In the words of Ned Stark...winter is coming. And this winter, I want clothes! (When do I ever want anything different?)

This winter I'm eyeing a light colored jacket, preferably one with FUR. I am getting into fur and fabulosity in a big way. I love cute demure little Mad Men-esque dresses and always pair them with opaque black tights, but in the winter I need wool to keep my gams warm. I'm starting to discover a deep love of cocktail rings, especially the ones with animals on them, which I blame entirely on my turtle ring Hermy. (Yes. I named it.) Plus more jewelry! I don't wear earrings with fur trims because of a few unfortunate experiences with getting my earrings tangled in the material...ahem. Gloves to keep my fingers warm, earmuffs for my ears, and these buckled converse wedges that I've been eyeing FOREVER. Well...since the summer, anyway. They bring the outfit down enough to wear to classes without looking overdressed, and hey, if I need to, I'll throw on a pair of knee highs to go out and about in.

This Black Friday, I bought...NONE OF THE ABOVE.

Like most cities, Boston is indeed beautiful at night, especially as we walked across the bridge outside of MIT.

Sorry ladies and gents, my smartphone's the only camera I've got on me these days.

My friends and I headed over to the neighborhood Best Buy, where the line was long but not that long, and then headed straight for the laptop section. None of us bought anything, but I did spend a very pleasurable hour or two wandering the sales racks. Consumerism and discounts - they make Black Friday my favorite holiday of the year, and yes, I do firmly believe that Black Friday is a holiday. So this Thanksgiving, I was thankful for my friends and for Black Friday being only a day away.

While I bought nothing at Best Buy...I did go back to Amazon and buy a tablet pc! For less than $80, I'm crossing my fingers. I don't need anything very powerful, just something I can watch movies on while I work out and read books on in buses and airports.

I have plans for you, little tablet.

Muahaha.

If fashion is a language, then women have a much wider vocabulary. And we have a wider range of things we can say in that vocabulary.

So again: Fashion is one of the very few forms of expression in which women have more freedom than men.

And I don’t think it’s an accident that it’s typically seen as shallow, trivial, and vain.

It is the height of irony that women are valued for our looks, encouraged to make ourselves beautiful and ornamental… and are then derided as shallow and vain for doing so. And it’s a subtle but definite form of sexism to take one of the few forms of expression where women have more freedom, and treat it as a form of expression that’s inherently superficial and trivial. Like it or not, fashion and style are primarily a women’s art form. And I think it gets treated as trivial because women get treated as trivial.

- Fashion Is A Feminist Issue: Greta Christina

Happy Black Friday, everyone!

LINKS

• A woman after my own heart, Sonnet created an October-only Friday column dedicated to demonstrating the ways beauty products can be made from cupboard ingredients. My favorite of these is Baking Soda and Vinegar Hair Care! She finds ways around the common problems (ie. the smell and the dryness) to create what looks like a fabulous makeshift, green-friendly shampoo.
• How gorgeous is this photo shoot? It looks like a bacchanal, all dark and sensuous and earthy.
• Are you an organic or a mechanic? I'm definitely an organic, haha.
• Cheapie swaps for high-end skin care is worth taking a look at, because who can't afford to save a few bucks here and there? Especially high-maintenance gals like myself who love love love our skin care products...
• The difference between a brand and a signature is pretty interesting to think about, in this day and age of the blogger. How many people are making the leap from blogger to business?
• Oh my gosh, and you thought YOU were busy...Leonardo da Vinci's to do list. da Vinci is my man, his paintings were so exactingly perfect that that was passion in its own right.
• And on a more relaxed note...natural hair care recipes for the hippie in us all. As soon as I get some ingredients together, I am going to try them out for sure. After all...I already put olive oil in my hair, sour cream's not going to hurt it.

Traveling up to Boston has required me to pack light...which is not exactly easy for me! I collect, collect, collect, I overpack immensely, and I always regret it the moment I have to struggle my way through the aisles. Makeup's been a bit of an issue for me - I usually favor light, natural looks during traveling because I can slap them on with minimal fuss in the mornings and wash them off quickly at night, but how natural is natural? Any makeup aficionado knows that the more natural your look, the more work you've put into it!

1. MISSHA M Signature Real Complete BB Cream (SPF 24, No. 23)
2. A makeup bag, don't know where it's from
3. Bare Minerals Mineral Veil
4. Bobbi Brown Gel Eyeliner (black)
5. Urban Decay Naked Palette
6. Urban Decay Eyeshadow Primer Potion

The best part of this is that with the gel eyeliner and the naked palette, I can create a whole range of looks, from the soft and natural to the striking and dramatic. I favor dramatic winged eyeliner for my day-to-day look, but some days I just don't have the time. (Or, rather, my friends don't want to wait for me...)

BB cream is amazing. If you've been paying attention to Asian beauty blogs in the past couple years, BB cream has shot its way up to the top of the HG beauty products. It doubles as both foundation and concealer for me, with the mineral veil dusted on after to set it a bit. The only way you can tell I'm wearing any at all is because my skin looks too perfect to be real! Gel eyeliner is a godsend, it doesn't smudge even when I hit the gym. (True story: once I was too lazy to wipe off my liquid eyeliner before I went for my daily workout, and it ended up streaking all the way down to my chin. Attractive, c'est moi.) And naturally, who wears eye makeup without primer? UD's is one of the best on the market and their new packaging is so much better than those annoying little bottles of yesteryear, letting you actually squeeze out all the primer rather than having to scrape the inside of the bottle with their wand.

Everything but the Naked palette sits snugly inside the makeup bag, making it perfect for a weekend visit up to Boston. You can even just sling it inside your purse every day for quick touch ups.

What's in your bag?

Oh man, it got crazy around here. I've been neglecting this blog sorely in the hustle and bustle of scurrying to do makeup work, get my work in, and get some work done ahead of time so that my Thanksgiving weekend won't be filled with non-stop homework. But I went up to Boston to visit a friend at MIT and it is so pretty here, if extremely cold. What can I say, I have such a fondness for red brick buildings. (My friend disagrees...she says everything breaks. Oh dear!)

But the cold has highlighted the importance of something in my wardrobe...or rather, something that my wardrobe lacks.

EARMUFFS!!

A Bryn Mawr friend has this pair from Uniqlo:

And at $12.90, they are a steal! Not to mention in honor of Black Friday, Uniqlo is offering a free gift with every purchase.

A Princeton friend of mine once very sadly announced that it was so cold he was reduced to using his headphones as earmuffs...and man, they were not effective at all. Well I would offer to him these (only slightly girly) earmuff + headphone combination pair from Target:

But what's really catching my eye...are these panda earmuffs from JCPenney!

They are so perfect for me that I can't take it! Its little mismatched eyes...but if pandas aren't your thing, they offer a number of other options, like sock monkeys, koala bears, lions, and kittens. Either way, how adorable are these?

True...you could just clap a hat on over your head to keep your ears warm, but where's the fun in that? This way you can look cute AND prevent hat hair from sneaking onto your scalp.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING, EVERYONE!

What does your daily routine look like?

Source: Imgur

"If only my routine were PERFECT. Then I too would be PERFECT!" I say this every morning, each time believing that if only I could figure out that ultimate life hack, I could Have It All. I wake up full of ambitions to Get It Done, but crawl back into bed later admitting defeat. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

My daily routine looks something like this:

Wake up at 6:30 or earlier ♥ Run 2 miles or do bike intervals for 20 minutes ♥ Shower, get dressed, go to classes ♥ Go to work ♥ Do my homework ♥ Go to the gym ♥ Fall asleep at midnight or later ♥

What I want my daily routine to look like is this:

Wake up at 6:30 or earlier ♥ Run 3 miles ♥ Shower, get dressed ♥ Plan my day out over breakfast ♥ Go to classes ♥ Get all my homework done ♥ Go to both my jobs ♥ Go to the gym ♥ Watch an episode of TV ♥ Fall asleep at 11 PM ♥

What a glorious looking schedule. Look at how much sleep I get! Look at how much stuff I get done! Look at how I get to eat breakfast! (I might talk a good game about healthy eating, but I'll totally sacrifice meals just for a bit of extra time in the day.)

Well the key to accomplishing anything is figuring out how to make what we have now look more like what we want. You've all heard my thoughts on how to wake up early, so how exactly do you hack the rest of your life?

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Source: WeHeartIt

Start small, then get big

Look at my schedule. I want to run three miles every morning, but I only have twenty minutes to do so. That's a six minute mile and right now, it's so not happening. So I'll start with two ten minute miles, which I can handle, and aim to run those full three miles by 2012. I may even make a schedule for myself! (For I am a schedule obsessive fool...)

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The Pomodoro Technique

So the best way to get things done is to power on through until the task is complete, right?

BZZT. NO. Everyone knows that you have to break things down into small, easy to manage chunks. You don't eat the whole cake in one sitting, you cut it into slices; you don't run a marathon, you run a couple million steps.

Each person has his or her own way of doing things, but my very favorite is the Pomodoro Technique, which basically calls for this:

1. Choose a task to be accomplished
2. Set the Pomodoro to 25 minutes (the Pomodoro is the timer)
3. Work on the task until the Pomodoro rings, then put a check on your sheet of paper
4. Take a short break (5 minutes is OK)
5. Every 4 Pomodoros take a longer break

I have no idea why this is so effective, but it has made my life about a gazillion times easier. It helps me blitz through my homework at warp speed, leaving me lots of time to faff around on the Internet and go to the gym. (Or, you know, see my friends. Social life, what?)

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Source: Favim

Break the rules.

Sometimes the whole daily routine isn't helping. Sometimes it just drives home the fact that you are in a rut and your life is boring and you are boring and you should just give up on ever being an interesting person...and on days when you feel like that, step out of your life. Call in sick, skip a class, whatever it is you need to do - take the day off and make yourself feel good. Go on a bike ride, go shopping, pamper yourself. It's your own personal one day vacation and you have all the choices in the world!

However...I would not recommend spending the day watching TV or movies. While this is something I've done myself and there is a certain rejuvenating effect after, most of the times it just leaves me groggy and reluctant to return to my normal life. The point of the exercise isn't to turn your brain off for a couple of hours, but to recharge it - key difference there! Come back to your life feeling fresh and ready to take on the world again.

What's your daily routine like? And what do you want to change about it?

What I'm into right now: crazy colors paired with black, crazy hair, crazier eyeliner, stripes, and Japan, because the Japanese know how to get crazy.

For the curious, the characters in the middle are onna no hito no getsuyoubi, which means Woman of Monday. Four months of first-year Japanese are really paying off!

The picture on the left was taken by Lara Jade. The rest are from random places all over the internet that happened to find their ways into my computer.