Hey, everyone! Remember me? I guess I accidentally took a Christmas break!

I took my laptop on our trip with us, but I just never pulled it out. I was busy! We went to Utah to visit my family, then we hit Orange County on the way home to visit my in-laws.

I would like to assert that we are NOT from Utah. My entire immediate family moved there because, I don’t know, they like drinking but it wasn’t challenging enough in California? Or, they like it when things are, like, grossly wholesome? I did consider the fact that they just don’t like ME. It’s hard to not entertain the possibility when everyone who lived in your childhood home all moved somewhere else, together, 12 hours from you. FINE THEN. I’LL BE RIGHT HERE.

CALI TIL I DIE.

I like my Christmases warm, my drug laws lax, and my population unimpressed.

In Utah, there is stupid snow everywhere, and you have to wear winter clothes like, socks, and pants, and shoes that aren’t flip flops. INDOORS! It’s terrible! SOCKS!? Who even? What the? It’s so much work!

Being back in Southern California was a relief. I love my family, but I miss my own bed, and my natural environment. The air in Utah is so clean, it burns the inside of my nose. I need those minerals and vitamins in the California air to keep me strong and focused. Dirty air is bad for me? I doubt it. If I breathe poison all day, I am surely stronger and more powerful than anyone who doesn’t. Try me. See what happens. Now that I’m back in California, I can punch a hole right through your chest. I was born here. I’m on some X-Mang shit, FO SHO. That’s just science, y’all!

The trip was a mixed bag, but overall, fun. I got to see all my nieces and nephews aka my darling baby children. I did that Tia work, handing out gifts and lipsticky kisses with unrestrained enthusiasm. I love to kiss those little faces, even though it’s tough to see how big they get in between visits. My two oldest kids, my nieces, just turned 8 and 10 this week, and that’s rough. I want them to stay little forever! They’ve lost those chubby baby faces, and now they like One Direction. Which is fine! I don’t begrudge anyone their generation’s boy band. I had the New Kids, my mom had the Jackson 5. We all need some non-threatening dudes at that age, it’s just nature. Then, you work your way up to peen with guitars. I went straight from Joey McIntyre to Slash, but there are usually more steps in the middle. I’m just a prodigy. (P.S. I just googled Joey from New Kids, and that fool is 40 fucking years old. How do these things happen? I need to start planning for our retirement because I guess it comes faster than you think it will.) (P.P.S. Can we all agree that Donnie had no business being in a boy band? Motherfucker was a full grown man with, like, a beard and a wood paneled study. He was old as hell. If you were a 9 year old into Donnie, you probably have hella therapy bills now. Not because of Donnie, specifically, but because you clearly have issues.)

All the family stuff was good. We had noche buenas with so much good food; enchiladas, taquitos, frijoles y arroz, salsa, GUACAMOLE MADE BY ME! Christmas with my mom is the sting of jalapeños on your fingertips and tongue, it’s hot chocolate made from Abuelita tablets. It’s Navidad! She even pulled my oldest nieces and nephew into a roughshod Nativity pageant that featured Joseph in a knockoff Gucci head wrap, and culminated with “Mary” ripping the blanket off of the doll cast as Jesus, hoisting it into the air and shouting, “BABY JESUS IS REALLY A GIRL!!!”

It wasn’t all La Raza and controversial Jesus theories though. I left California with what we thought was a stress headache that actually turned out to be a dental issue. In a stunning example of “worst case scenario while on vacation out of state” I had to make an emergency dentist’s appointment to try and get my face back in order. It did NOT go well. Turns out, I have two giant abscesses that have worked their way into my sinuses. My own teeth have conspired to erode my face bones. It’s a mess. The dentist couldn’t do all the work necessary to fix it in such a short amount of time, the day before Christmas Eve. So, he did what he could do to relieve the pain a little, wrote me a prescription for some antibiotics, and sent me on my way. It was not what I had planned for that day.

Here’s your girl on her way to the dentist:

And now here’s your girl post dentist:

It wasn’t fun. It was pretty painful. But, I persevered. I’m always a little bit annoyed, so when shitty things happen, I can keep my cool and roll with it. I was drooling on myself for the rest of that night, and I was in pain off and on throughout the rest of the trip, but, at least there was an off. Before I went to the dentist, it was just nonstop on.

So, that put a little bit of a damper on our trip, but it was manageable. Plus, my parents felt really bad for me, which is extra nice. My mom was petting me a lot, and that helps. She was also making me rinse my mouth with hydrogen peroxide, which was not nice even though it helped. Gross.

After we left Utah, we drove straight through to Orange County to spend time with Jason’s family. I spent the night over there for the first time! Jason and I slept on the floor, in a spare room, with this scary thing holding down its post just inches from my head.

What’s he in trouble for? MURDER?! Probably!

Luckily, beautiful White Jesus was there to keep an eye on things and make sure that murder baby didn’t turn around in the night.

WHITE JESUS GOT CHU, GURL!

Our day there was really fun too. The more time I spend with them, the more I see our life together as a family. There isn’t anything funny about that, it’s just good. I miss doing family stuff, like sprawling on couches all day and watching movies together, or hearing a whole afternoon’s worth of dad jokes. It’s hard sometimes to be so far from my family, and it makes me happy to know I can get my fix if I need it. I still have to wear a bra over there, but Imma work on that. Baby steps.

Our trip was great, but I was so happy to be home. We got in around 10:30 on Saturday night, and we basically spent most of the day yesterday asleep. I’d like to spend most of today asleep too. Vacation is so exhausting! I was going to unpack us today, but I think I’ll be ok pulling my underwear out of a suitcase for the rest of the week. It’s a slower way of unpacking. It gets the job done, it just takes a little longer.

As the cherry on top of my week, one of my favorite people in the whole known and unknown universe got engaged a couple days ago. I don’t want to make any assumptions, but I’m already pulling together makeup looks. I JUST GET SO EXCITED!!!

So, Christmas over! It’s time to get back to regular life. That’s cool. I’m ready to do it! I’m back and ready to show you guys some good stuff! I hope you guys all had a good holiday too. Did anyone get any amazing beauty related Christmas gifts? I got some perfume I really wanted, so that was a mega score. I’ll tell you all about it soon!

You guys. That new Beyonce album dropped and I fell out. But, ever since then, I’ve been on a nonstop Vitamin Bey regimen. So, now I’m stronger than ever! No lie, my abs hurt because I’ve basically been dancing for four days straight. Just nonstop booty pops.

I’ve been feeling kind of uninspired lately. This blog can be tough for me sometimes because it’s not just about makeup, it’s also about writing. It’s hard for me to bring myself to write a lackluster, bare bones post about a product when I’m just not feeling the words. I hate it, and I wish knew how to write on command, but I don’t. I try to pump out something every day, but when the creativity isn’t there, it’s just not there. I’ve been getting stagnant while product just piles up on my desk. I haven’t even used my Naked3 palette. Isn’t that sad?

When I get blah like that, everything gets blah. I’d look in the mirror and not feel like putting makeup on because my hair has been looking like butt, my eyebrows were overgrown and I’ve been dealing with a breakout. Like, fuck putting all that time into my face when my eyebrows look like that. I needed a big change to shake myself up!

You get used to doing things a certain way, you know how to make it look good, but that’s no fun forever. I always want a new look! But, what? The biggest beauty change is always hair related, right? I don’t want bangs anyone, I don’t want long hair anymore, I don’t want the coppery color anymore, but what DO I want?

That’s where I always get stuck.

Over the years, I’ve tried to adopt a detached attitude to my hair. It’s just hair. It’ll grow back, you know? So, the problem isn’t that I’m scared of cutting my hair, the problem is that I can never decide HOW to cut my hair. My friend that usually does my hair takes a hands off approach to this part. Since we’re not just customer/client, we’re also ex-coworkers, party friends, and birthday week buddies, this adds an extra layer of trickiness. She worries about taking big risks because she doesn’t want to be responsible for something I end up hating, and I want her to tell me what to do. We frequently end up at this impasse. So, with her blessing, I went to another hairdresser to try and get a different perspective. It worked out great! Working with someone who doesn’t know all my annoying client quirks was just what I needed.

I went in, took a bunch of different pictures, told her I needed something big, and man, did I get it.

DO YOU LOVE IT?! I LOVE IT!!

I’ve wanted a color like this for years! But, as I got into my late twenties and then my thirties, I convinced myself that I was too old. I’d look at pictures of hair colored like this, and just hem and haw. I almost didn’t go through with it this time! I’m so glad I did though! My only condition was that if my hair was going to be blue, the cut had to be sophisticated. I’m sorry, but I really do think I’m too old to pull off super long blue hair. But that’s ok! I didn’t want that anyways!

Beauty risks are so fucking scary. What if you hate it? What if it looks terrible? What if people think you look stupid? We get so stuck on the negative what ifs, that I think we forget to think about the positive ifs. Like, what if you look fucking amazing? What if a modeling scout sees you and you become a superstar? What if you love it? If nobody is telling you you can’t do something, why do we tell ourselves? We’re our own worst enemies. We’ll stand on the metaphorical edge of a big decision cliff, look down and say, “I can’t jump! What if I fall?!” But, we rarely stop to consider the possibility that we could fly. What if you could fly all along but you never knew because you never tried? That’s not just hair, that’s life, bbs! It sounds like such corny bullshit, but it’s a concept I struggle with often. It takes mighty big ovaries to step outside of our comfort zones, but it’s always worth it. Even when we fail, it’s a success, because we tried. This is dumb too, but it’s like when I decided to try being a blonde. It looked terrible, but at least I found out! I could stop wondering about it, and file it away. And really, that’s the worst that can happen. It looks bad. No big deal, everything is fixable with enough color and time!

Regrets are stupid and indecision is the worst. Sometimes, you just have to jump.