Spring 2014 Hairstyles

Here are a few pictures of hairdos my roommate made for me during this past Spring semester!  Many of them are from the elaborate May Day hairstyle she created (Hairstyle 3).  We got up at 5am to do it and it took an hour and a half to finish plus a practice round the day before.

Hairstyle 1

Hairstyle 2

Hairstyle 3

Hairstyle 3

Hairstyle 3

Hairstyle 3

How to Make a Flower Crown

May Day Crown 2013

Last May Day, I was fortunate enough to receive one of four May Day gifts given by someone other than a Senior.  This came in the form of a May Day Crown, giving me the special privilege of "Page Duties".  Pages are four Freshman who follow around the President of the college dressed in a special costume during the morning festivities.  Other special privileges come with it as well, like attending the Senior Breakfast, going up the Rockefeller Towers to the roof, and walking in the May Day Parade.

As a sophomore, it was my duty to pass down the Crown to one of my Hell Babies.  That left me without a Crown for this May Day.  So, I got to make my own!  May Day Crowns (also known as tiaras or floral head toppers, as I like to say) are simply crowns of flowers.  A few days before May Day, the college has a special event for students to make May Day Crowns from real flowers, but that causes allergies and they are very impermanent.  My roommate and I decided to make our own permanent ones.

Supplies:
-Wire cutter
-Hot glue gun
-Hot glue sticks
-Scissors
-Ribbon
-Fake/plastic Flowers
-Any other small (fake) accessories, like butterflies or birds, leaves, etc.
-Some sort of wire to shape into a crown (pictured on right)

Step-by-step Guide:
1.  Plug-in hot glue gun and get it ready
2.  Cut your wire with enough room to make a full crown for your head, plus some extra to "close" the circle the crown must make
3.  You have a few options for closing your crown:  you can intertwine the wire around the whole crown to close it off as a circle (what my roommate did), you can just make a slight twist on either end to hold the wire in circle place and then solidify it with ribbon (what I did originally), or you can choose not to make a full circle and use ribbon to close the ends and soften the ends with hot glue or ribbon or both (as with others I've made in 2015 and the original one from 2013)
4.  If you choose the second option you will likely need a full spool of ribbon to cover your crown; start at one of the twisted ends and tie the ribbon on tightly; begin very tightly wrapping the ribbon and do not forget to flatten out the extra ribbon from the knot to cover it over with the wrappings or do not tie a not and rely on tightly wrapping; when you get to the end of the ribbon I suggest hot gluing it into place (you can still wrap a crown that is not a full circle)
5.  You can then add extra ribbon details around the crown as you like
6.  Arrange your flowers to your preference and then begin hot gluing them one at a time; I suggest using the small stubby (usually green attachment) on the flower as the part to glue to the crown so that the flowers face out, not up
7.  When done with the flowers, add extra accessories that fit your tastes
8.  Make sure that you use a generous amount of glue for each flower/accessory
9.  Pull away any loose hot glue pieces that get spiderwebby

My Final Product:

           

Some Cool Hairdos

My roommate at college is really good at styling hair, considering she's never been trained.  She taught herself pretty much everything she knows about styling hair.  Last semester, before going to a series of parties and events, I was lucky enough to have her do my hair.  Below are some pictures of what she came up with for my rather long hair.

Hairstyle 1

Hairstyle 2

Hairstyle 3

Hairstyle 3

Hairstyle 4

The third hairstyle also consisted of a long braid laying over my left shoulder.  There was one other hairstyle that was awesome this past semester, but for some reason we forgot to get a picture of it specifically.  It was two braids wrapped into two buns stuck to my head.  I wore my hair like that for Halloween because I was a bumblebee!

When I was in high school, I can remember it being a rare occasion to see someone in braids.  Upon observing high school students now, or at least over Winter break, it would seem that braids have become a regular hairstyle.  I would assume this is because of the Hunger Games, as that was where I got my inspiration of course.

Just An Update About Things to Come

I apologize for not making very many posts anymore.  College has been keeping me very busy, so time to create innovative topics for my blog is limited.  I did however finish reading the fourth book in "A Song of Ice and Fire" series (aka "Game of Thrones") over Winter break.  Currently, I am about half-way through the fifth book; but this will take me a while now that classes have once again begun.  After I've finished the fifth book, I will write a review on the fourth and fifth book combined.  I've also been busy (at least mentally) in preparing new fictional character analysis to add to my work-in-progress post about the astrological signs of fictional characters.  Also, I intend to talk about first semester this academic year as well as the start of my second semester and the declaration of my major sometime soon.  If there are any astrological topics that you would like to be discussed on my blog, please leave a comment!

Catching Fire: SPOILER ALERT

The film began with scenery reminiscent of the Twilight movies, so you can imagine that it brought me to laughter at its start.  However, the outdoor setting relating back to the ridiculous Twilight movies quickly turned legitimately intense as Katniss attempted to shoot a turkey.  Her reaction to shooting the turkey and having a vision of killing a tribute shows her Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, not exactly her emotional state.  I've heard it argued that Katniss was more emotional in this movie and that the actress better portrayed Katniss' emotions.  I disagree.  In the books, Katniss is not a very emotional person, she's very thoughtful (as in, she thinks a lot).  Throughout Catching Fire, the book, Katniss has many more outbursts, as a result of her being traumatized, leading her to have many more in this movie, contrasted to the previous one.  Katniss in The Hunger Games serves as a participant; now, in Catching Fire, Katniss must deal with her past and start dealing with the trauma it has caused.  The adrenaline has worn off (now that she doesn't need to literally survive), now she's stuck processing everything she went through and everything she did while also struggling with the more physical consequences of her actions.  Overall, I believe she, and the other actors, did a great job portraying their characters; or, I was just too distracted by the awesomeness of the movie to notice bad acting.

I understand that the writers of the film must have chosen to also have Gale in this opening scene in order to speed up the process of showing his and Katniss' potential love interest, but I honestly think the book's opening scene would have been more powerful.  A sixteen-year-old girl drinking away her traumatized past would have hit the audience more dramatically and driven home the point of her suffering more thoroughly, I think.  By the way, I hate how the world is creating a "Team Gale, Team Peeta" around this story.  It was okay to do that with Twilight; because, other than an obsession with being young and beautiful, Twilight made few statements about society worth looking more deeply into.  The fact that we're taking this story and turning it into a fetish about who is the "better guy" for the heroine means that we are doing exactly what is so disgusting about the Capitol inhabitants.  We are failing to recognize the grotesquery (I may have just made up a word) given to us in the story.  THE STORY IS ABOUT CHILDREN KILLING OTHER CHILDREN BECAUSE THEIR GOVERNMENT FORCES THEM TO AND THEIR PARENTS HAVEN'T STOPPED IT.  Yet, we, as a society, allow ourselves to get caught up in the very, very slight, insignificant romance in the story.  The romance was only important to the extent that it provided some relief to the dreary aspects, even though the romances often also exacerbated the problems.

Another thing that makes me sick is the advertisements by Covergirl.  I get that the brand may have done the make-up for the movie, but they shouldn't be advertising the styles as something we should mirror or repeat.  The whole point of the Capitol people looking that way was to cover-up the nastiness beneath and to juxtapose them and those from the Districts.

Suzanne Collins may be brilliant.  She has let us mirror what she has shown us is so wrong in her books.  However, if she were really feeling this way, I would hope she'd voice this opinion.  But, perhaps she's either not that brilliant after all or she's also fallen prey to hypocrisy.

Other than the scenery given in the opening scene, the only other scenery I had a major problem with was the Victor's Village.  I pictured it to indeed be "sanitary" but more colorful, or at least grand, from the outside.  The movie made the village look like a cemetery.  The arched entrance looked like one that would be at a cemetery entrance and each home looked like a tombstone.  This was not what I pictured at all.

I really appreciate the looks we get at the gamemaker's studio and the president's house through the film interpretations.  However, I was surprised they didn't put in the part about Plutarch Heavensbee showing Katniss his watch at the president's party though.  That would have been wonderful foreshadowing!  I was very impressed with the arena and the attack of Cinna before Katniss entered the arena.  The only problem I had with the arena was that I was very confused with where Katniss and other tributes were when she dove in the water and ran on the platform.  I also couldn't figure out why Finnick, being such a natural swimmer, wasn't able to reach Peeta and help him when he was fighting the other tribute in the water.

I would have also liked more character development of the other tributes.  And, Finnick was NOT cast right.  Sam Claflin is not very attractive in the way Finnick should have been and really doesn't seem to fit the mold for smooth, charming, cold, passionate, and deceptive all at the same time.  But, I'm not very surprised he was given that role.  After his appearance in Pillars of the Earth, then in some PBS movies, and finally in Pirates of the Caribbean, I knew he'd get a role in one of the big "blockbusters" loved by teen girls.

I really, really, really liked Katniss' hairstyles!  Although, she is supposed to have drastically longer hair.  Her hair for the president's party was SO intense!  I loved it.  I also liked the general braid they chose for her this time.  I don't really understand why they changed her costumes from what she was supposed to wear in the book though.  I definitely pictured different suits for the arena as well.

Well, for now at least, I've run out of things to say and I'm very tired.

Lucid Dreaming

When I was in my sophomore or junior year of high school, I discovered lucid dreaming.  I'm not sure whether or not I was able to control my dreams before this experience, but I do remember the realization that I can completely control my dreams; at least I can when I become aware that I'm dreaming, which has occurred anytime that I've woken up remembering that I have dreamed.  Somehow, in a discussion, dreams were brought up and I told my good friend about my discovery.  She warned me that controlling dreams can leave you in an unrested state as well as cause you to be stuck in the paralysis caused by the dream world and other issues (her knowledge came from her AP Psych class, which provided more knowledge than what I had previously gained about dreams).  Whether or not these side effects are true, I do not know; but at the time, I took her word for it and stopped controlling my dreams.  I still would dream lucidly, I don't believe that you can remove your lucidity once it's there in a dream, but I took a step back and let my dreams play out.

In my dreams since then, as I've said, any that I remember, I have been lucid in them to some extent.  I've never practiced lucidity intentionally.  After my first realization of dreaming lucidly, I constantly controlled my dreams quite naturally and it was quite fun.  I believe the reason I first gained control was because I was so embarrassed and in absolute shock at myself in my dream that I had to take control.  Following that dream up until my friend warned me of potential dangers, I controlled and was lucid during anywhere from 1-3 dreams per night.

I'm not so afraid of controlling my dreams anymore.  I try not to control them too much though, because I find it more therapeutic to allow my dreams to progress on their natural courses.  Sometimes, however, I find myself gaining lucidity because I am controlling my dreams.  It's very strange.  Upon gaining this lucidity, I often lose control (or rather my dream comes to a stand still as I evaluate what I'm doing in my dream and what I should be doing) and begin to pull myself out of the dream.

I've found that both controlling my dreams and gaining lucidity usually lead to displeasure in my dreams and I do not suggest seeking it.  However, lucid dreaming does provide interesting concepts about life.  Controlling our dreams usually allows us to do whatever we want.  But I do say to use caution, you probably wouldn't want to find yourself making immoral decisions you wouldn't make in the waking world in your lucid dreams because you will likely still feel the same shame, but it's deeper because you will likely not admit your dreams.

Some interesting articles that got me thinking about this:
Dreaming Article
Lucid Dreams
More on Dreams

Bryn Mawr College Early Fall Photos 2013

Goodhart Theater

Thomas Hall from Cloisters perspective

Taylor Hall

The Labyrinth

Leaves on Merion Green

Covered over Fountain in Taft Garden