Saturday, August 25, 2012

vampire fangs for a vampire bride

Yesterday found me doing absolutely nothing with myself, so I decided to go and get vampire fangs.
They're more commonly called snakebites, but let's be honest, vampire boys and girls. We know what they REALLY are... ;)

I didn't get to see my normal piercer, Lysa -she was on vacation in Canada and I forgot about it. Usually I would wait for her to be back, but I'd been meaning to get these piercings for weeks and kept having road blocks pop up, so when I was actually able to make it to the tattoo & piercing place I just decided to seize the day. The piercer was a cute girl named Star -she flew in from New York to sub for Lysa while she was on vacation.  Star was very friendly and knowledgeable, and I think she did a great job. Lined the piercings up exactly where I wanted them on the first try, and even though they hurt more than any other piercing I've had (thanks to the lips being so sensitive), it only hurt for a second and my eyes barely had time to water before I was on a nice piercing high!

My lips were a little sore yesterday, but they didn't really swell up until today. I have very plush, bee stung lips at the moment, and I felt even more like a vampire when I woke up this morning: thanks to my habit of sleeping on my face, one of the piercings had gotten pissed off and was bleeding a little.

I love the little studs, but I'm excited to have them switched out for rings in a few weeks. It's much more fang-like.

Now, onto the pix!

Brand new holes in my face. I've been told I look a little mad about it, but really my lip was stinging too much to smile.


Bruise!

Sunday, August 12, 2012

We Dwell in Forever, & The Devil's Carnival (Again!)


Moving sucks, but it's also kind of awesome. Or should that be, moving is awesome, but it also kind of sucks?
As luck would have it, about a week ago I scored an amazing, 675 square foot loft for Stephen and myself. We've named it We Dwell in Forever, after Cobweb, Swift and Terzian's home in Wraeththu, but for short we just call it Forever, or The Keep. The Keep is in an old industrial building (it used to be the Mutual Creamery, or some such thing) with a FUCKING TOWER.
Yeah. We have a tower. We sure as hell can't access it, but that's okay. I just like knowing that it's there.

I'm really excited, and not just because of the tower. Forever is Stephen's and my first place together with no roommates. It's a loft, so it's got GIANT windows, and our view at night is really cool -you can see out into the Oakland hills, with little tiny lights all over.
Our landlord doesn't care what we do to it, as long as we can undo it whenever we decide to move, so we painted over the ugly white primer on the walls and made it beautiful, with a different theme for each room: the living room is a Victorian parlor with black and white striped walls (Bernard and Danielle get so so so many best friend points for painting that shit), our bedroom was inspired by an old school Goth club (we painted the walls such a deep purple that they look black at night, left a lot of the cracks visible through the paint, and are pretty much just strewing creepy stuff left right and center), the kitchen is an apothecary, and the bathroom has a green faery theme -two of the walls are bright absinthe green, and Bernard painted a gorgeous, sly minx of a green faery perched right by our mirror.

We're pretty happy with our little batcave came out. It's still a bit of a wreck, since we're having to unpack new furniture that ships to us right as we're trying to clean out the mess of boxes from unpacking all of our other stuff, but eventually it will be decent for having people over. Midnight tea parties!!

The only downside? (apart from once more having to pay rent...I'm not too excited about that, but the rent is practically dirt cheap). The reason our rent is dirt cheap is because we're right smack in East Oakland.  The nicest way I can think of putting this is, I sort of feel like we're living in Gotham City, or on the set of The Crow.
Yeeeeeahhh...but even that isn't too bad, the building itself seems very safe and we're about 5 minutes away from Alameda so we just go there to do all of our shopping and stuff like that.
I'll miss walking around, but we're close enough to drive pretty much anywhere else in Oakland or Berkeley and walk about to our hearts' content.
And we're so much closer to San Francisco!

We went to Balboa Theater last night, to catch the encore tour of The Devil's Carnival and it seemed to take practically no time at all to get there, compared to the trek it used to be. It was completely amazing -I was so happy to see it again, and the best part was that FUCKING TERRANCE ZDUNICH REMEMBERED ME FROM SACRAMENTO. And he called me lovely, and kissed my hand.
I pretty much walked on air for the rest of the night after that.

Now I need to get back to more unpacking, and wedding planning: in between apprenticing at the hair salon, moving, and basically running an off-Broadway production (also known as planning a whole wedding from the ground up, including writing a ceremony because we haven't found a Wiccan ceremony that we like enough to use) I've been a busy vampire bride lately.
Maybe I'll reward myself a little later with an absinthe for my efforts...

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Scored a Salon Job!

Very soon I'll be wielding shears and color brush at a salon near you! Actually, it's only near you if you happen to be in Berkeley. But I DID get a salon job. I'm pretty excited, I'll be graduating from cosmetology school soon and I'm rather pleased to have a job right off the bat.

My new home is an Aveda salon & art gallery. Perfect pour moi.
I get to keep indulging my love for Aveda, and also be surrounded by cool artwork. 

Since I'm just out of school, I'm starting as a lowly assistant/junior stylist and it will take me about a year to work my way up to being a stylist (and then who knows how long before I become a senior stylist!) but it's worth it. Working in an awesome salon, getting to move back to Berkeley, getting to show my piercings and tattoos, and of course getting to do some cool hair. Exactly what I want :]

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Cool Find

Rimmel Cosmetics makes a black lipgloss!
How cool is that? An honest-to-god black, not a dark purple, that you can buy in a regular makeup & beauty store: I got mine at Ulta. Bought the last two...hopefully they'll get more soon.

I need to take some pictures soon and show it off, along with the eyebrow piercing I got for my last unmarried anniversary. And my vampire-black hair that is now almost back down to my waist for the first time in a couple years!

Mostly I'm just excited about that lipgloss right now. I wonder if they'll come out with a matching lipstick.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Last Unmarried Anniversary

Mr. Phobia and I celebrated our 4th (and last!) Unmarried Anniversary ever today. How exciting!
In truth it was a bit laid back: there was a lot of Assam Golden Tip tea involved, we indulged in our love of Miyazaki and finally watched The Secret World of Arrietty, and  headed over to  Industrial Tattoo & Piercing to get each other our official anniversary presents -eyebrow piercings.
It was his first piercing ever (I know, can you believe it? He's been with me for how long?) and only the 2nd one that I've had done there.
I've been tattooed there a couple times and I was always really happy with the result. I'm glad to say that I feel the same about getting pierced there! It's such a great place to go, and I think Mr. Phobia might be hooked now. Oops... ;)
We also went to a record store that sold almost nothing but honest-to-god vinyl, and bought a couple Tom Waits albums to christen our new record player with.
A good day? I think so.
Tomorrow we get to celebrate all over again: a friend of ours is doing tech for UC Berkeley's production of Sweeney Todd, and of course there's no way we're going to miss it!

Monday, April 9, 2012

Vampire Bride

That's right, I'm getting married!
This isn't really news if you know me in the real world, but it's the first time I've written about it on my blog.
The Doomsday Clock is at about 6 PM exactly (we have 6 months and 4 days until the wedding) and Mr. LilyPhobia (let's just call him Mr. Phobia, because it's fun) and I have been running ourselves into the ground trying to put together an Elegant Gothic wedding for the centuries.
After all, vampires live forever: we're going to be looking back on this shindig for all eternity.
Today we designed a decadent wedding cake decorated with black and royal blue silk roses, and had our gorgeous black-on-black invitations ordered. People will definitely know they're from us when they receive them...
Also, in a weird twist of perfect timing, our Alchemy Gothic wedding bands arrived:
Obviously it's not the traditional gold wedding band, but neither of us cared much for those to begin with. We both wear a lot of bat jewelry, though, and my first engagement ring before I got my official silver-and-emerald band with engraved leaves was actually a plastic bat ring -Mr. Phobia randomly got it in the mail along with a package of CDs and some other stuff from Calabrese, and he had been planning to propose anyway, there just wasn't a ring. Next time I see Calabrese, I should tell them they played a key part in our engagement.

Watching our darkly romantic wedding come together is great fun...I hope when the day itself gets here I can slow down and enjoy it with my new husband.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Piercings

As of today, my newest piercings are a week old! How lovely.
I had my nose re-pierced and my eyebrow pierced last Wednesday, at Industrial Tattoo in Berkeley.
If you count the industrial bar in my ear as 2 piercings (and I do, because if I wanted to I could take it out and put in  two earrings) it brings the grand total up to lucky 13!
My eyebrow piercing will have company soon, though. My fiance and I are getting our eyebrows done on our anniversary, and I'm going to put in another little bar right next to the one I already have.

Pictures will be coming soon-ish! I'm excited to finally have some new mods, it's been ages since I've gotten anything.