Tutorial: Make-up for busy people

For whatever reason (probably because tumblr), I stumbled upon some make-up tutorials today. This gave me an acute reminder of how very complicated make-up is, and how unlikely it is that I, a poor, busy, glass-wearing nerdy girl (disclaimer: nerdy girls can wear make-up. This is not a statement about stereotypes. This ia a statement about facts about me. K? K.) me will ever truly properly understand how to use make-up. To illustrate this, I decided to give a tutorial of how I use make-up.

How to be a busy science* student and wear make-up

* Or other discipline requiring an inordinate amount of work

Step 1: Wash your face. If it's before 9 am in the morning, use cold water to shock your system to alertness. If it is after 9 am, you're probably still tired, so use cold water anyway.

Step 2: Dab a little bit of skin-coloured make-up (it doesn't matter whether it's foundation, some sort of powder, blush, concealer or whatever a primer is, as long as it's the colour of your skin) onto any blemishes or discolorations on your immediate facial area. If you wear glasses, don't worry about the bruises and bags under your eyes. Most glasses cover those up just by existing.

Step 3: If you wear glasses like me and people tend to remark on your glasses more than on your eyes, you might like to use some dark-coloured eyeliner (the dry, pencil kind, because you'd just smear the wet kind all over your face this early in the morning anyway) to highlight your eyes. Hell, you might even get adventurous and use some mascara. Just try to not get it all over your eyelids, because you're going to be late to your morning class if you spend too much time trying to clean it off.

In these three steps, you will manage a tired university student look in absolutely no time at all -- which is handy, because then you can spend more time on drinking coffee in the morning!

Note: if you're a chemistry major (like moi), don't bother with nail polish. You're just going to end up spilling acetone all over yourself anyway.

The Correct Dosage of Education

"It's actually a little bit more complicated than that, but at this point you only really need to understand this much."

My beloved readers, I can't begin to express how frustrated I am with consistently having to listen to these words. This is an almost exact word-to-word quote that I could attribute to any of the at least 10 lecturers I have had in the past four semesters. Every single class, without fail, a lecturer will feel the need to both remind us that we are lowly undergraduates whose understanding of the world is severely lacking, and that their field is much more interesting and/or complicated than they lead us to believe.

There's nothing wrong with starting with the basics. In fact, there would be something severely wrong if the basics were completely ignored and more advanced things taught out of the blue. It's difficult to understand a concept you have no founding knowledge in (which is a completely different problem I may return to later). However, when every single lecturer in our undergraduate course can be heard saying this, there has to be something wrong, hasn't there?

Again, I understand that a lot of the concepts that we study could be studied in much greater detail (but if you go down that path, you'd require everyone to have PhD's in everything, which would be an interesting thing in itself). I understand that especially processes related to the biogeochemical cycle have a million different variables and are just as complicated as the almost-nonsense name would let you believe. I understand that there are plenty of things in science that are poorly understood. I still believe that when I am taught something, especially in a science course, I shouldn't have to take it on face value; I should be allowed to understand where and how and why this concept has come into being -- and I don't mean the tedious lesson on the history of this and that technique that every lecturer feels the need to include in their lectures.

I'm not saying it's not interesting. It's just that it's hardly ever examinable, and I've got too much examinable material to worry about in order to be able to fully appreciate some interesting non-examinable material.

Now, you could say that this is an avenue for independent study and that it is my responsibility as the student to go and find out more information on it. Unfortunately, this solution is a bit of a would-if-I-could, can't-so-I-won't type of affair.

You see, I complain a lot about how many assignments I have due and how much work I have and all the other complaints that you've heard all about by now. Usually it's not the assignments that gets to me -- homework isn't a foreign thing to me -- but it's the sheer volume of knowledge that I'm supposed to ingest and then digest during the course of the shortest of the short 12 weeks we call a semester. It's a bit ridiculous when you think about it: in a total of 72 weeks involving lectures, tutorials and labs, I am supposed to be eligible to graduate with a Bachelor of Science. That's 72 weeks of tertiary education. That's it.

Sometimes I don't even wonder why graduates aren't employed without significant work experience.

In that amount of time, it is impossible for both lecturers and some students (because I know there are those people out there who aren't massive nerds and are happy to get by with the smallest amount of work possible) to go into the amount of detail that they would like. I have heard this complaint from two lecturers already this semester -- that they may choose either to cover as much breadth as they possibly can by compromising the detail of some more complicated concepts, or they can sacrifice the breadth of our education for some more detail.

That's a situation I'm not particularly happy with. Sometimes I wish that our semesters were longer than just 12 weeks -- that our weeks were freer, that there were fewer assignments (or the same number spread over a larger amount of time) and more time to digest all of the information we are given.

I feel like university -- where I initially came to gladly to continue my education, since I have always loved academia -- as it currently stands, is destroying my love in science. And that, my friends, really sucks.

Sometimes I suspect that some of the world has yet to be convinced of how much of a dork I am. In such moments, I get a burning desire to reveal to everyone that I am, in fact, the dorkiest person you will ever meet. Here, and today, my friends, I present you the evidence!

You're welcome.

In seriousness, mounting tiredness and an ever-growing pile of assignments makes you do strange things.

No masks, no clever titles

It's difficult, being a nerdy young person, and running a blog.

Your relationships and your attitude, as well as other specifics of your life, keep changing so rapidly over such small periods of time that it's sometimes difficult to keep up with which way is up at any given moment. It sometimes feels like a majority of my day is spent trying to figure out what I'm doing and how I'm doing it rather than actually doing whatever seemingly superficial thing it is that I should be doing. The easy solution to that, the one that plenty of adults keep on trying to feed us, is the ages-old carpe diem: you don't have to always have what you're doing figured out; if you enjoy it, just keep doing it, it'll work itself out in the end.

As always, since I can barely speak for myself out of the dimensional confusion I was talking about earlier (I'm moderately convinced that "up" is where my ceiling is), I most certainly can't speak for any other generalised category of people, but I'm guessing this is another one of those things where we don't benefit for being this specific breed of nerdy. We relish, as we always have, with facing the world in the morning and asking "why". This is something I benefit from in my endeavor to become a scientist, since not only does it make studying easier by limiting the need for rote memorisation due to a deeper understanding of certain concepts, but it also deepens my delight in whatever I learn, since it gains a context, and thus does not remain a disjointed concept I am learning for the sake of good grades. However, in my personal life, it's something that consistently brings me down.

In the end, it's my definition of myself that cops the biggest blow. I still hazily remember a time when I was able to confidently and proudly describe myself in a few lines, mostly by the things that I enjoyed, the activities I partook in, the people I knew. I've never had this much trouble describing myself in my entire life, not even when I hit my teens. From ten to fifteen, any change that I underwent was a sort of linear event: it was clear what circumstance changed and how it changed me.

Since fifteen, I can confidently state that everything in my life has changed. I live in a different country and culture, I am surrounded by different people, my hobbies have been forgotten, my attitude to my education has changed, and even my family is in a different role in my life than ever before. All of this is not the product of a single, simple change, but instead a culmination of at least three major events in my life in the last few years. And this magnitude of change has left me, and my concept of self reeling.

I'm not sure this would be as much of a problem if my obsession with asking "why" weren't so well established. I've been uprooted, tossed around and plugged back into the ground, and instead of accepting and adjusting, my inner self is constantly attempting to analyse what has changed. The only issue with this is that the change is so complete that I have completely lost touch with any reference point -- there is literally no way for me to tell how I was before and therefore how I am now different. There is no way for me to trace back the reasons for certain emotions and certain behaviors. In other words, there is no way for me to quantify and qualify the change. And as a budding scientist, that drives me mad.

As always, the easy solution, the solution that so many people in my life advocate, is to sit back and enjoy and let life figure itself out. But if I know one single thing about myself, it is that this is something I simply can't do. It manifests itself in this blog. If you've read even one or two of my previous posts, you would discover that there's some half-hearted purpose and connectivity behind some of them. Writing, perhaps, or science, or reading. But a majority of the posts are less like a conceptual discussion and more like a diary: concerned only with what is happening at any given time in my life, if only to give reason for not posting more about anything else. Whenever I post one of these posts, I think that I'm simply too busy to write anything else, and that I want to apologise for not being able to. On hindsight, I look at the proportion of these posts compared to any with actual content (not to mention the generally poor quality of the content), and I wonder whether those posts are only motivated by the lack of time. Perhaps some of them are motivated by the fact that a majority of my life is now concerned with trying to find purpose in being busy: concentrating so fully on each task so as to make it the purpose of my life for that fleeting instant. This, too, is why I become so very stressed, throwing myself 110% at a task, devastated if it does not work out as planned, or never content with it, since everything may always be in need of improvement.

Either way, I don't win. Either I can sit down and constantly question myself who I am and what I'm doing here and what I want out of life and how I view my relationships and what I like doing, driving myself mad in the need of any sort of reference point, or I can throw myself at meaningless tasks and let that make me stressed and unhappy.

I feel caught in an endless race, where every now and then the location of the goal changes, except that no announcement is made, and you can never be sure whether you're running toward it or away.

The One Thing

During the course of this semester, one of my units has a decreased number of contact hours on the condition that we post lecture-related blog entries on the unit website during the semester. I just finished writing my first blog entry (two days into the semester. I'm a bit of an eager beaver). I looked at it for a while, shrugged, and figured I could post it here as well. Be warned: the blog entry is on the subject of science, it takes a slightly more formal tone than I usually write in, and it's aimed toward people who study science and are likely to end up being scientists at the end of their education. I would also give this specific one a "WARNING: SWEEPING GENERALISATIONS AHEAD" sticker if I had one.

Still, the sentiment at the end is warm and fuzzy. Hope you enjoy it!

The question of what I would teach the world if I could teach them just one thing about science has been plaguing me ever since the question was raised. To me, there is an obvious answer in the scientific method, which we understand to be the philosophy and the heart of science. Clearly, the scientific method is the key to understanding the practice of science, and possibly a further gateway to critical thinking. For some reason, however, this answer just didn't seem to fit the bill. No matter how long I thought about it, and no matter how many times I came to the conclusion that this was it, this had to be it, I couldn't manage to convince myself that I had the answer.

At length, I realised that this is because such a lesson is unlikely to make any sort of impact. Having gone to a high school with many art and music-centric students, my experience is this: unless a given person studies science, has at some point studied and/or enjoyed science or has some other external influence (such as a parent or sibling) which pushes them to science, there is very little general interest in science, how it works or why it is great. Were people like this given the lesson on the scientific method, I am almost certain that, while some of them may even find it interesting, they would at some length shrug it off as irrelevant. Though I firmly believe that it is important for the general population to understand and appreciate the pursuits of science, I also believe that teaching someone who does not want to be taught is only going to be a waste of time. It is frustrating for both the teacher and student.

In my experience, the reason for this disinterest is found in a perception of what science is. Those who have little or no science education tend to perceive science as formulaic, tedious and boring, studied from large, dusty tomes, far removed from the exciting, imaginative world of books, movies and art.

My answer to the conundrum is this: teach the world something about the vast creativity it takes to understand and practice science. Emphasise the lengths to which one has to stretch one’s imagination to even begin to relate processes occurring in the world around us to each other or to create laws which bind together all objects in the universe. Illustrate the magic of the moment when the experiment and theory come together perfectly. Perhaps this lesson would require some elaboration on the history of science, and on those remarkable people who have literally dreamt up all the theories (or foundations thereof) that now live in those large, dusty tomes.

Perhaps if we can successfully stimulate the imagination of those who write science off as formulaic or boring, they could be inspired to learn more about science and its methods by themselves. There is nothing that I would like more than to share the love, passion and enjoyment I know so many scientists have for their fields with every person in the world, so that they, too, might actually care about it when someone next talks to them about the scientific method.

Those stickers I mentioned at the start are totally the greatest idea ever. I'd stick them on everything for shits and giggles. Who knows how to make stickers?

Oh no

Well, crap.

You guys, I did it again.

That thing where I get on a looong holiday and completely ignore absolutely everything I do on the internet, you ask? Yeah. That thing. Except this time, the holiday ended and I didn't come back.

You know, it's almost interesting how I seem to do it every single time. How come, when I actually DO have some free time and sometimes would even have interesting things to talk about, I don't seem to be able to muster up the motivation to get up on here and blather on about things. Then, just when I'm inundated with other things that urgently require my attention (as of now: sleep), I seem to turn up again?

Really, someone should do some sort of psychological study on me. And then lock me in a lab forever because nothing I do makes any sense and trying to puzzle out the logic in my (even if I say so myself) pretty little head might just crack a puzzle or two to do with the human condition.

Still Alive

This post is best enjoyed while listening to Portal's theme song, Still Alive. I would provide you a youtube link, but I'm lazy. It's a terrible, chronic condition.

My dearest, darlingest, most wonderful readers, I apologise profusely for my prolonged absence. At first, there were exams, and then, my brain was so fried from exams that I felt that it was better if I stayed offline until it had returned to its original state. Let me tell you, cramming, perfectionism and the desire for reasonably good grades makes a very special kind of crazy soup (as observed to the right).

Though then again, I had three of my four wisdom teeth taken our yesterday, and I'm probably not much better off right now with my chimpmunky cheeks and being amped up on painkillers and antibiotics as I am. However, my current predicament did make me bored enough to finally groan and drag my behind over to this blog, so I guess that's something positive about all of it, eh?

This post is probably going to be just a short update and what I've been up to, and then an announcement of posts yet to come. Because I'm immensely organised, I'm going to do so in list form!

Exams
I should start with this one, even though I probably have the least to say about this. Exams suck, as everyone knows. Cramming sucks. Going to the exam and coming by a question you've either never seen before or do not know how to solve sucks. Being nervous about your results and not getting them for the next three weeks (due on the 5th, meep!) sucks. Having a 20-page chemistry exam full of questions that require a lot of thinking over a period of 3 hours also sucks. My neck was really sore after that one. Besides, whose brilliant idea was it to make the hardest exam the last one? A few friends of mine were very aware of how burnt out my brain was after that last one. It took me about a week and a half to fully recover, which is to say stop giggling randomly and saying really weird things at odd times. As a result of my burning out, some of my November plans have gone slightly awry.

NaNoWriMo
I came to discover that writing a novel you have only begun planning two weeks before the beginning of the writing period on the basis of "hey, wouldn't it be cool if...?" doesn't work when it comes to the time & brain constraints of exams, especially if you're supposed to write over a thousand words per day. On the tenth of November, the day after my third exam, I looked at the pile of Chemistry work I still had a head of me and said "you know what, I can't do this." That would have been fine, if I hadn't been simultaneously too braindead, tired & lazy to actually continue writing after the 16th, but, alas, I didn't. Only two days ago did my muse tentatively step back into my brain, take a look around and nod approvingly, allowing me to continue with the story. As it were, I only reached 25,000-ish words after achieving about 7,000 words on the 29th of November. As such, I consider this a victory enough, since I would have had about half of November to write anyway -- besides, I got excited about my story again, and isn't that what's most important?

No? Damn it.


The Epic Reading Quest
If you follow my GoodReads profile or pay attention to the sidebar on this blog, you will notice that I have been stuck on The Egyptian since late October. This is because of a few reasons: The Egyptian, no matter what GoodReads says about it, is over a thousand pages long. It is historical fiction, and reading it feels almost like you are reading a history book -- each page is so crammed full of information and details that even though this is the second time I'm reading it, I still can't remember everything that has happened. I'm slowly getting toward the end, however, and then I can move on to Robin Hobb and her Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies.

It's funny how the point of this Reading Quest was to read the books I haven't yet read, and with the exception The Wise Man's Fear, I have yet to pick up one of those books. Oops?


And, well, apart from all of those things, I have been up to a lot of this:

I apologise for the poor image quality. I have a new camera, and I'm not entirely sure how to use it just yet. That, and using Paint as an image modifying tool probably doesn't produce the best possible results. I also apologise for its ugly look. I'm getting a bit sore right now, and I really cannot be bothered going back to it to crop it and whatever. You get the picture (har har har), right?

Coming Up
Some posts ago, I mentioned something about amazingly awesome holiday plans that I didn't want to talk about if they fell through. Well, I am happy to announce that they didn't! ... But that's all I'm going to be offering on that now. If you want to hear about my awesomely nerdy holiday plans, stay tuned for a post on that soon.

Another post you should look forward to is my experience with Skyrim. I've been collecting some screenshots, of funny and plain awesome moments I've had in the game. I'm going to continue collecting those, and when I feel like I have enough material for a blogpost, up it comes.

Alright, that's me done blathering about my November and my obscure plans. How has everyone else been for the month-ish that I've been away?