Looking and growing younger more than half the age

I recently watched the movie, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"  

The plot is about a man who was born old, and how he progresses through life backwards, and grows younger as time goes by. It makes me wonder is it really a good thing to trim the age by more than half, and become younger and younger each day. In general, the society has this obsession of youth, and as I grow older, I refuse to grow older, but hope to grow wiser. What if there is really a way to stop aging, will I do it?

I remember this Chinese quote from somewhere that says, " As one grows older, you gain more wisdom and lose more innocence.". Somehow we tend to equip wisdom with age, but trust me, I had met some older people who are not necessary wise at all, the person may be more experienced, however, not necessarily wiser.

One of the quotes from the movie, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is the following from a letter he had written to his daughter:

“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”

This quote really strikes me, I hope I always have the strength to start all over again even when I eventually realize my journey maybe more than half way through.

A fashion model who is more than half the size

New York Times recently has an article, "The Triumph of the Size 12s" that has gathered mixed comments from the public, the article is an interview about the plus size model, a size 12 Crystal Renn (Picture below) who is 5 feet 9 inches tall, 165 pounds, and her measurements are bra 38C, waist 30, and hips 42. Over time, the average size of the American woman keeps fluctuating. Looking at her photos, she is stunning. To make it in the high fashion industry, one almost has to be less than a size 2, and at one point, she was 95 pounds.

Is less really more? How about the concept of one size fits all? V Magazine launched a campaign where they feature a size 0 model and a plus size model wearing the same outfits to demonstrate that regardless of an individual's size, one can still be beautiful, and there is no need to rely on jello and diet coke to shrink down to a size 0.

What is the right size? Does size really matter?  All these questions will always remain subjective, since beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Decorating with low budget!

Good ideas with frugal decorating can be made possible with a low budget. Recently, I started learning the craft of making roses with streamers, the kind you use to decorate for parties. My passion of making paper roses had gotten OTT (Over the Top) when I discovered how fun it could be to make them for my loved ones.
On a boring day where I was just idling at home, inspiration hit me, and I decided to venture out to a 99-cent store to look for 6 identical white vase.

When I got home, I started to make 6 roses with red streamers. As you can see from the images, the result is pretty dramatic! Once again, it prooves that one does not have to sacrifice style and good looks in order to stick to a budget :-)

Staying beautiful without spending a fortune

In the words of Audrey Hepburn, she gave in her pearls of wisdom for maintaining a beautiful soul, she was often quoted as saying, ‘to improve your smile, speak kind words to all, ‘to maintain a good body, feed the hungry’, ‘to improve your skin, feel the soul of a disappointed person, your kind words will make his heart lighter, allowing yourself to feel good, and the good feeling makes you more lively, ultimately making you glow. Having hectic lifestyles, it is almost impossible to follow all that is mentioned above, I think the safest and most efficient manner to look beautiful would be to feel beautiful. In short, feel beautiful, to look beautiful, as no amount of growth hormones, meal replacements and healthy eating can ever show their results to an unhappy soul. Botox=$500, facelift-$300, Liposuction-$2,500, Positive Thinking=Priceless :-) Stay happy, feel happy, and you will be naturally beautiful from the inside out!

Polish stainless steel with half price

Currently, I live in an apartment where it is has an open kitchen with stainless steel panels. To most people, it definitely looks stylish due to its uniform look. However, try returning home seeing streaks of stains on the panels, it is not a pretty sight. My boyfriend who is more of a perfectionist than me had attempted to clean it with stainless steel cleaning pads, but it did not work like it was supposed to. Both of us knew if the stubborn streaks remained, it would definitely drive us up the walls. One day, he came up with a brilliant idea, he purchased a bottle of baby oil, and poked a needle-like hole on the tip of the bottle. He poured a tiny bit of it on a piece of paper towel, and started polishing the stainless steel panels and other appliances. Voila! It works like magic :-) No more streaks, it is magical!

Half Identity

Being an Asian foreigner in Seattle, it is challenging to be aware of my own assumptions, values and biases. The mainstream tends to think that someone like me should be passive or perhaps less articulate. Struggling to find my identity in this society has made me wonder what my cultural identity is. The ironic part is the further I move away from my native country to the United States, the closer I am to finding my cultural heritage. Often times, I am caught between both sides; trying to assimilate to be part of the melting pot has left my own community thinking that I am not retaining my roots. On the other hand, if I were not to conform to social changes, I will be accused of not being able to adapt. It is never a win-win situation, but I guess that is because I am on the crossroads of both Eastern and Western cultures. I just want to be accepted as who I am. Personally, I feel that if an individual is really committed to a rigorous respect for difference, whether in terms of cultural identity or political options, then difference is not an optional extra. In political and practical terms, diversity costs. Yet for me as a hybrid of both east and west whose culture is not completely mainstream has encountered the feeling that if I want to be different in any way, I may be a nuisance. While adapting to cope with my cultural identity, there is an absence of a dynamic of creative confrontation, of the dialectical process through which ideas are opposed to one another and something new and creative emerges in the interactive process that this entails. I am aware that I can reclaim or retain my cultural identity from the far right if I emphasize the diversity of my own origins, not its alleged unitary nature. I think that a truly transformed cultural identity should celebrate all cultures, including the dominant one, within an agreed, common, rights-based framework. Minorities within the dominant culture who feel ourselves to be excluded can join forces with other minority cultures. All of this will require meaningful power-sharing, across classes as well as across communities. This means, paradoxically, that I must be more willing to empower and support my own critics on the margins, creating in the process a self where different cultural identities and also profound differences of view are acceptable. But can I truly be me? Using Shakespeare’s famous line, “To Thine ownself be true,” suggests that an individual only has a single self to which he or she can be truthful. But can we be totally truthful to ourselves, and the people around us? Like everything else, there is no definite answer, simply because the truth is somewhere in between, just like half and half :-)