N A K E D

um hi, be mine.


urban decay naked palette

this sounds promising:
Launching next month, the Urban Decay Naked Eye Palette (approx $45) features 12 sultry shades, from nude champagne to a gritty gunmetal and includes seven of the brand's best selling colours. I've been a fan of the brand's shadows for years as they're richly pigmented and wear really well without any colour fade. With a built-in mirror and dual-ended pencil, there's everything you need if you get stranded on a desert island*. Or have a hot date last-minute. LOVE.

*LOST is currently taking up the majority of my time and energy.
thank god for ASOS. see you in october, my dear!

oedipus

the library is so peaceful, watching people absorbed in some of the most useless things ever to be taught. of course, many people would argue that these things we spend ridiculous amounts of time, energy and money on aren't useless at all - not to the economy, or the wellbeing of society, or the environment in fifty seven years. but really, are you fucking kidding? so what if we learn to understand how a lawn mower eats your weeds, or we finally manage to grasp the concept of some shitty law concerning kinetic whatever movement? people gain recognition for their ability to persevere through the most soul-deadening years of their lives, learning things they don't want to learn. and if they do find joy in such nonsense, they despise anyone who tells them that it's all a SUNK COST and more or less pages and hours of something i'd get more joy out of sprinkling hundreds and thousands onto triangular slices of buttered bread for the rest of my existence. at least it's colourful. and the best part of all, is that it's all self-inflicted. because if you don't know where you want to be, you can't get there, but where do you go in the meantime? spend day after day deciding what's better than spending day after day deciding something you know nothing of? spending your time somewhere that may not even share the same postcode with anything you wish to achieve, ever? i watch time go by and i think wow, what a waste - but even if i spent this time doing something worthwhile, the moment would pass and the clock would still tick if you remembered to keep track of its battery life. and if you could capture a moment you thought to be perfect like a firefly in a jar (i still don't understand why people do this) you would appreciate its beauty until, like everything else, it becomes obsolete and nothing more than a memory touched upon once in ten, maybe twenty years.

cos you're there for me too

Monica: Okay Phoebs, you know what you're doing right?
Phoebe: Yeah.
Monica: Okay Joey's gonna catch the ball and you and I are gonna block.
Phoebe: What's block?
Monica: Phoebe, I thought you said you knew what you're doing.
Phoebe: I thought you meant in life.

if only we were all as confident in ourselves as Phoebe Buffay, aka Princess Consuela Banana Hammock

Mike: Do you even know what a banana hammock is?
Phoebe: It's a funny word.
Mike: It's a Speedo.

put dirtballs in your pocket

I love Regina Ilyinichna Spektor.

Well maybe you should just drink a lot less coffee
and never ever watch the ten o'clock news
Maybe you should kiss someone nice
or lick a rock, or both

READING TIME WITH PICKLE

and speaking of coffee ..

LORELAI: [Sighs] I can't sleep. I can't turn my mind off. It keeps running and thinking and making lists.
LUKE: Maybe if you drank a little less coffee, you'd make a little less lists.
LORELAI: Oh, I can't stop drinking the coffee. If I stop drinking coffee, I stop doing the standing and the walking and the words-putting-into-sentence doing.

this is cold, hard, 2D proof that i need to live in the present and not in the stars hollow of 2004.

clarity

september 3rd, vault lounge: one of our favourite girls turns the big 21 - the lovely dani and her plastic-fantastic ken, and bathroom bonanza minus chuchu train!




two girls who make my life worth living, and a bag which almost tipped all my possessions under the train at wynyard station.

why do i go to uni?

you know your hair's getting long when you can tuck it into your jeans ..

currently exercising what i'm best at, ie. doing everything but facing the task at hand, or rather, on the desk in front of me, the task being to cram my freshly-washed head full of bits and pieces that will be washed away once i hear boy and bear play again, this time at the oxford art factory in october! no, probably once i drop my pen at 11am tomorrow.

nonetheless, life is a decent shade of beige, i'm above average in terms of excitement about new employment commencing sooner than i can say "i hate retail" and i cannot wait to go paint-sample-garage-sale-random-furniture-thrifting-crazy with my favourite millar!

"what a wanker"

i couldn't have put it better myself.


a cup and a half of love for possibly two of the most talented people to walk the earth, ever. barefoot.

a snippet of julia, behind the braids and never-diminishing cheekbones:

The home on the 13th floor is rob and janie’s- friends of our mum and dad’s— they are now friends of ours also… the house is filled with canvases with beautiful designs in wax…. rob is an artist who has just started using wax as a new element in his art… angus cut some of his hair for rob to use underneath the wax… i wanted to get in on the action so cut some of my hair off also— he made two paintings while we were there— so our dna is preserved beneath the wax paintings somewhere down in battery park.. the room that angus stays in is right down the end of the hall… that is where rob’s home studio is with all his guitars… that is where we sat in the early hours of the morning recording ‘santa monica dream’—- angus had been out on the town… enjoying the festivities of manhattan… i had been, all day in that little room down the end trying to get sounds that i liked for this new song i had written that morning… it sounded okay…. the guitar sounded lovely- an old dobro of rob’s that was tuned down— it all sounded okay… just okay though…

is the rob in the kitchen making pizza the rob of rob and janie? possibly.

and because i can't figure out how to download videos off youtube, this has kept me in a constant bop for the last 72 hours!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26AV4sAZWpE

do walnuts grow on trees?

it's so painfully tiring, answering questions to which answers don't exist, and stringing words into sentences when there is absolutely nothing you wish to say. i find it more boring to be in the company of those i've adored in the past, than to be on my own, at my own pace, not required to react or conjure up a jumble of excited phrases and facial expressions in response to something that means about as much to me as a bag of sesame seeds do. and the best (or worst) part is that there doesn't even seem to the slightest hint of recognition that nothing is genuine anymore, like i've wallpapered over my old self with patterns of wildflowers and elephants and jellybeans, and people walk in and out of the room, failing all the while to notice what used to lie only millimetres below.

and on top of that, why are people so quick to attribute anything out of the ordinary (and what is ordinary, anyhow?) to something being wrong? what's wrong with not being one's usual self, and moreover, what even constitutes as normal? there isn't a single person who can sift through all your moods and phases and moments to be able to decide what is, and isn't, your ordinary self. if i were to go all hardcore physics on you (to the extent my limited brain capacity allows) i'd say that everyone is simply in constant reaction to forces being placed upon them, willingly and knowingly or not, and when there is nothing external for you to respond to, is that your usual self? when nothing is wrong, everyone hopes that there is, so there is something to fix. but then things are much easier to handle when you tell yourself that #1 you don't give a ring toss and #2 that even if you did, it would neither mean nor change a thing. but you run the risk of giving up other things too, like the ability to feel excited or even vaguely amused. and can you really ever tell yourself anything? no, because you refuse to ever listen. you think you know better (than your other self, might i add) and when you find yourself in over your ignorant, self-absorbed head, you wish you'd listened - to yourself.

and it's all so bothersome, having people all around you searching for the meaning of life just to have something to search for, because they can't deal with the prospect of there being no meaning, and then they're the ones to look at you in horror, like not only have you grown horns, but a trunk and a tail and whiskers too, when you suggest that maybe (and let's face it, probably) there is no meaning, and we're all just products of an empty box of condoms.

oy, humbug

isn't it funny to think that when you tell a story you go "and then this person said -" or you say something like "so i was driving and there were all these cars being losers" and to those losers, you are also just a car, not a person driving a car, not a daughter or a cousin or a grandfather, but a car.

i wish i could be a dog and wear a shiny collar and lean out the window and have my tongue being blown across the side of my face by the wind, on the way to a holiday house with my family where i could frolick in the sand and pick up tennis balls with my mouth and not be concerned with the fluro fluff coming in contact with my saliva. and i could pee in public with one leg up, but it'd be okay because i'd have three other legs to keep me balanced. if i were a dog, i wonder what my name would be.

galawala

i don't appreciate that which is explicit, or a rational reason for explaining something which cannot be properly explained through logic. i think that it is impossible to place a price on a feeling, or have an instrument that has the ability to accurately measure emotion, because you can never fully know something in its entirety about another, even if you know them really well, or you think you know them really well, or they tell you and you trust them because you know (or think you know) them really well. so when someone says "i love you" or something along those lines, and the other person wants to know "why?" in my opinion, any answer they give is as incompetent and shallow as those dishes you use to serve pasta in. who decides the different levels of happiness on the smile-o-meter? what factors determine your current emotional status? i have this image in my head of a creepy clown whose smile gets bigger and bigger the happier and happier you get. eiw

what makes you fall in love with someone? and more importantly, how can you be sure that what you feel belongs under that particular flashing neon sign? love is different for everyone - to me, it's a four letter word. it's overused, yet never used enough. those four letters, arranged in that sequence, look like love to me, even if i didn't know the meaning of love. i don't. over time, it's been sculpted and melted and ripped apart and put back together again, with bolts and UHU glue and thread and plastic waterproof bandaids. i believe in what things used to be, in how things used to be done, in the ways people used to think and their capacity to feel things that don't exist anymore, because people aren't made that way anymore. it's like the more they try to improve us, like ipod classics and nanos and videos and shuffles, the more they are taking away from what we could be. things don't have to get better - they just can't get worse.

more often than not, we're looking but not seeing, like that moment where you stare straight through the face sitting before you, and you try but you can't focus, maybe because you don't wish to and maybe because you're unable to bring yourself back from that place beyond the eyelashes and the dimples. it's similar to noticing but not caring, both about what you notice and also the fact that you don't care. everything is a moment, a moment which simply evaporates as if it never existed as a moment - but the fact that it did makes it like no other, before or after. every breath exhaled and every word uttered out loud or somewhere deep inside. and they come and go, day in day out, forgotten and discarded like an old movie ticket or treasured more carefully than the hands of a world class surgeon or pianist.

my head, and this post, and really everything around us - it's all bits and pieces, a mishmash of scribbles and heartbeats and tears, like a pot of leftovers at the end of the week before grocery day.

toothpaste kisses

i get a little chill every time i walk past a busker doing an amazing cover of coldplay's 'the scientist', which is not all that often, but seeing as that is the tune people will be humming (or rocking) to when my casket is being lowered into the ground, or my ashes being swept into the wind (i haven't decided yet - maybe it'll be a meredith grey "i brought my mum to work in a baggy" situation) i find it takes a moment before the goosebumps subside.

the thing people don't mention about crying whilst wearing eye makeup is that not only does it sting, but it's kind of itchy. luckily for me, smudge pot and i are tighter than snugglepot and cuddlepie, and has yet to betray me in my moments of need. oh, how american television makes me bawl like a kid who's had its pacifier taken away (mind you, i never had a pacifier in my day, so i sat in my stroller as patient as ever til the day i grew the teeth to bite my sister and everything she owned).

i need sleep help.

who is john galt?

second post of the day. what can i say? i suffer from diarrhoea of the mouth. crystal clear visual you've got there - my apologies. wow, the number of entries i've posted is teetering dangerously towards a number that used to hold the title of favourite in my years of junior high.

i only have a slight problem with the writing of ayn rand, and that is, that it's so incredibly descriptive and drenched with thought and detail and emotion that once my face is no longer buried within its pages, i find that reality in all its three-dimensional glory is really a much less interesting story where nothing is being told. and that nobody honestly thinks about things with such depth, if at all.

sometimes the things that people do or say have me resisting the urge to run in circles clanging saucepans and various other miscellaneous household items over my head, or better yet, in their face (and by in their face i mean at their face). i think that the day i hit someone in the face, the liberation of my rage will mask the pain that their ugly, annoying face bulging with lies and ulcers will cause my knuckles. much in the same way that alcohol disguises the pain one feels when they're holding fajitas that have been in a 175 degree oven for over an hour.

i don't even hate people. usually. the pot clanging and the face bashing usually arise from feelings of frustration and annoyance and incompetence. and on that note, i don't like uncertainty, or things that are late, or people who are gay (and by that i don't mean homosexual, i mean gay like when i was in the fourth grade and called you a gaylord because there was no better way to describe you and really, you were a gaylord, except when we grew up we used different words to describe people such as yourself, although i don't know why we did because gaylord suits you perfectly). go pick a toddler's nose and eat whatever you find on your finger, please.

overuse of the word face - yeah, yeah i realised, no need to point it out. i'm going to go read a thesaurus now.

Monica: It doesn't make any sense.
Joey: Of course it does. It's smart! I used a thesaurus!
Chandler: On every word?
Joey: Yep.
Monica: All right, what was this sentence, originally?
Joey: Oh. "They're warm, nice people with big hearts."
Chandler: And that became, "They're humid, pre-possessing homosapiens with full-sized aortic pumps?"

the question is not what you look at, but what you see

there is so much beauty in simplicity, and it's one of those things that isn't hard to achieve - but it's hard to maintain and in most cases almost impossible to appreciate. the things that put a smile on my face don't involve a string quartet and five course banquet, but are as thoughtful as a bucket outside a cafe labelled "dog's water". it's not a given, that you get to do something you love, all day, every day. most people hate 16 of the 24 hours of their everyday life - the time not spent dreaming about climbing palm trees and pegging those you hate with coconuts. and you find yourself beginning to grow irritated at the ones you told you'd love forever in a cathedral surrounded by hundreds of people and four times that number of flowers. the most basic things in our life are taken for granted and constantly being replaced with shinier, more expensive substitutes.

"Well, since my grades went from 'B's to 'A's, I was actually wondering (points to her chest) if you could change my 'A's to 'B's."

i love orange county.

walking the 200 metres down the road to the framers this morning left me feeling strangely annoyed. it struck me that not only am i impatient, but incredibly lazy. you see, while crossing the street that consists of approximately 3.5 lanes of traffic, i found that it took too much energy to look right, left, right before crossing, if i were to be the rebellious 5ft 2 asian that i am and jay walk. but standing waiting for a light while you watch the weed tumble by is equally frustrating because the moment you decide "alright i can step off the curb now" a mercedes comes whizzing by and you're left with your hair in your face and lipgloss and in much need of an espresso. what also shits me, other than traffic lights, are those people who stand so unnecessarily close while you withdraw money that i'm pretty sure they could count the numbers of hairs they were causing to stand on end. yeah, you behind me at the st george atm in greenwood plaza north sydney on friday morning at approximately 9:42 am - i remember you.

my titles are getting so long these days.

i hear eyebags are in this season

"It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the centre of your being, then you can't afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You've got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you've got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you're compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content; we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship."

Touché, Nick Hornby.

and it's not just the love part of your life. love is just one of the keys in a bunch that you carry with you - sometimes you need it and at other times it's completely useless and poses the same effect as hanging a potato off a chain. when you think, you feel, and when you feel, you think. and sometimes you'd rather just do neither.

let's go to the market, maggie!

yeah, we don't take enough photos together.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY my wrinkly and oh so lovable other half of our racing grannies!
i met you in 2005 when you wore your overly puffy garfield jacket in substitution of the cardigan a nameless mole stole from the sidelines of the netball court, the same sidelines where you fell as a result of the lunchtime games we invented running along the markings, i don't know what we were thinking - physical activity, really? luckily we have grown out of that. and you had your little purple scar and i had my vegetable peeler/shaving scar of 2006. then you progressed into farenheit, and i wish i could say that you've moved on from that onto bigger and better things but i'm not 100% sure that you have, however i do give you the two thumbs up for queen victoria and the domestic newlywed bloggers. and now you are wading through the flood water in the northern hemisphere! I MISS YOU, YOU NINETEEN YEAR OLD WOMAN

petroleum jelly

oh my lol how do you ever sit down with that huge stick coming out your ass?

thank you for providing me with priceless laughs (and snorts) that have been absent from my life for as long as i can remember.

and as a side note: HAPPY ALMOST BIRTHDAY my greener-than-green granny smith apple!

travelling

i don't really think that the english language possesses the ability to capture the essence of human emotion as cartoon sponge and starfish capture jellyfish in butterfly nets. i constantly find myself landing upon words that only describe what i feel with mediocrity and not so much accuracy. which is where i find myself now. it's not boredom, not dissatisfaction, denial or acceptance, pain or indifference - maybe i've found that i am able to be devoid of emotion, that i don't necessarily have to yearn or feel angst or frustration or rage, or that loss of breath when your heart admist hopes is crushed. am i not okay with being okay? sometimes we put all our efforts into things which dissolve within days or even hours, and we tell ourselves time and again that we'll strive to do things which mean more for ourselves and the world, things that will last or carry more than just the superficial pleasure of a matter of trivial moments. but why? why is there a constant need to better ourselves and our actions when they don't mean a thing to anybody else regardless of how they seem in our eyes? in all honesty, most of what we do is done to seek the approval of those we love and admire, or those we wish to love and admire us. it, and you, and those before have all taken little by little to steal the trust and the patience and the will to hold out. belief in a word isn't dissimilar to belief in a brick wall - useless and time-consuming, and when observed upon by an outsider, utterly pathetic.


J; thank you for providing me with literature and stolen spoonfuls of ice cream and ripe triplets.

5-11

coincidentally two of my favourite numbers.

stars hollow snows.
straub dies.
milk & cookies.
grown up milk & cookies.
emily discovers the internet.
kirk is a whore.
jack russell terrier.

i wish somebody would build me an ice rink. despite the fact that i cannot ice skate, and i despise the cold.

vaseline

Love is just a word until someone you meet gives it a proper meaning.

black lingerie

it's a strange sensation feeling your body move without your full consent or knowledge, like you're walking away from something and walking towards something else without your mind being entirely sure of it. it's almost my stop i should put my bookmark in and take my ipod out and stand up without making a fool of myself by falling onto yet another unsuspecting victim and before i know it i'm out the hissing doors of the grubby tangara carriage. i dislike the way in which authors at times feel the need to ramble on for pages about a certain character or event that logically gives the rest of the book context but ignores the fact that in reality i don't care for context, or gail wynand for that matter. i think the only thing i like more than eating would be to prepare food that will later be eaten, not necessarily by me but by someone who will enjoy it. or on par with that, watching that process unfold on television. i like looking at macaroons more so than i enjoy eating them. maybe, just maybe, i don't actually like the things that i think i do. let's take a moment to reflect upon these wise words -

LORELAI: And then I thought, "maybe their freak-outs are like some kind of compass for me" you know like, "I know I'm doing what I want to do if it freaks them out." And then I thought, "what if I don't want to do what I want to do because I want to do it, but because they don't want me to?"

RORY: Huh?

LORELAI: I mean what if I don't like what I like because I like it, but because my mother doesn't like it and doesn't want me to like it? What if I don't actually like the music that I like or the movies or the clothes or the men? What if I don't like what I seem to like?

RORY: Ah, hence the pop-tart.

LORELAI: Yes. Hence. I can remember the first time I had a pop-tart. It was at my friend Erica Catcha's house, and she said, “Do you want a pop-tart?" And I knew my mother would recoil at the very idea of me having a pop-tart. I could just picture her. [Emily voice] "A pop-tart?!" [normal voice] And so, I had one. And I opened the little silver wrapper, and I took a bite, and I thought nothing had ever tasted so good. I thought it tasted like freedom. It tasted like I was my own person. The pop-tart tasted like freedom and rebellion and independence.

RORY: Wow. That's some pop-tart. What flavor was that?