing this after my first final, Art History. I ended up finishing 40 minutes ahead of time, which is great! I don't think I bombed it - I'll probably get either a B or C in the class, depending on if my TA pulls her head out of her ass to realize that she grades much too harshly compared to the other TAs.

I'm currently in the library - my next final is for my orgo chem lab, and that's not until 7:30PM. Yes, a full 10 hours from now. I'm not leaving this library until then.

My physics TA just sent me an email last night letting us know that according to the other professor, we will be covering material from chapter 32 on our final. Awesome, because my professor didn't go over it in class. At all. In fact, it wasn't even on our syllabus to begin with. Luckily for me, el Seppi pointed me over to the lectures on electromagnetism given by MIT. so I'll probably be watching those today in an effort to understand the material. It makes me want to demand a refund from the University of Maryland so I can go send it on to MIT.

Tomorrow I have my orgo chem and physics finals, so I guess now would be a good time to start studying for orgo. Yeah. Physics has been taking up all my time and energy. I haven't started studying for Russian yet, but I think I'll be ok with Russian. I'm pretty assured of a B no matter how I do on the exam, unless I get really lucky and ace the final and get an A in the class.

I am so looking forward to Wednesday. My last final ends at 12:30, and I plan to blow my brains out afterwards. I refuse to engage in any sort of activity that requires thinking until after the New Year.

2008-12-14T15:17:00.001-05:00

PSA: LORAC Snake Charmer palette on Sephora is $20, down from $35. I suspect they are trying to clear out their stock of these. They've been labeled as "online-only" and "limited edition" for something like a year now. The LORAC website also has them in their VIP discount section for $17.50 - they were out of stock every time I checked, but it seems like they're back in stock now.

I'm actually a big fan of this palette - it's very flattering on warm complexions. I bought one a while back, but lost it. I debated buying one during Sephora FF but held off. I'm glad I did now!

So my total order:

$40 Murad T-Zone Pore Refiner (best skincare.... thing, ever. I would pay full price for this if I had to, but I try to avoid doing so whenever possible.)
+
$20 LORAC Snake Charmer Palette
=
$60, which qualifies me for free shipping. But wait, there's more!

-$9 promotional code (FYP96, expires midnight PST today - thank you, Alienman!)
* 1.06 (tax)
=
$54.06... but wait, there's STILL more!

- $15 gift card code from Sephora
= $39.06 total.

I'm positively rubbing my hands in glee - I essentially got the palette for free and I saved 94 cents on the skincare thinger! (Technically, after taking taxes into account, I saved a total of $24.54) And free shipping on top of that. I WIN AT SHOPPING. This is so Asian of me.

Edit: I just remembered that I could've gone through Ebates. D'oh. But still. This was pretty good.

2008-12-14T02:17:00.000-05:00

I don't care how smart you are, if you are fresh to electric charges and shit, there is NO WAY you can learn everything from electric charges and fields and Gauss's law and potential and voltage and current and resistance in two weeks. Especially not when it's calculus based... I'm pretty strongly against memorizing formulas for the sake of memorizing them; I like to be able to at least know how to derive the formulas in case I blank out on a test.

I hate my physics professor so, so much. We are behind all the other Phys261 classes, and we have to take the same final. Somehow he decided to cram 7 chapters into 2 weeks, when our usual pace is a chapter a week. For fucks sake, if I wanted to learn out of a textbook, wouldn't it have been more efficient for me to just buy a textbook and not have to pay tuition to the University of Maryland at all? Jesus christ. My physics professor back at community college is better than this guy -- Denis has him now, and I have to rely on second-hand community college teaching in order to understand this shit.

Not to mention, this textbook (Knight's Physics for Scientists and Engineers, 2nd edition) is awful. I've been getting supplemental help from my brother's old copy of Young/Sears/Zemansky's University Physics, 7th edition. Despite the fact that the Knight text is supposed to be more modern and student-friendly, and "geared towards a more intuitive understanding of physics", the 17-year-old text my brother used is much, much better. Amazingly, it actually explains the concepts! Goddamn, what an idea.

I'm frustrated as hell. I'm FINALLY starting to get it, but this is after beating my head against the wall for 3 days. If I didn't have several friends (El Seppi, Kan & Denis) who are talented in physics (and very very patient with me and my whining), I think I would go crazy.

Actually, I'm not out of the danger zone yet. I probably WILL go crazy. A couple more days of this, and...

I has a mad.

2008-12-11T20:21:00.001-05:00

So, I had my Russian oral exam today. Depending on the context, you might think it's very sexy and very fun, but no, it was not the kind of Russian oral exam I would have with Denis. Think something more along the lines of showing what I've learned this past semester in my Intensive Elementary Russian class to my two rather nice professors. (I gave them gushing course evaluations, by the way -- they really ARE awesome. But not sexy.)

The way it was set up was that everyone in the class was paired up, and each pair had to write a dialogues for a various scenarios. Individually, we also had a set of monologues we had to be ready for - very basic topics like talking about yourself, your family, your classes or your favorite things. My professor stressed that it was more about being able to communicate, and not necessarily about having perfect grammar/structure/accent... which was great, since I'm ridiculously self-conscious about my accent in Russian.

Bad luck came in the of my partner - a Russian major. I have no idea why this guy is a Russian major, because he's easily one of the worst, if not the worst student in the class. He rarely does his homework, skips a lot of class, and doesn't even make an effort to pronounce things correctly. It's hard to out-do me when it comes to being grammatically challenged, but he manages to do it. The most shocking thing is that he actually studied Russian for a couple years at the high school level. Technically he should be ahead of the rest of us.

Anyway, we had a little less than a week to prepare for the oral exam, and neither of us managed to actually get together and set up our dialogues. We agreed that we'd collaborate together on it online. Now, I have a pretty heavy course load (17 credits) consisting of real classes like calculus-based physics and and organic chemistry, and labs for both of them. Understandably, I'm pretty busy and sleep deprived. This guy is skating by on 12 credits, 6 of which are Russian. His other classes? English 101 and something called "Physics for decision makers,"* which is apparently a class about global warming. (What?)

This guy contributed absolutely nothing to our oral exam. You know who sat down and wrote pages and pages of dialogue for 7 straight hours, tediously flipping through our 500 page textbook to look up words and structures? That's right -- me. My brain circuitry finally fried around the 4th dialogue we had to do, and I asked that he write the 5th one. He said okay, and then disappeared at about 1AM, his last message to me being "hey should we meet up early tomorrow to exchange the dialogues so we both know what to say."

Knowing this guy was a flake, I sucked it up and wrote the 5th dialog, just in case. Along the way, I took the time to actually go and neatly type up our dialogues - in Cyrillic, no less. (Yes, I learned to touch type in Cyrillic on the fly last night after installing the Russian language packs on my laptop. You will see me abusing this new ability in this post and in future posts.) I finally finish doing all this work at about 5AM, and I have yet to even touch my physics homework. I collapse into bed.

This morning, at around 9AM, I get a text message from him: "Sorry for not replying last night, I was tired and went to sleep." This is followed by another text message, "Did you write the dialogues? I didn't get your email."

Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me.

Gee, I wish I had the luxury of leaving all the work to other people and going to bed early!

Anyway, our oral exam is at 11:30, and we agree to meet at 11:00 so we can at least go over our dialogues together. I have a very simple system for dealing with oral examinations in foreign languages: I memorize the main gist of what I want to say and any key phrases or expressions I want to throw in for the "wow!" factor, and then I translate the concepts as I go along. This way, I don't have to torture my brain by memorizing lines, and I also have room to improvise in case my partner makes a mistake. I share this insight with him, and we go over the main ideas of all our scenarios. I'm prepared for some improvisation, and after 7 hours of drilling Russian, I feel pretty comfortable with the language. (In fact, last night I had DREAMS in Russian.) I didn't have a chance to prepare for my monologues, but I felt comfortable enough that I thought I could handle it.

We go in for our oral exam, where we randomly choose a slip of paper that determines our topic. We picked dialogue #3 - a good one, actually! The scenario is between two lovers, who are having a little spat. I wrote this dialogue rather humorously, managing to put in the kind of cheesy overblown speech that would be at home in a soap opera, with the limited vocabulary that we learn in 1st year Russian. The professors gave us a few minutes to go over and discuss our scripts before we really launch into it. I had given this guy a printed copy of the script earlier, and he had plenty of time to read through it, so it's not like he didn't know what was going on. And you know what he said when I gave him the papers? "Whoa, that's a lot of stuff to read... I hate reading."

I briefly went over the "plot" of our little skit right before we had to present it. It was really not that hard - he barely had any real grammatical structures to deal with. To nobody's surprise, he totally, totally fucked my shit up.

First, he apparently decided not to take my advice on memorizing concepts and being prepared for improvisation. In fact, he started answering my questions before I even asked them, because he memorized our script wrong. I am amazed that anyone is so dumb as to answer "я не хочу" ("I don't want to") to the question "что мы будем делать сегодня вечером?" ("What are we going to do tonight?") He could've answered anything to that, like "я не знаю" -- "I don't know," which I would imagine to be a pretty standard and safe answer to most questions. Or he could've said, "ну, что ты хочешь делать?" -- "Hm, what do you want to do?" which would've followed the original script I had written. Really, not that hard.

The idea was that I was going to run through a list of suggestions, and he would reply, "no, I don't want to," or some variant thereof to all of them. At that point, I get frustrated and then we would have our little lover's quarrel, and I then confront him with my suspicious about his neighbor, implying infidelity. Then we would have a dramatic breakup, and I get to call him the very mild insult that we learned -- "дурак!" -- which is about as strong as calling someone a dum-dum head. It was a pretty goofy skit, and it diverged completely from the example in the text, but who doesn't appreciate a little creativity? Before we started, I warned the professors that that we were aiming for "soap-operaesque". "Ooh," said one of them. "This sounds like fun!"

Our professors tried to be helpful. They could see that he was obviously lost, and I was rubbing my temples in consternation. They prodded us along, throwing out suggestions about what we might say next in our dialogue -- "so, perhaps he is jealous?" or "maybe he tried to call you, and you didn't pick up?" "Maybe you were on the Metro and didn't have reception..."

So Genius McSmartypants here starts veer far, far away from the script. Wildly so. I manage to drag our conversation somewhere back in line with the script, and eventually we manage (kind of) to complete our dialogue. More or less. The professors eventually cut us off. (I still managed to work in my key phrase at the end, "я не хочу смотреть тебя, я буду пить много водку!" or, "I don't want to see you, I'm going to go drink a lot of vodka!") On the bright side, they thought it was hilarious, and "certainly the most interesting dialogue we've had today."

No surprise, he fucked up his individual monologue too. Mine was a bit on the short side, but I managed to say enough to satisfy my professors, and they helped me along by prodding me with a couple of questions. ("моя самая любимая передача... я люблю "House"!" -- "my favorite TV show... I like House!") I do think it was probably pretty obvious who was and wasn't putting in the work for our oral exam, and I seriously, seriously hope they don't take points off MY grade because my partner can't coherently string together two words in Russian.

And of course, to make up for yesterday, I now have to bang out 4 chapters of Physics now to keep to my schedule of being ready for all my finals next week. I'm grouchy as fuck.

Oh, yeah - my suspicions were right. He didn't do the 5th dialogue. We were lucky we didn't get tested on that one, since we probably would've been well and truly fucked. That one was not up to my standards; it had turned out rather awkwardly.

I don't think I'm going to get an A in Russian, which is unfortunate since it's a 6-credit class, but I'm pretty assured of at least a B. I've missed a couple homeworks, but I generally get low As/high Bs on my tests and quizzes. I guess it'll depend mostly on my final exam grade...

*Honestly, I would not want the kind of people who take "Physics for decision makers" to be making ANY sort of decisions around here. Though maybe that's just the bitterness speaking out.

2008-12-10T19:46:00.000-05:00

My course evaluation for my art history class - thank god it's anonymous.

This class would better be named as "SSMT560," with SSMT standing for "soul-sucking memorization of trivia." Yes, I know, nobody likes taking CORE classes, but this class is probably one of the worst.

I know forcing us analytical science-major types to take humanities courses is an attempt to get us to "think outside the box" and get in touch with the touchy-feely world of the liberal arts, but I honestly fail to see how any part of this class will ever be relevant to anything. The level of trivia we are expected to memorize (the specific archaeological site where some artifact was dug up? Seriously?) is completely ridiculous. Should I ever pass by a piece of Mesoamerican or Andean art, I might be able to identify what culture and time period it came from... but that kind of knowledge wouldn't even be useful on a trivia game show like Jeopardy for being too obscure. In fact, if I were ever to point out a piece of artwork and do the kind of analysis that this course requires, I'd be labeled as a "pedantic windbag" and my friends would mercilessly make fun of me.

If I were to awkwardly compare this course with a science course, it would be equivalent to asking what specific variety of apple fell on Isaac Newton's head when he came up with his theory of gravity, and then asking about the ramifications of the specific variety of apple - why is it important that it was a Red Delicious as opposed to say, a Braeburn apple? What might that imply about agricultural practices in England in the 1600s? And finally, how did the earlier ripening period of the Red Delicious apple affect scientific history? Had the tree been a Braeburn, the fruit would've ripened later in the season, perhaps not falling off the tree until much later...

Does all that miscellaneous trivia really matter, or is it more important that Isaac Newton observed SOMETHING falling, and from that, deduced that a force acting on the something causes it to fall? Likewise with this class, is it really important that we can identify specific stone carvings (one of many, many, many very similar ones, with very, very similar names like "Maya Lintel #3" or "Maya Lintel #5"...) or more that we understand the culture it came from, and how their culture affected their art?

Винтаж и Елена Корикова - Плохая девочка (new)

2008-12-09T00:10:00.001-05:00

Dear Russian Pop Music Industry:

Over-sexualized much? (Re: Open-leg crotch shot at 1:58)

Appropriate, I guess, for a song with a title that translates to "Bad Girl," not that I can understand the rest of it.

I do dig the makeup though.

2008-12-07T16:14:00.000-05:00

Final exams coming up...

Dec. 11th
11:30 - 12:00
Russian Oral Exam

Dec. 15th
08:00 - 10:00
Art History final

7:30-8:30 PM
Chem lab final

Dec. 16th
10:30 - 12:30
Orgo Chem final

6:30 -8:30
Physics final

Dec. 17th
10:30 - 12:30
Russian final

Top 5 songs for this week:

Melissa Etheridge - Come To My Window
Elton John - I Want Love
Elton John - Rocket Man
Keane - Somewhere Only We Know
Leona Lewis - Run

Somebody suggest something for me. I'm feeling acoustic lately.

The Eyelids of an Asian Woman. ep2.pt1

2008-12-02T20:37:00.001-05:00

This is... the weirdest shit I've ever watched. Oh, my, fucking, god.

You should see this guy's other videos, especially the "dating the asian woman: episode 2 part 5 sexual attraction" video. He's quite obsessive about Asians. It's creepy as hell.

I'd feel bad about having double eyelids if it weren't for the fact that, oh, a lot of Asian women naturally have those too? Let's just generalize that all Asian women have the same "beautiful eyelids."

EDIT: WAIT WAIT WAIT. I take that back. THIS is the weirdest shit I've ever seen:

(For the record, when I tried to guess the various ethnicities of the women he demonstrated, I got 2/4 wrong... so what does that say about me?)

2008-11-29T12:53:00.000-05:00

I just spent $25 on socks* for Denis as his Christmas present. "Socks?!" you think. "My god, that is like, the most unromantic gift, ever. You must be the world's worst girlfriend." Yes, my way of expressing love is by making sure that my loved ones' feet are never cold.

It's kind of an inside joke. I actually have another present for him already prepared, which happens to be exactly what he asked for. Though, I get the feeling that he only asked for it because it's relatively cheap.

We're both hard people to shop for. My family has never been big on presents, and I never really want anything enough to ask for it. I pretty much drove Denis crazy because I didn't want anything for my birthday - just a quiet dinner with him at a nice restaurant. He insisted on the diamond ring, which, amazingly, I haven't managed to lose yet, unlike the $500 diamond earrings he got me last year. (I still feel bad about that. I only managed to find one of them, and you can't wear just one earring.) It's probably because I never take the ring off, though one of these days I need to get it resized for the 3rd time. (Recent weight loss = the ring is now half to three quarters of a size to big for me. Scary, considering I originally had it sized down from a 6 to a 5, and then to 4.25.)

I really need to think of something to get him. Like, a serious present. What do you get for someone you've dated for nearly two years who doesn't really want anything? He's a really simple meat and potatoes kinda guy, literally. It makes special occasion dinners really easy, since all he wants to eat is steak. Doesn't wear jewelry, doesn't really care about clothes or fashion, and has pretty much everything that he needs.

He claims he is getting me underwear for Christmas, because he's already seen all my undergarments and believes I need some variety. I know him too well to know it can't be THAT simple. He is probably planning some ridiculous, extravagant gift. I need to be prepared to gift him in equal measure.

*I'm not talking about your garden variety, white cotton Hanes 6-pair shit. I'm talking about the primo Fox River, Original Rockford Red Heels, $11/2 pair stuff.

2008-11-24T12:25:00.000-05:00

Dear asshat in the silver Kia SUV this morning:

I know you were probably too caught up seething over why some young little 20 something girl drives a nicer car than you, but please try to keep in mind that you *don't* have the right of way when turning left in an intersection when there is oncoming traffic, even when the light is green. Unless there's explicitly a green arrow giving you the right of way, you have to wait until traffic is clear. I have done enough kinematics problems in my physics courses to know what happens when a small subcompact gets hit by a large SUV traveling at high velocity. (I've also done enough thermodynamics to know that the energy in such a collision is enough to increase temperature of 3 tons of metal by 2 degrees Celsius.)

Also keep in mind that the world doesn't revolve around you, and not everyone on a cellphone while driving is busy yapping away about the newest skirt they just bought.

In fact, here's the story behind why I was on the phone on the first place:

As I was leaving my neighborhood on my way to school, I passed by this old guy with a walker standing outside. He looked a little straggly and unkempt, and he held his thumb out, apparently thumbing a ride. It's cold out here these mornings, and even though he looked like he was well-wrapped up, it couldn't have been fun for him to be standing out there. Car after car passed him by, including mine.

I don't know about your neighborhood, but in my relatively well-off suburban neighborhood full of million dollar-plus houses, a homeless guy is pretty rare and pretty suspicious. Then again, you drive a Kia, so I don't really know - maybe your neighborhood is different.

I didn't really know what to do about this homeless guy, so I pulled out my cellphone and dialed 411, asking to be redirected to my local police department. I asked for them to send out someone to pick up the poor guy, and it took them a while for them to hash out the exact location where the guy was before they redirected me to the County police. The whole time, I was still driving, and ended up at that fateful intersection where we met.

For one, if I'm inching forward, it doesn't mean that I'm about to dart out into oncoming traffic like a retarded squirrel, just so you can get to work 5 seconds sooner. It means I want you to get off my ass. My car has a manual transmission; sometimes there's a little bit of rollback, especially on hills.

For two, was it really necessary for you to accelerate as hard as your little Kia 4-banger could go, just to cut me off? Especially when there was a red light in front of us? I hope you enjoyed all 15 microseconds of satisfaction you got from that, especially since it got you all of a whopping subcompact's length (that of an Acura RSX, to be precise) closer to that red light.

The topper? You actually making a point of getting out of your car to scream at me: "IF YOU CAN'T FUCKING DRIVE WHILE YOU'RE ON YOUR MOTHERFUCKING PHONE, THAN HANG UP YOUR FUCKING PHONE!" Classy. Real classy. Do you scream at all the soccer moms in their giant SUVs and other bland business-y types too, or is it because I'm young, female, and look like I wouldn't step up to a real confrontation?

Finally, I'm pretty sure I saw you at the same Metro station. I had to wait 5 minutes too for the next train too. I'm pretty sure it was you, since you assiduously avoided looking in my direction. I'm sure those extra 30 seconds I held you up REALLY made a difference, even though your car disappeared from my view, dodging and weaving through traffic on the 3 miles between that intersection and the Metro station.

Karma, douchebag.

If I Were A Boy - Beyoncé - ( Official Music Video )

2008-11-24T02:00:00.001-05:00

I was with Denis in the car when this video came on, and...

Denis: "She's totally missing the best part about being a boy: you can stand up and pee anywhere you want!"

I actually really like the song, not that I particularly agree with it. It's just a perfect, perfect pop song. And I dig the video too.

rose petals and mango -

2008-11-24T00:13:00.000-05:00

Czar Nikolas II black tea
+
mango syrup to sweeten to taste
=
WIN

I drink ridiculous amounts of tea these days. I like to think I'm getting my antioxidants in this way.

I'm 22. Is it too early to start thinking about anti-aging skin care? I just started using eye cream regularly, and I tend to use richer creams because my skin is rather dry these days.

2008-11-23T00:13:00.000-05:00

While cuddling in bed:

Boyfriend: I think I have a you fetish. Everything about you turns me on.
Me: Even the stretch marks?
Boyfriend: Especially the stretch marks.

(Always thought stretch marks were a weird beauty issue - are they really that big of a deal? I never thought so. I mean, everyone has them, and there's nothing you can really do about them... it's like being upset about your eye color.)

2008-11-15T15:06:00.001-05:00

Random thought:

House and Wilson from House M.D -
House is the kind of guy I'd like to date, but Wilson is the kind I'd like to marry. Does that make sense?

Crush Official Music Video - David Archuleta (HD)

2008-11-12T23:46:00.003-05:00

Dear David Archuleta,

Nice song. Catchy. Hint: you may want to reconsider your choice of vehicular transportation. A Toyota Prius is not exactly a chick magnet.

You may want to invest your American Idol winnings into a manlier car.

Until you stop pussyfooting around the subject and maybe flat-out tell her that you're interested (as opposed to constantly making sad, lovelorn puppy eyes at her), you will most likely remain "just a friend." Forever. Then you will cry and write a depressing song about how nice guys finish last and she's dating some guy with a Camaro who is Totally Not Right for her, and how you would Treat Her Like A Queen. Sorry man. That IS how it works.

Yrs,
Russianfortunecookie

P.S: Angst is so not attractive on well-scrubbed, fresh-faced teenage boys. Perhaps you could pull it off better if you wore more eyeliner and limited your bathing habits to just one shower a week.

2008-11-12T00:36:00.000-05:00

Fawk. Switching my major from Biochem to Biological Sciences, Physiology and Neurobiology. This is the difference between graduating in Spring '10 versus Fall '09. Still going to be taking summer classes. It's gonna be pretty hardcore, but my plan for the next couple of semesters looks like:

Winter 2009:
-CHIN213 (3) - Chinese Poetry into English
fulfills humanities language/diversity credit.

(3 credits)

Spring 2009:
-CHEM241 (3) - Organic Chemistry II
required
-CHEM242 (1) - Organic Chemistry II Lab
required
-BSCI330 (4) - Cell Biology & Physiology
required
-ENGL39X (3) - Upper level writing course
required

-?RUSS102 (6) - Intensive Elementary Russian 2
does absolutely nothing for me, but I want to continue learning Russian. After this, I'll have the equivalent of 2 years of college-level Russian classes. I might have to give this up to fulfill other requirements.
(or)
-?CHIN402 (3) - Advanced Readings in Modern Chinese 2
Well, easy A, right? Need it to get an advanced credit in something other than life sciences.

(11-17 credits)

Summer 2009:
-CHEM271 (2) - General Chemistry & Energetics
required
-CHEM272 (2) - Bioanalytical Chem Lab
required
-BCHM461 (3) - Biochemistry I
required
-BCHM462* (3) - Biochemistry II
req'd upper level, elective

(10 credits)

Fall 2009:
-?AAST201 - Asian American Studies (3)
need some sort of social/political history credit
-BSCI446/453 (3) - Neural Systems or Cellular Neurophysiology required
-BCHM465* (3) - Biochemistry III
req'd upper level, elective
-*BSCI44X (3)
req'd upper level, elective
-*BSCI44X (4)
req'd upper level, elective +lab
(16 credits)

*Whatever course from available list

I'll also have to figure out where I'll cram an advanced 300/400 level course in something that's NOT life-sciences related. I'll probably take the easy way out and take a 400-level Chinese class or something.

2008-11-10T20:58:00.001-05:00

Stuff that is totally, totally not cool:

1. Losing 3 pounds in a week from stress. I was already under my usual weight from my acid reflux issues last month. I haven't weighed this little since the 5th grade. It also appears that all my weight is lost from my ass, because I can no longer fill out my favorite jeans. Uh....

2. Getting an 80/150* on an Organic Chemistry test that I actually really studied for. I think a lack of sleep may have contributed. (Pulled an all-nighter writing an Art History paper.) Plus I only averaged 3 hours of sleep a night that week, so...

3. Suddenly becoming not-physics inclined anymore. All of a sudden it doesn't make sense! This is incredibly frustrating. I feel like I'm back in high school, failing physics and not understanding why. (I have a test next week - hopefully my brains will return by then.)

*That's ABOVE class average, believe it or not. Well, barely above class average. Holy shit. That was a hard test.

World's Most Boring Sephora F&F Haul:

2008-11-09T01:44:00.000-05:00

$40.00 Murad/T-Zone Pore Refining Gel/2 oz
$24.00 Kevyn Aucoin/The Precision Brow Pencil/Brunette

$0.00 Smart Samples/Giorgio Armani Acqua di Gio Pour Homme Eau de Toilette - 0.05 oz
$0.00 Smart Samples/Kenzo KenzoAmour Eau de Parfum - 0.04 oz
$0.00 Smart Samples/Guerlain Le 2 de Guerlain Mascara - 0.06 oz

,.. Yup. Skincare thing, and a brow pencil. I'm so exciting.

That Murad stuff is awesome, by the way - I got a deluxe sample of it last time I ordered from Sephora (~5 weeks ago) and I still have 25% of my 0.5oz sample left. It's definitely worth shelling out the money for. I love what it does for my skin.

I WAS going to order the large size of the Shu Uemura cleansing oil, but then decided I couldn't justify spending $60+ on a facial cleanser. I have the smaller size right now, and it's already half gone in about 5 weeks. At this rate, the large size would only last me about 8 months or so? I've never spent so much on cleanser before, and even though I love it... my wallet tells me I'm just going to have to learn to do without.

I remember I used a similar cleansing oil from Kanebo a while ago, but don't remember how well it worked. I figured it won't hurt to drop the $8 at the Japanese grocery again and find out again. I can always wait for FF2009 if it doesn't work out :P If I get really desperate, Missha makes an excellent inexpensive one, and I'll just force my brother to send me gallons of the stuff from China.

I was also going to go for the Shu brow pencil, but they were out of stock. The KA pencil on sale would be cheaper than the Shu pencil at full price anyway... and I'm a sucker for KA's pretty packaging. (My Kevyn Aucoin Sensual Skin Enhancer is the only thing I own from that line, and I thought it might be getting lonely.)

2008-11-08T22:09:00.000-05:00

Quick gauge of interest -

If I were to sell my makeup collection, would anyone be interested?

I'm just overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I own, yet don't want to throw it out. (It cost me too freakin' much to just throw out....) Ideally it'll go to someone who'll love and enjoy it. I considered swapping on MUA, but there just isn't anything that I want, and I don't want to ADD to the collection. I just want to pare it down to a few essentials.

There's some backups of limited edition stuff (MAC Barbie, mostly) and a lot of really gently used MAC makeup. (Y'all know I love my makeup and treat it like a baby, but I'll leave the disinfecting up to you.) I have a buttload of drugstore makeup too, but I'll probably throw it in as extras or sell for really cheap. Probably a few brushes too. I have 2 MAC187s, and rarely use either of them - my MAC168 doesn't see any use either. (Nor does my MAC190.) I've also got a few Asian brands, including a jar of really nice Shiseido foundation that I haven't even TOUCHED.

Considering I don't even wear foundation anymore, I have no idea why I have 5 different cream foundations, 3 different liquids, and 4 different powder formulations. And of my 20+ MAC lipsticks, I only wear like 3: Fresh Morrocan, Freckletone, and Kinda Sexy. Yeah. And I don't even wear those all that often.

I'll probably keep most of my MAC glosses, since I'm not too sure about passing on used wand glosses. I DO have a lot of L'Oreal Colorjuices that are unused though. (Bought them as a set off ebay.)

Don't laugh, but I think ideally I would pare my entire collection down to about 5 lipsticks, 15 eyeshadows, and like, 3 blushes. The only palette I'd keep would probably be the MAC Ornamentalism Trend palette from 2005. (Yes, that means Urban Decay Deluxe is going to go. 9/12 shadows in there are untouched, I am not even joking.) I'll probably keep my Keyvn Aucoin and Graftobian foundations and MAC pressed powder. (Actually, I plan on buying a new MAC Sheer Mystery Powder when it comes out again this year... it's the only pressed powder that I really *love*) and maybe 3 Fluidlines. I'm not sure about my MAC pigments, since I only own a couple, but I can tell you right now that I rarely ever use them. I might keep a sample from each of them and sell the original jars.

All in all, I think I'm just tired of makeup.

Think anyone would be interested?

2008-11-05T10:36:00.000-05:00

I'm thrilled Obama is going to be our next president, but can we seriously stop with this "historic first black man in office" business? I don't give a fuck that he's black. I mean, yay, awesome, now we've got proof that "the man" can't keep you down if you work hard enough for what you want - but it's not like being black is like a handicap or anything. Or at least it shouldn't be.

Having 53% of America prove themselves not to be racist isn't something that needs applause. I voted Obama, because I really do think he was the best choice for the country, and he is exactly what we need to get our country out of our current economic situation, and improve our world image. We're not electing a black man into office because we want to show prove how un-racist we are. We're electing him into office because he's intelligent, capable, and he's the right choice.

That being said, after seeing this video:

.... I am so, so, SO glad Ohio went blue. I have faith in people again.

(Also, I'm enjoying my bit of schadenfreude by reading the comments on foxnews.com. HAHA, suckers!)

2008-11-04T23:29:00.000-05:00

I love how in this graphic, Obama is like :D while McCain is like :( HAHAHAHA!

This is awesome. Now I won't have to move to Canada anymore.

(Yes, I voted.)

skincare secret #1: make your own moisturizer

2008-11-02T19:18:00.000-05:00

I've always had trouble finding a moisturizer that worked well with me, because everything that hydrated enough would make me oily, and anything that didn't make me oily left me with dry cheeks. Plus there was always the risk of having some random ingredient react badly with my skin-- usually silicone-rich products, for some reason. So I formulated my own moisturizer, which I feel better about using because I know EXACTLY what's in it. Plus it's super easy and cheap too.

Basic ingredients: Aloe vera gel, jojoba oil, vitamin E oil, camellia seed oil, and tea tree oil.

Feel free to substitute your own favorite skin oils, such as grapeseed, almond oil, castor oil, olive oil, etc. The ones I have listed here are just what I have on hand and have had success with.

Quick run down of ingredients:

-Aloe vera gel: clear, slightly sticky, light, non-greasy, generally considered to be Good For Your Skin, especially to soothe a sunburn. It's actually edible! (Some people take it as a laxative, no joke, and my dad drinks aloe vera juice.) The kind I bought actually had some glycerin mixed into it, and glycerin is also edible. Glycerin is hydroscopic, which means that it absorbs water from the air - which is good if you tend to have dry skin.

-Jojoba oil: another one of those oils considered to be Good For Your Skin. It's supposed to have a chemical composition closest to human sebum of all the vegetable oils and waxes, as it's technically a liquid wax.

-Vitamin E oil: The stuff I bought from the drugstore was actually a liquid supplement intended for dietary use, but whatever. All tocopheryl acetate is the same to me. Vitamin E is a well-known antioxidant that's Good For You, but here it serves a dual purpose, because it's also a great preservative, due to its antioxidant properties.

-Camellia seed oil, also known as tea oil: I had it on hand. It's a very light oil, and it's been used for centuries by Asian women both as skincare and as a cooking oil. And then something about how it has a lot of antioxidants in it too. I don't know where you can get it here, short of ordering it online, but I bought my bottle for about $10 USD at a Watson's in China.

-Tea tree oil: known for killing off zits. It has anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, and anti-viral properties. I don't put a lot of it in the mixture, just a couple drops, as it can be harsh on your skin. I like to think it helps prevent zits.

My general rule of thumb for making your own skincare products and deciding what to put in it: if you can eat it, you can put it on your skin. However, this does not always work the other way around. Obviously. Eating shampoo is not a good idea. Also, putting things that have a tendency to go bad is also not a good idea, so no milk products, honey, pureed fruit/fruit juices, eggs, yogurt, etc, even though all those make great facial masks.

Making the moisturizer is simple: squirt some aloe vera gel into a bottle. Throw in a the jojoba oil, the camellia seed oil, a few drops of the vitamin E oil, and couple drops of the tea tree oil. Percentage wise, I'd say it's probably 50% jojoba/30% camellia seed oil/16% vitamin E/4% tea tree. Overall, you'll probably want a 70-30 proportion of aloe vera gel to oil to start with, and you can mess with the proportions on your own later. Shake the bottle like crazy. The aloe vera gel emulsifies the oils and you'll get an off-white, creamy-lotiony gel. (Better living through chemistry - kinda cool, isn't it?)

If your lotion-y gel is very thin and sliding around the bottle really easily, you might want to add more aloe vera because there's excess oil that hasn't been emulsified - I personally prefer a more viscous texture. If you have the time and inclination (and the resources to make a HUGE batch of this), you could probably put it in a blender and make a whipped version of it.

Of course, you can customize this as you wish, but this is the basic formula that works for me. Feel free to take any of the following suggestions at your own risk:

-If you tend to be oily, you might want to have a greater proportion of aloe vera to oil. Also, some witch hazel might help with big pores, and a small amount of kaolin clay will help you mattify.

-If you tend towards dryness like me, you might want to add more oil (or a richer oil, like macadamia nut oil). You could also add some glycerin in the mix to help you retain moisture.

-If you're not sensitive to silicones, go to Coastal Scents and order a few samples of the silica powder. Throw it in, and you'll have yourself a very cheap makeup primer. For you mineral makeup fans, you could throw some of that it in there and make yourself your own tinted moisturizer. (Or liquidy-gel foundation. Up to you. I've done it before and it works well except for the fact I don't like mineral foundation.)

This concoction WILL make you a little 'shiny' at first, but it absorbs pretty well after a few minutes. It doesn't make you greasy, but it will make you a little 'glowy'. Not in a bad way, but in a MAC Mineralize Skinfinish in Shimpagne kind of way. However, I like to be matte all the time, so I usually throw some translucent powder over it. This is not a heavy-duty moisturizer, so it won't do much for you if you have chapped skin, but for my normal/slightly dry skin, it hits the sweet spot in being hydrating without being greasy.

The best part of it? After the initial investment in ingredients, this is a really, REALLY cheap moisturizer. Rough, back-of-the-envelope calculations tell me that this costs about $1.16/oz to make. It's full of Good Stuff, no filler, and I like the peace of mind of knowing everything that's gone into it.