Little things to make your grad student or adjunct hovel feel like a home

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I thought I'd take a weekend break from beauty posts for something a little different. I'm so not a lifestyle blogger, and I really couldn't be, because there's nothing aspirational about my lifestyle. That kind of comes with the territory when you get a Ph.D., especially in the humanities, these days. It's been three years since I got my degree, and I still don't have a permanent job, which is unfortunately not an unusual position to be in. I'm not saying that I wouldn't have gone to grad school if I'd known, necessarily, but the uncertainty has been a source of intense anxiety and stress for the past few years. (Besides, I started my Ph.D. program in 2007, before things became quite so dire, so I couldn't have known.)

I'm lucky enough to make enough money for everything I need, but I don't have extra money for things like new, coordinating furniture. Most things in my apartment were either free or the cheapest items available at Target or Ikea at the time, and as a result I have a hodgepodge of colors and finishes and styles. Let's just call it eclectic. What's more, I have moved every year for the past four years, and I'll be moving again this summer, so there's never much sense trying to find furniture to fit my apartment du jour, even if I had the resources to do so. It's fine--I don't need a fancy house--but I am someone who is pretty affected by my environment, and I find it easier to relax and to get things done if the space I'm in is visually (and otherwise) pleasant. As a result, I've collected some things over the years that make my home, if nothing else, a place I don't hate to be in. None of these are earth-shatteringly unique, but I'm hoping that maybe someone else here will find something to make their lives a tiny bit more materially comfortable too.

Framed Posters, Prints, or Maps

I like to have lots of things to hang on my walls since I tend to move from apartment to apartment every year or so. Because I know I'm going to again soon, I can't be bothered to paint my walls, and so I need to cover as much of the depressing, standard-rental off-white as possible. Posters are cheap, and they always look better in a frame. One of my favorite posters is the Polish Cleopatra poster above, but I can't find it for sale anywhere at the moment, though I got it a few years ago from Movie Poster Shop. (Amazon has lots of other great Cleopatra posters, fyi.) I also have a poster for the movie Cat People, which I've never seen, but it seemed appropriate.

I've bought cheap, plain black frames both from Ikea (cheapest) and from Amazon.

Another source of art in my apartment is a book of historic maps of Rome, which you can see in the first photo in this post. The pages in these books are designed to be removed and framed, and they include both maps and other images like etchings and vintage travel posters. You can get a books for a bunch of major cities: Paris, Chicago, San Francisco, etc.

Also, obviously, hanging your art using 3M Command Strips is the easiest way to make sure you can get everything to hang straight and (usually) not damage your rental walls in the process.

Good Sheets and Towels

It's not only a good idea to have things that look nice, it also helps me to have things that feel nice. We were lucky enough to get an amazing new mattress as a wedding gift from my mother-in-law, and I think that's the thing I'll miss the most during the next year when we move into a couple of furnished places temporarily. But even when we had a shitty Ikea bed, having decent sheets made it a lot more pleasant to sleep in. My sister got me hooked on these bamboo sheets (here's another set from Amazon) that breathe really well and just get softer and softer the more you use them.

Thick, soft towels are another luxury that's surprisingly affordable. My favorites are the Ralph Lauren brand--the big bath towel is usually about $15.

Miscellany: Dry shampoo hysteria, tricky sunscreen, Amazon sales, and Too Faced on HauteLook

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First: My husband shared an article from the Atlantic with me today linking dry shampoo with hair loss. "It's in the Atlantic; it can't be complete garbage." Oh, no? You can read it for yourself. It's the typical beauty article where the writer ask "experts" (in this case some combination of hair stylists and dermatologists) about her theory, and they basically respond, "Yeah, I guess it's possible that something like that could happen." I'm not going to throw out my Batiste. The lesson is probably that you can't replace actually washing your hair with using dry shampoo, because building up all the product on your scalp isn't great. I imagine it would feel pretty gross, though, so I don't know how someone could stand to regularly use dry shampoo without washing it out. (There was a similar article in Refinery 29 where the woman clearly had some kind of allergic reaction to an ingredient in her dry shampoo that caused the hair loss. If it hurts you, stop using it!)

Second: Evangeline emailed me with some helpful information about that Sephora Sun Safety Kit. I've never bought one of those, because I'm picky about what sunscreen I use on my face (though sometimes I use sample packets like these ones I reviewed on Instagram), but not at all picky about what I use on my body. That means a bunch of mini sunscreens isn't going to be much use to me. But if you are still trying to find your ideal sunscreen, buying a kit full of various minis seems like a potentially useful way to narrow down the search.

But here's what Evangeline says: "I recently bought the Sephora sun safety kit. I knew that $32 was a lot to spend on the total amount of sunscreen in the kit. It really annoys me to find that some of (all?) the small tubes are only half full. This trickery came as a complete surprise to me. I weighed the cost against the size of those small tubes. They fooled me."

So it sounds like this is one of those cases where you have to pay close attention to the labels in order to determine how good a deal it really is, because they've used tricky packaging to make it look like you're getting more product than you really are. That is something I often forget to do, as evidenced in my "tricky, tricky" series.

Third: Amazon has a deal right now where Prime Members get $25 back when they spend $50 on luxury beauty, so if you've been biding your time to buy something fancy on sale, now might be your chance. The downside is that it seems like you also have to spend the $25 you get back in the luxury beauty department, so you'll have to think about whether or not there are $75 worth of things you need right now. Use code PRIMEBEAUTY25. They also have a 35% off section, which seems to include mainly LORAC, Mario Basescu, Make, and Gorgeous.

ETA: Too Faced is on HauteLook today for 40-60% off, if you're looking for any eyeshadow palettes or lipsticks. Their eyeshadow primer is also marked down to $12.

Radioactive Cat Update

I posted back in July about trying to save some money to get my cat radiation. I thought I should update you all on that. Lucy got the treatment at the end of November, did not kill any of the staff at the clinic, was temporarily radioactive, and is now back to her old, curmudgeonly, corpulent self. Success! I had to save up for almost a year to afford the treatment, but it was still less expensive than two years of medication would have been. Good thing I have a backlog of makeup to post about here, since this damned cat spent all my money. And to top it off, she has not expressed any gratitude whatsoever! Brat.

Thanks to everyone who contributed by buying stuff from my blog sale. Every little bit helped, and I'm sure if Lucy knew you, she would bite you. Not as a gesture of thanks, but just because she's kind of an asshole.

Some recent Google searches that got people to this site

• "nail polish storage"

• "best affordable skin care lines"

• "cheap as fuck skin care routine"

• "cat themed clothing"

• "calm your tits bra"

• "beauty lies fuck hd"

• "fuck chanel"

• "hand cream fucking"

• "how to screw over your friends with . . . "

 That last one is cut off in my stats! I don't know how to see how it ends. Do you think they got the information they needed??