things i'm loving: pinterest

If you're at all interested in art, fashion, design, photography, or beauty, you have to check out my new obsession: Pinterest.

Falling in love with images online is a common occurrence for me, so I keep an inspiration folder on my desktop that I'm constantly filling with things I find gorgeous. But this folder gets messy and is hard to browse, you see?

When I discovered Pinterest, I was ecstatic to learn that I could bookmark or "pin" images while I browse blogs and other sites, and save them to "pinboards" organized by subject.

Once you apply to join Pinterest, you can install the bookmarklet in your browser. When you see something you like, you just hit "Pin it" and all the images on that site pop up. You pin the one you want, like so:

You assign this pin to a board, add a description and tags and pin it like this:

What's great about pinning is it preserves the link to the source of your image, for easy photo crediting or reference later.

You can also follow the boards of other users, or re-pin their pins to your own boards. Browsing through all your contacts' pins is like looking at a dynamic, evolving inspiration board. If you follow people with like interests and tastes, you'll find yourself discovering more beautiful things that you could ever come across alone. E.g.:

So far I'm using it to keep track of makeup and beauty ideas, wedding fashion and decor, style, decorating, and photos I find truly captivating. You can use it to save and organize pretty much anything, however, from recipes to potential dogs to adopt.

You can also login and link your Pinterest account to either your Facebook or Twitter handles, which saves time and allows you to share or tweet your finds with your friends and followers.

So, join up and follow me so I can follow your pin boards and see what you find beautiful or inspiring!

formspring.me

Open for business http://formspring.me/dallasllama

Have you guys tried Formspring yet? It's loads of fun.

a facelift of sorts

As photography is a huge part of this blog, I decided to adjust the layout to be more image-friendly. Please bear with me as I may still tweak a few things over the next while. Hope you like the new, larger image size!

Twestival MTL

Last Thursday, I volunteered as a photographer for Twestival Montreal, an event that raised money for Charity: Water.

Event photos can be seen here.

I am really loving doing event photography. Although portraiture will always be my favourite form of photography (one-on-one bonding, makeup, and all that good stuff), I have a fabulous time at big events too. It's a great opportunity to meet loads of new people, and it gives me an excuse to dress up!

on another note

Tired of the same old look? Wish you had the makeup and hair skills to switch things up a little bit?

Let me introduce you to the wonderful world of instructional hair and makeup videos. I have recently learned how to create gorgeous curls with a a flat iron, and how to do the burlesque makeup look. Thank you YouTube.

Here's a good flat iron curls video:

Or, if you have a curling iron, here's how to create "a sexy, beachy, supermodel wave look.":


Here is one that demonstrates how to do a smokey eye.


I could post thousands of these videos, but if you're interested, explore the related videos to these ones on YouTube. A lot of them are for makeup and hair beginners, but there are some more advanced ones as well. Enjoy.

blogs and getting over oneself

Doris Lessing, a lady who at age 87 lives by herself in London, and just recently received a Nobel Prize in Literature, is hugely inspiring person. Despite the fact that her fiction is based predominantly on her personal experiences, her stories have appealed to millions of readers. Lessing suggests that that the best stories--or perhaps the most relatable ones--tend to come from writers who share a piece of themselves with their audiences.

At the beginning of her book The Golden Notebook, she explains her realization that "the unease of writing about petty personal problems was to recognize that nothing is personal in that sense that it is uniquely one's own. Writing about oneself is writing about others."

Recently, I was interviewed by the Montreal Gazette about blogs and privacy. The reporter was asking me about the act of sharing one's personal life online, and the various ways in which one can choose to do so. She asked me what the intent of my blog was, and at the time of the interview I had trouble thinking of a good answer.

After thinking about it for a while, and after coming across Lessing's quote, I have realized that I do think there is value in sharing with strangers. The idea of sharing with strangers goes against everything we are taught as children. Our interactions(and our words and images) should be limited to people we know, we are told. But sometimes it is nice to share our thoughts in the hope that someone out "there" might relate to something we have written. I sometimes think that the less the reader knows the writer, the more they may be able to relate to the story, the thought, the image--the post.

Through the buffer zone of the blogosphere, traces of the writer's specific life can be cleared away, and the reader can approach the post with a degree of neutrality. Maybe he or she, the reader, will encounter a phrase that makes something click in his or her own life, a realization that might not have been sparked by someone immediately familiar.

I do believe that our stories are less ours than we would like to think. I suspect that there are lots of women who write like I do, take pictures like mine, and who are even gunning for the same careers as I will be. As I meet more people in life and come across new strangers online, I have fewer illusions about my own self-importance. Ironically, as self-involved as the personal blog inherently seems, maintaining one is often a step into a much larger community.

my texistence (and its bane)

On more than one occasion over the last year, I have proclaimed texting, or more specifically, those who text incessantly, to be the bane of my existence. Text-a-holics are more than a slight annoyance, more than simply rude--they actually make my life worse. They suck joy out of my life, and are therefore a bane (or killer) of my happiness.

I love the ease, cheapness, efficiency and surreptitiousness of texting over phone calls. I can understand why people text. I text. But when I choose to do so, I ensure that it is not going to disturb my conversation with someone, or offend or endanger any other person. It is very simple to wait until a conversation, or other engaging task is over to decide to send or reply to a text message. People who choose not to wait, or are simply overwhelmed by the urge to reply to a friend's "wut u up to 2nite?" inquiry, to finish a conversation or other task are rude, stupid people.

I really cannot believe that people cut their companions off in mid conversation to tediously press a bunch of digits, only to reply, "not 2 much, just talking to some friends."

Imagine my disgust then, for moms who push baby strollers through crowded streets while texting, owners who don't notice that their chiuahua is relieving itself while they are busy texting (and consequently walk away leaving a steaming pile of rat-dog poo in their wake), or--the gravest offenders--those who text and drive.

Last week, 5 teenage girls were killed in a head-on collision that occurred in between text messages sent and received on the driver's phone. It is believed that the driver was sending messages to friends in the area, asking what they were up to that weekend. This has been well discussed in the news, but I still cannot believe how stupidly tragic this incident is. WHY would anyone possibly endanger the lives of her friends in order to send a text message?

It is a terrible tragedy, and I feel horrible speaking badly of the dead, but when I see friends, my younger relatives and strangers texting constantly, oblivious to their rudeness as well as to their immediate surroundings, I get very angry and very worried. Just WAIT! Wait 5 minutes until your conversation is over, or you can stop walking or, for god's sake driving. Life will wait for you.

keep on keeping on

Is it just me, or, despite the increasing availability of online communication tools and social-networking software designed to connect people, it is becoming proportionately harder to actually keep in touch?

The problem lies in the frequency at which all of these social tools emerge, become wildly popular, and are rendered obsolete when replaced by newer social tools.

I can't keep up with the very things that are supposed to help us keep up with things. This is a problem.

I consider myself to be fairly technologically savvy. And, after all, I am doing my MA thesis on just this kind of subject matter: blogs as tools for story-sharing and connection. But just as I begin to investigate the idiosyncracies of blogs, to try to understand all the virtual chatter that takes place in the blogosphere, and to describe the voices that "speak" within it, suddenly things are becoming very...quiet.

Large parts of the blogosphere are becoming ghost towns. Dusty blogs sit stagnant, left months without an update or a comment and are declared dead after 3 months of inactivity. Internet fame is fickle, and it is hard to sort through all of the ghost blogs and their dead links, to track down living blogs, even using search sites such as technorati. This becomes especially problematic for my research.

The voices, the words, and the people who are sharing them, have taken their digital soapboxes and begun to move on. The internet hosts a travelling caravan of online entertainers and raconteurs. Those who have something to say, want what they say to be heard. They follow the action. They go to Youtube and Facebook. On a more personal level, when the next social/sharing phenomenon comes along, and I believe that will be sooner than we think, will I have to pack up all my friends again, only to "find" them again on another online venue? This is silly, and yet I am a slave to the system because I move, physically, around a lot and I do want to keep in touch.

Maybe blogs are just a moment in time, evidence of one attempt to connect us to eachother. My generation seems to be one of movers and travellers. Perhaps communication technology is simply being developed this rapidly to try to keep up with the pace of life of those who move around so much. Maybe it is just racing to keep up with us.