I’m feeling a bit tired and blah today, and it’s only Tuesday. Thursday is usually Exhaustion Day, when I find myself waiting for the kids at karate and wondering if I’m going to make it or if I am just going to fall over from tiredness, but I feel like that today. It doesn’t really bode well for the rest of the week.

I should be more perky, really, since January is almost done and it’s light at five o’clock now. The sun is up before 8:30 and it sets after 5:00, and that alone should be enough to give me some pep. Also, we’ve only had a few Very Cold Days; mostly the weather has been (relatively) mild for the entire month. But the sky is a dull, dull grey and my husband is out of town and I bought the wrong lip gloss; all is ashes.

My two favourite lip gloss colours have been discontinued, and it is distressing me more than it should. Ideally, I should be able to bounce back from this kind of thing, but for some reason I am now obsessed with finding an exact match to my two favourite glosses. This puts me in mind of a lipstick hoarding issue I had; I had purchased a bunch of dark lipstick on sale, and time ticked forward and suddenly, that dark colour no longer suited me. Instead of making me look perky and red-lipped, I looked like a papery-skinned old crone who was desperately holding on to the vestiges of youth, which is not a look I want to embrace. Anyway, I was left with several lipsticks of that shade, thanks to my hoarding/ sale purchasing. Never again would I waste money that way, I thought to myself.

Sadly, this has come back to haunt me. Since the discontinuation of my two favourite lip glosses, I have tried – and failed – to purchase a reasonable facsimile. There is a significant hurdle to face: sample lip glosses. I cannot even bear the thought of putting a sample lip gloss near my face – think of all the people who have touched it! – and yet just dabbing it on my wrist does nothing to tell me if this is a suitable colour or not. So I buy a lip gloss, hope for the best, and become immensely disappointed when it washes me out or, in the case of my latest purchase, is purple.

When the lip gloss itself started to fade, it left me with a purplish ring around the outside of my lips, like a 1986 lip liner. This feels like an immense waste of money, although, as Swistle says (HI SWISTLE), it is educational and will keep me from purchasing anything similar in the future. Which is true, but damn. I just want a perfect, non-glittery, sort-of-mocha, neutral toned lip gloss. IS THAT TOO MUCH TOO ASK? If I could hop on my super-awesome-time-travel machine, I would go back and buy out the entire line of those two lip gloss shades and hoard them until they became brittle, crusty bottles of goo.

Anyway. I had no intention of this being a post about my lip gloss angst. What I had meant to write about was how women are often very self-deprecating; I read two things today (HI LISA) (HI ALI) in which the writers talked about their inability to accept compliments and their difficulty in saying what they love about themselves, respectively. How that segued into lip gloss, I have no idea. However, I want to know – what do you love about yourself? I want you to brag a little – tell me what is the most awesome thing about you. Do you have fabulous hair, do you take amazing photographs, can you edit a paper like nobody’s business? Can you run a 10k, do you decorate cakes, can you sing really well? Do you know how to knit or can you change a tire? I want to know what you think your best qualities are. Don’t be shy – it will brighten up this dull January day. Tell me, please. xoxo