Does cooking drive anyone else mad? I've just cooked (rather hectically) a dinner for my Gentleman's birthday- it went over quite well, but in the last minutes of wrapping up his present while he hid in the kitchen, I left the first batch of rice to burn and undercooked the bok choy. (In my own estimation- the Gentleman approved of them.)

I don't get this way when I cook for myself, but on the other hand, when I was for one, I hardly ever experimented. I defaulted to humus and veggies or pasta more often than not. But when other people are involved I feel pressured to book more and better, and to try new things.

I've been obsessing and gathering data about make-up in the last month or so. It's a pattern: Around finals time every quarter/semester, I develop a creative obsession to allow me to ignore finals. Baking! Origami! Watercolor painting on very small paper! Bookbinding!

So, I've been poking through a lot of cosmetics companies' websites and product descriptions, comparing them to the recommendations of actual humans, and wading through the bullshit. It's been a fun run, because I get to play with pretty colors and brushes! And feel pretty!*

But I've noticed quite a bit how there is a clear discrepancy between the cosmetics websites and the actual human reviews and make-up vids. The vids contain humans performing femme (all cisfemale as far as I can tell/they're willing to tell) of all shapes and sizes and races. Particularly, there are people of color in RL vids, comparing notes and talking about techniques that work well with the range of skin tones and facial shapes associated with their own race.

But on the corporate websites? I have found one website so far that has any vids especially by/for POC's. ONE. (BareEscentuals, if you care.)

At first I was like, yay! Good job, BareEscentuals! I was just kind of happy that they noticed that hey, not everyone trying to buy makeup from [insert company] is as white as KitewithFish! Just pleased, really, I was.

Except that I shouldn't really have to be this pleased by such a little thing. I should think this is standard. Because it should be standard. Unless a company wants to have their slogan be, "[Insert company], cosmetics for Whites!" just as some companies really have made similar slogans about marketing themselves specifically to people of color.

My mind is trying to make me go to an angry place about this, because I've always associated the kind of passive attempting-antiracism mindset that notices the lack of POC's in the big make-up companies' mind with a kind of righteous rage about it. But more honestly, my first reaction is to just be sad. It just makes me sad that this thing that was just fun for me is hurtful and erasing to other humans, because I have to go shopping for clothes and find out that no-one had someone as short and as fat as me in mind when designing clothes and I feel erased and hurt, so I turned to make-up to be a one-size-fits-all-and-looks-great-doing-it solution, only.... not so much.


*Which goes to show just how deep the whole performing femininity thing goes, yes, but also works with my growing sense that I get to play femme my way, rather than the way I was told to back in eighth grade. I play with femme with the parts of femme that I enjoy, like choosing "girly" clothes, high heels when I want to bother, thinking about making my body look as good as I feel, picking out jewelry (or accepting it with pleasure as a gift), and playing with make-up.
Hair? bah, not my thing. I'd consider shaving my head again this summer but I think that I'd get more flak on that than I am willing to deal with. So I have some hair at the moment, but it's about an inch and a half and I've not done anything do it-just let it grow out from my peach-fuzz cut and washed it as needed. It's not a part of femme I feel like experimenting with right now.

Kind and gentle folk! Some of you are wearers of makeup!

Kind and wise elders, TELL ME WHAT YOU USE TO DO MAKEUP ON THE GO!

Background: I'm seeing someone regularly, which means we're living together in two apartments. I frequently get up from spending the night at his place and head out without stopping at my place, which means that the makeup that lives in my purse is the makeup that I put on regularly.

Right now, that means: a set of two cheap little eyeshadow brushes, a cream blush from Revlon with a little mirror in it, a dark brown powder that doubles as eyebrow liner and eyeshadow (from an Etsy vendor), and an eyeshadow compact with several complementary colors, from Revlon.

What works for you? What do you advise against? What's a great product that you can sneakily use for two things (cream blush and lip gloss!)

Random Dresden Thought-
Harry's father did not die of normal means. Instead, he was drowned in Lake Michigan, and Harry can summon up the elemental power of the lake through the blood and bones of his relative. Bonus points for apparitions of his father.

And I am REALLY EXCITED!

*runs away*

New Life Goal: Be exactly as freaking silly as I want- it's the juice of the creative process spilling down your chin as you bite into it.

My hair's been in a buzz cut for a few months now, and that appears to have been long enough for most of the people I know to completely forget what my hair looked like long-- including some people who've known me longer with long hair.

But during finals, I let my buzz grow out from 12mm for about a month. It got to around half an inch, a brown halo of fuzz 'round my head that caused my fingertips to disappear into it.

And then I went to C2E2, and China Mieville was a bald bamf, and I found myself holding a beardtrimmer the next day thinking, well, maybe I can take it down to the shortest setting...

AND I DID.

It's been about three days now, I'm getting slightly fuzzy again, and life is good.

Finished reading KRAKEN. My brain is in a happy little place right now about the whole thing.

My Boy has bought me a string of fat purple pearls, which can only be cultured but are shockingly pretty. They are each just slightly off round and fascinating to roll between my fingers and feel the strange organic seams left in them from where they have been shit out of mollusks. I'm been wearing them draped around my neck and feeling like the exile baroness of a land that has since sunk to a dull and dreamless bolshevism where the people are busily oppressing themselves through the pedantic scribbling of bureaucrats. They will look up in the near future, at the grey walls of the grey prisons, peering out of the unornamented corners into which they have painted themselves with vats of mass produced cheap whitewash that will pull dust to it like a magnet, leaving it a grey sickly mess a year after it's brushed on, and they will lament that once, the heel that pins them in the mire was shod in style.

I have solidified my position in the highest echelons of the exile elite by the acquisition of a gin for slow sipping that leaves a faint taste of cucumber and cruelty on the tongue. It comes in a round plain and unfaceted glass jar, because of course I will be having my servants pour it into my cut crystal decanter before it ever touches my palate.

I am beginning to wonder if I am stranger than I thought.

Caveat: I am trying not to be judgmental of myself or of anyone else in the following paragraphs, and I mean to invite discussion and comment. Feel free to disagree with me- because this conversation is actually one in which I would welcome someone who thinks differently to voice their opinion, because I am kind of confused about some things.

So, if I am hurt or annoyed by something a friend of mine does, either I forgive them for it in private without talking to them about it and don't harbor resentment over it OR, I tell them that I'm angry or hurt and why. I feel like relationships are damaged by unvoiced anger and resentment, and I feel that once I voice my hurt, my friend will try and explain why they did what they did, and perhaps apologize if necessary. People I can be friends with are often the kind of people who, while that kind of open conversation may not be their habit of communication, they can step into it if it I need them to. Once they explain or apologize, I accept it, and when I'm able to stop being mad at them, I tell them that I forgive them. ( Not before I stop being mad. After.)

The people that I don't talk to about my feelings of being hurt or annoyed are people I don't care too much about. I am willing to write these people off as being people, for one reason or another and with no condemnation or real dislike, I am probably not going to be deep friends with. Colleagues, acquaintances, or in the same group of friends? - No problem, we'll be courteous and even have fun together. I am not going to feel comfortable talking to them about my frustrations with my life/family/SO/job/whathaveyou, and that's fine. If they hurt my feelings, I may never tell them about it, and I may stay mad at them, but likely they are not people who are important to my life, so it's not something that eats at me.

Here's where the system breaks down: A few times in my life, I have discovered that a friend of mine was mad at me and did not tell me.

And this confuses me greatly, because my relationship with my friends seems very much to be driven by the ability to confront each other and forgive each other. So when I find out that a friend has been hurt or upset by something I did, and stayed upset or hurt, and not confronted me about it and called me on it, I felt hurt.

I felt like a) I had done something really, really wrong that they could not tell me about. (which was generally not the case.) and b) I was confused as to how they dealt with conflict with their friends if not through open discussion. What makes someone a friend, if you can't tell them how they made you feel?

So, dear readers, (those of you who have born with my prattling this long), I am somewhat interested in knowing how this reads to you- Does this behavior read to you as unusually confrontational? If a friend of yours does something that unintentionally offends or hurts you, what's your process for handling it? Does confronting a friend feel like an affront to your friendship? or does it feel like a duty? Or a really uncomfortable chore, but something you do have to do?

Greek final- killed it with FIRE

IN OTHER NEWS:
-I am 2/3rd through finals. Yay!

-I have not trimmed my hair in about 2.5 weeks now. My head feels like one of those furry-rubber Koosh balls from my bizarre childhood. Press lightly, and it pushes back; press hard and it goes flat only to spring up again at the passing of the storm.

-I am watching this video from a visit to North Korea which is weirdly severe in character except for the hairdresser, who appears to be adorable. (As many hairdressers are.) The women's formal gowns are lovely.

-I've been re-watching Weeds recently. I'm not fannish about it, primarily because I don't think it's meant to be fannish- I can't imaging loving any of the characters.
The show seems to go to an effort to distance us from them visually and emotionally by stepping back and doing a music-backed montage of all the characters' lives at least once in the show- something about that strikes me as really highlighting the fictionality of the show and pushing us away from the characters. There's also the fact that many of the characters are farcically vile- the pot-smoking CPA on the town counsel would would disown his son if he found out he was gay, the drug-dealing suburban widow who seems more concerned sometimes with trying to control a situation she very stupidly got into rather than getting a real job and a real life outside the classy suburb she lives in.
There's a real sense of complete chaos and catastrophe boiling up under a smooth suburban surface, where the main character has to worry about being caught by a DEA agent and making sure her older son doesn't commit upper-middle-class suicide by dropping out of high school to follow his girlfriend to Princeton. It's a very weird juxtaposition of a heightened fiction of a life, being portrayed in a heightened fictional media.

I only notice that my day has started off badly when I am, myself, feeling badly. So this is how my day started.

6.30- Wake up. The Boy's roommate with the room nearest the kitchen has asked that I don't make breakfast until after his alarm goes off at 7am, which is annoying but a reasonable request. Normally, I would shower in the 30 minutes in between, get dressed, and snuggle the Boy a bit more before getting breakfast. But there's someone in the show.

6.35 - Doze a bit, start awake, still someone in shower.

6.55- Still in shower.

7am- The bathroom still occupied, I go to check for breakfast. Only, I cannot tell the Boy's food from his roommates' breakfast food, and so I decide to forgo breakfast and buy something from the coffee shop before class.

7.10- The bathroom is free! I dart in an take a shower! Only to realize that the slow draining tub is now lightly coated in the sediment of the soap and shampoo that has settled in the pooled water around my ankles, and that showering is very dangerous. I keep one hand on the wall, and do a quick rinse and wet my hair so that it stops looking like I have mange.

7.15- The roommate who barred me from the kitchen before 7am is now knocking on the bathroom door, asking if there is any way that "we could speed this up." I should answer, "Not unless you want to help me towel off. I'll be out in two minutes." Instead, I leave the bathroom immediately.

7.17- My glasses are still in the bathroom, and now the Boy's other roommate is in the bathroom, so I have to wait him out. Hugs from Boy.

7.25- He's out of the bathroom! I get my glasses, grab my coat, and run out the door.

7.26. It's raining outside. Today I will be making the walk to and from school at least twice, and to and from church at least twice. My rain-appropriate footwear is either ugly and lightly crusted with dog shit, or really painful.

7.51- At school! Lots of time to get coffee! Coffee shop is staffed by nice people that I like! Who are running behind, so there is one really dark kind of coffee (bleh) and no milk out, and I'm exercising "niceness through nonresponiveness" because if I get beyond "Hi, how are you- great-small coffee please" right now I will bite at someone.

Did I mention that it's Ash Wednesday? The beginning of Lent, the season in which the lovely organ music leaves the church and we have dreary tiredness? And I'm supposed to have a Lenten practice to be holy and self-improving and I'm just not feeling it right now?

Rar.