There's an ant nest in my laptop/ Christmas Eve.

I think the title really say it all.  It's Christmas Eve, I'm bored out of my mind, so I go to turn on my laptop, and as I go to get my power cord since the battery is dead, I notice that my laptop is crawling away in a million little pairs of legs.  I don't know if this is just one of those things that come with living in the Australian tropics, but whenever it rains (as it does over Christmas) ants tend to nest in strange places, wherever is warmest for them.  This means they go straight for the electronics.  Last rainy season it was the printer.  Now its my laptop.

Of course, the last thing you ever want to do is talk to the Cleaning Nazi about how you've been sheltering a jolly bunch of critters in your bedroom for the past month or so.  And you REALLY don't want to tell her this on Christmas Eve, where she is frantically trying to learn how to correctly fold napkins in time for the family breakfast tomorrow morning.  I had to though.  I got the usual "well you're obviously a disgusting animal who doesn't clean their room" lecture, but other than that, she left me alone because she had better things to do.  I looked in my room, and there's no food or anything in there, except for a sealed pack of gum that seems to have never been touched by ants. So I assume its the warm and dry aspect of my laptop that makes it so appealing to ants.

Other than the ants, I don't have much more to say.  I've been working a lot, yet I am still broke because I've been buying Christmas presents for everyone.  Got all my shoppping done fairly early, except for one person who already knows what they're getting, and we'll just go to the alcohol place together to get it when we buy drinks for New Years Eve

That's about it at the moment.  Merry Christmas/Happy holidays for those who aren't into Christmas.  Have fun, keep safe, and try not to blast the crappy carols too loud.

Oh Makeup, how I love you! (Warning, lots of pics)

I don't know why, but I love makeup.  The people I know may not know that, but I do.  Here in Townsville, for 11 out of the 12 months in a year, it is way too freaking hot to wear makeup, because it melts right off your face.  Have you ever seen a person wearing foundation who is sweating?  They get an orange moustache.  And I'm already unattractive enough WITHOUT the orange moustache.

Anyway, I love makeup.  I love looking at it.  I love buying it.  I love putting it on. I don't love looking at my pores too closely, freaking out, and scrubbing my face because it looks weird, but I do that anyway.

I don't even remember when I started using makeup.  It was later than a lot of my friends, because I wasn't quite as vain as some of them, or maybe it was just because I accept that makeup can enhance, but not change me.  Of course, I refer to the acceptable amount of makeup for daily usage. Modelling/photoshoot makeup CAN change you into a completely different person.  See this person below, who is not me.

Believe it or not, that is the same person.  I'm not saying the first picture is bad or anything, its fine.  It shows that she's a normal girl. In the second photo, she's the most stunning person I've ever seen.  I have honestly fallen in love with the photos from this photoshoot.  And they were taken just down the road from where I live.  It's about 2 minutes walking distance from where I am sitting right now.  Anyway, my point is, makeup can change you, if you don't mind caking on the foundation and making it look like your makeup is a separate entity, guarding your precious skin.  For daily use, it can enhance you, but not change you.

I've been thinking about doing a post about this topic for a while now.  Kind of.  I was going to write about how people's photos can be misleading, and how people are completely not-photogenic.  And since I bought $50 of makeup today, I thought I'd talk about it all at once.

Today I felt like spending some money, so went to the chemist and scoured their bargain bins.  Everything I bought today was under $5, but it added up to nearly $50.

I got:

Shampoo and conditioner, 2 for $5

2 types of mascara

Lipgloss

Lipstick

4 different types of eyeshadow, with each pallet having 5 colours on it.

1 massive eyeshadow pallet with 18 colours on it.

Eyeliner

This sounds ridiculous, since I already have several pallets of eyeshadow already, each with 10+ colours, but I just wanted to add 38 more colours to my collection.  I'm very particular about my makeup, particularly eye shadow, since it needs to be decent quality.  I don't shop for certain brands though, I look for variety in colours, and how long it's going to last, and how loose the powder is (if it's too loose, it goes everywhere but the eyes).  I find that the so called high-quality brands are incredibly overpriced and boring. 

I searched for "tropical eyeshadow", and this is what Dior has to offer.  That's bullshit.  There's 3 everyday wear colours (and boring ones at that) as well as a hideous green colour.  That's not tropical at all.

This website, however, has the sort of colours I go for.  In fact, those are the pallets I bought today.  I got Fiesta (golds, oranges, browns), Tease (multicoloured) , Chromatic (silvers, purples, browns, very metallic) , and  Serenade (pinks and purples).  As you can see, I like the ridiculously bright, unusual colours for my eyeshadow.  But what I'm saying is, the cheap stuff usually is better.  It's a different story for foundation though.

I'm sick of talking about makeup, it's too hot to even think about it without feeling like you're melting here  (good old Aussie summers).

About photogenic people:

I am not one of them.  I look terrible in photos.  They just capture me at the absolute worst possible moment.  Like when I'm blinking, eating, sneezing, laughing, scratching, or in the worst case scenario, all these at the same time.    Let's show you some examples, using pictures of me.  You've only ever seen one, and it's purposely small and hard to see, so lets see some more.

  Making the pic extra large so you can get the full effect of "WTF is she doing?"

And then there's photos like this one below, where I purposefully make a stupid face, then astound myself at how I managed to contort my face in such a strange manner.

But there's some not-so-bad ones too.  

Above:  My eighteenth birthday.

Below:  Some random photoshoot thing I did because it was $40 as opposed to $500

I really can't be bothered writing more, so I'll just say that I look terrible in photos.  And it's not fair.  What if I had a stalker, and they saw all of the photos of me on facebook and decided I was too ugly to stalk?  I've already had people judge my looks by my facebook photos, and I wasn't too happy about what they said.  Still, I think that my photos should realistically represent ME, good and bad angles.  I'm not one of those people that demands every bad photo of me to be deleted, simply because they're all bad.  I know one person who does this.  She's 6ft+, and not the skinniest person around.  Yet, in the photos she shows on facebook, there would be no way to tell this.  I've been yelled at before because I took a photo of her that shows her body below the shoulders.  So, her photos look pretty good, but they don't look like HER.  But each to their own.  People do what they can, to look as good as they can. 

I'd just rather look honest.

Might as well update.

So I haven't been doing much lately.  I've started a free one week trial at the uni gym, to see if it was any good.  I really like it, and even if no one else goes with me, I'll probably keep going back.  Mum keeps asking me if I'm in pain yet, and she reckons I'm not doing anything because I'm not hurting.  MAYBE, just maybe, I'm not in pain because I'm only 18, and not approaching 50 like her.  Just because she's old and weak, that doesn't mean I am too.

Anyway, I'd just like to say that after the last two days of gym > work > sleep > gym > work > blog post, I'm starting to feel it.  When I  laugh.  My rock hard abs ache.  Unfortunately, I've done a lot of laughing lately.  I have a brilliant plan for a friend's Christmas present, which I won't share on here, just to keep you guessing.

I'm craving an energy drink, but it's 11pm.  Can't do that.  Naughty naughty.

Last Night's Dream.

Now, normally my dreams don't bother me.  I have pretty average dreams, like a jumble of the events and thoughts from that day.  Like, I bought face wash once and I had a dream about it.  That sort of thing.  But last night's dream was a bit different, because it sort of means something to me.  And not in the way that I had to use a dream dictionary and pull out some ridiculous Freudian interpretation.  I woke up and thought it was a nightmare, for reasons that I will detail later.  But the more I thought about it, I realised I was actually the bad guy in my dream, and I realised the effect that my real life actions may be having on other people, even if my subconscious presented it to me in an exaggerated fashion.

I realise I may be completely wrong about this interpretation, but it doesn't hurt if I change my ways for the better because of it.

Now, there's quite a few aspects to this dream, but from what I remember, there were 3 main parts.  They mostly revolve around me, my boyfriend, and a select few friends.

The first part I remember is that I was in a lounge room, on a couch with some friends.  We had guns, and we were shooting people rather nonchalantly.  We saw them as the bad guys attacking us, so we had no problem with these bodies piling up around us.  Then the boyfriend comes towards us.  He's not angry or anything, but I shoot at him anyway.  He still doesn't get angry, and I keep shooting until I rum out of bullets.  By now, he has a massive hole in his chest.  Right in the middle.  A big, gaping hole right through him where his heart should be.  It doesn't bleed, and he's still not angry at me.  My friends chuck a few insults his way, and he comes a bit closer.  Of course, we're terrified.   I thought he was going to hurt me, that he wanted revenge because I put a hole in him, or maybe I just made it bigger?

But he didn't get revenge on me.  He took me by the hand, and we went to the movies.  Some different friends were there, and they told us they were seeing a different movie, but they were in the same cinema, sitting next to us.  Some women sat behind us, and my friends were talking to them about the movie they were going to watch.  They mentioned the name of it: "Differentiate".  It's a ridiculous name for a movie, but that's what it was.  So my friends are chatting away, the boyfriend is sitting there happily and quietly, still with a hole in his chest, while I'm crapping myself, thinking he's going to kill me any second.

I don't remember exactly what happened next, but the dream changes settings.  I'm with the BF on a grassy hill.  There's heaps of people around, like there's a concert or something going to happen.  We're sitting there, and he's just talking casually with me.  I ask him if he's angry at me, and he couldn't understand why he would be.  I'm still terrified.

It changes again, and it's night time now.  I'm in a car with people, I don't know who, and I don't recognise the car at all, but in the dream it seemed normal to me.  We were going to a water tower, or some sort of man-made structure.  I think it was near a farm or something, but we were trespassing on someone's property, just to carve a message onto this wooden tower thing.  I don't remember the message or anything, but it had something to do with graduation.

The rest of the dream is fuzzy, but I went to different places, carving a message into things.  The whole time I was worrying about the BF, and what he was going to do.

When I woke up, I was still terrified.  Not of my boyfriend, but the fact that my subconscious could generate feelings of terror at his image.  I don't want to be scared of him. It's the opposite, I want to be with him as much as possible.  So why was I dreaming about this?

I originally took it at face value, that I dreamed about shooting people, and them having ridiculous injuries.  I googled "hole in my chest dream interpretation" and nothing came up. I kept thinking about it.  Normally I don't bother thinking about something apparently meaningless, but the emotions I felt that lingered after I woke up were really disturbing me.  So I thought about it.


Now, you may need a bit of backstory for this part, but it's kind of personal, so I won't go into depth.  Anyway, my boyfriend isn't the most emotional person.  There's a reason for that, but it creeps people out so you don't need to know.  But he's not as deeply affected by emotions as other people.  His mother died almost exactly a year ago, and from what I saw, there wasn't much of a grieving process.  He told me he didn't even cry at her funeral.  But I'm thinking (I haven't spoken to him about this, just my thoughts) that the emotions are there, but they're just internalized.  So it's not that he doesn't have them, he just doesn't show it.  And that's what the hole in the chest is about.  He has all these emotions eating him away on the inside, and my disregard for his feelings (the bullets from my dreams) is tearing him open until it's all laid bare.  The friend who was helping me shoot him in my dream is also known in my circle of friends as the loud/brutally honest/uncivilized one who speaks her mind.  Especially in relation to my boyfriend.  They tease each other and stuff, but sometimes the things she (and all my friends) says to me about him gets to me.  It goes beyond joking around, and gets quite hurtful, and even if he doesn't know it, and he wouldn't care, it still hurts me.

Anyway, I found it interesting that she was the one there helping me hurt him. 

Hmmm, what else.  I think the movie part was just provoked by the fact that we went to the movies together a few days ago, and that I made him choose, so that I knew we were watching what HE wanted to see (I didn't tell him that I'd already seen it until after we got out).

But it's just little things like that that trip me up.  I forget that even if he doesn't have the same sorts of emotions, he still has likes and dislikes and wants and needs, and I feel absolutely terrible that I've never really thought of him in that way. I haven't done anything bad to him, that I know of.  I haven't hurt his feelings as far as I know, I just haven't really taken them into account.  Just because he hides them, doesn't mean they don't exist.  I feel so bad.  And I think the fear from my dream is not because I think he's going to seek revenge or anything, it's that I'm afraid of what will happen to me when we break up.  I know he won't intentionally hurt me physically, I'm just worried that the pain is going to cause a metaphorical hole in my chest to match his.  He may not intentionally get revenge with malicious intent, it might just happen along the way.