5 reasons why I can never be a fashion blogger

I have often wondered how all those fashion bloggers manage to look so chic and perfect in their outfit photos. The poses they do to make the photo so appealing effortlessly and of course the outfit. I know this is simply not my thing. I’m more of a PJ and a sweatshirt person. I’m most at ease when I’m in them. That’s why here are the FIVE reasons I can never master the art of being a fashion blogger. 

1. I’m not a great poser: I just don’t know how to pose like a pro or look cute at least. In all my photos, my head is always tilted to the left; it goes off automatically as if I’m programmed to do that. Call this my signature pose. The HAND; 95% of the time I’m not sure where to place it and I tend to place it at the wrong place all the time. The picture below is the testimony. 

 

1.The Signature pose, head always tilted to the left. 2. Same Cardigan in the first and second pic 3. Check out the cross legged pose 4. The hairstyle

2. I’m not a fashionista : Apart from the traditional dress for work, 90% of the time, I will be wearing the same outfit over and over again. I’ll be droning the same outfit; Jeans, a top and of course the cardigan with a pair of loafers. Even if the weather gets too cold, I’ll be layering up ultimately with the cardigan. I buy clothes, shoes, bags and makeup but wear the same cardigan and carry the same bag, wear the same shoes until it breaks or wear the same scarf over and over again. Grrr…I’m this plain boring and lazy. 

3. The same old hairstyle: My hair is not exciting. I never try to experiment my hair (again laziness it could be or I dare not to look outrageous). It’s the same old left parting. Wash, blow-dry (sometimes), comb, let loose and go- that’s the only routine my hair have gone through for the past 27 years. 

4. My life is monotonous: My life lies on the 7 km road stretch between home and office so I land up wearing the same outfit again and again. Apart from the little grocery and vegetable shopping I do while returning from work, I do not meet many people. So neither is my life interesting to plan outfits.

5. My color palette is black or dull: I feel like I’m screaming if I wear pops of neon. So 95% of my closet is filled with either black or grey or dull colors. But, I’m learning to incorporate other shades.

So,do you also have reservations to become a fashion blogger like me?

How safe is your town?

Image source : Kuensel

It isn’t surprising any longer to hear news of burglary or auto stripping in Thimphu these days. However, when you wake up to the news of a cold blooded murder in your backyard, it disturbs you tremendously. The murder of a 48 year old Indian official in Chang Jalu, Olakha on the night of November 7 shook the residents of Chang Jalu. If you have been following this blog, you know why I’m gravely concerned over this for the virtue disadvantage of being a Chang Jalu resident.  

 

Chang Jalu is largely a residential area. However, it has all the facilities of bars, drayangs... that encourage unwanted activities. It’s common to hear fighting at night and people high on alcohol disturbing the whole neighborhood.  

  

With majority of the offices located in the core city, returning home from office late in the evening is becoming a safety issue. There are no street lights in the area. In fact, the area where the body was found dead is a pitch black area in the evening where you encounter deadly looking young men and women.

The security personnel just a yell away isn’t of any help either since they are mostly locked inside their cabin to escape the awful cold in the night or they must be snoring to heaven’s glory, we can’t blame them. 

The previous night, my nephews who were returning home from celebrating Diwali were also robbed off their mobile phones and cash on the same spot. 

Urban Bhutan is becoming increasingly unsafe. Why don’t the concerned authorities do something to avoid such social ills? In this case, putting proper street lights in this area could have avoided the miscreants to carry out unnecessary activities. The concern of street lights has always been there for this area. My cousin who returns from office late in the evening given the nature of her job shared with me some months ago that she doesn’t feel safe to walk home from this area. I, as a concerned resident and a responsible gender focal point raised this issue in one of the consultation meetings with the relevant stakeholder long time back. However, the outcome of the meeting remained in policy papers only. 

Not long ago Thimphu was considered as one of the safest cities. It was perfectly ok to run to a grocery store to shop leaving your car’s ignition on. Now what has become of urban Thimphu? This could be just a tip of an iceberg, so many cases go unreported. Sadly, it’s our youths who are dragged and involved in such social ills. 

I hope the concerned authorities really start doing something immediately so that the next morning residents of another town do not wake up to the news of another murder in their backyard. 

I pay my deep condolences to the bereaved family.  

Until then, remain safe. 

100 things I ❤ - Part Ten

Finally, finally this post saw the light of the day. It has been on my draft for quite some time now. May be because the series has come to an end that I didn’t want to end it by posting the last part or I was plain lazy to do it. I’ve a strong intuition that the latter could be the reason.  

  

All these while, the cold weather has chased me to hibernation and the queen of procrastinator I’m, I want to shoot myself sometimes. Three days off for a weekend and all I did was spend endless time on the internet, doing nothing productive of course. Well, I need to work on the thing that is due tomorrow, but I just got the greatest idea for this other thing that is due next month. I’ll work on that first. That’s how I sidetrack work.  

Sometimes I wonder whether I’m really alive and kicking to have possessed this kind of attitude. I'm not having a quarter life crisis, am I? Seriously, I need some motivatiooonnnnn….

You know what I want to do. I just want to sit around a fireplace, reading books and drinking coffee. I wish I get paid for that. I‘d have easily given up my 9-5 job.  

 

See, I’ve already delayed you in this post, the finaaallll post to Things I  ❤ series. 

#91 Sweater, fluffy and comfy in this weather

 

#92  Sleeping to the sound of rain

#93 Trees in Autumn, yellowish and orange in color

#94 Watching movies in bed

#95 Romantic Evenings

#96 Discovering a new blog

#97 Book Shelves : As much as I love reading and sniffing books, I love to collect and preserve it. And I'm on my mission to building my fantasy book shelf.

#98 Bonfires

#99 Being loved

#100 You, my dear readers for coming this far with me. 

Woah! I'm finally done with this series. I'm not sure what I'll blog about now. I had so much fun getting to know myself by penning down the little things in life that reminds me to be happy and thankful about. I'm sure you enjoyed as much as I did. And I don't know but I didn't want this to end.

[All image credit : www.pinterest.com]

Book Review / Kafka on the Shore

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami is the second book I’ve read by a Japanese writer. The first book I read was The remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro in my sophomore days in college. Perhaps I was a little too naive to understand the depth of the book which was awarded the prestigious Man Booker Prize for Fiction (1989) that I didn’t quite enjoy the book. 

With the same skepticism in mind, I grabbed a copy from the local book store and set out to read Kafka on the Shore.

My oh my, I was totally blown off.

It was a complete page-turner; I could not simply put it down and I have been consistently late to work for the last few days for staying up late at night just to put it down. I struggled though.

Kafka on the Shore (translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel) is mesmerizing, ethereal and surreal that sweeps you out of your way and leaves you puzzled. 

On his fifteenth birthday, Kafka Tamura (we never know his real name) runs away from his affluent motherless home in Tokyo and lives in a corner of a library in a far-off small town.

Fifteen year old Kafka is laid under the omen of his father, a renowned Tokyo sculptor who tells Kafka that he is destined to murder his father and sleep with his mother and sister. This oedipal prophesy is heavy for Kafka and the story centers around it for him. 

Paralleling the story of Kafka is the story of Nakata, an old man who has the ability to talk to cats. As a child in the fourth grade, while on a mushroom-gathering outing with his class he fell into a coma after an unexplained flash of silver in the sky. When he woke up several weeks later in a military hospital, he had lost his entire memory and with it, the ability to read and write. He lives on the government subsidy and earns some commission from finding lost cats in the neighborhood. 

It’s the story of fish and leeches falling from the sky and a shadowy pimp dressed as Colonel Sanders and an enlightening sex worker. It features un-aged WW I soldiers living in a forest, a transgender hemophiliac, a woman living in the past with an ability to travel through space and time and the unenlightened Hoshino, a truck driver with a ponytail, a pierced ear, and a Chunichi Dragons baseball team cap and how their lives cross each other's path.

I’m not a cat person. However, Nakata’s ability to converse with cat made me give a second thought and it is endearingly written in the book. I developed a love for the old man, Nakata’s character in the book for his innocence, truthfulness, honesty and for his inability to read and write. Of course his ability to converse with cat is exceptional. He was a perfect vehicle to execute the plots which perhaps could have been incomplete without him.

There are many questions unanswered in the book. 

The theory of T.S Eliot’s Hollow Man, Oedipus complex and a lot of symbolic metaphors are sometimes ethereal and makes one ponder until one lets things pass by and sometimes make it utterly empty. 

It filled my head, it consumed me but I loved it. Murakami is reported to have said that his novels are meant to be read again and again, and that it is up to the reader to devise their own thoughts and conclusions. Perhaps I need to read it again to formulate my own thoughts and venture beyond what I need to. 

A brilliant book! I enjoyed it completely. And definitely its one of those 1001 books that you must read before you die. Thus, this quote from the book completely sums me up: 

“The book didn't come to any conclusion, and nobody wants to read a book that doesn't have one. For me, though, having no conclusion seemed perfectly fine.”

                                                                                                          

                                                                                            Haruki Murakami

100 Things I ❤ - Part Nine

Shoot...I'm late by three days. Blame my work and the amount of reading and watching movies I've been doing. From the reading job I've been doing, another review will be up soon in the blog.So keep checking out this space if you enjoyed reading the book reviews here and here.

Also I would like to thank all of you for the beautiful and encouraging comments you have left for the posts on this series which inspired me to continue with the series.

For the benefit of new readers, here is the link to know more on this series. This is the second last post I'll be doing, sad that it's already coming to an end :(. 

#81 Flowers

#82 Smile : It's amazing how a smile can make one look beautiful and straighten everthing up.

#83 Compliment from a stranger : A 10 year old or something kid said he liked my pair of stilettos this morning when I was on my way to work. Kid these days, sigh! But it made my day :).

#84 People Watching : One of my hobbies is to people watch. I love to sit on the top of a place and watch all the people passing by and sometimes wonder what is all running through their head and where they are headed to, what battle are they fighting today...

#85  The feeling of letting go : I'm a nostalgic person so letting go is one of the hardest things for me to do but now that I'm learning, there is a beauty to it. And I'm learning to accept the facts of impermanence in life.

#86 Bigg Boss : I hate it yet I've to watch it. You can understand my love-hate relationship with the show from my comments in this post. Bigg Boss is the Indian version of Bigg Brother reality show. 37 days have already passed in this season's Bigg Boss 7, so please follow the show with me at 9:30 pm BST every night on Colors Television. Let's wait and watch who will emerge this season's winner.

#87 Sunshine 

#88 Writing a journal : Call me old timer, but I love the feel of writing with a pen and paper. And writing a journal definitely helps me take my love for writing to the next level. 

#89 A pair of comfortable old Jeans

#90 Freedom : The present state of mine is definitely what I would call freedom. 

I'd love to hear about the things you heart in the comments below.

[All images are from www.weheartit.com]