Current Skincare Routine (Winter 2022)

Tuesday, 31 January 2023Wednesday, 1 February 2023 StarrLeave a comment

I don’t know why exactly but I feel compelled to document my current skincare routine just so I can see what I was using, maybe because I suspect I’m using products just for the sake of using them but they’re not doing much for me.

My family has decent skin genes, so I am already lucky enough to have a fairly agreeable skin canvas to work with. My T-zone gets oily in the summers and my cheeks get very dry in the winters. My skin concerns are around texture, brightness, and moisture, with the goal of maintaining what’s good about it and preventing future damage.

Here’s a list of products I’m currently using, and what I may add/swap in the near future

I got COVID

Wednesday, 11 January 2023 Starr2 Comments

This year, after 2 years of spending my birthday mostly alone and at home, I decided to celebrate with my friends doing my favorite thing in the whole world: karaoke. In the days, weeks, and months leading up to my birthday, I hesitated a lot, constantly expressing to my partner that I should and would cancel any reservations and forgo having a social birthday for at least one more year. He talked me down frequently, reminding me that we are fully vaccinated and fully boosted as well, that our friends know how cautious we have been and especially how cautious I have been and would not risk infecting me if there was any reason to believe they could.

So I went and I had an incredible time on Friday evening. A staff member at the karaoke establishment recognized me from my previous birthdays celebrated there and pulled me up on the (new-to-me since 2019) stage to celebrate and pour sparkling wine into stranger party-goers’ mouths and generally be merry. It was a fulfillment of a wish I never even dared to make.

On Sunday, already a little hoarse and tired from an evening of singing for my life after having not sung for years, I screamed and cried and cheered as Argentina won their first world cup in decades, cementing Leo Messi’s status as one of the greatest to ever play the beautiful game.

On Monday, I went about my day and cooked a big pot of soup for myself, my partner, and my brother who was staying with us until his new lease started a few weeks later. I recall feeling the effects of all the singing and screaming of the weekend on my throat, and having been so busy with the day that I was uncharacteristically dehydrated. My lips and hands were dry, and my head was starting to hurt, not quite bad enough to call a migraine but enough that I realized I hadn’t had very much water at all that day, a bit embarrassing to realize as the person at work who reminds everyone to drink water. The three of us cleaned up after dinner and sat down to play video games together when I started feeling chilly. “Are you two cold at all?” I asked. Neither of them felt cold, but I had pretty distinct chills.

A knot of anxiety formed in my gut and I excused myself to take my temperature and also a COVID test, just in case. My temperature was normal, so I wasn’t experiencing a fever, but I wanted to see the negative test just to be safe. I swabbed my nose, set a timer for 15 minutes, went to the bathroom, and came back 3 minutes later to make sure the test was working correctly, bracing myself mentally for maybe that faint wisp of a line that you can barely see.

2023 Resolutions

Tuesday, 3 January 2023Tuesday, 3 January 2023 StarrLeave a comment

Dear readers, I need to be real with you.

Last year, I confessed that I felt less ambitious than any year before, and that feeling has only grown over the course of 2022. I looked back on my resolutions I set last year and found that my big, broad goals for this year have essentially not changed. So I’ll leave them the same, there is no point in twisting myself into a pretzel trying to… have different goals? I am disappointed to not have made as much progress on them as I was hoping but it’s not bad to want the same big areas of improvement as I did a year ago.

I do have new concrete goals (remember my concrete vs. abstract days, wow I aspired to so much) that I am looking forward to working on this year but the rest of my goals are going to look very familiar.

2022 in 365 Seconds

Tuesday, 3 January 2023 StarrLeave a comment

After years of playing with the 1 Second Everyday app and watching people do true video compilations with 365 seconds from their year, I was finally able to do my own video to look back on the year.

I’ll admit that this is still not a true 1 Second Everyday, as some of these seconds come from the same days, but my COVID spiraling that kept me at home also kept me very… stagnant for much of this year, and I would find myself with days having passed and not finding myself having done anything noteworthy. It was a creative challenge for me to try to find brief moments of beauty and interest in the more mundane parts of my life, but I think the result is a more calm meditation on the romanticization of the every day.

Let’s see if we can do it again in 2023!