I am aware that my use of super like this reveals me to be so South Floridian. I have gotten questions before about my skin care routine and I have forgotten to get back to them in a separate rebloggable post so I finally grouped together my products and snapped a photo of them. For the most part, I have kind of sensitive and dry skin. I will warn you that I’ve never really had an issue with acne, in fact, I’m that obnoxious person who gets one zit a year and is so freaked out by it that every friend of mine is like, “shut the fuck up, you are such a jerk.” After maintaining good skin for many lucky years while not taking such good care of it (i.e. sleeping in my makeup, not thinking of sunscreen, etc.), I finally took the good advice and example of my mother and started working out a whole skin routine.

Here are the products I use and love and swear by and want to marry:

1. Philosophy Purity Made Simple Face Wash: This is a pretty well-known cleanser and it works perfectly for me. Right now, I’m using the foaming one because I ordered this one accidentally on Amazon but I usually use and prefer the original creamy formula (if you have more oily skin/acne prone skin, foaming cleansers are much better for you, actually!). You can use this with your fingers as I do or on a face brush or on a Clarisonic. It’s very gentle and unless I’m doing a srs bsns eye, it removes all my makeup. Score.

2. Burt’s Bees Rosewater Toner: My mom was always a big fan of rosewater and witch hazel and glycerin, mixing her own toner/face spray but I don’t have that kind of time/effort so I just buy this one which is natural and feels amazing. Moisturizing while also giving that clean, tight pore feeling witch hazel gives you. Dab on with a cotton ball, put some in a travel size spray bottle and keep it in your purse when it’s gross this summer (i.e. all the time in Florida).

3. Weleda Iris Hydrating Day Cream: This is what I use when I am in actual winter or my skin is extra dry. Like, I made so much use of this when I was in Canada over the holidays, slathering it on nice and thick to fight winter. It’s for dry and combination skin and it’s definitely perfect for dry climates and winter and whatnot.

4. Ole Henriksen Sheer Transformation Moisturizer: This is what I use when I feel like I am getting old and want to believe in face magic. My mom gave me this and I love it so much. I switch between this and my main moisturizing squeeze (below), just depending on how I’m feeling (I usually like this for lighter days). This is great for hyperpigmentation, scars, UV damage, etc. It wears really, really, light and it feels dewy and fresh. I’m almost out of my jar and I’m kind of Gollum about it and I really just need to get some more when I run out instead of being a big baby. 

5. First Aid Beauty Ultra Repair Cream: This is my moisturizing pièce de résistance. Look, I know I’m a big weirdo about moisturizing. It used to be something my friends jokingly referred to as my main hobby but you know what, I feel like a goddamn baby. This moisturizer is the fucking shit. You can use it on your body but it’s gentle enough for your face, it has a bunch of antioxidants that are just there on your skin working away for your benefit, it’s good for eczema, it’s unscented, it’s whipped and not in the least greasy. It shouldn’t exist but it does and ever since some girl at Sephora showed it to me a few years ago, it has gone on my face and/or body pretty much every day. It’s like skin food, guys. This big tub of it is $28 and I still have a 1/4 of mine left and I’ve had it for a year and a half.

6. Aveda Green Science Firming Eye Creme: Yes, I use eye creme because prevention, yo. I love this because it’s not greasy at all and you can see the difference and reduction of puffiness in about two weeks. I just dab it all around my orbital bone (eye creme drifts closer to the delicate eye skin area so don’t put right up against your eye or it will absorb into your eye and ouch, sting). A tiny bit goes a long, long way.

BONUS Aveeno Baby Continuous Protection Suncreen SPF 55: The makeup I wear usually has SPF in it but on days I don’t wear any, I put on this sunscreen which is nice and light and non-clogging and made for babies/ladies with baby skin. I am crazy about sun protection as my mom and grandma have both had skin cancer and I am way more fair than they are and to be honest, I’m terrified of wrinkles.

Other skin thoughts/tips:

• I only wash my face at night because my skin gets too dry otherwise. In the morning, I might just tone if I feel the need to but I always put on a bit of moisturizer.
• Again, dab and pat eye creme on, don’t rub that area because that skin is super delicate and dickish about wrinkles.
• Drink so much water. If you think you’ve had enough, drink an extra glass.
• Put sunscreen everywhere! It’s not just your face that you need to protect. I like the Aveeno Baby sunscreen for my body as well. Like I said, paranoid about skin cancer and wrinkles and not looking at all times like Lydia Deetz.
• Take your makeup off at night, c’mon, guys, learn from me.
• Never feel bad for taking time for yourself, to make a ritual out of taking some time to be calm and take care of yourself. It’s not about anyone but you and don’t feel bad about that, no matter what the reason for that time is.
• Only wearing lipstick (Nars Valkyrie) below, embrace your naked skinness:

There’s a lot of beauty in ordinary things. Isn’t that kind of the point?

I watched The Office for the first time with my old friend Heidi who told me she had started watching a show that made her think of me. This was right at the time the second season DVDs had been released and were on one of those really good sales at Target. She got the first two seasons and persuaded me to come over after lunch. We smoked a bit, out of a hookah with peach-flavored tobacco since we were 19 or so, and put on the first disc.

“It starts a little slow,” she said. “Give it a few episodes.”

She wasn’t wrong but it had me from the start and not just because I was a little bit stoned. We watched for the next day and a half, ordering pizza when we were hungry and climbing into bed and couch respectively when we were tired. We called another good friend of ours to join us and she jumped in where we were. I can’t tell you when it grabbed me, maybe it was something desperate that Michael said or the simple joy of seeing Dwight’s stapler in jello but I was in. I still have never laughed as hard as I did watching “The Injury” for the first time and I’m not sure I ever will. We watched the next two seasons together every Thursday and when I moved away, I introduced my BFF to the show and kept watching.

I haven’t watched The Office since the end of season 7, a season which was already testing my patience with a show that I loved so much. I cry about most things because I have all the feelings and because I went to therapy and dealt with the things that kept everything I felt inside. This show was one of the few things to make me cry before I could cry at the things going on in my actual life. I cared about these people, these fictional but regular people, in a way I couldn’t really let myself care about people in my life. It became a conduit for this while I continued to grow. I stopped watching after season 7 because things had changed, because I had changed, but it never made me mad that it had changed; it was a weird, forever home for me in a way.

I feel this way about Tumblr. It started off as a place for me to put writing from a workshop I was taking, an archive of sorts and it became this passage to the rest of my life. I put myself out there for the first time in a long time, in just a small way, but it was enough to start something. It made me start really writing, it made me be ok with people reading the things I write, it gave me the opportunity to write for places I never would have considered beforehand. It helped me deal with things until I couldn’t do it alone and then it helped me go to therapy. It led me to meet some of my dearest friends, including my best friend. It led me to my husband, for Christ’s sake. It led me to explore art and culture and feminism and so many things that have made me a better person, the person I am today. 

It wasn’t all great, of course. It also introduced me to awful people, rude people, clamoring people who made lots of things feel worse than they had to. Tumblr changed and fluctuated and we changed and fluctuated along with it. It has been a place that has documented the best parts and the worst parts and the most random, drawn from mindlessness parts of all of us. I don’t use it the way I did in the past and I have a different relationship to it now but I can’t deny that it’s a huge catalyst in how I grew into who I am now. It’s not really good or bad, it sort of just is. And this is how I feel about The Office, after all is said and done about its progress or lack thereof; it’s pretty consistently inconsistent because it’s primarily about people. It lives and breathes and fucks up and changes like we all do.

I watched the last few episodes of The Office because I had to. Of course, I had to! I fell in easily with the people I grew to know so well and caught up with them at the end of their documentary journey. I cried, more easily and with less conflicted feelings than I used to cry when watching TV and movies, and I watched as these characters, these people, that I’ve watched for years became whoever it is they were going to be; I cannot tell you how much I cried at finding out that Michael finally got the big family he always wanted, that Jim and Pam were going to take this big chance together. My heart felt so strangely full at seeing where these people are now: in better places for some, in the same cycles for others. It was so good to see all of it and I couldn’t feel anything but love for it despite the fact that it’s not the show it used to be. It changed but then so did I. 

I didn’t expect to react as strongly as I did to the finale because I’d been removed from The Office for a while. It wasn’t until I was presented with this evidence of not only how far this show has come that I could really fathom where I’ve been and gotten to in the past several years as well. I feel so much the same but I know that I’m not, that I’ve changed in ways that you can only look back and realize after the fact. It’s why Tumblr changing doesn’t matter or why The Office ending doesn’t feel like something being over; what counts, the time you’ve spent and the way you’ve grown as a result of something, never really ends in the ways that matter. 

Everything I have I owe to this job blog show…this stupid, wonderful, boring, amazing job blog show.

So, thanks to a TV show and a blogging platform for helping me get to wherever it is I’ve gotten to; I like it (and me) a lot.

That’s what she said.