no boys allowed in the room!!!!

I have...a couple of friends who are nice-face all the time, because they are SO controlled w themselves, and v private people. It's difficult not to be neurotic about how they perceive me because I'm sure I'm never getting anything unfiltered from them. As long as they keep calling me to hang out or w/e I can only figure that they probably like me? But there's some internal algebra where I have to decide that the stress of never knowing where I REALLY stand w them is worth it to have their friendship.

If that math doesn't work out, though...it would kinda be over.

I think a lot of times people think that I am putting on a nice face when really, that is just my face. I don't hate people, for the most part. They can be exasperating, but most of the time I just find them kind of weird and interesting. Talking to someone I don't like (I do this a lot at work, like most people) is an opportunity to study that person, which makes it more interesting/easier for me emotionally.

I've never thought of this as lying at all. Lying is false enthusiasm and "I love your belt" (when it means "Look at that hideous belt")

i do this nice-face thing, i think. or at any rate i am often described as "nice" by people who i am acquainted with. i'm not saying it's not worth examining, but i think part of the reason i do it is to keep people at a distance until i'm sure i don't want to keep them at a distance.

i meant, people i'm acquainted with as opposed to friends.

I think a lot of times people think that I am putting on a nice face when really, that is just my face.

This too a little bit for me, tbh.

I have had to do this a lot with people I actively disliked at previous jobs but that was mostly when I was waitressing and/or bartending and was it was largely awful.

I think I'm pretty lucky in that my current and last several jobs have been in really women-friendly environments so that it's not something I generally encounter at work on a regular basis. I don't know how I'd react if it was tbh.

I don't know that I feel this way most of the time b/c things aren't "woman-friendly", most of the time I'm just bored with the people and with whatever I have to pretend to be doing, and I feel disagreeable, and the person I'm talking to doesn't really want to know me, they don't want to know what I think and they wouldn't like it anyway, so it's better to make what I feel like is the "real" Laurel very small inside and not let her out.

I'm so sad that this is one of the threads that I can't get to stay bookmarked…

I had no idea about low pH vaginal discharge (as in, this doesn't happen to me and I did not know it happened to others). That is amazing.

Oh but menstrual stain pro tip - take your jocks (<3) into the shower with you. Throw them on the floor while you do your thing, then wash out the stain with soap before you get out. Cheap and easy.

Also you to throw out a plug for cloth panty liners.

I think a lot of times people think that I am putting on a nice face when really, that is just my face. I don't hate people, for the most part. They can be exasperating, but most of the time I just find them kind of weird and interesting.

i am a bit similar - i find it hard to hate people, and i am in general 'nice'. but i think for me nice-face is mostly just what's less exhausting than the alternative. for me, engaging with someone means giving something of myself away. If they're someone i like, fine, but if it's someone who annoys me who i don't have any investment in then giving them more than politeness, even if it's anger, is draining and wasteful.

Relevant to our interests?

http://d3j5vwomefv46c.cloudfront.net/photos/full/516667215.jpg?Expires=1329236697&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIYVGSUJFNRFZBBTA&Signature=bUOzhtys8-db-VJm8gaW1xW484IqtClw9K5lqsmBX9vlocdq10sMr4qrDxT-s~F0o6pnVghHAlZD1N7qFVkA3fK1NyFO6dpcE0sH9cK1dQXAYs8IqthTAXu0oMU9-mLGipx9CUrETBO-4DSns-4chcoK38HnqlKK6HEJ~f8nuG4_

(I'm not sure if this will display properly, sorry if it doesn't)

That's by Kate Beaton, by the way.

<3 kate beaton <3

xps because i am slow.

willfully ignore some things that might bother others more because I'd find the alternative too trying.

i do this a lot but then i'm bothered by it later. a lot of the time i just don't have enough time to process what's bothering me so i do a default nice-face. and then when i've thought about things, i get really irritated.

i wish i could be quicker to react to things. (and then decide whether or not to keep my reaction to myself!)

but interacting with people can be really exhausting.

my family comes to mind with a lot of this.

<i>take your jocks (<3) into the shower with you. Throw them on the floor while you do your thing, then wash out the stain with soap before you get out.</i>

but hot water could set the stain! i always wash blood in cold water.

my family comes to mind with a lot of this

ha. yes.

yeah, i'm with Julia, cold water and soap (and what the hairpin's clean person described as 'fabric frottage')

my family are also the ppl who tell me i'm overreacting EVERY TIME i try to assert myself about something i find incredibly offensive. arrrgh.

i am trying to hone my abrupt-subject-changing skillz in the hopes of avoiding some of this.

xp re Kate Beaton - Oh god, I saw that on twitter and was just like YES.

The shower water isn't hot enough to set the stain, plus you're using soap to wash it out right away so there's not enough time for it to set.

I guess if you take boiling 1 hour showers this might not work.

Or maybe I have unusually soluble menstrual blood.

This is like that time that I washed my bra by wearing it in the shower. Really I'm all for all forms of this kind of thing.

Now that's just silly.

jocks could be my new favorite word
at least for today

carl agatha, i had that bookmark problem when i first signed up for ilx and again on the sandbox -- both times i deleted all my bookmarks and then previously unbookmarkable threads were bookmarkable. maybe i signed in and out also, i can't remember.

I discovered this by accident when i got zing and all my bookmarks disappeared, and suddenly i was able to bookmark things i wasn't able to

(this might be a problem if you've got a gajillion bookmarks)

on topic, i once had to go commando b/c i forgot to bring an extra pair to the gym, and felt very uncomfortable! but more psychological i think than physical discomfort

Kate Beaton is not displaying for me ;_;

I guess like "naturally chipper" vs "nice-face" is one of those things I find v v hard to read, or maybe it's hard for me to tell the difference between ppl who are genuinely lovely, ppl who do it as a distancing technique and ppl who did it as a policy and only years later you figure out they didn't like you v much.

Perhaps it's difficult for me to grok bcuz I'm not naturally a sunny disposition, I want to blame "ooh moody Celtic blood" etc but that's hard to tell bcuz I have just come out of spending 3 years in such an awful situation I forgot the capability to be pleasant? And I'm feeling like I'm in a depressurisation zone right now trying to figure out who I am again so who knows who I am.But I've always been manic or depressed, seldom nice.

But y'know, like I said, it's something I'm trying to work on, not being so suspicious.

Then again, I don't find "the alternative" that exhausting. If someone pisses me off, I blow up at them, they go away, I don't have to deal with them, and I return to happy v quickly! Problem solved! :-D

This works less well in long-term situations, mind.

xp I don't know of I've done enough troubleshooting re the bookmarks yet and I certainly haven't asked for help or researched it so I don't know. I keep hoping it will just fix itself.

Oddly enough, I don't feel pressured to act nice when I don't feel nice. Don't know whether that's because I generally am nice (I am pretty personable and I generally like interacting with people) or am in a profession where bitch face is a perk, or maybe nobody expects govt employees to be pleasant so nobody cares when I'm surly.

Or yeah, like WCC, I'm comfortable being straightforward about when I am not feeling nice.

I got a lunch hour manicure because my cuticles, especially around the top of my nails, gets all dried out and jerky-like in the winter and, you know, blood red nails = funtimes, and tonight I'm getting my hair cut/colored and I'm feeling very... maintained right about now, and not entirely in a good way.

I meant to say that my practical manicure reasons are to get all the dry skin snipped away from my fingers, and the fun reason is to have my nails painted blood red.

One of the nice things about having nail, hair, facial, etc appts close together is that you can stop thinking about all those things at once for another 2-8 weeks.

In a way it's like going to all the kinds of doctor for check-ups in the same week.

I got a lunch hour manicure because my cuticles, especially around the top of my nails, gets all dried out and jerky-like in the winter

Mine too, it sucks.

I have a tub of Military Strength Cuticle Cream and badass hand lotion (I actually asked the lady at Sephora, "Which is your most badass hand lotion?") on my desk and apply both after I return to my desk from the bathroom every time and still. Jerky fingers is me.

I can already tell the polish part of this manicure isn't going to last more than a couple of days, much less two weeks, but that's okay.

I type all day at work and I readily admit that I like seeing my painted fingernails flying over my keyboard.

Me too Jenny, me too. I have cuticle oil, handcream, the works! Still, my annoying cuticles persist. The girls always tsk or make faces when I come in because there's so much to snip. lol.

I have silver glitter nails right now and watching them type is pretty mesmerizing. Gonna switch it up at home tonight though because I think all 10 digits done up in glitter is a little too much bling for me.

I'm curious about the bad-ass hand lotion. What did they recommend?

Also, what's a good cuticle oil?

Caudalie is the hand lotion. It's pretty standard high end hand cream and doesn't smell ridiculous so I like it.

I guess it has some grape-related bullshit in it. The sales person pitched it as being invented by a woman who owned a vineyard after she noticed how soft the hands of her farm laborers were and I was like… that is highly unlikely and also makes you sound like a shithead.

unless it's some sort of "All that Heaven Allows" kinda noticing

ugh, post before thinking, prob. D.H. Lawrence is a better reference

I wouldn't have gotten either one, so.

the lady of the house getting it on with "a hired man"

I don't dislike shopping, AT ALL, but I hate getting dressed and walking to the train and spending 1 hour on the subway just go to a store or 3 which will be crowded with people who I'll have to jostle/avoid jostling in order to fake myself out with some kind of "pleasant" or even "luxurious" shopping experience ie buying nicer things than I normally would. Like the wear and tear of the trip takes all the fun out of having fancy lotion or a scented candle.

I'm going to start ordering every single thing in my life on the internet,e even, like, potted plants.

xp - there was an awesome lifetime movie about that starring the extremely blank david charvet and the woman who played andrea on 90210

I love so many things about New York but I'm really getting to a place where other people make leaving the house just not worth it. I wonder if that would be lessened or resolved if I were willing to pay $400 a month more to live in a nabe with walkable luxuries.

xp Ahhhh, got it.

I don't know. Maybe it was the Sephora environment or the overly made up woman relating the tale, but I got a Elizabeth Bathory Blood Countess vibe of knowing. Like the original formulation of the hand cream might have been made from the actual hands of the farm laborers.

Laurel, I spent some time this weekend wrestling with whether it would be easier to order a large lingerie bag from Amazon or take one (1) bus to Bed Bath and Beyond to buy one.

I really want a "string of pearls" succulent plant for a hanging pot in my window, but the amazon.com shipping is like $10 for a $10 plant, and I think, that's ridiculous, surely I can buy one somewhere in this city? but the trip is always going to be an hour each way and fuck it, I just can't.

Do you drive? Can you get a car share and stack a bunch of errands at once? That's usually what we do for that kind of stuff.

I don't have a license anymore, and I haven't done all the background work necessary to get one. There's a driving test in NY state, which is inconvenient at best if you don't have a car to take the test in.

I should go waaaaaay out in Queens or something where there are no city streets or lots of traffic and go to a DMV there.

(Note: I seemed to have fixed the bookmarks issue and here is how! I deleted all of my bookmarks. I logged out and deleted the cookie. I cleared my browser cache. I logged back in and bookmarks magically worked. *THE HUGEST OF SHRUGS*)

Having a job that required me to be friendly to some pretty horrible people (not the clients so much, but their relatives) really, really fucked me up. I'm hoping that I can get a job that doesn't make me deal with the public, but there aren't many or any of those in the entry level category.

"Ruffle butt pants" are really called rhumba pants, BTW.

Today I had the first bout of menstrual pain that I can remember having. I wonder why I'm getting this now, for the first time in decades if not ever.

whoa string of pearls is RAD
succulents are such fabulous squishy space fractals

I love hens and chicks.

I was thinking about getting an African violet.
I was also thinking, with my budget, I need to quit buying frivolities.

I grew up with loads of houseplants all over the place, plants lining every windowsill and hanging from every ceiling.