Beauty products you can eat

I just got my hair cut, and yes it's super short again. I let it grow for three months, hoping to retain some length, but no one does what I want them to. This lady cut it and it looked cute and still didn't look too short. Then she shampooed it and brought me back and let it dry. She put product in it, I liked it! Then she showed me the back but the whole time I was looking in the mirror she was chopping away at the front! Then she used the blow dryer to get the pieces off. It was starting to look short but I thought she was done. Nope, snipping away at the sides at the speed of light, she asked me what I thought of the back. More product. More snipping! By the time I was done, it was only slightly less short than the last time. I guess I won't bother waiting three months next time.

Anyway, she washed my hair with shampoo and used styling product from this new line of beauty products, John Masters Organics. The packaging is biodegradable yet stylish and the products have enticing names and delicious smells. Everything is edible and organic and produced in an environmentally friendly and human friendly way. I love the way they made my hair look and feel and they have absolutely no chemicals! For salon quality products, they're really reasonably priced and much better than Aveda, whose products I never liked and were never all natural. He makes pet products too, endorsed by PETA if you can believe it. Check out his mission statement and video.


See, if you eat chemicals, your body has an army of protections working to save you before they reaches your bloodstream. When you put products on your skin and lips and hair, the chemicals in those products soak right into your bloodstream. It's more dangerous to put chemicals ON your body than it is to put them IN your body yet the FDA has much more lenient restrictions chemicals in beauty products than they do for our food. My friend blogged about this and mentioned a company called Terressentials, which I haven't tried. Either way, not only it is much better for us to stop polluting our bodies with chemicals, when you shower those chemicals go down the drain and into our water supply passing them on for someone else to drink or shower with.

The endurance of hope

When I planned to vote yesterday, I was initially annoyed because it meant I'd have to drive to work. But when I drove up, sun shining, and saw the signs pointing me into the senior center on Capp St., I immediately became emotional. I walked in to a table of young and old women, anxiously awaiting my arrive. "Name?" one asked, "address?" said another. Beaming, I giggle at the fact that I have never failed to be filled with love and hope when walking into a polling center.

They handed me my ballot and I voted (no on everything except Obama) and ask I turned back to put it into the scanner, I wanted to hug and kiss those women for being there. For realizing how precious this democracy is. Around the country at that very moment, thousands of volunteers just like these are spending their day sitting at fold-out tables handing out democracy, making it so that our voice can be heard.

Throughout the day, my friends recounted similar stories of being unusually giddy when offed the "I voted!" sticker (in English, Spanish and Chinese). I cried all the way to work. It was a particularly beautiful day - we haven't had much sun lately - and I saw three snow white egrets in the bright green grass between the two directions of the 280 freeway. They are awkwardly beautiful creatures and they reminded me of our democracy. Voting is a bastion of beauty and purity in the cross traffic of politics, proof that these things endure. Go Obama!

No time in the present

Folks, I'm just not sure how to keep up the blog. I'm depressed about it, in part due to my feeling of responsibility to people who want to read the blog but mostly because I LOVE to blog and I'm really despondent about the fact that I don't have the time to do it. I can't figure exactly why I have no time; I feel like I have no time to exercise, read the newspaper, call friends and a multitude of other things that I used to take for granted. In a corporate environment, we put in10x more effort than what comes out in terms of product (what I can say that I actually did). So there's this feeling of always working hard, being totally consumed by a job, yet never getting my work done and at the end of the day, not having much to show for it.

On the way back from Portland on Monday morning, after spending two days with my nephews whom I love love love, I was on the plane having thoughts of wishing the plane would just crash into the ground. It started with the whole emergency exit thing which I realized is one hundred percent bullshit. Do you realize that the exit is ONLY for a water landing? And do you know the chances, when flying over the continental United States of a water landing? It's pretty much zero my friends. If you're going down, it's into a mountain or into the ground. There's no f'ing water to slide down the wing into. It's a fantasy, a false sense of hope and yet they make you listen to this shit as if it's really going to make a lick of difference.

I don't normally have suicidal thoughts and I'm not even sure that's what was happening. Maybe it's the fact that it's my birthday tomorrow and I often have very "final" thoughts around that time, like what is life all about anyway? Maybe it's because I really don't like transportation and have had to do so much in this job that I feel like I've dramatically increasing my chances of dying. I mean, by percentage flying isn't safer than driving but certainly a person who travels by plane once a week is at more risk than someone who travels once per year? I also, while looking down on the world, had thoughts about how ugly human life is from the air. (And frankly, it's pretty ugly inside the plane as well) The world without us is beautiful and awe-inspiring - mountains, lakes, clouds, the sky and stars, the ocean - but everything human made is pretty much disgustingly ugly from up above. Rooftops, roads, airports, shopping centers. None of this is designed to be looked at from above and it all looks like a blight on beauty and I start to think about what a disaster humans are...and hence start wishing that I weren't one of them, but I am.

So here I am, way past my bedtime (already!) on a Tuesday night with a pile of handwritten blog entries that haven't yet, and may never be posted on the blog because I don't have the time. And I don't know what to do about it. How do I post when I'm on the road when my "spare" time is spent flying? I'm hoping I'll get this whole time management figured out, but it's possible this is just my life for the moment.