Rainy season is here, and it's here with a vengeance.

It's been raining every single day in Bandung lately. Not the beautiful kind of rain with a little sunshine between the drops, no. This is hardcore rain with tree-swaying wind and roaring thunder. Bring an umbrella with you, folks. We're in for this for a good time.

Amphibious life.

Living in two different cities and having to shuttle back and forth between both isn't bad, per se, but it does have its demerits.

For instance, if you accidentally forget to bring something with you to the other city, it's not like you can go home during lunch hour to pick the firgotten something up. Which in my case, happens to be my tripod mount.

Keeping the story short, I brought the camera with me once to Jakarta, with the mount attached to the bottom of it. I took the mount off because I was going to film a vlog hand-held. Then I took the camera with me back to Bandung, sans mount.

And to this very day, I keep on forgetting to bring the mount back with me to Bandung. Thus the lack of YouTube video updates.

I will update once I have the mount back in my possession. Many apologies.

Shoes, oh, shoes.

Are you a cutesy shoe type of person? Or are you a heavy duty shoe type of person?

Personally, I'm a heavy duty shoe type of person. I once bought a pair of flat shoes because I saw other people wearing them and the shoes looked cute on those other people. However, those flat shoes were completely ruined after using them for less than three months. So I gave up on using cute flat shoes. I reverted back to using thick-soled oxfords. At least, they can last for a year on me.

What kind of shoes do you wear daily?

The Expense of Beauty. The Beauty of Expense.

As you may know, I currently work in Jakarta. Previously, I stayed at my parents' place whenever I had to spend the night in Jakarta. Recently, my parents decided to move back to Bandung, which prompted me to search for my own place in Jakarta. Fortunately, I found a relatively affordable place in the middle of the city which allowed me to commute to my office under half an hour.

The thing is no matter how affordable the place is, it still makes a monthly dent in my savings. This additional expense has me rethinking a lot of my other expenses, i.e. my beauty expenses. Since I ended up doubling up on a lot of my products (for Bandung and Jakarta), I've come to realize that a rather good portion of a woman's income goes to consumer goods, more specifically, to beauty products.

Just today, I bought some hair products that I needed to stock up for the house in Bandung. Three products in total: shampoo, conditioner, and a curious hair mask that I willingly will admit bought out of sheer curiosity.

Total cost: IDR 109.500,-

That's effin' expensive!

For those who don't live in Indonesia, and don't know Indonesia living cost standards, just as a comparison, when I stay in Jakarta, I can buy a simple lunch of rice, chicken with veggies on the side for around IDR 15.000,- to 16.000,-.

My shampoo and conditioner could provide me 10 days worth of lunches!

My validation would be that my hair can no longer stand shampoos that contain SLS/SLES. Therefore any local-produced shampoo has to be written off. The validation for the conditioner is that my hair gets very dry easily. And for the hair mask, ...nope, there isn't any excuses for that one. It was an impulse buy, really.

Recently, a meme about lipsticks has been circulating in the social media. The tagline basically goes, "The reason why women need to work is because men have no idea how much beauty costs." It's illustrated by comparing a $5 lipstick with a $50 one.

Now, while I don't give two shits--pardon my French--about what men think about my lipstick, I find the meme does have a point in that a lot on a woman's income goes to appearance costs, whether it's apparel or beauty.

Back to the shampoo case: on one hand, I feel like I'm spending an awful lot on a fleeting sense of vanity. In the other hand, I don't want to live with an itchy scalp for the rest of my life.

This conundrum does get me thinking about how much of it is really necessary. Is it really necessary for me to spend more than a hundred thousand on hair products? Are the results worth the extra bucks? And do the results really have an impact on the quality of the life I'm living?

Where exactly is the line between spending in the name of comfort and spending in the name of vanity?

What do you think?