Off the prompt "cuddles."

Because I can't find significant portions of my stage make-up kit, I went to buy a basic Ben Nye kit from a costume shop today. I got them to whip out the board of foundation colors so I could do match test to my skin and what really struck me was:

All these dozens of variations of human skin tone, and Ben Nye is pretty good about having all kinds of races represented, and it's really a lot of shades of brown.

This is part visual arts training and part intentional self-deprogramming about race, but, whiteness is a social construction, nobody is actually #FFFFFF white, and when you look at skin colors as paint pots it becomes really obvious that pretty much all skin tones have more in common with raw umber (the color you mix into paint when you want the main hue to be less in-your-face) than anything else.

When I watch other students in my class think of those colors in Ben Nye pots as skin tones, it gets weirder for me: many of these (mostly white) girls thought they'd been given a a tone too dark for their skin, that the costume shop had run out of their color and they'd been poorly served. The girl next to me had a "tan rose" pot. I looked at it and looked at her and told her to put some on her hand and see how it blended. And it did. She was very startled at this development. Guess what, honey, you are not snow white. You wouldn't be no matter where you lived and you walk around in the sun in Valley of Hell so actually, you're pretty tan. A color called tan rose? I am shocked, shocked I say, that that matches you.

But even though white people know they are not actually literally white, they assume they are lighter than they are. And maybe even--subconsciously, I'm going to suggest, to give them the benefit of the doubt--want make-up a shade lighter than they think they are out of desire to meet our society's white beauty ideal.

Right, so about four and a half hours of sleep last night. I got up at three, figured I'd write for a bit and go back to bed, but I never got back to bed, and I'll be heading off to class in a couple minutes. I don't feel tired now but I bet I will around time for work! Go me!

My sense of days is getting really skewed because I didn't think three in the morning was going to be the fucking morning.

I keep having straight vid bunnies (and this is the theatrical sense of straight: straight vs musical, or straight vs. comedy--basically, straight == standard drama; hilariously for vids, standard drama is often slash, because that's one of the traditional purposes of vids: so anyway, when I say straight vid bunnies, here I mean standard dramatic occasionally slash vid bunnies). I really don't want to do any of the Sammy angst vids I've had ideas for, but I just found a goddamn Dean/Cas song that's really hugely just perfect Cas POV and the thing is it's not so much standard angst as "wtf strange human I do not understand you" with a side of DIRECT REFERENCE TO "heaven abandons me, you drag me down with you." I COULD MAKE AN ENTIRE VID OF CASTIEL'S CONFUSED FACE AT DEAN.

(It doesn't help that I spent the uh morning listening to everysecondtuesday remix John and Bobby's epic fail to Dean being an extremely fucked up moppet and driving Castiel to drink.)

I'm a little tempted.