Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Some BYS swatches: Pouty Purple, Sunshine Yellow

I believe this is an Australian brand. I've seen it around the nail blogosphere and then ran across it on eBay... and then, magically, money flew out of my PayPal account. Funny how that happens.

BYS Pouty Purple

I'm torn on this polish. On one hand, it's pretty nifty: a shimmery blue-leaning purple with almost a ghostly light blue light that floats above the purple. On the other hand... unless you catch it at exactly the right angle, it just looks like a plain purple shimmer. And I'm not a big fan of purple shimmers.

BYS Sunshine Yellow


This was one of the less fun yellows I've had to deal with in awhile. Thick, gloopy, hard to apply. Streaky at coats one, two and three. The fourth coat almost took the other three off... I've got enough good yellow cremes now that one that gives me grief is barely going to be a favorite just because it's a favored color.

And then I got another BYS (and I don't know where it went), but it turned out to be an exact dupe for Nabi Big Green Ball. Looked the same, even smelled the same. I love Big Green Ball but it smells absolutely terrible. And the BYS had the exact same smell.

I've been doing a lot of research-type soul searching: what is it that I really want to study? There's the immediate beast: my second year project, which has a definite deadline of about five months from now. And then there's "what's going to interest and entertain me for the next four years... and more"? I have so many half-ideas and the attention-span of a five-year-old boy. The fun of cognitive psychology -- of any psychology, I guess -- is that the seeds of research ideas can come from just observing one's own mundane existence. Recently, I've been really amused by how my labmates and I "pass notes" via SMS during one of our classes. Yes, I'm ashamed to admit it because it's so disrespectful to the instructor (our advisor!!) but I I'm not sure our performance in the class suffers because all our SMS notes have to do with the class itself... but the comments are usually tangential and are generally humorous comments ON the class, rather than the class material. It's a class about conversation and my labmates and I amuse ourselves by conversing, at a hidden level, about the in-class conversation on academic topic of conversation.

What's caught my attention in this situation is the way we take turns in passing notes (turn-taking being a pretty significant aspect of conversation). Usually, with SMS, you wait for the buzz on your phone to check for a message because usually, you are not in the same room as someone sending you a text. Me and Labmate #1 sit diagonal to each other and are in full view of the other so I can see when he's looking at his hands... but not necessarily when he's typing on his phone. But I've started to use his looking at his hands as a cue to expect my phone to buzz. Once in awhile even, I'll have asked him a yes/no question in the SMS message and he'll wait until I'm looking at him to answer by nodding or shaking his head subtly. ...so, I think there's something that's sort of weird and interesting going on in that we're using two communicative mediums simultaneously, but I'm not sure why it's interesting or what questions I could ask that spring from it and I feel too impatient to try to figure out how to make it interesting to other people. So... half ideas and attention span of a five-year-old boy.

That and I don't know that I want to tell my advisor that we pass notes during class. That seems unwise.