on the importance of having organized eyebrows...

yesterday was ted’s birthday, and i had a salon appointment at 5:30pm…now what kind of a wife schedules to have her eyebrows waxed around dinnertime on her husband’s birthday? a ditzy one like me…well, to make up for it, i had my friends john & jon bake a cake and show up at our condo to surprise ted while i was out…ted thought john was just stopping by on his way home from work, like we’ve told him to do on numerous occasions…he didn’t know what was in the big bag he was carrying…and it just happened to be a really yummy yellow cake with homemade lemon icing and cranberry filling…yum…when i got home from the salon, we ordered thai food and feasted and had a grand ol’ time…john & jon are good people and we love hanging out with them…

so regarding my salon appointment…this weekend is the wedding of my oldest friend in the whole world, ruth chung…by oldest, i mean she was the first friend i ever had here in the united states…we grew up about a block or two away from each other from first grade until she went off to college, and we were in the same class in school from first through 7th grades…our birthdays are 10 days apart, and we and our siblings spent almost every afternoon and evening playing together for a number of years…

ruthy asked me to read in her wedding, so ted, cadence and i are going out to the bay area of california tomorrow…the wedding is in palo alto, and then we will be staying in the marina district of san francisco for 7 nights after the wedding…this will probably be our only vacation this year, so we’re really looking forward to it…

so back to the salon appointment…i decided that it was high time i got my eyebrows organized professionally so that maybe, just maybe, i could lay off the plucking for the duration of our vacation…and then i thought, well, as long as i was meeting with the aesthetician, i might as well find out a few things about the mysterious world of cosmetics…you see, i have never been formally educated on the proper application of makeup, having been raised in a fundamentalist cult where makeup was discouraged until the date of your arranged marriage when women like my mom would cake your face to look like a beige geisha…so i’ve always had the sneaking suspicion that i’ve been doing it all wrong all these years…

now i know i’ve committed some stupid cosmetic faux pas in the past…like in high school when i started wearing eye liner, and out of my ingrained brainwashed modesty, only applied the eyeliner over half of my eye because i thought covering the whole eye would be, well, too radical…i still remember my friend kae kuk staring at me and saying, ‘uh…it’s different…’ different my ass, it looked horrible…

i personally don’t like wearing a lot of makeup…i still really take to heart what my dad told me time and time again, that beauty radiates from the inside out…and i don’t want to raise cadence to think that perfectly shaped eyebrows are what make a woman…that being said, i’m going to be 34 in may, and although i don’t feel like i’ve matured much since 24, my face sure has…so out of courtesy to my friend ruthy and all her wedding guests, i figured i should learn how to apply my makeup properly before i attempted to get up and read in a wedding…

which brings me to why the heck i had a salon appointment on my dear husband’s birthday…i found this relatively new salon called salon echo which is not too far from me in edgewater…it’s an enviro friendly salon that uses aveda products, so i thought i’d give them a try…i initially made an appointment to have my eyebrows waxed, but i found out they did makeup lessons and signed up for that too…[lielle, please don’t laugh at me for paying someone to teach me something you probably can do much better…]

the girl who was my waxer/instructor for the evening was named molly, and she was really nice…i gotta say, i need to have my brows waxed on a more regular basis…it was really relaxing, almost like getting a massage…she actually did give me a bit of a temple rub at the end…it was definitely not just a simple and quick wax-on/strip-off procedure…

for the makeup lesson, she spent a good hour and a half on me…i guess i needed more than the usual hour lesson…let me just tell you right now, if you ever plan on getting a makeup lesson, don’t ever do it right before you need to go out or be anywhere presentable…why you ask? because the instructor will only do half your face and expect you to do the other half, which means unless you are already pretty good or a fast learner, your face will end up looking like a freak…i don’t know how good of a job i will do with my makeup in the future, but one thing i know for sure…i won’t be wearing much eye shadow for probably the rest of my life! that stuff is damn difficult to apply properly…so i think i’ll just try to avoid it…

so that’s my salon story…and tomorrow we leave for the bay area for ruthy and michael’s wedding in palo alto…then on sunday, i am meeting my dear old friend hayuta for lunch at yoshi’s in oakland…hayuta was one of my best friends in high school as well as the valedictorian of our graduating class…i have fond memories of driving around in her car singing sinead o’connor or listening to WLUW 88.7 fm when it was still a high energy radio station…i haven’t seen hayuta in at least 10 years, so we have a lot of catching up to do…

we are going to be in SF until 3/19, and i can’t wait! i have such fond memories of that town when i visited josh while he was living in oakland…it’s such a walkable city…i remember that somehow, no matter where we thought we were going, we’d always end up at ghiardeli square…our hotel is going to be less than a mile from fisherman’s wharf, so i’m sure we’ll end up at ghiardeli square quite often…

i get to be with my baby for 10 days straight! woohoo! i love family time…