What's Up Pennsylvania

What a nice day!

After practice ended around 16:30, I took a nice hot shower then hopped in the car for a two hour drive down to my mom's in Pennsylvania.

Sad to say, although I missed driving while in Singapore, I don't fancy it too much these days. My legs started aching within the first half hour of driving and all I wanted was to just get there already.

Zooming by little American houses.


And sheep.

Cass gave me these to try, although I'm generally not a beauty person. I just take a shower when I need to and that's about it... okay... and some makeup once in a while. But do-it-yourself facial stuff like that is just not my cup of tea.

However since face masks seemed to be all the rage back in Singapore, I thought I'd try one to see what the fuss was about.

Because I'm a complete noob at this, I thought I was supposed to put the eye mask on your eye! I mean, why call it an eye mask if it's not supposed to go on your eye? I looked on the packet and there weren't any instructions on how to apply the patches so I simply used my (obviously defunct) common sense.

I felt kind of antsy in about 3 minutes so I flipped the patches off my eyes and onto the above shown area. This was done so that I could google the benefits of face/eye masks. Seriously, I'm putting this wet membraney thing on my face and I don't even know what it's doing?

So the google search came up with information like how masks

1) are filled with nutrients

2) are better than other facial products because of the warming effect they have on the skin which opens up pores

3) keep your skin moist

Well that's all great, but I didn't find any articles on how environmentally unfriendly these things were. The amount of trash one girl can generate in a year from non-biodegradable mask packaging can't be very little if she's doing them once a week! (Which is the suggested usage rate- once a week)

However I was glad to discover that I had stumbled upon the correct way of applying the eye patches.

I didn't bother to load a before and after picture because they both looked the same to me. But basically, this is the after.

And I'm pretty sure the reason why my skin appears to be glowing is because of the right amount of camera flash.

I did have the eye patches on for at least 15 minutes, but for an impatient just-not-interested-in-this-kind-of-beauty-product person, it was more than enough time to convince me that they're just nice things to put on other girls' faces.

To be honest, I am putting in a little extra effort now to be a more "manicured" person. During the past two years, I had grown rather disinterested in self-maintenance in terms of beauty because I simply saw no point. God loves me for who I am right? He doesn't care much about how I look I bet, because He's seen me at my worst.

But then... I'm not sure why it happened, but I began to see that there were little things that simply were a courtesy to other people, especially people around me. And I mean really little random things like- my track teammates used to make a big deal of my "ashy knees". That would be a result of not applying moisturiser to my knees. When they got dry in the winter, they'd turn an ashy grey colour. But it didn't bother me that it bothered them and it still doesn't. Yet I've now begun to apply moisturiser daily; a thing I haven't done in a long while. I also began to clean my nails as well as polish them.

I guess it's one thing to try too hard to look better than other people; and it's another to just be a proper young lady instead of a dishevelled weirdo walking the street.

I think perhaps, now that I'm 21, I've had enough of being a dishevelled weirdo.

Sometimes I look back though, and realise that if I weren't ever a dishevelled weirdo, I'd never have learnt the lessons that God wanted me to. Through my experiences, the Holy Spirit broke many strongholds that I was locked in.

Therefore, I've also learnt that there really is a reason and a season for everything. I wonder what season it is this time?