Shirley Temper

Changes

2008-03-25T10:06:00.000-07:00

This blog started as a place to review cheap makeup. I love makeup and wanted to advise others on how to look good without spending a lot of money. Recently, it has occured to me that this is absurd, because I usually look like a hungover hobo whith a racoon just got fresh. I'm taking this blog in a different direction. The current focus will be about discussing and elucidating the philosophy about Montel Williams as espoused in his seminal philosophical work, Mountain, Get Out of My Way: Life Lessons and Learned Truths. To be fair, this philsophy is not Williams alone, but was widley practiced by the Gnostic Christians before the canon was established and their esoteric practices forced underground.

Tears of the Clown

2008-03-20T11:26:00.001-07:00

Years ago, some friends and I were discussing an imagined scene which would epitomize the idea of tragicomedy. An example of the sort of our inquiry were the real-life rape allegations against self-proclaimed “Lord of the Dance,” Michael Flatley. To be clear, these allegations were made by a woman. This is an example of tragicomedy in that the idea or rape conjures up horrific images, while the idea of Michael Flatley conjures up (to the exclusion of all else) images that are, well, really, really gay; these images also step lively and involve colorful pyrotechnics. (See: fagbam*)

The idea that we ended up settling on (settling on, by the way, in the sense of agreeing to, not in the sense in which Clinton settled on Lewinsky, lacking any other options of the rotund, beret wearing variety) was that of a clown, naked, in full face makeup with his red rubber nose, crying and masturbating in the shower. This, however, was an agreement of sorts, because wasn’t complete: we were divided over whether sobbing would better describe tragicomedy rather than a single tear, leaving in its wake a kaleidoscopic line of smeared makeup.

Over the years, I’ve wrestled with this divide among my friends; sometimes joining one group only to open up my heart to the compelling reasons of another and, like a drunken college girl trying to get attention, again switching teams.

At long last, I’ve come to believe that the single tear is more poignant a signifier of the delicate sensibility of tragicomedy.

But on to other issues which, given the single tear/sobbing divide, have not received the attention they deserved. We’ve been over looking the hastily thrown off clown garb, a rainbow puddle in the austere, military barracks style apartment. Forgotten, they lay on the floor like a pool of hope among the ruins of the clown’s life. He too had bigger dreams. And now, at long last, I see also his shoes—both pairs. The clown shoes are on the floor alongside his regular shoes; the former triumphant red, bulbous, the latter workaday, pedestrian, grey, befitting those with normal feet and average aspirations.

I put it to you that he hadn’t ever meant to deceive us about the size of his feet, but rather, he too had bought into his own mythology: a big man with big dreams, who needed large feet to get to higher places.

*Meads, Potluri: Brooklyn, NY 2007. Consensual homosexual acts done in manner at once joyous and celebratory. Can involve pointy, paper party hats.

More and more couples finding surrogates in India

2008-03-20T10:44:00.000-07:00

The Switzers, awaiting twins, found India to be a cheap, secure alternative

This makes me sick.

I find this article deeply upsetting. The questions that kept occurring to me as I read it was: is there no end to Western narcissism? Does our fetishization of fertility and parenting know no bounds? Is nothing sacrosanct from the long arm of US capitalism?

The pursuit of these American women to have biological children past their fertility window is yet another symptom of our society in which we all live like perpetual adolescents, unable to accept that unfortunately, there are simply things in our lives which we will want but will not have. We cannot accept that if we make choices in our 20s and 30s to not have children, we may not be able to have biological children afterwards. Rather, we are a deeply consumerist society, in which even a womb can be purchased, and now, at a bargain rate! Each case of infertility is considered a catastrophic tragedy, not a part of life, which is often hard and unfair. Can Americans, more and more myopically narcissistic, simply not accept a life with consequences? A life in which there exist problems, the solutions of which cannot be purchased with greenbacks?
Have any of these women considered adopting a child born into less fortunate circumstances?
The discussion in this article is shallow regarding the very real dangers these Indian women face without the legal and medical protection, nor the emotional support offered to surrogates in the US. There is little if any concern about their emotional welfare and future physical health that may be affected by carrying additional children, often in quick succession. There is no discussion of the fact that these women face potentially real and very dangerous medical complications during pregnancy, nor is there any study about the long-term emotional and medical effects of repeated surrogacy. The fact that American women are paying minimally for the womb-rental is skirted, but the reality is, these Indian women are being sought out with the same type of thinking that might cause this same American woman to buy a dishwasher at Sears rather than Lowes. The motive here in choosing India is purely capitalistic.

The American women who exploit these third world women can comfort themselves all they want with antiquated, Orientalist notions of India.

Sadly but unsurprisingly, and in the spirit of trendy, Angelina Jolie paternalism towards the third world, these American women speak of the spiritual side of having children born in India, and their token gifts of toys and clothes for these women is held up as a sign of goodwill, of the global bonds of sisterhood. Rather, this attitude and the money and other material returns earned by Indian women for surrogacy should be viewed as yet another example of the American idea that any sin can be forgiven, and problem solved, if enough money is thrown at the problem.

The idea of American "medical tourism" in India is laughable and ironic.
These women, while not agents of US government, are its subjects; the very government whose protection of corporate pharmaceutical companies and their patents have caused the premature, medically un-aided deaths of thousands of Indians and other third world citizens.
That one of Americans hugged her surrogate was written about as if it were a sign of Western ideas of equality shaking off the shackles of the Indian caste system. To the contrary, it is precisely the Indian caste system, not to mention the global one, in which millions are locked into poverty, which allows cheap surrogacy in the first place.
What next? Indian hair is already harvested for most of the world’s wigs.
Should we also ask that organs are harvested? After all, us Americans can smile and answer reassuringly, "we’ll pay, of course!" $5,000 for a kidney?
$10,000 for a heart? An HD TV for a lung? We can console ourselves knowing its more than these poor villagers will make in a year otherwise, and after all, we too will face hardships, like the mosquitoes and heat that one American complained of in the article.

The plight of these Indian women is truly and profoundly deplorable. At the bottom rungs of Indian society, they work hard and long for little. Then they carry white women’s babies, which are removed from their bodies for what is—in anywhere other than the 3rd world—very little money. Then they are asked not to complain, after all, they received a handsome sum. Violated once by Indian society, they are violated again by the endless greed and limitless sense of entitlement of Western society, and then asked to say thank you for the favor.

Sigh. I love this so much...

2008-03-11T13:16:00.000-07:00

Samuel Johnson said, "If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman."

Don't Mess with the Beaver State

2007-09-13T21:07:00.000-07:00

I wish there was an opposite to putting a flag at half mast, like if we were to raise it higher as a sign of joy or pride. If that was possible, I'd raise the flag of the great state of Oregon, home to yours truly. Why? Because of this video. I mean, first we bring you undeserving bitches Tonya Harding and now this. Go Ducks! Please keep this in mind the next time you are fixing to piss me off. I mean I literally have neighbors back home that stock guns, canned goods and have home-made bomb shelters for the impending race-war. Oregonians won't go down like bitches.

In Memorial

2007-08-09T10:52:00.000-07:00

Some of you have asked, but Anna, after you die, how will we continue to keep you memory alive?

I've come up with a nice option, best followed by jumping in after the casket arms raised to the air screaming "WHY GOD WHY!!! WHY DIDN'T YOU TAKE ME INSTEAD!?" This will be especially touching since I plan on being cremated and you will be jumping on someone else's casket. I've asked Sabrina to throw frogs down over the services for dramatic effect. At the end of the funeral I would like you to please reenact Michael Jackson's Thriller video while sobbing.
So after that, please see the attached memorial tattoo of ODB, and have one of me done on your upper arm. The face is so similar looking that really all you have to do is have the tattoo artist make the hair longer.

My first marriage

2007-08-02T06:41:00.000-07:00

I realize that I didn’t account for possible heirs when writing my living will. I will now address my death as it concerns my first child, Jianna. For those of you who don’t know the story of Jianna, I will briefly elaborate here.

When I was in middle school in Portland, my class went on a retreat for three days to a local campsite for “Sex Camp.” We learned about STDs and condoms and crap. Then, to discourage us from ever sitting on a boy’s lap or sharing gum or any other means of getting pregnant, the teachers drew names out of a hat and assigned us spouses.

I was madly in love with a half Irish, half Iranian boy named Mike, and crossed my fingers that I would get him. Rather, I ended up with Jonathan Peterson (I’ve changed his last name). Jonathan was a fat, bespectacled genius who ran in gym class with a scarf around his neck and a cardigan around his shoulders. Looking back, he was pretty awesome but I was a mean pretty girl and I was so mad about being paired with him I couldn’t see straight.

Any who…our child was a sack of flour that I called “it” and Jonathan named “Jianna.” He drew long, Daisy Duck eyelashes on it and a little red mouth. A day later, in a fit of parental rage, I threw Jianna into Jonathan’s chest and she exploded against her father.

Last year, I found out that Jonathan is now an Ivy League educated, contact lens wearing homosexual. I really believe that people are born gay or straight, but I can’t help but think that the fact that his first experience with a girl involved him tolerating her emasculating rantings and the murder of his daughter.

Jianna gets nothing.

Question.

2007-07-27T07:59:00.000-07:00

I'd like a propose a question to my readership. Robert Downey Jr: Down with the swirl?

Please take this question seriously. I see him as the sort of, I dunno, nearly homosexual, heart of gold, bipolar coke-head I could really see myself with. I'm about as white a woman as you'll ever meet, in every way other than the fact that by some accident my skin is of a burnished gold only otherwise seen on statues of Mayan goddesses. Will this stand in the way between me and RDJ?

John Beck FanFic

2007-07-27T07:53:00.000-07:00

Please use this blog as a sort of HQ for all your John Beck fanfic.

Okay I'll start.

I'd like to see JB dating a surly black woman in a wheelchair. I know he's married, but I don't care. This is how I see it. JB and SBW see each other across a crowded buffet hall, he's got cheesecake in one hand, and cheese bugles in the other. She's shouting obscenities at no one in particular. He pushes his women and children aside. JB and SBW remain lovers for years, in a relationship not unlike that of the late Graham Greene and his mistress Yvonne Cloetta.

Now it is your turn.

Tiny Women

2007-07-26T21:15:00.000-07:00

After work today, I was walking in my neighborhood. There was a cute girl in front of me, maybe about my age. She was smallish and wearing a tiny t-shirt and shorts smaller than most of my underwear. She was no great beauty, but pretty enough. Guys were making lewd comments to her, as they do, and I could see her profile as she walked along, weirdly acknowledging them (I'm a cold-hearted re-buffer). We were both ducking into Marshall's on 125th and as we are going up the elevator, she is sort of crunched against the side of the elevator stairs.

All of a sudden, I felt so bad for her. This small girl wearing small clothes trying to take up as little space as possible. The whole scene was just so desperate: her in her tiny shorts as if she has to cull from the bottom of the ocean of men to get noticed. It made me glad to be more substantial than her, and I felt myself suddenly putting my hands on my hips to take up more room. I felt glad too to be wearing a sort of grantastic skirt and loose shirt, and not endlessly in pursuit of a small life, in which all that could be said of me was that I took up as little room as possible.

Company BBQ

2007-07-26T11:24:00.000-07:00

My company had a BBQ today. Why bitches go down hovering and not eat?! I was eating BY MYSELF. God I hate women that are timid around food. I mean why you messing around? Eating is a competition and don't get into the kitchen if you can't handle the heat, otay? And if you aren't going to eat, get the hell out of my way. I don't want a bunch of Lindsay Lohan Melissa Joan Olsens in between me and a plate of brownies.

And then there is that guy. I am standing behind this man wearing a long Hawaiian shirt with a soul patch while he carefully lines his hot dog with pickles for like five minutes. That is five minutes I don't want to be waiting, poindexter. I am not your girlfriend, we are not "making love," and I am not underneath you waiting to die while you ask me, "am i hurting you?" while you thrust away in your socks and Birkenstocks. Fuck you and get the hell out of my way! I want pickles on this veggie dog that is kinda gross and doesn't even bear a passing resemblance to meat. And the whole while they are playing Bonnie Rait. I am waiting for pickles listening to "i can't make you love me." That is the song that turns an innocent trip to the grocery store for milk into a day marked by me ending up sobbing on the tile floor in the middle of the dairy section questioning my will to live while clutching white bread to my breast. Why the fuck are they playing this at a BBQ whose ostensible goal has more to do with corporate bonding than mass suicide? Will someone tell me?!

I've been inspired

2007-07-26T11:22:00.000-07:00

My friend Laura has a fabulous blog. And it occured to me that I should blog more and blog less about makeup and more about the everyday. Starting NOW. OW!

Maybelline Blush

2007-07-12T12:08:00.000-07:00

Dream Mousse Blush: this stuff is really, really amazing. Even on my dark skin, its pigment rich forumla shows up, and just like it says on the commercial, it is air light, and it seems to be full of silicone, because it just glides on. I got in Pink Frosting, which is great if you want to create that sort of Barbie-turns-real-girl look. You get a lot for the price (I use very little to get a nice flush going) and it comes in a cute, round glass container. Definite bargain!

Vaselline

2007-04-24T08:09:00.000-07:00

The weather is finally pretty and springy here in New York, and for me that means I can bust out my Imelda Marcosesque shoe collection. This weekend, my heels and toes were in pretty but punishing peep-toes and high heels and by Sunday night, my feet looked terrible--they were dry and sore and bruised. I slathered Vaseline all over them before bed and woke up to soft and smooth feet...such a great cheap fix.

Pefumealicious

2007-04-24T08:02:00.000-07:00

I love perfume...I'd love to call myself a connoisseur but my knowledge is just beginning, and me and my friend Babs make trips to Bloomies and Barney's to do smellings. My collection now is modest, but I'm proud of it--Baby Doll (I feel I won't forgive my now young self at 50 if I never wore this), Shalimar, Paris, Organza Harvest and a few others.

However, I must say that one that I've enjoyed and am sad to see go is the Gap Scent Editions Sueded Musk. It is a warm, anamaliac vanilla that is soft and doesn't aggravate my allergies. Cute container too. My friend Gkim loved the Magnolia Blossom, and Glu loved the Faded Jasmine. I don't really enjoy the normal Gap stuff like Heaven and the others. The Scent Editions, however, were lovely single-notes that were affordable.

Pick 'em up on eBay while you still can.

Dove Sensitive Skin Body Wash

2007-04-17T06:54:00.000-07:00

This stuff is great. I do hate it when something says "free of perfume" etc and then you check the back and fragrance is a listed ingredient, so minus one for Dove. However, this stuff is really soothing to my dry skin, and foams and lathers nicely. It is also cheaper than Dove's new line of cream oil washes, but the ingredients are more or less the same, with moisturizers listed before detergents. Good buy.

Physician's Formula Mineral Makeup

2007-03-21T09:42:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the super long vacation...last night a couple of my friends told me I should get on the blogging horse again, so I'll start with a couple of products I was lucky enough to get for free through manufacturer rebates. Physican's Formula does this often with their new products so its a great, risk free way to try their stuff.

The first product is their Mineral Wear™ Talc-Free Mineral Fluid Powder Eye Shadow. I got this in amythest, a shimmery purple. I am a contact lense wearer so my eyes are a little senstive on occasion and I have to say that as far as the non-irritant claims of this product go, it is true. It comes in a mascara-like tube and the wand is like that of a lipgloss. It cools your eyelids momentarily when you smooth it on, which it does without bumping and skipping too much. The downside of this eye shadow, for girls like me who are darker skinned is that this is more of a sheer wash of color than a heavily pigmented one. So it isn't great for bold looks, but it does give my eyelids a shimmery, soft look.

The next product I tried was PF's new Mineral Wear™ Talc-Free Mineral Mascara . Of the two products, this was definitly my favorite. Again, this did not irritate my eyes. And unlike the other PF mascara I have, the F.L.A.T. one, this one doesn't flake and smudge easily. The brush is one of those new-wave comb types on one side and the traditional bristles on the other. I got it in ultra black, and the color is indeed wet and inky and I only need one or two coats for super long lashes. Unlike the Mineral Wear eyeshadow above, this one is better for a glam look than a natural one because it will make your lashes look fat and long.

Fructis Styling Products

2006-08-01T11:18:00.000-07:00

I'd like to give a huge rave for Garnier Fructis Smoothing Milk, Curl Boost Spray, and Volume Gel. A less enthusiastic thumbs up too for their Curl and Shine leave-in conditioner, which does make my hair very soft but also leaves it feeling a bit weighed down.

I've never used this line's shampoos and conditioners, and was reluctant to try any of their products because of their advertising's reliance on their claims of natural fruit this and that, which I don't feel often amounts to much. I want detergents and silicones, dammit.

The Smoothing Milk is almost pure silicone, and should be used sparingly. But for my dryish, curly hair, it really smooths and makes my often dull hair shiny; it works as well as Phytodefrissant, which I also love but is so expensive.

Curl Boost is a miracle--my hair has never looked so bouncy, nor my ringlets so defined and light--I love this stuff.

The Volume Gel does give the hair around my crown a lighter, airier feeling. If you are used to using a lot of styling instruments like dryers and curlers, it might help, but I don't have the patience for that and this didn't give me Brigitte Bardot-esque body.

Olay Definity Foaming Moisterizer

2006-07-28T09:22:00.000-07:00

Got this free through a Rite Aid rebate--I can't yet attest to its claims of penetrating 10 layers of skin, BUT this does go on like silk. My friend Glu hates anything with silcone and couldn't stand this on her skin, but I love it. It is one third of a new line from Olay, whose Regenerist products I love. At $30 its steep for the drugstore, but might be worth a shot. I'll update when I've been using it for longer.

Revlon Illuminance Creme Shadow

2006-07-28T06:54:00.000-07:00

Got this the other day in Skinlights for a dollar through rebate/coupon magic and I just love it. Complexion wise, I'm Indian and have a sort of Halle Berry skin coloring (unfortunatelly that is where the similarities end) and I because of that I was a bit wary of such light colors (they range from a pearly white to a rich coppery tone) but, I'm happy to say that it was a good purchase. This line gives a very similar result to Chanel's liquid shimmery eyeshadows and at a quarter of the price. It is also good for giving you that I-just-woke-up-looking-like-this glow. I like doting the white in the corner of my eye to open it up and make me look like I've actually slept recently.

A side note on the Skinlights line--I really love this stuff. You would think that with all that mica you'd look like a disco ball but it does actually give you a glowy, almost natural look. And since all the colors are relativly sheer and delicate, you can indulge your inner Tammy Faye and highlight all your features, which for me is generally a big makeup no-no.

Two Things

2006-07-26T10:07:00.000-07:00

about me: I look good and I'm cheap. This blog is all about helping broke girls look photo-worthy on a drugstore budget. There is something you just have to roll with me on: high end just doesn't mean better product. In fact, a lot of cosmetic companies have a counter line (like Lancome) and a drugstore line (like L'Oreal) and put out the same if not even better products at the local Rite-Aid.