Photo courtesy of blinc

My Birchbox subscription has taught me a lot about the cosmetics industry.

For example, a lot of women will apparently pay $18 an ounce for a “molecular mist” purported to do everything from keeping skin hydrated to protecting it from “ionizing radiation” emitted from the sun and cellphones.

I thought it smelled like that one perfume that every lady over 75 is contractually obligated to wear, so I tossed it.

Come at me, ionizing radiation.

I’ve also learned that oil-based moisturizers, even those containing lavender-scented unicorn tears of happiness, make my eyes swell, which I guess puffs the tiny wrinkles right out.

Overall, the Birchbox experiment has been loads of fun, especially when the $10-a-month box of samples includes makeup. My first box held a full-size container of Laura Geller Baked Blush N’ Brighten blusher/highlighter, and this month I received stila’s Smudge Stick liner in Lionfish (that’s a coppery brown for those of you unfamiliar with hilarious names for cosmetics shades).

The Birchbox item that’s changed my makeup routine, however, is blinc mascara (and no, the cosmetics industry absolutely CANNOT afford to purchase uppercase letters for their company names).

I had been having trouble with mascara for a while. L’Oreal either stopped making or stopped distributing my favorite mascara, FeatherLash, a few years ago, and while other varieties were certainly waterproof, they weren’t anywhere NEAR smudgeproof or flakeproof. By midday, especially in the summer, I was almost guaranteed to have light black smudges under my eyes. Of course, I couldn’t remove waterproof smudges without removing any foundation or concealer that I might be wearing, so sometimes I would just skip mascara in the morning, especially if I was planning on wearing makeup on an evening outing and didn’t want to start over.

The blinc sample promised to form smudgeproof tubes of color around my lashes instead of painting them. It also pointed out a DUH factoid about waterproof mascara: Your skin’s oil makes it smudge because it’s waterproof, not oilproof (oil is a central ingredient in many of the very products that REMOVE waterproof mascara, after all).

So how DO you remove mascara that’s waterproof AND oilproof? It turns out that blinc is actually water-resistant rather than waterproof. Sweat, rain and tears shouldn’t affect it, however, since it requires a combination of water AND pressure for removal. I’ve found that a few concentrated splashes of warm water, followed by gentle tugging with my fingertips, takes it right off. This method actually results in fewer lashes getting tugged out, too.

So, yeah, I totally spent $25 on a tube of mascara for the first time ever. Wonders never cease.

This was never what I would call a nightmare, since Dream Me would just sort of sigh and start picking her way through snakes, but it always occurred during stressful times.

After Hurricane Katrina flooded my home, my hometown and a boggling number of other places I loved, my subconscious traded snakes for water as an expression of anxiety.

Again, these dreams aren’t nightmares. The problems encountered — usually water rising where it shouldn’t be rising, or me somehow falling into a deep body of water — aren’t so much scary as they are irritating.

During one particularly active dream sequence a couple of weeks ago, I found myself seated at a table that was really part of a boat that plunged over the side of the dock when the driver gunned the engine (I never said my dreams obeyed the laws of mechanics or physics). I swam back up to the dock and climbed into a dockside restaurant, which immediately began to turn sideways since it turned out to be a huge boat that was rolling over. As I kicked my way out of a window into the water, Dream Me really couldn’t believe she had to swim all the way up from the bottom of the ocean AGAIN.

I mean COME ON.

I totally get it. My subconscious gets overwhelmed with anxiety and takes it out on my dreams. It takes what I’m apparently scared of deep down and releases it at 2 a.m.

My everyday way to cope with anxiety is to constantly analyze how to fix problems. I’m on to Plan C before most people even realize that Plan A is done for and Plan B is just ludicrous.

It’s the same in my dreams. Instead of waking up in a cold sweat when the boat plunges beneath the surface of the water, Dream Me is concentrating on swimming horizontally before trying to head up to the surface in case the sinking boat creates a whirlpool (apparently my subconscious thinks it just might, no matter what the Mythbusters say).

Healthy? You’ll have to ask my theoretical psychotherapist. But it makes sense to me that working through dream anxieties rather than simply having them scare you half out of your pajamas has to be pretty good self-therapy.

Cashiers at the two grocery stores where I shop at regularly have begun the holiday charity spiel early this year. The script literally says, “Would you like to give a dollar to help a family have a turkey for the holidays this year?”

Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes, if I thought that dollar actually went toward the purchase of a turkey. But I’m afraid that only 40 cents of that dollar goes toward a turkey. Possibly less.

And, you see, I know and trust several local organizations to take that dollar and do something awesome with it. Your unknown organization, not so much.

You might say that I won’t miss a dollar here and there. And you’re probably right. But at some point I WILL miss the sum of those dollars, and my own pet charities may get shortchanged.

So stop it. Stop delivering your spiel in a manner that makes me feel like a cheap jerk for saying no.

Stop hooking up with organizations that I’m not familiar with. Would it be so bad to sponsor a LOCAL organization? Ask me to donate a dollar to Manna House, or Friends of Huntsville Animal Services, and see how quickly I say yes.

Until then, the answer is still no.

In four weeks, I’ll wrap up my master’s degree in English. I never intended to pursue this degree, but it has been one of the more awesome things I’ve ever done.

I think everybody should go back to school for something in their mid-30s. It remaps your brain and reenergizes your thinking process. Or at least that’s what it’s done for me.

It apparently has not, however, transformed my ability to do three things at once into the ability to do five things at once, so I better get back to writing for work, writing for class and cogitating about this Friday’s master’s exam.

I promise to return to cooking and decorating and writing about the whole glorious mess sooner rather than later.

Let’s start with the journey. Having discovered the amazing lunches at Birmingham’s Culinard Cafe a few months ago, I decided that I simply had to start my journey early enough to make it there to test-drive the breakfast menu.

The breakfast menu is significantly smaller than the lunch menu, but it still lists enough items to make anybody happy. It boasts three breakfast sandwiches on ciabatta bread, all featuring scrambled eggs: hot ham and Swiss cheese; bacon and cheddar cheese; and Southwestern chorizo, sautéed onions and peppers and jalapeno cheese. All are priced between $3.35 and $3.65.

My instinct pointed me toward the spicy chorizo sausage, but I’m still getting to know chorizo, so I chose the hot ham and cheese sandwich instead. I also ordered a small serving of loaded grits ($2.10).

My meal arrived with a surprise hashbrown pattie (a surprise only because I hadn’t really been paying attention to the menu details).

Just like the irresistible flat-iron steak sandwich that the husband and I have split a couple of times at the Culinard Cafe, the ham, egg and cheese sandwich was big enough for two people. Alas, I was by myself, but I did my best.

The bread, as usual, was spot on: thick and sturdy enough to safely encase the slippery ingredients, but thin and soft enough to bite through without too much effort. The eggs were cooked to perfection and then wrapped around the ham and gooey cheese.

The grits? Oh, the grits.

Loaded grits usually arrive with grease pooled on top, a consequence of adding more cheese and butter than necessary in an attempt, I presume, to fully “Southernize” the dish.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

There were no greasy pools in these loaded grits. They weren’t laden with butter or unmelted cheese. The grits were light (not so light that I thought they were baked with eggs in a casserole, however), and filled with small pieces of bacon — real bacon, not fake bacon bits.

The grits alone made the early departure worthwhile. I didn’t even have to stop for lunch (I actually tried to find lunch, but you know that span of I-65 between Montgomery and Mobile? That happened.)

If I have to plan a trip through Birmingham, I’m totally planning it on a weekday during this restaurant’s business hours.

It’s the site stats. Definitely the site stats.

The myriad ways that people find this blog are simply fascinating and, sometimes, completely random.

The most popular search terms aren’t the ones that interest me, although it is flattering to know that I’m one of the top 3 Google results for “little debbie banana pudding rolls.”

The more rarely used search terms tell more interesting stories.

For example, over the past two years, six people have arrived at this blog using the search term “two headed angel.” The related post describes a craft project gone wrong due to wine and impatience, but seriously, WHO is typing in this search term and what are they looking for?

My absolute favorites, however are the weirder, more mysterious search terms:

• llama sunset (pretty sure it leads here)
• pete \”wet dawg\” gordon (I have NO idea)
• Revenge of the king cake babies (probably leads here)
• 2 other uses for star crunch pies (totally did not address this topic)
• fun weird things to do on a first date (I know a few, but haven’t written about them)
• model of land tortoise house (I’ll build you one for a price)
• uah nerdy (you have no idea)
• two-headed (likely)
• how to stop 25 things (you can’t)
• used mattress alabama (not recommended)
• he was adequate for her (so far)
• dogs texas “avoiding snakes” (not likely)
• sherbet cigarettes (I’m in)
• wide cats (overrated)
• is it too late to by butterfly bandages for my laceration on my arm? (yes)
• cow child (guilty)

Until the groupies show up and take me to the after-party, this is as good as it gets.

So if I had anything as organized as a bucket list, seeing U2 live would definitely be at the top of it.

Check.

More about this later. I’m still processing. And recovering.

Girly moment — I received my first Birchbox sample box today. If this collection is a good example of what they’ll be sending every month, then it’s totally worth the $10.

It held a sample of Kate Spade Twirl (which, yes, I could have probably gotten at a department store, but then I’d have to endure a sales pitch from ladies wearing lots of makeup); a small bottle of Blow NY volumizing shampoo; a sample of Sircuit Cosmeceuticals Molecular Mist, which contains “heavy water” that’s supposed to keep my skin hydrated (and I assume that it has nothing to do with nuclear reactors); a couple of nail polish stripper removal packets (note to Birchbox: next month, send nail polish); and, finally, a full-size container of Laura Geller Baked Blush N’ Brighten blusher/highlighter.

As I expected, it’s going to be very exciting to see what’s in the box every month. It’s an awesome gift to myself.

Awesome?