Curls are a girl's bestfriend.

I have found a new way for girls to curl their hair (and make it look absolutely fabulous) with shoulder length (thin) hair. Since I dye my hair quite often, I always try to find ways for it to look naturally full. I use anything from thickening shampoos, oils, treatments, and extensions.
Of course during my free time I obsess over my hair and I always figure out new and different ways to make my hair look fabulous, so without future adue, I would like to show all of you my new look that I came up with. :)

In this picture I have no extensions in my hair, all I have is my natural hair's body (along with minimal teasing) and just a few squirts of Aussie Mega Flexible hairspray.

In the future, I will totally upload a video on Youtube of me styling my hair like this so that way everyone can see a more thorough way on doing this.

1. Make sure your hair is completely dry (preferably just washed and blow dryed)
2. Section off your hair in 4 different sections
3. Grab a small comb and lightly tease (JUST) the roots of your hair in very small sections (so that way the teasing part stays up all day)
4. Take your flat iron and the small sectioned hair that you just teased and go put it through the iron for about 2 inches down
5. Twist the iron outwards (away from your head, this gives much more body and fullness)
6. Drag the flat iron two more inches and twist the flat iron again (you will twist the flat iron a total of 3 to 4 times per section depending on how curly you want your hair to turn out)
7. Continue to do this to your whole head and once you're done, lightly spray your hair with the Aussie hairspray (even though it's flexible, it will stay all day because of the teasing that you do prior to the curling.)

Note: Incase you are alittle confused on how to use the flat iron correctly, here is a small little video I found on Youtube that give the just of it. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca3k1syt2G4 <--- Go ahead and click on the link <3

Lost in Translation

It's honestly like being on cloud nine. I feel like everything is shifting into place (thank god) and everything is getting better and better. I can't wait for what the future has in store for my next chapter in life, because right now I couldn't be happier. This career path I've chose is completely amazing and I couldn't ask for anything better!

Here's to an amazing week, hope everyone is going to be having a fantastic week as well.

Mozel Tov!

My new secretary.

With a new career in my hands, I'm super excited to start this new beginning in my life. I finally feel secure and I feel like I've found an amazing career (not a job) and I can't wait to start! Whenever I acquire something new, I always see it as an opportunity. Everything that comes my way is an open door, and I encourage you to do the same!

With that said, I would like to inform you of my new journey that I am going to partake in. Not only am I going to start a new career, but I'm also going to give up to of my guilty pleasures, drinking soda and eating french fries. I know that just by doing these two things it will improve my health and make me a more cheerful, happier person, and I can't wait! I'm going to drink my last soda on Friday and I'm currently eating my last french fries. I've stopped drinking soda before about two years ago and I had quit for quite sometime. Just like eating meat, after you give it up for a while, you learn not to enjoy it anymore. I haven't ate any animal in almost two years, and I know that with my dedicated heart and determined soul that I'll be able to do this! Yay to new beginnings and inspired healthy living!

Beautiful Lengths

This time last year I had cut all my hair off, so short that it was probably only an inch long. Why? I know I'm crazy, but my hair had been bleached and it started falling out and cracking and became so 'gummy' and damaged. I started doing my research on home remedies and expensive conditioners and treatments that I could use. I read one article that was wrote my Madonna's stylist and he said that one time she came to him and she had bleached her hair and it was completely lifeless and damaged and asked what she could do to make it healthier. He told her "The only thing you can really do now is cut it all off and start fresh." Needless to say that article was inspirational. So I waited a week and sat and thought the whole time on this, weighing out my pros and cons and wondering if it was really worth it because it had already taken me two years to grow my out already, it would probably break my heart to cut it all off. Well, needless to say, I did. I wasn't happy with the cut, and the only thing that made me happy about it was the low maintanence I now had and how once my hair was washed it would be dry in 5 minutes, no blow drying, no products needed, no damaged from heating products..that was nice! For the whole year I tried to find an amazing product to ue in my hair; I must've spent atleast $150 on all the different kinds of creams, treatments, oils (yes, I use oils in my hair) and spray in conditioners. Not much did what I wanted it to do, I needed to restore moisture and make all the hair that grew back out be as healthy as possible (not to mention I wanted it to grow back already!) Here I sit a year later with the hair that originally took me two years to grow out (not to mention I've trimmed my hair three times since my 'big cut').

The one shampoo and conditioner that I absolutely LOVE is Pantene Pro-V, hands down. I religiously use their "Beautiful Lengths" shampoo and conditioner everyday, and for my treatments I shampoo my hair with their "Full and Thick" shampoo, and then comb my wet hair, put the "Full and Thick" conditioner in it and massage my scalp. I use an extra large flat brush and comb the conditioner in my hair and then place a shower cap on my head.

Note: Make sure you have a while before you need to leave the house, you might want to do this on the day when you're not going to go to work, or if you work a night shift, to do this earlier in the morning while you're cleaning or doing laundry. With that said, take this time to focus on you! If you have things to do around the house, go ahead and get them done, but now comes the important part, taking some time and giving it to yourself. This should be simple, right? Right! So find a quiet spot in your house, put on some soothing, relaxing music, and practice some yoga. Not only will this make you feel better and help you get rid of all the toxins in your body, but it will rejuvinate your mind and your soul. Take anywhere from 20-40 minutes (while the conditioning treatment is still in effect!) and release everything. I love yoga, it's so fun and it's an amazing way to stretch your body and workout your core.

Depending on how long you take to do your chores around the house, and with the 40 minutes you dedicate to yoga, the conditioning treatment should be in your hair for about two, to two and a half hours. Once the time passes by, take the shower cap off, rinse your hair throughly, gently towel dry your hair, and style as normal. You can go ahead and blow dry your hair after the treatment, as well as flat iron or curl. I wouldn't recommend to use hairspray until the next day, just so your hair can breath. What I like to do, just because I'm a conditioning junkie is use a spray in conditioner. Just like with all the products I've used, I haven't been satisfied with any of the spray in conditioners that I've purchased. So what I've done is take any cheap conditioner (even VO5), I use Sunsilk, mixed with Aussie, and fill the bottle halfway to the top. Then I put luke warm water in the bottle and fill it up. Twist the top and make sure its secure and then shake it to mix the conditioner with the water. The great thing about making your own spray in conditioner is that the skies the limit! You can add your heating protectant in it, your hair oils, hair mayonnaise, hair smoothing product, or whatever you normally use for your hair into the bottle and it will be all your products mixed into one. To apply the spray in conditioner, I usually just spray my ends, or whatever part of my hair that's looking alittle frizzled or tired. Then I brush my hair out with an extra large flat brush and then blow dry my hair.

When dying your hair: I never use box dye. Box dye is more of a rinse and it comes out with a brass tone (even the $20.00 box of dye!) Instead, I go down to Sally's and buy a $3.00 bottle of Clairol, a $2.00 bottle of developer, and 50 cent gloves and I'm set! My color lasts for 3 months and I only have to touch up my roots every 2 months (my roots grow super fast but I usually wait till my hair grows out an inch before I dye the roots.) Box dye fries your hair and it never stays the way it should, I suggest you try the Clairol and see how happy you are with your hair color. Note: Clairol comes in every shade they sell in the box, and all Clairol is, is what your hair stylist uses when you go to your beauty salon.

I hope you use my tips, and have fun with your radiant, beautiful, silky soft, damage-free hair! :]

Little secret?

I've always wanted to live in New York.
So I can walk on the Brooklyn Bridge every morning and visit Coney Island every afternoon.

I live here and you live there.

When Chris and I started dating, I must admit that I was kind of embarassed about the whole distance thing, no one seemed to understand how a relationship based on monogamy could work if the person you're with lives on the other side of the coast. I didn't know what to tell people when it came to him, infact I even lied to some people when they asked me how him and I met. How could I say that we met on myspace? How could I tell them that he lives over 2,000 miles away? How can I explain how me makes me feel better than any guy on westcoast ever could? Two years down the road now and we still manage our happiness, infact we are much happier than most couples I see who live near eachother and are completely miserable. I know in this blog I talk about Chris alot, but there are just certain things that he does and says that inspire me to write and make me feel so wonderful (good energy gives good blogs!) The one thing that I can't really put my finger on is how long distance relationships became "the thing" now and everyone's jumping onto our boat. It seems that everyone's blog I've been reading lately, or everyone's myspace I've had the pleasure to visit, has a tiny little story with a nice note of their loved one who lives around the world and they're in love with them. Now, it's not that I'm hating on this or anything, it just seems like something so peculiar. Jeans and tops in fashion become trendy, as well as Ray Ban glasses, but...long distance relationships? Not just a few 100 miles, but a few thousand? Hmm..and they proudly talk about it? How rare. How funny. Maybe I should've done that from the beginning. Maybe I wouldn't feel so bad about my white lies. Maybe people would have understood more. Maybe I wouldn't have got so much shit from people, or questions on why I'm with someone that lives on the other side of the country.
To me California and Virginia are only a few states away, and no distance can rip us apart, because unlike others, him and I are adults about it and we make it work.
Kudos to those who are doing what we're doing, who are actually making it work and staying faithful to eachother.
People come to me and ask me how I'm able to stay happy with him and keep patience and not carry around a broken heart; my answer is simple. I ask God for guidance and strength. In every prayer I ask him to look over me and help me celebrate my love for Chris. Now I know no a days people have lost their faith, and believe me, it's my faith that's kept me going. Praying changes my outlook on life and it keeps me strong and helps me throughout my life, there's no other thing that I can offer people as far as advice goes, and if you don't want to take the advice, or if you don't have faith, that's alright, to each his own.
But on the flip side, it's done everything that it can for me and so much more.

A revision, and looking back.

My realistic side keeps reminding me that I should stop wishing for time to pass or stop at my will. I guess I've been pretty rude to it due to the way I've been ignoring that sound advice. The present is a very complicated moment to live in, it's this tedious sort of balancing act caught in between comparisons to the past and often impractical notions of the future where the flow of time shows you your mistakes right after you've already made them.

For some reason we humans never seem to learn from these mistakes and no matter how things have resulted in the past we keep making our foolish plans and doing the same things expecting different results. That's the definition of insanity you know. It's not at all reassuring to think of where you thought you'd be in the present when you go back a few years. I was going to get emancipated or run away from home when I was 15. I was going to go to Ithacha in New York and raise hell like the kids who watched Mario Savio's speech and run for office after I got older. My major was going to be Political Science, and I was going to be an RA to help pay for school. I was going to be a comic book artist too, and maybe even write them as well, I wanted to translate stories from thoughts to images and words about a universe where everything was connected.

I was going to marry the boy I was in love with, he even picked out rings, they had celtic knots on them. He was going to be an actor. That was my last actual relationship. I think I was 20 when we broke up, I don't remember who actually ended it. It might have been me. I was going to be a radical story of success in the face of opposition. I was going to be in those history books where I learned about the Jacobins, Lenin and Che. I was going to lead the revolution. I still haven't quite gotten over that one yet. I am not the person I thought I'd be at 22 years old. No matter how many plans I make I have the perspective of one who's always ended up doing something unplanned, rejecting the perfect equations I'd drawn for myself to come up with results that simply appeared before me. I didn't get into Itacha, not even UCR for fuck's sake. My job couldn't have supported independence, I got a 2 in AP studio art and the first love became the old friend. Instead I chose a school I'd only applied to due to a suggestion from my guidance counselor, had a year of therapy to learn to coexist with my family, fell in love with history, did drugs, got tattoos and began to approach affection from an outside perspective rather then participating. Despite a relatively random sequence of events that led me to this point I am occupying in space and time I still find myself attempting to organize my future in ways that make sense following the intentions and desires I currently feel. Silly, huh? By definition I'm insane. I've started to think that it's not our mistakes that we ultimately learn from, it's our dreams, or at least the instants where we realize that they didn't come true because there never really was a chance in hell. And I think what we learn from that is that it didn't matter anyways. No amount of regret can alter the conditions of the here and now, the only way that would ever work is if you could regret a decision before you made it.

Day dreaming

What do you think about when you day dream? Do you think about money, success, sex, happiness, what you did last night, what you're going to do tonight, your dream wedding, do you surround yourself with passed memories and do you form into a complete state of nostalgia?

When I day dream, I think about my future and how amazingly beautiful its going to be. I think of the big move I'm going to make to the east coast, the weather, the leaves turning in autumn, the dinners I'll be having in DC and the nights I will spend sitting on my porch with a glass of wine while watching the sun set. I think about my first trip to Virginia and how my heart was pounding out of my chest by the time I got to the airport, and by the time my plane was landing I nearly cried when I looked out the window because I couldn't believe how absolutely stunning it was, it had me from hello.

Feel it in my bones

Sometimes life calls for a revamp. Pick your poison and go with it, you deserve it! Things may seem alittle down, or you may seem alittle out of it. Perfect perscription for this is always revamping. What I like to do is light candles, sit on my bed with the lights off and meditate. My form of meditating is praying, but of course to each his own, do what makes you happy. <3
I like to call this a revamping of the soul. If you hae the habbit of renewing your soul, your kindess and prosperity levels with soar through the roof without you even having to try. It's the way I've managed to stay content with my happiness levels as well as fight off all the negative energy that tries to knock me down.
Try this, see how it works.

"Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being "in love" which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two." -St. Augustine

Where The Wild Things Are

I don't understand why everytime I see the trailer for Where The Wild Things Are that I get so teary eyed. The first time I saw the trailer, I was sitting in the movie theatres with Patrick (him and I were the only people in there). The trailer came on and instant tears came to my eyes.

Where The Wild Things Are was the first book I ever read. It was magical. It made me feel like I was Max, a little boy who no one understood, who made up this magical place with his imagination. He made friends with the monsters who lived underneath his bed and went on all these crazy fucking adventures with them. What an amazing story, and I can not wait for the movie to come out!

Beauty

When I was growing up there was definitely pressure to look like all the other girls. I was 30 pounds heavier than the other girls and I had crappy fashion sense. I never wore make up and kept my very bold eastern european brow until I was in high school. I always felt like the elephant in the room because I never did anything the way that all the other girls did, and I never understood why all the other girls were wanted and I wasn't. I never understood why when growing up I had to date older guys who didn't go to my school because they had the maturity level that I needed; they saw passed the bold eye brows and the pale face and the sandy blonde, beach wavy hair.
I was alwasy envious of the girls who wore a size 0 and were 6'0" tall. The girls with the golden tans and wore makeup from MAC and JC Pennys, the girls who on somedays wore pajama pants or gym shorts to school and were still wanted by the boys; when here I am, almost everyday wearing my best outfits (well, what I thought was my best) and I wouldn't even get one boy to notice me.
Now that I'm grown and almost in my mid 20's, I can reflect on how growing up was, and seeing how silly I was being. I should've focused more on my studies than wondering why the guys didn't turn their heads when I walked by. I wish it never bothered me as much as it did, but it did.
Whenever I see women who don't wear make up now, it makes me smile. Infact, I prefer to see women without make up on because I believe the world should see their real, true beauty and not what they just bought for $100 at the sephora. Women with breakouts, blemishes, dry skin, oily skin, blond eye lashes, thick and natural eye brows; you're all beautiful! You don't need to spend a million dollars on artificial powders and creams that will just clog your pours and make your skin unbarable, you need to shine with your true beauty.

Black and White

I like to take pictures of bands and make them look aged. I am guilty of not being born in the 1970's to be blessed to have seen the 1980's punk rock era. If you ever take the time, you need to feast your eyes on the photography done from 1980's hardcore shows in D.C., California, and N.Y., it's absolutely phenominal. Timeless, crappy pictures that just look fantastic! I always try to mimic those looks whenever I photograph bands, although they don't like it, and it's more avant garde, it's quite understandable. Thinking about it, I was probably the last person to convert to digital film just because I didn't want to "make my pictures look better than what they really were", meaning I took a shitty picture, and I want it to stay shitty just because I really strived to make my photography look one of kind 1980's hardcore.