A Lush Life
For those of you who don't already know, I am completely and utterly obsessed with a fresh handmade cosmetics store called Lush. So much so that I am starting to be recognized and considered a regular by store employees, and have had a few friends and family members express concerns over how much I talk about the store. Lush's manifesto is as follows:"We believe in making effective products out of fresh organic fruits and vegetables, the finest essential oils and safe synthetics, without animal ingredients.
We also believe words like 'fresh' and 'organic' have honest meaning beyond marketing.
We believe in long candlelight baths, massage, filling the house with perfume and in the right to make mistakes, lose everything and start again."
I've used pretty much one of every type of product they have. Right now I am using the following: - Sonic Death Monkey: This shower gel makes your hair and body feel soft; it's scented with chocolate orange and tones you up with fresh lime, Caribbean coffee and herbal tea.
- Banana Moon Soap: Our banana soap has lots of fresh bananas in it; we mash them up, mix them with yoghurt, soap flakes and essential oils and make a truly bananafied, moisturizing soap that smells of bananas because it's full of them.
- Sympathy for the Skin: Sympathy for the Skin is a body lotion with loads of moisturizing almond oil, cocoa butter and fresh, organic bananas and an infusion of vanilla pods.
- Honey Trap Lip Balm: Honey Trap is a gorgeously tasty, white chocolate balm, sent to tease your lips into a soft, sensual state, capable of seducing anyone they touch. Our Honey Trap hides secrets like nutritious wheatgerm oil and soothing oatmilk infusion behind its honey and wild orange flavour.
- Big Shampoo: This shampoo takes ten (or maybe twenty) years off your hair. Sea salt, seaweed, lemon and limes juices and coconut oil. But they have to be in the right order. The effect is not temporary; you hair just gets better and better.
- King of Skin: This unassuming bar is made to a patented Lush recipe with emollient, fresh bananas, oatmeal, avocados, moisturising cocoa butter, shea butter, almond oil and coconut butter. The fragrance is gorgeous, composed as it is of a bunch of skin softening essential oils including sandalwood, rose and frankincense.
- Aquamarina: Aquamarina is pink and squidgy face wash, wrapped in seaweed, rolled up like a big pink sausage. Your skin feels smooth and smells sweet and looks lovely, as it's made with a lot of calamine and Aloe Vera it's good for soothing irritated faces; use it if you've caught the sun.
- Breath of Fresh Air: This skin toner has rejuvenating rosemary, nutritious seaweed absolute and skin softening rose to make it the essential skin revitaliser for anyone trapped inside an air conditioned environment.
- Ultralight Moisturizer: A light textured moisturising day cream made with two types of fresh Pacific seaweed and loaded with vitamins, minerals and St John's Wort to produce extremely softening, moisturising properties. Ultralight offers softening protection when the skin is exposed to sunshine or cold weather.
- Smitten Hand Cream: A light, daytime hand cream scented with the same deliciously mouth-watering fragrance as Snowcake soap. Made with natural oils and butters for a longer term benefit for your mits.
See, I told you I'm obsessed.I absolutely love this stuff, the products work so amazingly well that you'll soon become as addicted am I am. So go out and Lushfy your life, or Lushfy the lives of someone you love.Better yet, buy me some Lush stuff - and I swear I will love you forever and ever and ever :)
Eugoogalizer
I've just finished writing and reviewing a big research proposal that's due tomorrow. The title I gave it is "cAMP response element binding protein mediated reconsolidation of spatial memory in the hippocampus". Even I'm not sure I understand it, heh.
For the Masters psych theory class, all 17 of us have to write an NSERC style research proposal for an experiment that we would like to conduct, assuming we had all the resources possible open to us. After we submit them, we then become our own selection committee: with groups of us rating eachothers anonymous proposals, and deciding whether or not we would fund them.
We even had to write a pretend one-year budget. I had absolutely no idea what research projects normally cost, I've only been a lowly experimenter, never the primary investigator. For my undergrad thesis I used the morris water maze, which I decided to include again in this proposal. I emailed my undergrad supervisor, and she faxed me the price quote for the water maze. Holy bagoly. It costs upwards of 14,000$. I shat myself, secrelty remembering those days when I was so frustrated and tired of running the water maze that I would give the tank a few swift kicks.
On a more pleasant note, I watched one of my favourite movies earlier: Zoolander. I cannot explain the depths of my love for this movie. Here are some of my favourite quotes:
- "You know, a eugoogalizer, one who speaks at funerals. Or did you think I was too stupid to know what a eugoogaly was?"
- "You think that you're too cool for school, but I have a newsflash for you Walter Cronkite... you aren't."
- "I deserve to die if I can't beat Han-suckass at a walk-off!"
- "Have you ever wondered if there was more to life, other than being really, really, ridiculously good looking?"
- "Who cares about Derek Zoolander anyway? The man has only one look for Christ's sake! Blue Steel? Ferrari? Le Tigre? They're the same face! Doesn't anybody notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!"
- "There was a moment last night, when she was sandwiched between the two Finnish dwarves and the Maori tribesmen, where I thought, "Wow, I could really spend the rest of my life with this woman"."
- "What is this? A center for ants? How can we be expected to teach children to learn how to read if they can't even fit inside the building? The building has to be at least... three times bigger than this!"
- "Just because we have chiseled abs and stunning features, it doesn't mean that we too can't not die in a freak gasoline fight accident."
- "Whoa, whoa, easy! How 'bout a "Good afternoon, Derek and Hansel. Thanks for the freak fest last night.""
ahhh, good times!
The Classics
I meant to post about my crazy fun New Years experience, but with school starting up again, the will got lost in the depressing daily grind of getting back into the routine.These 4 simple words and this lovely picture can sum up the night rather nicely: skanks have more fun. 
There was some champagne, lots of dancing, an open bar, more dancing, a buffet, more dancing, a stumble home on bruised feet, very little sleeping, and some pronounced hangovers. Good times.
Aside from New Years, there are also two more incidents which prompted me to finally get around to posting.Firstly: I love the runner's high. I had my first aerobics class today since the end of November. I thought it would kick my ass, and I wasn't sure how my knee was going to hold up. Knee was fine, and I kicked that class' ass! It was awesome. I hadn't exercised that vigorously in a while, and it felt spectacular afterwards. I essentially skipped all the way home, and danced to the radio while showering. I could feel all the serotonin and epinephrine floating around in my brain, it was delicious. Whoo for exercise!Secondly: I work in a Neurological Institute, it's where my lab is and where I conduct my research. It's also a Neurological Hospital, so there are neurological patients who are residents there. I went into one of the bathrooms today, only to find a sign posted on the wall above the toilet. It said the following: "Il est defendu de se masturber ici".
For those of you who don't speak French, this means "It is forbidden to masturbate here".
Classic.
