A quick update on life before I dive into things...

Work has been INSANELY busy. We had a morning deadline...an EST morning deadline which SUCKED which explains why we were in the office so late on Sunday.

...Okay I started that entry days ago and never finished it...and I forgot what I was going to write in that particular paragraph. MOVING ON...

Last month in my yearbook photo entry I wrote this:

You girls who grew up/are growing up in the era of the fashion blog and YouTube makeup tutorial? You have no idea how lucky you guys are.

When I was in high school all I had were magazines and the instructions that came on the CoverGirl palettes I had. Now, that might have been enough for some girls, but for a young asian girl with small internal epicanthic folds it was incredibly confusing. All I could think of was "Why on earth would I want to put shadow in my crease?" because of course, my eye "crease" (or what I thought was a "crease") wasn't exactly the kind of eye crease they were talking about and in fact was not really a crease at all.

I mean, even now it's tough for girls without creases to figure out their makeup...take it from someone who knows. I know it sounds weird but it's taken me years (well, not that I've been doing nothing but researching eye makeup for the past few years but you know what I mean) to figure out why standard eye makeup techniques don't really work for me...and it's all because it's rare that the intricacies and variations of the "Asian" eye (which it's usually described as even though all Asians don't have "Asian" eyes and all people with "Asian" eyes aren't necessarily Asian (hi Björk)). For instance, there's a huge difference between someone with an inner epicanthic fold and someone who has a real monolid, and there's even a huge difference between people with folds of different heights.

I really started to think about these differences when I came across a couple of threads on a makeup forum. One OP was a girl with a monolid who was asking for a critique of some look she had done. She had obviously looked at tutorials that all had the define-the-crease-by-following-your-eye-socket step in them and it looked like she had some random line drawn above her eyes. And it's not because she hadn't blended, either, because she had. But if you try and define your socket when there's absolutely no socket definition to begin with it kind of has the same effect as Mariah's painted on abs. The worst part? No one freaking told her this. Actually, that's not entirely true. After about 10 posts praising the look in its entirety (these forums are generally pretty friendly) there was finally someone who gently told her that maybe that particular technique wasn't working for her. The other thread's OP was a girl who was asking for advice on how to do her eye makeup so it was noticeable but not too heavy. The responses made me really sad because I don't think any of the other posters--not even the other "Asian"-eyed girls!--understood exactly what kinds of issues she was dealing with. I don't think people in general understand the difference between different types of monolids and how they even work. Which is fine, until you try to put makeup on them.

I think that the best advice to girls with this dilemma is just to experiment. At some point I realized that none of the advice or tutorials were going to help me figure out what do do with my eyes and the only way I was going to find a method that worked for me was to figure it out myself. Of course, there are some rules of thumb and advice that I picked up that think are important, but this entry is getting WAAAAY too long haha. Maybe I'll pick up on this later.

I'm going to leave you with a few (completely unretouched...actually the top ones were completely unretouched too now that I think about it) photos that I snapped w/ my point and shoot because the colors came out better. Also, I'm actually smiling in one of the photos so I decided I should probably post it.

The first thing I did after shooting this was wash my face. I haven't worn that much foundation (or makeup in general?) since ever. The second thing I did was trim my eyebrows because HOT DAMN JANKY.

That is all.

(btw it took me like 3 days to finish this entry...kept getting sidetracked. that's prob why it doesn't read too smoothly SORRY SORRY SORRY)

It's crunch time here. My eyes burn.

VV: (cuddling up next to me in bed) Did you use Tiger Balm???
me: No it's Vick's!
VV: You smell like my grandma!

SEXY

>

Photo taken a few weeks ago. No makeup/hair looks kinda sketchy but I like the light.

Anyway, VV is away for work (coming back tomorrow evening) and I still have this nasty cough that wakes me up in the middle of the night. Last night I popped a Ricola when that happened and promptly fell asleep again which is good for the most part except when I woke up in the morning I still had the Ricola in my mouth which was weird. And a little gross too, I guess. Not going to stop me from doing it again tonight if I have to because waking up with a 3-hour-old Ricola in my mouth is better than not being able to fall asleep again.

Also, my abs hurt from coughing so much these past few days which makes me feel LAME because apparently my abs are so out of shape that I can't even cough comfortably. If there's any such thing as comfortable coughing.

Better updates later maybe? I'm kinda spewing brainvomit right now. Eh. Meh.

This is the quick and dirty 20 second video I spliced together when I was testing out a piece of software at work just to see what I could do. I've never done any video editing before so it's kind of a sad effort. I changed it up a tiny bit...replaced company "logo" with "evilmidori" and blurred out the first video clip since no one here needs to know what the things on my desk or monitors are.

Stress. STRESS. As I guess some of you know but a lot of you don't, I'm working at a startup right now. In this economy, startup = REALLY EFFIN' TOUGH. We're going to tough it out, though, and maybe someday I'll be able to talk about what's going on (non-specifically of course) but not yet.

On another note, I kind of want to do a vlog just because I want to mess with some open source video editing stuff I just installed. Problem is, I don't know what I could do that would benefit from being in video form as opposed to being written. Well, that and lately I've been looking like I got dragged out of bed and had a bucket of ugly dumped over my head before leaving the house every day so yeah.

Anyway, anyone have any video ideas for me?