MNY Mini Make-up Haul

While strolling aimlessly in Limketkai (in Cagayan de Oro) two weekends ago, I accidentally found my new favorite lipstick.

Maybelline Colour Sensations Lipstick in Chestnut
In the background, my favorite mascara:
Maybelline Magnum Volum Express which was
also on sale. Hooray.

I am a bit of a lipstick junkie. I just threw out some of the older ones last December but I still have fifteen tubes. Not counting the lip gloss.

The shade is perfect for daily wear (not too pink, not too brown) and so is the 200 peso price tag! Even if I consume a tube every three months I won't go broke. :P

Barely there make-up.
Covergirl mineral powder
Maybelline Magnum Volum Express mascara
Maybelline Lipstick in Chestnut
Revlon Powder Blush in Smoky Rose

Sick of my face? Don't continue. You've been warned. ;)

Bloggeroid

I got my first Android phone last Wednesday. Haha it's a Samsung Galaxy Y but I really can't complain because I just got it from SUN loyalty rewards for my two year old plan 350.
Hrhrhr. :-)

My only real gripe is the camera, it's atrocious! Haha, my phone photos are in my Lightbox Page and they've been heavily edited with pixlr-o-matic and the lightbox app to make them halfway decent.

Anyway since i'm in CDO right now without my laptop (because of my delusions that I can study on vacation), I'm blogging with Bloggeroid which is the lightest Blogger app compatible with my phone. If this works, I'll be blogging more from my phone because Swype is actually easier than typing on my laptop. There was a steep learning curve but now I think it is the bomb! It just has a problem with my imbento words and extra vowels when i'm excited. Lol.

See? I think I just got carried away with my test post. ;-)

posted from Bloggeroid

Impulse Control

My friends know that I have problems with impulse control, especially when it comes to two things: shopping, and reading. Oh okay, three things -- eating too.

I struggle the most when it comes to book shopping and reading. When I see an interesting book, I'll  feel an irresistible urge to buy it; when I buy a book, I'll feel an uncontrollable desire to read it, and when I start reading a book I need to finish it and cannot stop.

The past months, I have consciously avoided going into book stores and buying books because I know I should be studying for the biggest (and longest) exam of my life. But whenever I see a book store, especially a book thriftstore, I am drawn in and I am powerless to resist. For the most part I still can't stop myself from buying books, but so far I have been very good about not reading them. Yay, trust me, it isn't easy!

Today I faced another challenge. While walking along Padre Faura I saw a guy hawking novels on the sidewalk. Oh wow. Haruki Murakami. Chuck Palahniuk. Kazuo Ishiguro. David Sedaris. Looked good as new and for less than two hundred bucks each. I immediately opened my bag to take out my wallet, but the little voice inside my head started muttering things I knew to be true:

1. If you buy any of those books, you WILL NOT be able to resist taking a peek.
2. When you take a peek, you WILL NOT be able to put it down.
3. If you finish one novel, you will start thinking, "oh wow how i missed reading!" and you WILL pick up another book, saying you read fast anyway and it will take you 3 hours max.
4. Once you get on a roll, you WILL NOT be able to stop and you will end up reading all those 20-ish novels stacked on your desk and you will not be able to study and you will faillllll.

Ooh scary conscience. Good job.

I walked away from cheap Murakamis, which, at any other moment in my life would be unforgivable, but for today I think gets me a clap in the back. :D

I just hope I'll see Mister-Sidewalk-Novel-Hawker again. Next time, ubos paninda nya.

Photoblog: The Board Review Chronicles

Because nothing interesting is happening in my life right now, and my brain is too exhausted to come up with anything creative, witty, funny or touching. All I can manage is sarcasm and that has no place in this blog, because I once swore that this would remain a place exclusively for rainbows and unicorns and other glittery sh..things. Lol.

My favorite pen right now. Because it writes well, and just seeing
 "Phi Lambda Delta" on my pen makes me feel warm inside. :)

Yesterday's dinner. Turkey and Chicken with Apple Stuffing on
Whole Wheat and Walnut. Not so good.

I was in such a rush to leave the house that I forgot my First Aid!
Say hello to my emergency Booksale purchase, 250php. :P

Trips to the bookstore always make me feel better. :)
Almost bought more highlighters and post-its but I already have
a buttload of those and I really don't use them anymore. I also have
too many pens and a new box of Mongol #2s. Hence, an eraser.

Iced Green Tea Latte because I needed a morale boost.
 Matcha is love. ♥

Totally unrelated to my studying "adventures"
but these were really pretty. :)

Aah neurons please don't die just yet. Stay with me until February!!! Also please allow me to write in coherent paragraphs soon because I still have to do that magazine article about the health benefits of {guess what activity} hahaha! 

Starbucks Smores and Other Failures

My friend R told me to be careful of calories now that I'm always at Starbucks again. So today I decided to get iced tea instead of the peppermint mocha which is essentially one shot of espresso plus milk and sugar and whipped cream. Hehehe.

But the line was long so I found myself standing a long time in front of the pastry display. 

For some reason I came to the conclusion that I was entitled to a pastry since the tea was only 95 bucks (versus a grande mocha which was 165 pesos). So I got their smores which looked more like a tart than well, smores, because I am a girl and the gold stars got to me. Darn you hormones! Hehehe. Total bill: 165!

It was only when I got to my table that I realized my reason for not getting a mocha was not really the price but the calories HAHAHA and now I have a pastry greaaaaat.

Apparently, gold stars are the key to my heart. Maybe I didn't get
enough gold stars when I was in kindergarten hahaha.

These two cost just as much as a grande red cup! I tell ya the
red cup beverages are gold!

I still say it was a TART not smores. It wasn't even that good too. Nakakaumay. (How do you say that in english?) I'd only buy that again if there were four or five of us sharing, because I can only handle one bite. :/

Anyway, operation expensive coffee was a failure today (maybe because I didn't actually buy coffee LOL). I had to leave early due to um, bathroom needs. Hahaha. And my laptop is back from repair (the hinge broke) so I don't know how I'm supposed to study now. I can't stop rewatching Hart of Dixie episodes because Rachel Bilson is a sweetheart even if she dresses all wrong for a medical practice and Wilson Bethel as a hot hot hot bad boy with a sensitive streak is irresistible. :D

Sorry if I'm blogging about Starbucks and TV shows again, there is simply nothing else going on in my life right now. What a sad sad life hahaha. Tomorrow I'll be in Banchetto for that thing with the lanterns maybe something interesting will happen then. Like I make a wish "please give me a hot guy" and then a hot guy actually comes up to me to say hello! HAHAHA, I really feel ditzy at the moment I am so sorreh.

Small Victories

1. Sleeping pattern back to normal. I get sleepy around midnight and wake up at 7! Exhaustion is the solution to insomnia pala hehehe. Last night I was woken up by a dream at 4AM though. Pft. 
2. Steady progress studying. I think it's the expensive coffee effect kicking in. HAHAHA.
3. My planner-i-do-not-actually-want progress, 2/17
4. In the self-control department, I can actually pass by the mall without buying anything now. YES. I can say no to clothes, books and food. Achievement! And, savingggs! (The coffees don't count, they're subsidized by the parents because they're for studying. Hahaha.)
5. My pants fit again. (They no longer did a few months after graduation. Which is why I've been wearing shorts and dresses only for the past few months LOL.)
6. Managed to reserve tickets for the Ultimate Taste Test 7.0 for myself and my friends yahoo patay gutom mode!
7. I apparently have excellent form and graceful moves in zumba. Yehes. Thank you Phi (my med sorority) for teaching me how to dance hahaha!

Lists are the laziest. And this list looks like it's written by a crazy person haha. I'm really tired tonight! Mentally and physically! 

But I'm the happy kind of tired. These small victories are  the things that keep me going. :)

Motivation

It is so hard to study alone. Bow.

Seriously, in my 7 years of Intarmed (a medicine program straight from high school in UP) I have never studied alone. This is a challenge for me, and one with very serious consequences! 

So I went to Starbucks, because I have come to realize that my productivity is directly proportional to the price of my coffee. LOL. It's like my subconscious is pushing me to read more pages to get my money's worth. Bwahaha.

It didn't hurt that the red cups are back. I love peppermint mocha! Enough not to think about the 165 pesos I spent for a grande cup. Hahaha it's like drinking GOLD!

Peppermint mocha.
I missed you so. <3

Anyhoo, studying in Starbucks Calamba (aka Jejebucks) was pleasant enough. Noisier than Starbucks Adri/ UN Av/ Valero where the usual crowd is law + med students, but a lot quieter than my favorite local coffee shop which unfortunately for me, is also the favorite hangout of college kids from UPLB (wow I really feel old, I call college students KIDS hahaha). 

My Starbucks days have started again, and I think getting that planner will be a breeze this year. SEVENTEEN ONLY? Hahaha! Too bad I've got my eyes set on another planner, maybe I'll just give it away as a gift. :D

--

Today I also learned going to a coffee shop alone = boys. Hehehe. Kaya lang, COLLEGE DUDES. Mga tsong, may gatas pa kayo sa labi! But fine, better than the old foreigners in Figaro. HAHAHA.

AAAAAAAH!

I swear I will never lose weight while living in this house no matter how many times I go to Zumba class. There's just way too much food. Too much TEMPTING food!

Especially now that we just got back from Cagayan de Oro (and my dad went on succeeding trips to Iloilo and Davao before that) we have too many delicacies either given by relatives or bought for pasalubong but ended up on our table anyway! Hahaha.

On our table, at this very moment, we have mango biscocho made by Trappists (monks) in Guimaras which I swear are super yummy, piaya, otap, pastel, digestives with milk chocolate from Marks and Spencer, chocolate slices from red ribbon, muffins from Goldilocks and cookies from my aunt. All of them are open and tempting me to eat them!!! In our fridge we have mint kitkats and chocolate mint patties, a fact I am ALWAYS aware of even if I can't see them. Earlier today we also had a plateful of ham from Cagayan de Oro which I tell you tastes like bacon, crabs and jumbo prawns, all of which are gone now. Hahaha.

I KNOW RIGHT! Intense. I have to lock myself in my room so I won't eat hahaha FML.

Anyway just a short crazy post because all this controlling my urges to eat is driving me nuts! Nakakainis my dad's entire family is super thin even when they eat like there's no tomorrow all the time, and I happened to get my mom's genes when it comes to metabolism. If you place me side by side with my cousins from my dad's side I am fat, when you place me side by side with my cousins on my mom's side HAHAHA I am sexayyyy!

Excited About Star Wars.

My current project is a Star Wars-themed party and movie marathon for my friends after they finish their surgery pre-residency. But this is a totally selfish project because I am a closet geek and a Star Wars lover and I don't really understand my friends who say it's overrated. Blasphemy! When I have a son I will name him Luke and the greatest disappointment of my life will be not being able to say "Luke I am your faaatherrr." Sucks.

What can you buy with a hundred bucks?

Not much, probably.

But in a second-hand bookstore in a small town, it's worth a few interesting finds. :)

TV Woes

People are too affected by what's happening on TV.

I open my Twitter and Dimples Romana and Ryan Bang are trending topics (read about the controversy here). Everyone has an opinion about it! Why is the network allowing it to happen, what she did was admirable, why did he have to cry on television etc. 

Ryan Bang. I just met him today courtesy of Twitter.

The network wars seem to extend to the fan bases. My blockmates once had intense debate about Kapuso (GMA 7) vs Kapamilya (ABS-CBN). Yes, this happens even in the top medical school in the country. 

A usual dinner topic for my mom and dad is primetime TV and how this character is so naive, how this plot dragging on too long, why everyone gets amnesia or catatonia! I used to participate in these discussions until I realized I had a better solution. I stopped watching.

So come on people, get a life.

Says the girl who cried when Numb3rs had their finale. And who still watches Casey-Cappie videos on YouTube! Haha. 

Things I Love Thursdays: Forms on Google Docs, Game of Nerds and Picnik!

Current Distractions: Pottermore, Tiki Towers and Chelsea Handler

Weapons of Mass Distraction.

The Ultimate Sign

OF BOREDOM!

Shifting in from one surgery subspecialty to another gave us a surprise gift of a postduty day followed by another postduty day by technicality, followed by a preduty Sunday which comes to a total of 3 free halfdays in a row. (Follow the math kids follow the math.) Hurray, I think would be the word to say, except the only sound fitting to describe the past 3 days would be a sleepy HNNNNGH.

My plans of "making a night" of every night seem to have failed with a resounding KAPUT. Ambisyosa kasi masyado. Haha.

What a waste of words. I bore even myself. HNNNNGH.

Weekend

I'm getting used to OB time so this morning I woke up at six, remembered it was a weekend, and went back to sleep. Which I think is the best thing about weekends. I get tremendous satisfaction from thumping my alarm clock and going back under the covers hehe. Most of the day I've been in bed, shuffling between reading The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (it's a children's book, i'm still stuck in nostalgia) and going through my reading list on GoogleReader with my playlist of oldish songs in the background. 


God, lazy days are the best. I feel like a certain fat cat whose favorite days are spent sleeping and eating lasagna. 

Beep!

It would make me happy, if I could write again. A single paragraph of beautiful prose. A few stanzas of haunting poetry. I would settle even for just a short, well-written narrative. But instead of words flowing forth, most times all I manage to do is spit out a few words, if you can call them such -- BURP! WHEE! YAY! AAACK!

Sigh.

Most of my outbursts are here-- bornlippy {dot} tumblr {dot} com.

Lovesittt.

I have these mean girl dreams where I go around in heels, a perfect pedicure, and immaculate hair and make-up, and bitch so hard I make people bleed. Don't judge me. Hee. 

I will now turn off my gadar

I am declaring it obsolete and useless. From this day I am going to rely on the wisdom of my friends who are much MUCH better than this.

False positives and false negatives abound! If this was an exam, true or false na nga lang binagsak ko pa. El-oh-elzz. I am laughing in frustration in the same way I cry when faced with hilarity.

CEBS.

When you make a profession out of hospital yaya-ship, the end of every rotation is a reason to celebrate. No matter how much you like it, or how much you say you're gonna miss it, the end is always an accomplishment. A reason to tell yourself, 'Congratulations for surviving, now that wasn't so bad, eh?' or 'Ohmygodthankyousomuchit'soveriamsohappppyyyyyyy!' And you move on to the next thing, wanting never to look back either because the experience was atrocious, or because it's was so good and the present so horrible it makes you feel depressed. But of course, the masochists we all are deep inside, we can't help but do post-mortem evaluations, and talk endlessly about our past achievements and booboos and either do a nostalgic "aww" in chorus or roll eyes (or smirk, for those who aren't gifted with very mobile EOMs) simultaneously, talking about previous experiences. And then we get these red and white forms filled with circles and suddenly you find the whole experience hard to evaluate! I know it makes it easier to collate and all but evaluating in dots is not easy! And they usually give it with the exams so when you get to it you're itching to get out of your seat and out of the room. Haay. But now I'm wishing that when I was in second year and still had these lectures alldayeveryday I had taken advantage of the comment portion to say something witty like this fourth-grader:

Yaaaawnnn. Feels weird to be home at this hour and not tired at all. And there's nothing on the internetZZZ! The matrix is dead, Facebook is boring. Even my GoogleReader is sad. What to do what to do what to do! 

Crazy Days.

I've been trying to write something about the last four crazy-ass, adrenaline-pumped days of my life but it always ends up as a big whiny post about my kawawa life as the Pedia Neuro intern with 5 patients on mannitol. DELETE! I read a few sentences and I realize, "OMG I sound like [garbled sounds]!" Not good.

It might not be obvious but I'm actually having fun in Pedia. I'm weird, IKR, I even liked my CI duty wouldjabelieve? I therefore conclude! That i like poking people with needlez! Seriously though, it's tiresome and tedious and it drives me nuts but at the end of the day I realize I like it. OMG I like kids. My world just turned upside down. :))

I gotta say, pedia internship is waaaay better than clerkship. Nevermind the fact that I now have FIFTEEN patients instead of five and my butt hardly makes sayad on the callroom chairs before I have to go out again for more needle poking and mannitol pushing. It's better. I don't know how. But it is! And I don't know how i'm supposed to finish that thought coz I can't really expound so let's talk about mannitol instead. (Sorry, it's the most ubiquitous thing in my life right now LOL.) The thing i hate about pushing mannitol (save for the fact that my thumb is now really really sore) is that I actually have to stay beside a patient's bed and listen to them or their PARENTS talk and complain and such. The thing I love about it is that I get to hear lots of funny stuff. Borderline freaky, really funny stuff. Patients are weird. IKR. Meet my patients!

1. Ang Prinsesa. Of all my patients I know her best because every four hours I have to visit her and push 200cc of mannitol, And I would dread going to her bed because she is, frankly, a HUGE pain in the ass. "Maam, gusto ko ng lugaw." "Ibili mo ako ng lugaw." "Kelan mo ba ko pakakainin? Gutom na ko uhaw pa!" "Maam gusto ko ng tubig!" And then as if on cue, tears would fall. Not moved by tears, I would stoically ignore her. That's my talent! AUTO-IGNORE! (Thank you Wilson!) I'd extract blood, and tears again. SIGH. She probably hates me, I think.And then! Monday morning, I go to her bed.

"Ma'am bakit wala ka kagabi?" In an accusing tone, IKR.
Syempre umuuwi din ako! In an equally maldita voice.
"Gusto ko ikaw lang magtuturok sa akin. Ikaw lang mag-aalaga sakin."
*Laughs* Naku eh next week aalis na ko dito, dapat magaling ka na by that time!
"Maam pwede bang sumama ka na lang samin pag-uwi? Dun ka na lang tumira sa bahay namin. Para ikaw na lang palagi magtuturok sakin. Wag ka na lang magmedicine ikaw na lang magiging personal nurse ko!"
[Speechless. Buti nalang natapos din ang 200cc.]

And then this morning.
"Ma'am bakit ngayon ka lang? Iba yung nagturok sakin kaninang umaga!"
Hindi ako duty eh.
"Alam mo bang andami nang nangyari sa buhay ko habang wala ka?"

FTW. And she goes on to say how she can now move her neck and her toes. I almost cried but then she went on to tell me she might be transferred to Rehab and she wanted to get my number so she can text me when someone has to push her meds, honestly she's starting to freak me out hahaha I couldn't push that 200cc fast enough. 


WHY AM I ALWAYS SURROUNDED BY CRAZY PEOPLE??


To be continued.