I was also probably just not feeling the urge because my body knew it was coming down with something. I began feeling a bit under yesterday afternoon during strike, with that stinging feeling creeping into the sinuses and a general weakness, and then I just crashed when I got home at the end of the day. Shuffled around the apartment for a few hours and had my ass in bed a bit after ten... and slept for eleven hours. It was one of those sleeps where you dream about waking up only you're so tired that you physically can't open your eyes. I actually didn't feel so bad when I woke up this morning and texted my technical director that I was sick, but after she told me to stay home from strike, the wooziness began to set in. Thankfully, I haven't been feeling too miserable, but my head has been floating around with the Curiosity rover somewhere on Mars. I did go in for the post-mortem at work this afternoon, but all I've accomplished since getting home is watching Beyoncé and Rihanna music vidoes. Which is worthy in its own right, but not what I'd been hoping to get done. Hopefully, I'll be able to be more productive in the next couple days, when I have a sizable amount of thesis reading to get done.
Thinking about it, the oncoming change of the seasons probably helped push along this sickness. The nights have started to take on that deliciously refreshing autumnal coolness, but changes in temperature always can wreak such havoc on the body. Admittedly, some of that might have been self-inflicted. I'd scored a Groupon for a four-person pass to a local year-round ice skating rink, so a crew of us went on an outing on Friday.
It was a huge amount of fun. I took figure skating lessons as a child, and though I'd switched to dance by the time that I reached junior high and have never been able to keep it up regularly since then, I can still keep myself upright passably well and enjoy it a great deal, not the least because it's a highly physical activity where I can actually not overheat.
I am, however, out of practice to the point of not being able to do any "tricks" -- spins, footwork, jumps. At least, not without a good hour of ice mostly to myself, where I can feel free to fall on my ass as much as necessary. For one thing, it's about the safety of others, as a public skating session like the one we attended on Friday often felt like a game of reverse Frogger, with you as the motor vehicle and the swarms of small children as the frogs that you needed to somehow avoid turning into roadkill. It simply takes a lot of focus, skill and energy to keep track of oneself and all others when all others aren't keeping track of either.
But also, something that those little frogs seemed to have that I've come to lack is a complete and utter fear of falling. It is true that my body isn't quite so cavalier in its recovery from gravity as it used to be. That doesn't let me off the hook for my attitude, though. As I said in only the paragraph above this, if you gave me an hour when no one was looking, I'd fall on my ass the entire time, to hell with my ability to walk the next day. What I've always lacked, and do so now more than ever, is the ability not to give a fuck about falling in front of others. Because those kids? Could not have given less of a fuck. And I think that's just something that I need to remember -- that sometimes, the only person of note who actually gives a fuck about your ass hitting the ice is yourself. Sometimes, staying upright out of fear is the greatest thing holding you back.
Anyhow, that's all that my brain can summon for today. I keep spacing out and clicking on more music videos. So I might as well go the easy route and dish on some things I recently threw money at.
First up is Helen Chen's Asian Kitchen Perfect Rice Cooker. I had received a small rice cooker as a gift when I graduated from high school, presumably to keep myself from starving as a college student, but as I ended up on a full board plan, it just got shoved into the back of a closet back home. When I embarked on the first internship of my stage management career, however, I wouldn't have survived without it. After a few years of dedicated service, it finally died, not owing me anything. I then bought myself a larger rice cooker, like the type you see at the end of the rows in all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets. It was awesome -- until it died on me a few months later. So I bought another one. Which also died. And then another. Which also died.
At that point, I resigned myself to stove-top rice cooking, at which I was decent but not free of imperfectly cooked rice, which is kind of a terrible thing. So when I happened to spot this little item on sale at Ideeli, I figured, hey, why not.
It's simple and elegant enough. You put the rice and water -- a one-to-one ratio -- into the cooker, and then you place the cooker into big stock pot with some water, which is then covered and heated, so it's partially a steaming process. It's so easy that it might make you roll your eyes, but the thing is? It works. That shit don't get burned. I've only used it for brown rice so far, which I've started cooking a little chewier than I used to eat it, since I no longer fear burned rice crusting the bottom of my pan. I haven't had a miss yet. It's a little on the pricy side, so I wouldn't recommend it to a casual rice eater, but if the state of your rice is extremely important to you, it's something I'd recommend for consideration. One thing I would caution is to be sure that you have a big enough stock pot. I think that mine might be a 8-quart, just one of those cheap ones you pick up at Target, and I have to remove the rice cooker's bamboo handle in order to be able to put a lid on the pot.
Next up is the PopSugar MustHave, which I decided to try on a whim this summer. It's one of those surprise gift bag subscriptions, where you pay a set amount to receive a set of various curated products each month. It's $35 for a month, and being gainfully employed as I was, I figured that it was worth a one-time splurge to satisfy my curiosity.
The service's blog posted a description of the contents of the July bag after it was shipped, but here they are in quick list form: -canvas beach bag -Body Drench Raspberry Gelee Body Scrub -Body Drench Pomegranate Crush Body Lotion -2 KIND bars: Madagascar Vanilla Almond and Cashew & Ginger Spice -2 RGB nail polishes: pale "neutral" pink Doll and pale seafoam Minty -Ilia lip conditioner in Bang Bang (sheer red) -Ilia lip color in In My Room (light pink)
I'll admit that there was a very fun "it's my birthday" sort of feeling to receiving a package in the mail and not knowing what was in it, except that it was presumably cool shit. Overall, however, whatever the retail value of the selection might be, I wouldn't call it worth it. I'd been hoping for some really ahead-of-the-curve products, but what I received was simultaneously unexcitingly unrisky while at the same time too narrow to be a guaranteed hit.
As a person with a pretty well-developed personal style, these items fell well outside of things that I would pick for myself. The bag is functionally great, sturdy canvas with nice shoulder straps and a zipper on top that partially closes it enough to keep things from falling out while still being able to slip things inside of it. With the bright pink, vintage-distessed print of the "PopSugar" label on it, it's definitely not my Look. Which is moderately forgivable in a beach bag, since aesthetics aren't my highest priority when heading to the beach, but fact remains that it's something I would never have picked for myself, and not in that positive "oh my, what a discovery!" way.
More useless to me are the cosmetic items, the nail polishes being colors that I basically wouldn't wear in a hundred years and will probably end up giving away. It actually surprised me a lot that they would include something like lip colors, where you're dealing with things like different complexion colors. The lip conditioner in Bang Bang is actually all right, very sheer but nicely creamy. The In My Room lip color, however, looks like absolute shit on me. The color is so pale, it almost gives me a Ganguro girl look, particularly with my summer skin. And while it is also very creamy and feels nice on my lips, the color coverage is pretty poor. If it's hot out at all, it starts to come apart and become almost grainy. Even when it's cool, though, I found it to have a tendency to really sink into the creases in my lips, collecting there while remaining extremely sheer on the rest of my lips, making my mouth look about ten years older than it is.
That they would include food items that contained nuts also surprised me, given allergy issues. I'm actually sensitive to almonds, but ate them one half-bar at a time, since I wasn't about to pass up protein that I'd paid for. They were good, but also not that exciting -- I'm not very impressed by a surprise "trendy" product that I see on a regular basis at the Korean deli on the corner. Granted, it's a Korean deli in a university town that includes multiple prestigious graduate arts schools, but my point remains that it's in the same place that I could pick up a package of Cup Noodles.
I've yet to try the body scrub and the lotion, waiting until I'm through my current scrub and lotion to begin using that as a fruity set.
As for the service itself, while the multiple-month subscriptions bill themselves as being automatically renewing, I have to caution that the single-month purchase also automatically renews. If you order a single month, you will have to go into your account and manually cancel being signed up for the next month. That had soured me to the service, as it seemed rather underhanded. Additionally, I don't know if they'll improve over the coming months, but I didn't receive my advertised "July MustHave" until the first day of August. And when I did get it, I had received a double of the two-nail polish set, with one bottle having leaked, and none of the lip color. I wrote them some rather tepid feedback about the packing mistake, pretty resigned at that point to not getting any fix for it, the late shipping of the product indicating to me that they didn't have their shit together.
To my surprise, without ever having gotten any digital reply to my feedback about my botched package contents, about a week later, I received a box in the mail. In it was an additional nail polish set, the lip color set and a hand-written note expressing their apologies for the mistake. So points to them for that.
So that's the dish on my latest forays into consumerism. I think it might be time for my fifth cup of echinacea tea before a spinach salad dinner and bedtime, honey.
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