Tragus Piercing

Ermagad.

I finally got my tragus pierced a whole year after my rook! I can't believe it's been so long since I had my rook done, I was so excited to get my tragus done shortly after I had my rook, I even contemplated going back and getting it done the very next week but of course didn't because of healing times etc.

But now... one year later and I have it! Myself and my manager at work actually had it done around the same time so we're practically going through the same pain, trying desperately to keep our long hair away from the piercing as much as possible etc. I love that there's someone I can moan about it who's going through the same thing on an everyday basis.

People ask me if it hurt - to be honest - yes, it hurt very much. After getting the rook and hearing that the rook is apparently the most painful piercing, I was fully prepared for my tragus after reading online that there's very few nerves on the tragus area and that it's comparable to a lobe piercing, I now want to ask HOW ON EARTH IS IT COMPARABLE? No joke, although it was a different kind of pain to the rook, the tragus was bloody painful. The rook was like a sharp quick (and crunchy) pain followed by some burning sensation then went away but the tragus was like a very dull long lasting (and crunchy again) pain that then disappeared and has come back (more on this later).

Also, something hilariously embarrassing happened to me whilst I was getting it done that I'm sort of getting over now but was too ashamed to admit. When the piercing lady was marking the spot where she would be piercing I was staring into the little mirror she held up for me going "hmmm it looks a little low, can it go higher?" then she was like sure and re-marked it and I was looking into the mirror again thinking "this looks the same what the hell?" so I asked again if it can go higher and she recommended not to go any higher as it would then be out of the little triangly thing where it should sit, so I was there like thinking is she blind? The marking is so low!! But I trusted her instinct and got it done where she marked it a few millimetres higher than the first marking. Then I looked in the mirror and could have slapped myself, basically, the "dot" I was looking at the in mirror was my bloody BEAUTY SPOT that I totally forgot even existed!! Oh my god, no wonder it wasn't moving BECAUSE IT WASN'T EVEN THE DOT SHE WAS MARKING. So yeah, the piercing lady asked "do you like it?" and I had to say yes of course, what was she going to do if I said I hated it and it's too high? Not like she can change anything at this point. Honestly, my heart dropped when I looked in the mirror because I had been wishing I stuck to her original marking. So I continued to sit there like a lemon waiting for my colleague to get her second lobe holes done after me.

BUT, it's been 3 days and I'm actually liking this arrangement, it's not as high as I thought it was and when you look at it side-on, it's actually bang in the middle of my little triangly piece of cartilage so I'm a lot happier now - phew.

So as for some pictures...

Here's day 1 of the piercing - it's fresh and doesn't look red at all which I was really glad about, it didn't even feel like I had anything sitting there on my face.

Day 2 of the piercing and it looks a lot like day 1, not much swelling, again, couldn't really feel the piercing was even there unless I touched it. I did accidentally lean on it at work when I was talking to someone and that hurt like a bitch.

(Excuse my fat chin), day 3 (today) was the most painful by far, as you can see from this photo, it's pretty damn swollen, red and angry. I didn't touch or lean on it today so this is natural swelling. I have found it hard to smile and laugh without feeling the same sort of dull, bruising pain around the area which isn't fun at all. Hopefully the swelling goes down soon!

May post another little update in the upcoming days if I remember to do so, I've been finding the tragus particularly hard to clean because the inside sort of sits in a very naturally dirty, oily and waxy area. I'm still trying to find the best way for me to clean it throughly, interestingly, I haven't been using sea salt and have been doing antibacterial liquid soap soaks instead which I find much more beneficial as you're actually killing bacteria with the soap and it lathers easily for you to wash. I'll see how that goes, it's my first piercing where I haven't used sea salt soaks just because making the sea salt concoctions are quite time consuming for me and you never know if you're ever mixing the right amounts. I'll probably keep updated on that too, may switch back to sea salt soaks if the swelling doesn't go down within the next couple of days. 

SHOPAHOLIC.

I am so excited. I just bought so much today. 

Soooo today, instead of having a chilled park day with le boyfriend, I decided to drag him shopping. What started as an innocent “I need to go and pick up my click-and-collect order” turned into a massive shopping haul. Here’s what I bought:

• A pair of black high waisted shorts from H&M (YUSSSS finally, I have bought another pair of these babies that I’m happy with) 
• A perfume atomiser from a really cute shop down Carnaby Street called Pylones - yes, I have no idea why on earth I need this, I just wanted one because I lost my old one ages ago on a night out ;__;
• Make up stuff that I don't really need but want from E.L.F.
• Concealer brush (my current one is a bit old and streaky...)
• Foundation brush (I have one but I will probably like this one more... because it's shaped differently)
• Highlighter brush (I've never had one okay?)
• Lip exfoliator (!?!?!)
• Face palette 

Ok so maybe in retrospect it's not that much stuff I bought but just know that I just went through my wardrobe and found so many pieces of unworn clothing still with their tags on. 

OH HEY!

Guess what?

I've started to vlog!

I thought long and hard about it as vlogging takes time and commitment even if you're not aiming to do it as a job. I didn't want to start it and then not commit to doing it at all and end up having this lonely one vlog on my channel with nothing to add to it. I do this quite often actually - I used to be into making gifs (not the most exciting hobby, I know), but that interest started to end once my blog started getting popular on tumblr and then I just couldn't keep up with the daily uploading.

The main reason I want to do it is because I want to create memories, especially with Hung (le boyfriend). Life is short and I feel like if I vlog enough, looking back on these vlogs will be exciting and pretty funny. I think vlogging is also stimulating me to want to look for new things to do when Hung and I go out on our dates and stuff. We've got some exciting things lined up to do during this summer so it'll be "vlog-worthy" content which I'm really looking forward to.

I'm not doing it with the hopes of amassing millions of followers or even becoming a partner or anything like that. I'm content with my current job and career that I want this to just be a hobby for me and also a place where I can keep my memories in video format and share them with whoever I want to share them with (and all those unlucky souls who happen to come across my vlogs on the internet).

So without further ado, I'm super thrilled to reveal my first ever vlog:

I'm not 100% optimistic but let's see how long I keep this up LOL.

P.S. Excuse my horrible sounding voice

Review: Samsung NX Mini

So I've been looking for a new camera recently and I stumbled across the Samsung NX Mini which looked quite sleek, good for selfies and has a detachable lens. I was looking for something that's a cross between a DSLR and a compact camera - high quality shots and videos but not super heavy and burdensome to lug around. This little camera caught my eye because well, it's Samsung and having a Samsung phone too must mean connectivity could be nice and easy, the 20.5mp as my last camera was only 16.1mp and I thought that was already really good and of course, the fact that it comes in white. I know I'm being a bit of a diva here but I really wanted something in white. 

I did some extensive research before buying it off Amazon, such as reading up some very technical reviews of it, some less technical ones for the casual photographer and also taking on board some people's negative reviews of it. Overall, people said it's a cheap camera, good money for value, takes some good shots, good connectivity with the camera having it's own Wi-Fi and NFC support, the only downside some people mentioned is that with the standard pancake lens you can't zoom at all unless you go and buy the 9-27mm lens. I decided to go ahead and buy it for £239.99 off Amazon, the kit I bought was the camera + a 9mm pancake lens - the other lens you can get for this camera is a 9-27mm lens which lets you zoom but that's additional and not included in the standard kit. 

The camera arrived pretty quickly, it came with:

• Camera body
• 9mm lens
• Charger
• Wrist strap
• Battery
• User manuals and 2 CDs, one for Adobe Lightroom and one for the camera software

First impressions was that it was small, sleek, nice aluminium finish on the top and bottom of the camera, lens clipped on nicely, the flip up screen was good - I liked how it turns on automatically when you flip the screen up to take selfies. The only downside was that the plastic "leather-like" main body felt really tacky and cheap. It was comfortable to hold and I didn't really experience any difficulty holding the camera and taking pictures that some people online have mentioned - maybe it's just because I have relatively small hands.

Unfortunately, I was quite disappointed with the performance of the camera, it wasn't as high quality as I expected and the video quality was average. One of the things that bugged me the most was that the focusing of the camera was terrible, of course with all cameras, when you hold down the camera button halfway it picks up focus before you take the picture - the camera had this but even before that, when you move the camera around it tends to blur a lot and then focus, blur and then focus again when you move some more. This was also apparent when you tried to take videos, even when the camera was still, it would blur and then focus, blur and then focus - as you can imagine this would be really annoying for vloggers. The settings for auto focusing were also very limited, it was literally off or on and although you can tap the screen to focus onto you, it tends to lose focus very quickly again. 

Positives that I did like about this camera was that you don't need to take the battery out and attach it to some external charger to charge the camera which I quite liked. I could also use my Samsung phone charger to charge the camera which was pretty cool. I also liked that the camera uses Micro SD cards rather than the larger SD cards, I had a spare 64gb Micro SD from my Samsung S4 which came to be really useful. The mechanics of the flip up screen was also nice, it locks into place when you flip it up and back down so in no way at all was it cheap and flimsy. You can also use the touch screen to navigate settings or you can use the buttons so there were 2 ways of scrolling through settings / viewing images and videos. The touch screen is also handy for when you want to change settings whilst you're taking selfies, I can imagine without it, taking selfies would be a lot more annoying.

Verdict: Although the camera looks nice down on paper, I would highly recommend you go and test this camera out at a store rather than buy it based on what is said online, for a camera with such good specs I was quite disappointed with the performance of it. My Samsung S6 takes better pictures and videos with less MP and no major auto focusing issues like this camera has. 

Basically, I ended up returning this camera due to disappointment.

Job Interviews

Getting a job interview itself can be hard these days when jobs are sparse and everyone is going after the same job with the same (or no) experience. If you're going out looking for your first ever job, you're better off looking for some voluntary experience beforehand so you have something to talk about and show in the interview. Even so, with some experience in a related job doesn't make getting that job that much easier anyway, but there are some things you can do you make sure you leave an impression on your interviewers. 

Here's some of my opinions and experiences I'd like to share throughout an intense 3-4 months worth of continuous job applications and interviews.

Feeling extremely thankful this week.

I've been inactive for a while on this blog (or any blog for that matter) as I've been really busy trying to get myself started on my career, trying to motivate myself to complete my degree and just feeling really pessimistic in general because life was not good for me.

Mentally, I was in a state of low confidence - happens when you apply to a handful of jobs and get interviews but get rejected in the process of competing with everyone else for a job. Physically, I wasn't well - I wasn't eating correctly, sleeping correctly etc. Emotionally, I was also a state because I'm having relationship troubles at the moment, I'm not ashamed to admit it and it's really nothing to hide. If you combine all that with my parents' concern for my health, future and them misunderstanding how I feel, I guess you can sort of imagine what I was going through.

But this week, I got offered a job that is potentially a starting point for me in a career field that I want to get into. I feel proud that I got the job through no connections and with no experience. I was envious of people who knew people in industries that got them where they want to be. But thinking now, I really feel that I achieved this job through my own efforts, I proved to myself that I could achieve what I thought was near impossible - getting a job without tons of voluntary experience and unpaid internships (which are also competitive, mind you).

In all, I feel thankful that I went through the experiences that I did in the last 3 months. All those interviews and days feeling down about finding my place in society are paying off and I'm also finally feeling like my years of education are starting to pay off.

Personal: Being Productive

Welcome to my desk.

I've been finding it extremely hard to be productive recently. It's not that I need to be, I'm not rushing to meet any deadlines yet but I've (sadly) found comfort in laziness especially when life has been pretty hectic recently. It's just that period of downtime that I've been liking and it's easy when my next deadline is 3 months later and I'm like 70% of the way there.

Today was probably the first time I thought I'd try and be productive and it sort of worked... I mean I got stuff done and prepared for tomorrow - I have a Skype interview for an internship position. Not particularly nervous but more worried about the awkwardness. Never had a Skype interview in my life so... It'll be interesting to see how this turns out. I'm hoping that the first thing I don't have to say is "hello? Can you hear me? Can you see me?" Oh god. Or my dad coming to find me and bug me. Haven't told my parents because I don't want them interfering with my job/internship search for personal reasons.

I also worked on my project for submission in January. There's still quite a bit to do, like conducting interviews with teachers bit should be soon. I'm excited but scared at the same time - I'm turning 23 soon and life is beginning to worry be quite a lot at the rate it's progressing. Not looking forward to growing old compared to before when I was a naive 16 year old who couldn't wait to be 21 and officially called an "adult".