Category Archives: Personal

Personal

Bunny, Interrupted

Rowdy overhead

The view from my pillow.

Maybe you’ve noticed I’ve been slipping. Maybe you’ve noticed my posts have gotten shorter. Maybe you’ve noticed my current face hasn’t made an appearance in a while.

I didn’t think I would write about this. I wanted to keep trying to pull it off every day, but I was so obviously struggling.

You guys want to know what’s really bad for your skin, and totally disruptive to your beauty routine? Depression. Unless your beauty routine consists of dirty hair and infrequent showers, and your ideal skin includes eyelid zits. Then, it’s really perfect.

I am not trying to make you feel bad for me.

I am trying to make you understand.

It doesn’t always look like it does on TV. Depression is not always a blanket pulled tightly around your shoulders while you cry out a rain spattered window. More often, it’s not so much the presence of sadness as it is the absence of any feelings at all. The thing I feel the most is the aches in my neck, the prickling anxiety related knots on my scalp that are sharp and dull and dizzying at the same time – like I’ve been holding my breath for too long, or straining my eyes – the kind of pain that makes you nauseous. But, happiness? Not here. Sadness? I guess. If you want to call it that. But, I don’t.

I’m down.

That’s really the only word for it – down. Most days, I am up. These days, these last couple weeks, I am down. Down underneath. Down below the sunny surface, down into the sucking depths in the murkiness and the muck where only ugly things swim. It is expansive. It is everywhere. It is everything and it is nothing. Being so far down here, the pressure is different, and I am being crushed.

This crushing doesn’t want me to wear makeup, or wash my hair, or put on a bra, or exercise, or write, or look in the mirror. It only wants me to face my own mortality, or berate myself over the dishes in the sink and the uncounted WW points, or sleep. So, I sleep. I sleep during the day, and I wake up tired. I sleep at night, and I’m exhausted in the morning. I am so, so sleepy. My usual forms of self medication aren’t working either; there hasn’t been a piece of pie big enough or an orgasm strong enough to make those synapses fire like they should. All I can do is keep taking my pills, keep trying to drag myself out of the house, keep trying to wake up, keep asking Jason to squeeze me, keep touching the dog’s ears, keep trying to get inspiration from somewhere ANYWHERE so I can keep this site going.

We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled dick talk and lipstick swatch programming soon. I promise not to disappear.

I’m sorry this isn’t funny, or pretty, or whatever.

I am trying to pull through it. Please bear with me.

 

Standard
Personal

Sick Girl

And then I sing, “SICK GIRL! NAHH NAHH NAHH NAHH SICK GIRL SHE’S A SICK GIRL WE’RE ALL SICK GIRLS!”

Because you can’t run from your past, you guys. And sometimes your past includes Social Distortion, and that’s OK. Plus, I’ve been sick, and on sizzurp, so I make a lot of funny jokes.

I’m finally on the actual road to recovery now. My voice still sounds sexy-froggier than usual, but that’s fun, so it can stay. It’s been really helpful in my Zooey impressions. I fucking kill at that cotton commercial song.

This is me stalling around because I don’t have anything right now!

The only product I’ve tested this week was a new toothbrush. I had to throw my old toothbrush away because it had been in my mouth, of all places.

Like, I finally emerged from my blankets after a week, and the whole operation has fallen apart! My hair is a mess, my legs are hairy, my mustache is twirlable, I haven’t even been able to bring myself to make full eye contact with my eyebrows. Even my glasses are really dirty?!

I feel like I’ve hit beauty rock bottom. I’m starting from scratch here. Dudes don’t understand how much work it takes to maintain all this stuff. I mean, really, one week of disregard for my appearance, and the whole racket goes feral. Where do I start? Probably with my legs, right? Get my razor all good and clogged. Thanks to my black soap, the only thing still working right is my skin. Which is super unusual, since usually when I get sick, I break out pretty bad. And why not? Days of sweating, and rolling my dirty head around my pillow equals chin zits. I usually get crazy dry patches around my mouth and nose from Kleenex and stuff too, and that’s not a problem either. That’s the worst part, right? Not only were you sick, but now you feel like you have to tell people, “It’s not mocos! It’s just dry skin!”

I’m still steering clear of my lipsticks and anything else I could cross contaminate for the next couple days. I can show you guys some cool polish. I’ll be doing that soon.

But, how about this?! If you guys have any questions or need any beauty advice, LIFE ADVICE, send your queries my way! I’ll even keep you anonymous if you want. Leave comments, use the contact form, sext me, come to me in a dream, however you want to do it! I’ll start answering questions here on the site.

Standard
Personal, Skincare

Brown Bunny

Like that boring porno movie.

And also like, all of a sudden, I want to tan!

It’s so unusual, and SO BAD. What am I doing? I’ve basically spent the last 20 years under an impenetrable layer of sunblock, and now I’m sprawling out, liberally oiled, under an afternoon sun.

It’s so weird.

I just want caramel thighs and cocoa bunz, maybe some sun-kissed shoulders. Doesn’t that all sound so sexual? And sort of delicious?

How did I go from being so pale I was literally sort of blue, to wanting to be a bronzed sun goddess? Not very goth, SARAH.

magda

Looking good!

I won’t fake tan because of laziness, and because I’m not sure they make a Tan Towel big enough to tan my ass. Tan Beach Towel maybe? **Note to self: TAN BEACH TOWEL? COULD BE BIG $$$?**  Plus, fake tanning doesn’t feel half as awesome as real tanning. Blanket, grass, chi, music, sunshine, NAPS?! All better than slipping a disc trying to tan the backs of my knees with can tan. Basically, the only thing fake tanning has on real tanning is, I don’t have to watch for neighbors booty peepin’ over the fence.

wilson

This guy knows what I’m talkin’ about.

So what then? Am I doomed to resign myself to a life of fish belly thighs, or do I get under that sun and keep an eye on my moles? Am I wrong and is Jason right about exactly what kind of Vitamin D deficiency I might have?

We all know it’s completely stupid to be out in the sun like that, but how do you fight the lure of that warm blanket? Why do otherwise sane people say “fuck it” to the dangers of tanning? I was just going to say I don’t want my moles to grow from the sun and take over my whole body, but then, I guess I’d at least be uniformly brown.

Standard
Maintenance, Moisturizer, Personal

I Don’t Think I Can Spare the Moisture

I’m super excited to be introducing you to my first guest writer!

We used to be small town alterna-teens at a dark riverbed, and we turned out great.

I don’t know about him, but I hardly ever go to dark riverbeds anymore… 

He always compliments me on the way I do my corn….

I think he’s awfully good….

Jono Nelson, COME ON DOWN!!!!

*****

 

I hesitate to reveal my deepest darkest secret because I know it’ll horrify the Editor-in-chief here at Lab Bunny, but I must be honest and admit my faults if I hope to grow as a writer and a person.

I don’t moisturize.

…

It’s a commonly held belief that gay men hold the key to everything beautiful, glamorous and creative. Historically we have been innovators and taste-makers. Leonardo da Vinci, Oscar Wilde and Andy Warhol were all gay men that changed the course of human evolution in innumerable ways.

While I may have possessed this key at one point, I lost it probably around the time I started buying drugs from a Mexican gangbanger that I was never allowed to talk to. Basically, I’m bad at being gay.

Sure, in my youth I was running around southern California in skin-tight designer jeans and vintage band shirts worn to hell but then shit got real. In my mid-twenties, as a survival mechanism, I was forced to get sober. The good thing about early sobriety was that I was free of drugs and booze and no longer hurting the people I loved. The bad part was I realized how much I fucking hated my life, especially my day job.

After being clean for about a year I decided to finish up my BA in journalism. The more I focused on school and other things, the less energy I had to put forth in the aesthetics department.

Cut to today: I’ve relocated from Bakersfield to Los Angeles for school and academics have taken over my life. I pretty much wear the same four band shirts on a loop. My teenage, punk rock self would be happy to report that I couldn’t pinpoint the last time I washed my only pair of jeans that fit.This isn’t necessarily what I wanted, it’s just a byproduct of trying to make my dreams come true. I would love to be shopping for vintage leather but paying the bills and getting an internship are higher on the list at the moment.

My beauty regimen has also deteriorated to almost nothing. I put on sunscreen before I go to work but that’s about it. If I’m feeling fancy or have the time and energy to spare, I might put on a squirt of Lush’s Dirty body spray or slather on one of the zillion Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab oils I own (another addiction I should go to rehab for).

It’s not that I’m against moisturizing or even that I don’t own moisturizer (I have a pot of Lush’s Cosmetic Lad staring me in the face as I type this). My main problem is that I can never seem to make it a habit. I’ll apply it every morning for a few days and then forget about it or be too busy for it and then the cycle is broken. Cthulhu help us all if I don’t make coffee every morning but I can’t seem to find an extra thirty seconds to put something on my face to make it look better.

The other problem I have with moisturizing is that my skin is insanely temperamental. I’m not talking the occasional blemish during finals week. My skin routinely breaks out when the weather changes, when I try a new product or any time I leave my apartment. This situation is understandable in your teens and maybe even early twenties but I just turned 30 and shit has gotten embarrassing. I’m always anxious that if I use the wrong moisturizer, it’ll somehow make my condition worse.

I know that I’m not getting any younger. I’m also at a slight disadvantage seeing as how I spent a decade chain smoking. I need to start moisturizing and I need to start today, otherwise I’m going to end up with patchy skin and crow’s feet six inches deep.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the genetics I cannot change, the courage to change the skin I can, and the wisdom to moisturize on the daily.

Amen.

…

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

 

(Ed. note: AMEN.)

Standard
BODY-ODY-ODY, Personal

Hair Apparent

CLAP YOUR HANDS EVERYBODY

IF YOU GOT WORKING MITTS

CUZ I’M SARAH C. AND I WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT

THESE ARE MY PITS

pits1

If you can’t tell, they’re hairy.

I don’t remember the last time I shaved them, and I have no plans to shave them in the immediate future. I wear a tank top pretty much every day.

It started by accident. I got used to the idea of letting my body hair grow in beauty school, of all places. When you wax, you need at least a 1/4″ of hair, so you can’t shave for a couple weeks. I was able to get over my embarrassment in a room full of girls with other equally hairy body parts.

The summer after beauty school, I had an epiphany while I was in between waxes; if I didn’t care about my hairy pits while I was waiting to be waxed, why was I waxing at all?

BECAUSE OF SOCIETY, RIGHT?

Because supposedly it’s mannish, radical, disgusting, dirty, unladylike, wrong for me to have underarm hair. Because someone actually told me if I loved Jason, I wouldn’t let my underarms get that way.

Am I maybe mannish, radical, disgusting, dirty, unladylike and wrong? Very possibly. I’ve been accused of being any number of those things throughout most of my life. I mean, in elementary school, I found out about Amelia Earhart and decided to start wearing an old leather fighter pilot’s helmet to school.

amelia

I had already taken to wearing a black sailor cap around, so probably nobody was surprised by my new hat.

Growing up fat, female, while dealing with depression and anxiety in a sometimes oppressively religious home, there are a lot of ways to question who you are; there are a lot of ways to feel like your body isn’t your own. The diet industry, the patriarchy, the church, everyone lays claim to your body. When you’re 13, with big boobs, and adult men catcall you, it’s your own body you blame. If you live your life desperately trying to change your body while it seems to only do what it wants, you don’t feel like you’re in charge. Hearing from puberty that your body belongs to your future husband. Knowing that just by leaving the house, I’m inviting commentary from the public. I’ve done decades worth of harm to myself mentally, physically and emotionally by letting other people tell me what to do with what’s mine.

I have super sensitive underarms. Regular deodorant+shaving gives me gross pit zits, every natural deodorant I’ve used+shaving ends up burning my skin. These issues hurt, but I shaved anyways until I had the realization that I didn’t have to do anything to my body that was painful just because it was expected. If I didn’t care about the hair, why should I keep hurting myself? For other people? Other people can suck a million.

I took some control by letting my body do what it does naturally.

This is me. This is my body. This is what it does, and it makes me happy.

pits2

It scared me more to show you guys my upper arm fat.

I can’t believe how freeing it is. It seems so stupid and small, but seizing that tiny bit of myself back from the world was exhilarating. That FUCK YOU makes me feel good every day. I start a revolution for myself every time I lift my arms over my head in public. I see people look, and it makes me feel proud and defiant. I haven’t felt so punk in years. I’ve started peace talks with myself here in my unshaven underarms. A small piece of neutral territory, where there has never been any before. My pits are Switzerland.

My body is the one thing I had when I came into this world, it’s the one thing I’ll take through my whole life, it’s mine. I share it with my husband, I share it with the world, but ultimately it belongs to me. I’m trying so hard to be beautiful on my own terms. My terms say my eyebrows are perfectly shaped, but my pits grow free. Take it or kick rocks.

mof

Here’s the picture of me they’ll use on my “Monsters of Feminism” postage stamp.

Standard