#needless to say I'm less than thrilled that it actually WAS a dream

[thequeenofsastiel]

Oh wow, I just had a Bellarke dream for the first time in years. It was very simple. It wasn't based in any particular season, it was just late in the series. They'd just managed to restore Earth, but magically somehow. Earth went from being completely inhospitable to covered in plants with a beautiful, clean atmosphere. Everyone was crying and celebrating, and Bellamy and Clarke were hugging. They pulled away, but still had their arms around each other. In this dream, it was Clarke who had another love interest instead of Bellamy. Her love interest came over and tried to get her to come with him, but she was busy gazing into Bellamy's eyes, and said that she was good where she was. The love interest realized that he was being dumped, and walked away in disgust. Then Bellamy and Clarke kissed, and it was amazing and lovely. The episode ended in my dream, and I was ecstatic, hardly able to believe that The 100 had managed to end so wonderfully after screwing things up so royally. It felt like a dream.

Then I woke up.

[sunnysviolin]

I'm sorry but I have a desperate need to ask of something...happy Mari lives content...

I'm stealing this for two of my favorite people Muse! You and the lovely @ksenya-and-the-artistic-cucumber Happy birthday dear take some more Mari content for you!! As for you Muse, well you know how much I owe you, so take some okay writing.

So there's a bunch of different ways this could go down, but I think I'm going to go with the idea that Sunny and Mari never have their fight in the first place. 

Mari sees Sunny is losing his passion and his stress is increasing. She sees that he stops sleeping. She sees that she’s pushing him, and before he can push back, she intervenes. 

It’s a really simple question, just a single change. She asks Is everything okay? The answer she gets is not simple. 

She gets back Sunnys stress, his anxiety, his fears of just not measuring up. How could he measure up when he has her for a sister? He couldn’t even consider being better than Mari at something, so all he can hope for is a close second, and he can’t even manage that. Of course, Sunny doesn’t really say any of that, he just cries in her arms and tells her that he isn’t good enough. Mari figures the rest out on her own. 

She holds her little brother tightly to her. Her precious darling little brother, her sundrop, the light in her life. She keeps him close, and she thinks. She thinks, and she thinks, and she thinks, because Mari is a thinker. Mari is a thinker, and Mari is a planner, and all of her plans just got thrown out the window as Sunny has a full on anxiety meltdown in front of her. None of them matter.

Mari cancels their performance four hours before they’re supposed to go on. Her parents are aghast, their friends are confused, and she refuses to say why. Mari isn’t really used to keeping secrets from them or her parents, but it’s Sunny. For him she will keep secrets. Besides, the concert doesn’t really matter does it? What matters now is Mari has to adjust her plans. 

Mari knew her parent’s plans for her. Ivy league, Harvard or Yale, then law school. Become a star lawyer, open your own practice, or become AG. No matter what she had to live up to her great potential, she had to be someone. That’s why she had to be in school every night, that’s why she had to take all these extracurriculars she didn’t even really like all that much. That’s why she had to be the head of every club, why she had to stay late and wake up early. All of this to achieve some unnamed goal of significance. To Be Someone. 

After that night, Mari isn’t sure she wants to be someone anymore. Not if it’s tearing her away from everything she loves. She keeps Sunny’s secret, but she tells Hero hers. She’s always encouraged his secret dreams, and now he take the opportunity to encourage hers. That she is already somebody, at least to him and their friends. To Sunny she is someone. 

Mari and Hero run away together after they graduate. Well, they don’t really. They just sort of do. They tell their respective parents that they in fact aren’t going to the far away prestigious colleges that they were expected to go to. Hero will not be a doctor. Mari will not be a lawyer. They’re staying local, at a tiny local school that has no pomp or circumstance, and, eventually, they are going to open a bakery together after they get their degrees. 

Needless to say neither set of parents is thrilled at this. Mari’s parents are even less thrilled, because she’s taking Sunny with her. 

Sunny needs her. Sunny needs someone who reminds him that he isn’t her shadow, but his own person. That he has talents. That he has skills. If their parents won’t do it, she will. They’re furious, they argue, and for the first time Mari argues right back. 

Yelling at her parents for the first time is a thrilling terror, but at the end she has a packed car, her boyfriend in the driver’s seat, and her brother asleep in the seat behind her. All through the drive to their new apartment she continues to check behind her, a part of her mind so sure that none of this is actually happening. Sunny is a gangly awkward fourteen year old, and as he sleeps he slumps against the window. Watching him rest settles her, and she grabs Hero’s hands and squeezes it. 

As much as she already raised Sunny, actually raising Sunny is a shift. She and Hero work part time jobs to afford college and providing or the three of them. Eventually Sunny convinces her to let him take one too. They’re all tired, and they’re all overworked, but they’re happy. They’re so stupidly happy. 

It takes time, and it takes arguments, and it takes a lot of stubbornness, but her parents eventually accept that she is going to follow her own path. That there isn’t anything in the world that will get her to waste her life just to make them happy. When she graduates from school (valedictorian of course, with Hero as the beaming salutatorian) her parents graduation gift is the promise to help her get a loan for her bakery. 

She and Hero start designs and plans, but they just need one more thing. Together they walk down the street, past statues of religious figures that seem to watch them, and they knock on the bread twins door. Bowen answers, and the couple asks to come in. 

They present their idea to the twins. The four of them together open up a new bakery. The twins initially say no, they want to continue their parents legacy, but Mari and Hero persist. Not only can their parents come in on the bakery, they will finally get out of the grocery store and into their own place. 

Not even a full two years after they graduate, Mari is putting the finishing touches on the first batch of cookies for their store window. She pulls them out of the oven, a sinfully sweet aroma surrounding her. She places the tray on a cooling rack and steps out from the back to look at the store front. 

Bowen and Daphne are carefully arranging loaves of bread in an artful display, while Hero and the kids finish cleaning up. Hero is wiping the glass of the display case to give it a good shine, while Basil and Sunny sit at the counter and watch Kel and Aubrey bicker as they always do. 

It’s not what was expected of her. She knows that the whole world probably thinks she’s wasting her potential. But as she watches Sunny laugh and watch Kel play keep away with the broom from Aubrey, she can’t help but think that this life is far better than any potential for more. 

[mylifeinmph]

Hourglass Cosmetics Veil Mineral Primer | .....pssst, I'm back.




Hey, hi, howdy, hola, konichiwa, bonjour, ciao. I'm back! Small life update; I'm living in CA with some family for a position I took in the beauty industry which is why I have been absent but as I work out a routine/schedule, I'll be wiggling TPH back into it and trying to figure out a new filming set up! So let's get back into it shall we?! Thanks to Influenster and Hourglass Cosmetics, I was sent a complimentary full size Veil Mineral Primer to try. It claims to "Elevate Your Foundation" all with SPF 15 to boot. I actually have tried this before but in the sample size. The size I bought was the little one that you see while your waiting in line at Sephora, and the little box says, "Excuse me miss, can I come home with you? It get's awfully lonely and dark here past 9." I'm a marketing departments dream come true, really. I remember using that little sample and thinking 'this is awfully runny' but I gave it a shot anyways. Let me tell you, it did diddly squat for my make up. I was so sad and upset but thankfully only spent a couple bucks on the sample size. Needless to say, when I opened the box to see this baby, I was less than thrilled.




As with everything I receive complimentary, I try to give it a fair shot, a fair once-around if you will. While visiting family last month, I gave this baby a whirl. This time around, Veil Mineral Primer totally knocked my socks off. It glides on feeling similarly to poreless primers, but without that weird gritting chunky transformation as it applies. (I've found this to be true with E.L.F. Pore minimizing primer and the small sample of the animal-tested by law Benefit's Porefessional Primer). The staying power of this primer was quite impressive, it applied beautifully, and felt ultra lightweight on the skin. After about 10 hours of wear, my make up from 3ft away still looked great. Of course, when I get super close to see the hairs of my eyebrows coming in, I can also see my smile lines, and around my nose had worn off. Keep in mind I also wear glasses, and for touch ups, I might do a little setting spray by lunch but nothing else. For that long of wear with my average day, this primer performed EXCEPTIONALLY well. I will say that the luxury name of Hourglass Cosmetics also comes with a hefty price tag. This primer is $54 for 1oz/30ml of product or they also offer a jumbo size of 2oz/59ml for $75. At that point though, I'm sure you're in a committed relationship with this primer and aren't looking for any others, ...ever. While the cost is a little offsetting, I will say I have yet to find a similar primer that works as well as this did for me. This would be a very good example of 'You get what you pay for'.




Overall I will say I'm thoroughly enjoying this product and yes, I will be purchasing another bottle when this baby runs out. I would highly recommend this to someone who has concerns of pores, or is looking for a little added SPF no makeup required. If you have the opportunity, absolutely try out the Veil Mineral Primer. It really did bring my makeup to the next level. You could almost say....it elevated my foundation. See what I did there? Photo credit to my talented cousin. Till next time, Maggie