Monday, January 11, 2010

Graduate-level procrastination: RBL Killa Red... and then with Maybelline Colorama Sonic Sunset... and then with ManGlaze Matte-Astrophe

I have been trying to get my head back into my research and it's just not working. I spent today half-reading the papers I need for class tomorrow (discourse markers and whether men and women talk differently -- there's little solid evidence that they actually do, but people hear what they want to hear and if they want to hear women as being less confident and more meandering than men, that's how women will sound to those people). And I've been fishing through the PsycINFO database on working memory and sentence processing (lots of stuff on "non-normal" populations like those with Alzheimer's or kids with ADHD, which is only marginally useful for me since I study "normals"). Also, beating myself over the head for not being done with corpus analysis data that should've been done half a year ago. Not a very productive day. I just couldn't decide what I needed to put my energy on... and couldn't seem to force myself to sit down and whatever task needed to be done. 

It was a similar day for my nails. First, I put on one of my newly acquired RBLs from the RBL sale...

Rescue Beauty Lounge Killa Red


A tad darker IRL. Red jelly, visible nail line at three coats. Diamont was being a bitch and left tons of bubbles on a couple of nails. One of the easier red jellies in terms of application but hardly the one-coat wonder that people attribute to RBLs. So far, I've liked a lot of the RBLs I've tried... but very few feel like they're worth it to me at $18 and shipping. Which is why I'll leave my RBL hauling for the big sales. Anyway, the bubbling bugged me big time -- that and I don't really like plain red nails -- so I decided I needed to layer something over it...

Maybelline Colorama Sonic Sunset layered over RBL Killa Red 



This is one of the Colorama nail polishes I got at the same dusty as I got the Street Wears. 20¢, totally worth every single penny and then some. Flakies always enliven a polish of contrasting color. I had a super hard time showing the green-gold duochrome side of the polish so I took some photos from non-conventional angles (for me):


I love how changeable it is. Red and orange, then green and gold. So pretty. 

Close-up of Sonic Sunset over Killa Red


But then... I got bored of this combination too. So, I decided to mattefy it with my new mattefying topcoat:

Maybelline Colorama Sonic Sunset layered over RBL Killa Red, with ManGlaze Matte-Astrophe topcoat




I just love mattefied flakies! I think they look so cool. This is a great matte topcoat and offers a really nice, truly matte finish. A little overpriced, imo, considering you can get Essie Matte About You for nearly half that price: $13.13 and shipping. It's a good alternative if you like to support small boutique brands though. 

...back to work. I should at least finish my readings for tomorrow's class before my SO gets home. I like to spend time with him in the evenings though I think it might behoove me to keep working after he goes to bed... it's much better for my productivity but less fabulous on my mental health. (Sometimes I wonder how different grad school would be if I were still single. It's much easier to live a selfish, self-centered life. And I'm not saying that in a horrible judgmental way: I think there's nothing wrong with being single and if I hadn't met my SO, I would have been perfectly happy to stay single.) 

This is what I'll do. I'll go through the articles I need for class tomorrow and then I'll sit down and decide exactly which memory tests I want to use. That sounds like a good goal. Should've been done with it three hours ago but no use crying over spilt time. :P 

ETA: LOL! I had to share one of the more ridiculous "layman's terms" comparisons I've read in awhile: 
"According to an analogy proposed by Kahneman (1973) in explaining his capacity theory of attention, a person with a larger memory capacity for language may be able to draw on a larger supply of resources, like a homeowner who can draw on more amperes of current than a neighbor and can thus generate more units of heating or cooling." 
from Just & Carpenter (1992) 

...more amperes of current and can thus generate more units of heating or cooling? There was no other more accessible comparison of having more resources and thus being able to do more because one has more? Sometimes I think cognitive psychology really suffers from an inferiority complex: it wants to be a science, it IS a science, but it has the word "psychology" in it so people have to try to liken it to the natural sciences to give it validity. (Yeah, yeah, I'm going back to work now...)