Make up box

Well this is my new makeup box which obviously I love. 

Nail Files

When you are an obsessive nail biter, there's a fun thing that happens called a nail file emergency. Monday on the way to the gym, I had one. I stopped at Walgreens then found myself sitting on a stationary bike with blood red nails filing like mad. Obviously this fits my very stylish and extremely  extra persona. 

But the best part is that once I was done filing my nails down to nonexistence, a sixty some odd year old guy came up to me and said "Can I borrow your nail file?" And I thought he was kidding (Obviously) but he said that he had a nail that kept catching on his gym shorts and he was serious. So basically my obsessive compulsiveness saved this guy's workout. You could probably say that I'm a hero. 

Pretty Girl

In 2002 when things were really stressful with dating (for example, I had to talk to a guy), I would listen to this song on repeat :

http://youtu.be/P0neh4spY8g

The song actually had nothing to do with anything related to my life, but it was early in the Millennium and everything was very EMO. 

Little did I know that 16 years later I would be listening to this song on repeat again when distressed about dating. Again it has nothing to do with what's happening in my life, but if there's one thing I have learned over the years it is that if I need to process some EMOTIONS, music from high school is one of the most effective ways to do it. Please remember that the height of Dashboard Confessional awesomeness was in my high school years, so the emotionally raw material is multitudinous. 

Needless to say as I got really for yoga, drove from yoga to guitar lessons, got ready for my massage etc, I have been listening to Pretty Girl on repeat. The song has been at the back of my mind because that's often what I call Gracie, pretty girl. "Hey pretty girl," soon turned into "Hey...pretty girl is suffer while he confesses everything." And then I remembered that listening to songs on repeat is top five ways to cope with difficult emotions. I had already done yoga guitar and diet coke, so it was the only thing left to do before a nap. A nap that I'll have you know I am about to take. As in, I'm typing this in bed. Which is a big fat Lent failure as my goal was not to use my phone in bed until Easter. So now that I've failed at that and begun to emotionally processed my distress, I will be headed for a nap. Like resetting a computer and feeling much better upon awakening. 

Guitar Lessons

I'm taking guitar lessons again. It's a thing that I do on and off sometimes. My guitar teacher Larry is in his 60's and is a super cool rocker who is also a clean shaven BYU professor. He's fantastic. The thing that has been really great about him is the way that he teaches by starting with the basics. That might seems like an obvious thing to do, but let me explain. Previous teachers have had me show them what I know and taught me from there. Larry did that. Then he had me start and the beginning and go through each lesson from there. Last lesson I went in telling him how I really srtruggled with tablature. I can read it but it doesn't really make sense to me-I can't process it in a way my brain understands. And he flipped to the tab page in my book. Then he went back about 20 pages to the part where you learn to play notes from the musical staff (is that what it's called? like treble and bass clef piano notes). I can play basic piano and he is teaching me literally all of the musical staff (scale?) on the guitar. 1-2 strings at a time and only in 1st position. He told me to play it for 10-12 minutes a day and that's it. Then I can work on whatever songs I'm working on for fun. 

There's something about that. Start with the basics. Go through them again. Then learn new things a little bit at a time. Practice them enough that they stick with you. Then play something fun. This is exactly the way I want to live my life.