Of course I believe few enough things, but one thing is sure, that you can't open Christmas presents in anything but pajamas. That would be wrong. I even have a special Christmas morning shirt:
However, this Christmas being a Sunday, I did have to get properly dressed for church and all.
Slightly lousy picture, but I couldn't figure out the lighting in a new location. Anyway, at church I seemed to catch a fairly surprising amount of hostility. I slipped out to the bathroom in the middle of services between musical numbers and was given a couple of full body scans and scowls from the women standing in the back with irritated children. My sister goes to a Mormon church, but I was raised Mormon and am fully able to dress myself appropriately for church (and I had the shawl fully covering my shoulder actually in church). I don't know if standards have changed or if hopeless spinsters like myself are expected to be more mild and, I don't know, pastel. Perhaps the rumors we always heard about Utah mormons being more cliquish and judgy than the rest of the world, but that seems a little unfair of me to conclude with so little data. Oh well, I think I was fabulous.
Of course I had loud bright green eyeshadow (which lots almost subtle in this picture compared to the real-life equivalent) and red lipstick.
Outfit details:
Dress: Target, a million years ago
Shawl: shady-looking Pashmina market outside the West Nanjing Road metro station in Shanghai
Shoes: Target, this season
Jewelry: Art of Adornment
Lipstick: Revlon, Certainly Red
Eyeshadow: Shiro cosmetics: Link around eye and in crease, Bulbasaur below crease, and Outright Fabrication (white with subtle but fun specks of red glitter) above.
Anyway, have a happy New Year! I have exciting plans involving a bottle of Cupcake Vineyards Prosseco and a large bowl of shrimp and grits
I just* got back from Christmas in Salt Lake City. It was mostly a good time. There were pretty mountains
Mt. Olympus, which is apparently in Utah. No word on what the Greek gods think about that.
and pretty lights:
It might have even been the perfect trip except, as happens nearly every time we visit my sister, everyone came down with some horrible illness contracted fro the small people:
How is everyone's holiday season going? I am in Salt Lake City having Chirstmas with my sister and having the unique Antropological experience of observing Mormons in their natural habitat (fun fact: even in Utah, you can buy beer at the grocery store, take that Pennsylvania!, but the tea selection is crap).
Christmas is pretty much my favorite holiday: I love presents, getting as much as giving, peppermint-chocolate flavored things*, light displays, and gaudily combining red and green in my outfits (currently I have black nail polish covered with green glitter on one hand and red glitter on the other).
I've been thinking lately about how all the winter holidays (Christmas, Hanukkah, Eid, and most overtly Yule) are about the ultimate triumph of light over darkness. While that may not inherantly seem like a very Goth-y sort of message; I would disagree. To me, the ultimate point of gothic subculture is to acknowledge that life isn't always sunshiney and bright, but to embrace the darkness in our lives and see the beauty therein. I think ultimately, that fits in with the winter holidays and the idea that while we may be in the darkest time of the year, that isn't permenent and within the darkness is beauty and a promise of light to come.
So tonight, I"ll be going to see the lights in Temple Square (which promise to be appropriately stunning) and tommorow I'll be woken up too early by a horde of enthusiastic children to open presents in my silly bat pyjamas.
I hope you all will of have had an excellent holiday and (in case I don't get back here before then) a wonderful new year!
This month's homework assignment from our dearest professor is to talk about what we do to relax and seek comfort during the stress of the holidays and whatnot. Personally, I don't find the holidays stressful. I looove Christmas and all the Christmas-y business, but that "whatnot", well there's a real grade-A bitch.
As a grad student I don't usually have finals, but instead final projects, which I find personally take a lot more time. Maybe I am too much of a perfectionist (when it comes to my writing anyway, not really anything else, really), maybe I procrastinate too much, probably both. Regardless I have been working on said projects pretty much constantly for the past month. I have a few rules to stay sane: if it doesn't get done before midnight it doesn't get done, always get a real night's sleep, eat three actual meals every day and take at least a half hour break to do so. The other rule is to occasionally (usually after finishing a project, regardless of how many are left) take actual, notable amounts of time to relax. So, what do I do during those times:
1. Read: but here's the important part (I read all the time, obviously), read for fun. I always have something on the go that I am reading for fun. I usually only manage 10-20 pages a day, but it gets read. Currently I am reading The Eyre Affair; a delightful book of such insanity I wan't even try to describe it, but suffice it to say it has enough literature in-jokes to keep me giggling.
2. Knit: I tend to retreat into selfish knitting at these times. Don't get me wrong, I am a selfish knitter most of the time, but it's right before Christmas when most knitters are working full tilt on gift knitting and I ...well I have a stocking on the needles, it's nearly done and all, but what I have been spending most of my time on are heavyweight kicking around the house socks for meeeeee!
Wool socks are an important part of my barely turning on the heater survival strategy, but these are especially satisfying because socks usually take me a 4-6 weeks but because these are thick yarn I should have them done in 2-3 with much less knitting time than usual. While I am knitting I like to:
3. Watch TV shows (on Netflix, usually. I don't have a TV) or random youtubery. I can't talk myself into setting aside enough time to watch a movie, but a 45 minute break or two in the middle of a 16 hour day of writing is acceptable. My current favorite thing is Rebecca Watson explaining how lying to children is fun and makes them smarter, also how awesome and messed up Iceland is, great, neglected Christmas traditions like Krampus and the Yule Lads, and the murderous Feline fashion police. It is hilarious (if you are somewhat twisted) and very NSFW
4. If all else fails:
Remeber: Peppermint Mocha in the morning, Bonnard's Buzz at night
Wow has it really been nearly three weeks? It has. I have been thoroughly in the weeds getting ready for final projects, studying, and keeping up with the stupid f*%$#@*ing class discussion board of my most annoying class. I am popping my head up because I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, and just because. Expect normal blogging to resume after the 17th.
I just got my first tattoo tonight to celebrate/commemorate my impending graduation from Library school. I wanted a quote so I started looking for quotes on libraries, reading, and information. I found a few great ones, which I still may get, but I also discovered that when it came to quotes about reading and books, when the reader was male or gender unspecific they were all exceedingly positive, but if the reader was female then they were quite negative. There was this sense that books, especially novels, will ruin a girl for any sort of "decent" life. Perhaps the best expression of this sense is in Charles Warnke's essay "You should date an illiterate girl", which says, among other things: "The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am.", and in this helpful Victorian infographic:
Look through these quotes long enough and you realize that the ruin dreamt up for the girl who reads, especially novels, is the ruin of wanting more from life than is deemed proper, the ruin of expecting great passions, true love, and thrilling independence; the great an inexorable ruin of independent thought. Such things as are grand and virtuous in men, simply ruin nice girls. I consider myself to be a girl ruined in just such ways and so when I chose my tattoo I went with this semi-biographical quote from my homegirl Louisa May Alcott:
Long before I got ahold of the mind-expanding and therefore obviously girl-ruining words of the likes of Audre Lourde, Carl Sagan, or, obviously, Sappho, I was already long gone. From Sophie in The BFG and Scout Finch I learned that girls can be brave and adventurous, from Chester the cat and Matilda I learned that it was okay to be smart and bookish, even a bit weird and that I didn't have to pretend to be otherwise and conform to the expectations of others, and from Huck Finn I learned to question every bit of received morality and to trust in friendship and your own beliefs, as your teachers and preachers may all be invested in a profound evil which they are too afraid to even question. That is just the corruption visited upon me in Elementary school. From there, it obviously got much worse. Therefore have books turned my brain. I might have been a normal girl; the kind that doesn't get excited by graph theory and has never tried to figure out a friend's Erdos number, but I am too fond of books, and so I went to grad school. We all know what kind of decision that is.
It is the end of the semester and that means deadlines all coming together in a rush, so I have been too busy to post anything or comment much in y'all's lovely blogs, but I thought I would quickly add a post for Movie Monday. I just had time to collect some screenshots from the internets and add commentary, so I thought this month I would feature my current favorite costume drama.
I really love costume dramas; the more repressed and British the better. Of course there are all sorts of great reasons for loving British costume drams: the inevitable sweeping, subtly expressed romance, the thoroughly polite but venomously bitchy matriarch, servant drama!, and beautiful scenery, but its pretty obviously mostly about the costumes. The best costume drama I have seen in ages is Downton Abbey. It has everything you want in a costume drama, and is executed perfectly. There are even two bitchy/polite matriarchs and they are at war with each other! The costumes are gorgeous. The first episode of the first series has them all in mourning so there are elaborately jet-beaded gowns as far as the eye can see:
Above you see Dame Maggie Smith claiming "no one wants to kiss a girl in black". One doesn't like to contradict a peer of the realm, but, well...
No one wants to kiss these girls, obvs.
Downton Abbey earns extra costume drama points for having lots of scenes of the characters dressing, which are always fascinating to me.
The accessories are also fantastic. I was drooling over their wonderful hair forks, but couldn't get any good pictures, but..
Don't you want to reach into the screen and snatch that necklace right off.
I need a necklace like that.
As is historically appropriate the older women, especially Maggie Smith's character, the Dowager Countess, dress more late Victorian than Edwardian
Also the hats! All the hats!
Finally, more jet-beading! And the meeting of the warring old Ladies!
I also found this great video for anyone attempting to replicate the amazing hair in the movie without the benefit of a proper ladies maid
I am going to get all sorts of interesting search engine hits off of this I can tell already.
This month the fabulous Professeur Gothique gave out a homework assignment for us all to show off our unmade-up faces to the internetz. By crazy random happenstance the very day she announced this was the one where, inspired by her previous post on makeup removal and Ultimate Goth Guide's Amy's post on getting ready, I shot a crazy amount of pictures doing and then taking off my makeup. I have a real homework assignment that required me to edit together a video composed of images, so I used this as practice.
This shows my sort of standard makeup look for work. I vary what particular shades I use almost every day, although it is purple of green a lot, and yes, I do have 5 different eye-shadow brushes.
My skincare routine is pretty unorthodox, but also really cheap. I have extremely sensitive skin and I used to have moderately bad acne. After years of experimentation I learned that the less I messed with my skin the less and less acne I had. Now I get maybe 1-2 zits a month (of course both when I was shooting this video) and my acne scars are starting to heal. It's all about gentle care. I use nothing to clean my skin but water (I like the rosewater as it smells nice and I spend 3$ every 2 month or so on it, so that seems worth it) and a microfiber cloth, and use pure oil on damp skin as a moisturizer. The kind I use, kuki nut oil is non-comedegenic, rich in vitamin e and folklorically considered to have
My outfit for the day. It was a
school not work day.
skin healing properties yet to be confirmed or denied by empirical evidence but it seems to be working for me. I use a tiny amount and have had the same 8 ounce bottle for over a year (kept in the fridge). I use light flavored olive oil to remove my eye makeup. It dissolves pretty much everything and seems to be good for my lashes and eyebrows. I do not keep this in the fridge as olive oil hardens at lower temperatures, but use it fast enough to not matter. The only skin care product I use that couldn't be an ingredient in a zesty salad dressing is sunscreen because it is really important. I normally buy Clinique city Block SPF 25 as the SPF 40 has some chemical sunscreens and the SPF 25 is only titanium dioxide and zinc oxide. I accidentally grabbed the wrong tube when shopping in the Clinique kiosk in the airport. I only use quality mineral foundation for similar reasons. I is a bit pricey, at least compared to drugstore stuff, but it also lasts longer. After "mineral makeup" became a huge fad a bunch of cheap knock-offs made mostly of talc (which is a mineral, but not one that is good for your face) flooded the market. Avoid these. You should expect to pay at least 20$ for 1/4 of an ounce. I can be less strict with what I use on my eyes. So that's good, because I enjoy some pretty crazy eye-makeup.
