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BBAC 2012: Day 01 - Hello!

Posted on Saturday, at • bought • 333 views

Happening again this year, the Beauty Blog Advent Calendar. Every day, several blogs will post at the same time - some days are themed, most are bloggers' choice. Check daily, because you never know who might be doing a flash-giveaway or some kind of fun activity!

Fauxlivia sent me these five questions to answer:

BBAC 2012: Day 01 - Hello!

<ul> <li><strong>What is a makeup look you are known for?</strong><br /> Um....none? I don't know. I tend to wear mimimal makeup, and one day I'll be having lots of fun with eyeshadow-colors and the next I might just do foundation-and-mascara. In this past year, I haven't posted any looks to this blog. That has to change, now that I've got most of it migrated to this new platform.</li> <li><strong>What is your comfort food?</strong><br /> My mom's homemade macaroni and cheese (lots of cheese, usually sharp cheddar. YUM) I have the recipe, but I've just been lazy about making it. My other comfort food, which is both faster to make and a tiny bit healthier, is roasted red potatoes with rosemary and olive oil.</li> </ul> <ul start="3"> <li><strong>If you were given the chance to be a superhero, what would you name yourself and what would be your super power?</strong><br /> The ability to balance the national debt, smack some common sense and cooperative instincts into our current crop of Congresscritters, and give people the world over, more capacity to understand and accept other people/cultures/ways of doing-and-thinking. (Notice I don't say "world peace." Because without conflicts and the need to resolve them, there's no advancement or change. Increased understanding/acceptance would hopefully minimize the violent methods of conflict resolution, though. Or reduce them to sotto-voce mutterings.)</li> <li><strong>If you could meet your teenage self, what would you tell her?</strong><br /> "The seizures will eventually be under control."<br /> POTENTIAL TRIGGER-WARNING: SEIZURES/VERTIGO (<a href="#gopast">skip</a>)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Okay? Okay.<br /><br /> When I was 13, I woke up late one morning. I was babysitting that morning and I had about 30 minutes to get to the job, so I jumped out of bed and ran to the bathroom to quickly put my hair into a ponytail, throw on some clothes, and get going. For whatever reason, I stood with one foot on the closed toilet seat. I was brushing my hair, my right arm raised up and holding the brush...and all of a sudden, I couldn't move my right hand or arm. I looked into my own eyes...and then started to fall to my left into the bathtub. I couldn't reach out to stop myself, but I could see myself falling. My vision tunnelled, and I blacked out before I hit the bathtub. My parents came up to check on me because they heard a rapid, sporadic tapping - my hairbrush, still in my hand, repeatedly hitting the side of the tub as I convulsed. I was taken to the hospital, they ran tests and didn't find anything, and while I lost my memory for a few hours and had a goosegg and some bruises and a bitten tongue, I was otherwise okay. Just...very shaken. (I had to walk away several times typing that out. The memory is that strong, and it still really gets me.) Over the course of the next six months, I went to several neurologists, underwent LOTS of tests, went through taking salt tablets to prescription meds to 2 prescription meds. Eventually, we found the combination and dosage level that kept the seizures to a minimum. As I grew older and eventually passed out of puberty, the seizures got less and less frequent, as well as less severe. I also have a seizure aura, which means I know when a seizure is coming. I have about 30-60 seconds' warning. I can avert the seizures if I calm down in a hurry. And if you think that sounds odd and confusing, try it sometime! When you're in a state of frenetic panic, try to calm down in 10 seconds or less: controlled breathing, slowed heart rate, no movement, relaxed muscles, the whole shebang. Just like with a lot of things in life, it's easier to say than to do! The seizures only happened when I'd try to wake up too quickly (transition from sleeping to waking mind-state), so all throughout high school I woke up a half an hour early to wake up gradually and avoid the seizures. The last seizure I had was in 2006, when I had been on the same medication for 20+ years and my body had finally adjusted enough that it wasn't working. I went to the neuro, got a new medication, et voila - back under control. Before 2006, the last seizure I had was...geez, when? Some time in the last years of the 1980s (I was already in college). So when my cat started having seizures, I knew exactly what he was going through.<br /><br /> My parents were amazing. I had relatives - yes, in the midwest - who told my mom that I'd have to be institutionalized now that I was having seizures. The medication I took to control my seizures really did a number on my cognitive processes - my GPA dropped from a low-A average to a high-C, in the space of a year. This wasn't high school, this was the meds. But despite that, despite my being unable to complete a sentence at times, despite my parents thinking that they'd have to take care of me for the rest of my life if these didn't stop happening, they never made me feel like I couldn't do things because of the seizures. I went on trips with the school's marching band, which I was part of (yep, I was a band geek. Tall-flag geek, to be precise.). I overnighted at friends' houses. I got my driver's license (once the state was satisfied that I wouldn't have a seizure while driving.) I got jobs, I took AP courses, I even volunteered at my first science fiction convention when I was 16 - just over three years after the seizures started. My parents were both in varying states of worry, but they never let me feel like the seizures were in control. That has played a LOT into my adult self-reliance and self-confidence.<br /><br /> To this day, I only take showers. I can't remember the last time I took a sit-down-in-the-tub bath. And it's not just because I'm tall and I can't stretch out. Needless to say, soaker tubs in homes are emphatically NOT a selling point with me.<br /><br /> Okay, no more Debbie Downer. I promise!! <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />And now lots of whitespace, for those that chose to skip past the trigger-warning.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></li> <li><a name="gopast"></a><strong>If someone offered you $1,000,000 to NOT wear a stitch of makeup for an entire year and this includes nail polish, would you do it?</strong><br /> Mmmmm...I'd love to say "yes", but I honestly don't know. I probably could. I don't wear lots of makeup every day currently, but I do enjoy playing with the colors.</li> </ul> <p>So that's me! Let me tell you a little bit about the Beauty Blog Advent Calendar, though, because this is its second year: I started it as a fun project for myself and some blogfriends, a way to post every day during the advent season, and hopefully provide entertaining reading. Last year was the first year, and everything was manual - because it was literally thrown together at the last minute. This year I had more time to plan, set things up so that people could add their links themselves instead of me doing it manually. Next year I may open it up a bit more, but I want to make sure that the people who participate 1) actually participate; 2) actually want to do this. This isn't supposed to stress people out, but it's also not going to provide immense cross-linking SEO pageranking weight. There isn't as much of a requirement for mutual participation, like there was with Beauty Bloggers Backstage (which I will never do again - I now know why Blogger Insider fell apart, because too many people flaked too often and balancing the policing with making sure that the others actually do get to participate is a great big huge headache) but people should be able to see a good, entertaining collection of links every day. And the bloggers should genuinely enjoy posting things!</p>

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