expectorant

My sister beat me to this blog post...
(I suppose if you've clicked over from her blog, you can now compare who is the more screwed up. I vote for me...)

Susannah's weekly week-end offers included this link, and I thought 'hmm, I wonder what my over-expectations are?'



I am supposed

to be more mentally stable
to be thin, effortlessly
to (like to) eat vegetables
to (like to) ski
to put things away
to make my kids eat properly
to be an artist
to have everything organized


Let's change that, shall we?

I will

congratulate myself on my present excellent mental health
be comfortable in this skin, reside in my body
appreciate my appetite
celebrate my family's skiing ability (from the spa. heh heh)
tidy, but not expect pristine
educate my kids on refueling themselves
be an artist, of sorts
embrace messy

That's better. Be your own best friend...

why I don't colour my hair (anymore)

There's talk in my circle of authenticity, living life whole-hearted... and yet I don't understand why everyone (everyfemaleone) is not being their authentic self...? how can one be themselves if they have fake hair colour...

wow, that's simplistic huh? (ok, and a bit judge-y)


For me: I was fed up. The kicker was when I read online how one woman kept mascara with her at all times so she could fix her roots in the washroom. Much like I quit a popular diet -- >ahem< lifestyle management -- company when they advocated counting each stick of sugarless gum (5cal), that was what did it for me. No way was I about to start getting that persnicketedy.

oh, come on! it was 1989...

I have curly hair, so I don't have a part and thus no skunkline of regrowth, but I have been going gray since my teens so after 18 years of colouring the gray away I was starting to see more gray regrowth than I felt comfy with. But fussing that much? nuh uh. I find having to reapply lipstick too tedious sometimes...

So six years ago I let it go au naturelle. Telling myself that I knew where my fake hair colour formula was and could return to it if I wanted. No biggie.

Except I haven't looked back, and I am more comfy now than I ever was. I've never been a primper, so I have a fairly basic routine. And I follow the Curly Girl approach to taking care of the tresses: cleansing my hair usually only once a week with mostly just conditioner (aka the No Poo approach to hair maintenance). Blow dry on occasion, always with just the diffuser and never completely dry. Very often I just clip my hair up wet, sleep on it and in the morning remove the clips and I'm off! And I haven't used a brush or comb on my hair in years. I just use my own two hands.

ps :: I'm not dissing authenticity 'n stuff, I'm in complete and total agreement with Brene Brown and her work... sometimes it just seems strange for people to wander around declaring "this is the real me!" when it's not, completely, y'know? and yeah, I guess the same could be said for makeup (yes, I wear makeup) but somehow that doesn't seem quite the same.

What do you think? Could you go gray...?


edits and further thoughts:

[my husband just read this and admitted that a fellow dogwalker asked him last week where his Mum was since she hadn't seen me out walking our dog in a while...]  8D

[which then reminded me of when we were car shopping 16 years ago and the car salesman asked if I was planning on buying the car for my son, gesturing to my husband nearby]

[which goes to show that it wasn't due to my hair colour, but due to the fact that my husband looks far younger than his years... see photo below... he's actually older than me!]

he's 27 here!

(So, I'm starting early on The August Break 2012. I'm going to be absent for part of the month, so I'm giving myself some leeway here...)

synchronicity and synaesthesia

I have synaesthesia. I'm sure I've written about it here before, but can't find that post and I'm lazy so I'm repeating myself. I'm a lazy, untidy synaesthete. Synaesthestian. Synaestheseologist. (huh, none of those triggered spell-check)


Note to self: must go back and tag some labels onto posts cuz now I'm cranky that I can't find where I wrote about my synaesthesia.


And, just to take my geeky nerdiness a bit more pedantic, I have chromatographemic synaesthesia. Or grapheme --> colour synaesthesia. Or letter-colour synaesthesia. I associate colours with letters. But don't feel too sorry for me, this is the most common form of this particular neurological glitch. 


A glitch that I didn't even know about until well into adulthood, and a glitch that I cannot imagine living without. 


But more recently, I've come to realize how important colour is to me. Now when I need a cheery moment to pass me by, I find a lovely colour combination to make me smile. I've started to collect certain colours too. 


By the way, this guy does a bang up job of describing this type of synaesthesia.


So I was extra special curious to see just what my colour perception would be, and jumped in both feet when I saw this test on a recent Apartment Therapy post.

Good thing I studied... I got zero. Perfect colour vision!

week eight, unravelled

This is something I thought I'd never see: a self-portrait. Even more surprising was how quickly I got used to seeing myself. I guess the course title ~ Unravelling: Ways of Seeing My Self ~ was very aptly named!

The First Step : admitting that you own it

I just started watching The Big Bang Theory. The opening shot of a recently viewed episode showed a book that I actually own! Here, take a look:


(the top photo is the opening shot, the other ones are of my possessions, which you may notice also includes an audio tape)

and if the Second Step is admitting that I gave myself a sore throat from practising too long (it's a very gutteral language) then I'm there!