Remember my resolution about wearing makeup and leaving the house looking like an adult? Or is that not exactly how I phrased it? At any rate, the new year is always a good opportunity to try to mesh together your vision of who you are with who you actually are. In my vision of myself, I'm a little taller, have better hair, and have no problems finding the perfect jeans. Alright, I suppose that's my fantasy of myself, not my vision!
So anyway, in my attempt to leave the house looking like the organized, responsible adult that I am, I'm trying to wear makeup. I actually don't mind wearing makeup. I dislike having to take it off. But that's not the point here. I have a lot of makeup for someone who doesn't actually wear that much of it, mostly because my mother can get it for free from Lancome.
Somehow, I have a lot of lip gloss. By "a lot" I actually mean three tubes, which isn't really all that much, except when you stop and consider that I don't like lip gloss. Not at all. I don't like how the brush never gets all the way to the bottom of the container, so you've always got product you can't use. I don't like how sticky it is. I don't like that my hair is always getting caught in it. Even though I live in Southern California, I don't plump my lips, so lip gloss manages to get stuck in all the fine lip wrinkles I have (look closely, you have them, too). I don't like how it doesn't go on evenly. I just don't like lip gloss.
However, I also don't like wasting stuff. Even stuff I don't like. (I know, I really need to get over this.) As sort of a humorous wedding gift, someone gave us a random combination of "sexy" things, including a CD of romantic songs, some warming lotion, and glitter lip gloss. (First, I would suggest that this is really not an appropriate wedding gift--it felt more like a goody bag from a bachelorette party, and secondly, Captain America and I didn't really know what to make of it--this wasn't someone close enough to us to know about our sexual habits, and how do you write a thank you card for this? It was just weird.) Anyway, so I have this perfectly good glitter lip gloss, except that I don't like lip gloss, and the glitter is really big--almost like confetti, so you can really feel it on your lips. And when I wear it, I feel like I must look about 14. I'm not saying adults can't wear glitter. I have sequined shirts, and glitter eye shadow, and I currently have a few pieces of tinsel tied into my hair. But there's something about this glitter lip gloss that just seems really immature. Which is totally the image I'm trying to project when I leave the house.
(I tried to find an image of my lip gloss on google, but apparently it's so horrendous that I couldn't even find anything that came close. So then I thought I'd just take a picture of it on my lips. But I haven't showered from the gym yet, so a whole-face pic is out of the question, and all of the ones I took of just my lips are a little scary. You're just going to have to trust me that this lip gloss is a terrible idea. Unless you're seven.)
So I've decided to get rid of it. Clearly, I have very few problems if this is such a momentous decision on my part. At the same time, I decided to get rid of all of the other perfectly good, but not useful to me, junk that had been taking up residence in my makeup bag. Like pink blush. I'm a pinkish person to begin with, and inevitably, if I wear pink blush, I look like an Asian who's had 4 glasses of wine. Again, not exactly the image I'm looking to project when I leave the house.
Meanwhile, in another part of my life, I expensed some Tazo Joy tea. It's a nice little black tea that's only sold at Christmas. So, naturally, I bought three boxes. And by boxes, I really mean tins. Which is fantastic because I was able to put all of my eye shadows into one tin, and that way I don't have to dig them all out of my makeup bag to find my mascara. I really like eyeshadow. It's fun to play with.
And this got me to thinking. I'm of the opinion that if you want to get organized, you probably own all of the tools you need, mostly because if you have enough stuff that it needs to be organized, probably somewhere in that stuff you have things that can be used to organize said stuff. This is especially helpful if you want to get organized AND stick to a budget. This is not helpful if you want every document stored in a pristinely labeled file that's been color coded, but if you have time to keep track of that sort of thing, you should really volunteer to do something useful or something.
So, in my medicine cabinet, I have a few little things that just don't stand very well, and are constantly falling out...like my chapstick (I do like chapstick. A lot.), my eye cream, etc. I figured that I had to own some sort of small container I could put these things in so that they'd stop falling out of the cabinet. My first thought was our salad-dressing-sized Tupperware containers. But then what would I do with the lid? I periodically go through our Tupperware and throw out everything for which I can't find the corresponding top or bottom. I didn't really want to do this because the salad-dressing sized containers are really useful.
But then I remembered that we received, as part of the Christmas white elephants that we did with Captain America's family, a little Japanese tea set. It's brown and adorable and I love tea. But I drink tea in big mugs. Not shot glasses. So I put this set in the dining room, figuring we'd use it eventually...like when our friend E comes to visit and needs to play tea-time.
So, I decided to use one of the tea cups in my medicine cabinet. The result was a success! I found a way to organize some things without having to buy something new, and I did it in a way that didn't annoy my husband (which is always a potential side effect of me rearranging things). Ta-da!
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