Now I know why I never felt comfortable or confident in it! It makes me look like a waitress or a sales associate. Not exactly the confident young business professional I was trying to channel. After exhaustively mixing and matching my suit with different tops inside, I finally realized that my downfall was my trusty white dress shirt. I instantly looked better after I changed into a dark blue silk dress shirt or a cream silk top with ruffles. I once heard that dressing in something a little different, like a colorful top or a pair of eye catching earrings, even in a business formal occasion, will make you standout from the herd in a positive way. Indeed, I don’t recall anyone in Lipstick Jungle wearing a white dress shirt with a black suit. Maybe a smart white shirt with a pencil skirt and heels, but a white shirt with a full dark suit just marks you as a nervous newbie. So next time you go for business formal, you might want to reconsider your trusty white dress shirt.

Image Source: Bloomingdales

I’ve always been a bit skeptical of gladiator sandals, because they look rather skeletal to me. But I must say, I quite like this one. It has the cool skeletal quality that brings gladiators back to us season after season and yet, it is still pretty with the girly bows.

Indeed, Leighton Meester does it credit, showing us how versatile it can be with our summer outfits, from casual shorts to a pretty dress. It works for mere mortals too! HG tried on the 1 inch heel white version the other day and it looked fab on her!

Image Source: Net A Porter and Coolspotters

There is just something so striking about the photographs that makes you want look closer. Perhaps it is the strong juxtaposition between the eastern and the western culture?

Or perhaps the dapper gentlemens randomly walking in the air with their umbrellas that seem so completely out of place and time? The fine prints said that these were frame stills from the film, The Spring, by Yang Fudong. Initially I thought it was some new version of Lust Caution, a genre I’ve never been very interested in, and that Prada happened to have sponsored the costumes. I wondered how they incorporated a scene with floating men. As it turns out, this is a short film especially commission by Prada to promote their SS10 Menswear collection. I know, I’m slow.

I watched the 9 minute black/white avant garde film last night on You Tube. I don’t claim to understand the surrealist art references, and indeed had no idea what the plot could’ve been. But I did find the imageries in the film incredibly intriguing. Every scene is picture perfect. It almost reads like a moving series of photographs. Definitely not a boring 9 minutes!

Image Source: the Coolist

It reminds me that I should get my hands on some updated classics like a pair of casual black silk pants (maybe they can be my new jeans?) and a long tuxedo blazer (definitely nothing new, but it looks like it’s not going anywhere anytime soon). I should also maybe give that tshirt under strapless dress look another try. I’ve tried but never really “made it work”, but it looks oh so very mod in the picture. And my, those flat simple gladiator sandals are very very versatile indeed. I should look out for something similar this summer.  

Image Source: Style.com

Unfortunately, unlike my trusty old Nokia cell, which held out for months after the battery expanded and I couldn’t close the back, when a touchscreen starts to die, it dies a swift death. My touchscreen stopped working and there isn’t much I can “work with” after that. The worst thing was, I called customer service and found out that I can’t even recover my contact list! I was under the impression that smartphones are mini computers, and figured that if hardrives can be recovered when a pc dies, it shouldn’t be too hard for them to recover my contacts. But no, apparently they reset your phone when they examine it and there isn’t some magic the technicians can do to recover it. I am so mad at them and at myself for not backing up my phone (the backup program is not userfriendly). I just spent the whole evening painstakingly going through my contact list manually and typing it into my google contacts (luckily I figured out how to use the few keys on my phone to get me the relevant page). I figured that I can transfer them over when I get my new iPhone (when it comes out). I’m placing my bet on the advance of technology in the last two years and the superiority of Apple over HTC, that this won’t happen again. I’m absolutely never buying another phone from HTC again (don’t know what made me do it in the first place- must’ve been the pretty glass case!). I’m back to my old Nokia in the meantime. Apple better come out with a new iphone soon……..

Image Source: HTC

Every year in Hong Kong, impromptu flower markets pop up to sell flowers and random specialty items, very much like how in the States you have random Christmas themed farmer markets. They open around the week before CNY and end on CNY. Most people go in the last few nights when it opens really late (like past midnight late- us HKers are a nocturnal bunch), when it’s absolutely packed. They say that just walking around the market will bring you good luck in the new year. So I must be VERY lucky this year, since I went to the flower market TWICE (it’s a loooong story). But anyways, this is where the flowers generally come from, though you can find them in flower shops too.

It doesn’t look too exciting when you’re at the flower market because  there are so many of them they all start looking the same. But once it get’s home, aren’t they so very very pretty? Each flower represents some kind of good luck, though I’m not sure of the details on that front. The names going clockwise from the top left to the best of my knowledge: a) Japanese orchids (they’re a new breed this year and I LOVE how it looks) b) some sort of red sword orchids? c) bells, because they dangle downwards and looks like a bell d) cherry blossoms, which is suppose to bring love. I think these might actually be better than a Christmas tree because of their many variety and vibrant colors!

In the spirit of the lunar year, many places made special Tiger items to commemorate the year. I paid special attention this year, since the Tiger is my favourite. Prada came out with a Tiger collection that frankly does not look very cute or pretty. But I do think that this Tiger from Swarovski is pretty awesome. Maybe even better than the Dragon one they had back in 2000 to celebrate the millennium.

Happy Year of the Tiger everyone!

Given my limited artistic capabilities and unimaginative nature, I decided to go with a simple shape and work on the color and texture. As simple as it looks, I’ll have you know that I probably spent a little over a hour working on the texture of the heart to get it to look like this. It turns out that texturizing is much harder than it looks and if you are not careful, you will over work it….

….and it’ll end up looking like this, which is neither here nor there. It looked much better in my imagination. It’s a good thing I took a picture of it before I decided to be done with it!

But yes, Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! I would like to take this opportunity to thank all my readers for sticking around in the last year. It’s officially been 1 year and 14 days since I started to blog alone. I was so busy cramming for an exam on Feb 1st that I completely forgot until now. I know there’s been ups and downs, and quite some bit of inconsistency, but I appreciate your patience and I’ll try to do better this year. There’s been quite a lot of changes lately i.e. I finally got tired of Chicago and moved back to Hong Kong, but hopefully it is all for the better. I love you all!

1. Chocolate Making: When we say we “made” you chocolate, it actually means we melted chocolate, reshaped it for you using a mold and then refrigerated it. We didn’t actually make anything. It’s almost like playing with play-doh except we did it with food. To top it off, genius stores like Muji also provides us with easy ready-made kits, which includes all the tools/ingredients we need with step-by-step instructions (and even an online tutorial). In all the standardization, there is even room for “creativity” with decorating. Minimal effort with full marks for DIY effort, what more can a girl ask for? Thank you Muji!
2. “Personalized” Items : Whoever invented sticking one’s picture onto any surface possible was a genius. Who doesn’t like constantly looking at themselves and their loved ones? Plus it allows the giver to appear thoughtful in their gift-giving even though it really just took them a few minutes to upload the pictures from the comforts of their home onto Shutterfly, fill in the form, click submit and have it delivered. Not that I’m begrudging all photo gifts, but I like to think of them as aids for expressions instead of an easy way out. A whole bunch of personalized photo gifts wouldn’t exactly match the decor of my apartment if you know what I mean. On the other hand, my friend got a personalized puzzle for her special someone this year and had it completed and framed as a present. The framed picture is probably nothing new, but the time spent putting it together and all is very sweet (Psst! I hear that in some places they put the pieces together for you).

Apple came out with an iPad that is an iTouch except bigger. Admittedly they have a few more tricks, like the book reader program. But then I can read ebooks on my laptop. Indeed, there are applications to read ebooks on the iPhone as well. The point of an e-reader would be that it looks like a book, so that it’s not as damaging to your eyes, and can store many of it. I had high hopes for Apple to come up with a good one, but I guess I’ll just wait for the Kindle to come up with a version that has a colored touch screen and a backlight for when it’s dark. It is an interesting evolution of human behavior. Now that I’ve gotten on board with the touch screen thing, it seems intuitive that I should be able to flick a epage over.

Late last year, Google came out with Google Wave and everyone was anxious to be “invited” to try it. As an email, I prefer to see my communications come in order and not all over the place. I do not have the patience to see it replay itself, as cool as the function sounded. As a chat box, it was slow and confusing. Am I suppose to start a new thread for everything sentence I want to say, or reply to a thread? While the auto mapping and the photo sending function was cool (that is if the photo sending worked. The photos I tried to send back in October is still currently loading), the Wave just didn’t catch on with anyone I know and we all quickly gave up. I still have 23 invites. Maybe if they tried to integrate these little functions onto my Gmail.

Speaking of Gmail, I logged on this morning and noticed Google Buzz added to my sidebar. From what I can tell, it is a Google version of Twitter, except worse. It publicizes your contact list and it sends you spam everytime someone updates a Buzz. Molly Wood hits the spot on this one. I’ve already turned mine off. The link to do so is at the very bottom of your Gmail screen, where the small prints and Google View option is. Maybe the folks at Google have been couped up in Google town for too long………