Days! They just keep going on.  We swear, if someone asked us the date, we’d say June 26. 1998. Seriously.

This means it’s Halloween tomorrow! We’re not usually big fans of this particular holiday, given our already discussed distaste for the "sexy " costumes, but we’re trying to stop being grinches. At least the Halloween version. Ghouls. Whatev.

Anyway, we’ve been looking for costumes we can create overnight, and for preferably less than nine dollars. We’ve come up with: giant butterfly collage! Above. Though without the chest hair. Also, "autumn," apparently very easy if you already have an orange dress:

Are those supposed to be pumpkins? Baffling. But better in any case than the year we decided to be the "pork rind princess." Jesus. You know how sometimes you look back and you’re just like, "God, I really could have tried harder with that." Indeed.

So we’re just sitting here in Malaysia, waiting for our hard drive to spontaneously resurrect itself from the dead, and while we do so – since we can’t do much else – we’re looking around for a Halloween costume. Actually, we don’t entirely mind our little computer-detox. For the moment, Halloween: This is Padma Lakshmi as, we are thinking, an anime butterfly. With: fishnets and panties? Really? This may break Salman Rushdie’s heart, but we’re not so impressed. Maybe it was really excellent in person.

We doubt it. This fails to escape our hated Halloween costume, which is "sexy [fill in occupation]," even if the occupation here is "flying insect."

Butterflies are insects, right? We’re pretty sure of that.

Anyway: the rest of Style.com’s party pictures.

It’s like 1993 all over again! This song just makes us want to go out and kick. Some. Ass!

Courney Love may be insane but there are worse ways to feel on a Monday morning, we’re thinking.

We loved loved loved the Body Shop’s Japanese Washing Grains when we were a kid – we were way bummed to see they stopped making them.  That’s why this tip from Delphine T is our winner:

Ooh, love the tips! Mine: you know
when you have a favorite face wash (or are obsessed with a delectable
new one), but it lacks that scrubby exfoliant oomph? Add organic mung
bean, soy, brown rice powder or all of the above (found in the bulk
powders aisle of your local Whole Foods or healthfood store) to your
face wash of choice — & voilà, it works double duty as your
custom-made exfoliating scrub. I keep mine in a little jar next to
the cleanser: one pump of cleanser in the palm, tip a bit of powder in,
mix, & go!

I freeze the powder beforehand as a precaution against bacteria, and
store the rest in the freezer afterward in a Ziploc. It keeps very
well. I suspect any bulk grain will do, but mung bean in particular (if
available) has the bonus of being a popular skin-soothing ingredient in
Korean skincare; a few cosmetics lines are based around its benefits.
This is also GREAT if you have sensitive skin & react to harsh
exfoliants, like me, as the natural particles get the job done but are
gentle enough for everyday use.

Bobbi Brown sells a similar(ish) product called Buffing Grains, that
you add to your face wash to turn it into an exfoliant …but it’s $40.
plus, by mixing the powder yourself you can control the degree of
graininess, and select all-natural/organic ingredients

In today’s Reader Mail:

 

Dear Bunnyshop:

 

You must answer this question. I read your site all the time, so I know that you’re always saying you’re broke, but you’re also always saying you’re in Bali or France or wherever. I don’t understand! Are you actually a trust-fund liar? Can you teleport? Tell me because if this is legit, I want some too!

 

Love,

 

A.

We do not lie. We are the freelancing kind. Anyone who does this knows that it is not, in any way, a reasonable way to make a living. For example, you spend most of your day masking your anger in quietly bitter emails to accounts payable people. There is one entity we work with, which shall go unnamed in these parts, that has not yet paid us for work we did last December.

However, there are obviously benefits to the lifestyle, and that’s that you can do it from pretty much anywhere you want. In fact, it’s the best part of the job. In other ways, it sort of forces your hand: If you freelance like we do, you make pretty much X no matter where you live. You can live in London, where a studio costs $3000 a month, or you can live in Saigon, where it costs $300 a month. As long as there’s wi-fi, you’re set. Of course, this has its own pitfalls: One time we went to the Lake District in England to a B&B that had promised to have wi-fi, which we needed to dial in via Skype for a conference call. We got there. It was broken. We had such a meltdown in this woman’s foyer that she ended up driving us down to Lake Windermere, handing us a bag of duck food, and instructing us to feed the birds. We remember standing beside the lake in her North Face poncho, in the rain, thinking: Yes, this is all very nice, but none of this would have happened if you just had the wi-fi you fucking promised!

All we know is that today we took four one-dollar cab rides, bought two $2 books (Tender Is the Night and Alice in Wonderland) and ate a $4 lunch (pictured above). Once you get past the airfare, as long as you’re not going somewhere like London or Stockholm, you’re golden. And speaking of airfare, we’ve been talking to our best friend about this a bit, because she’s trying to fly herself and her offspring to the south of France. First, we told her that someone she knows is racking up frequent flyer points they don’t need. Otherwise, sell shit on eBay.

The cost of our "villa" in Bali? $300. A month. With wi-fi.

Of course, this means we work all the time—but we like it, so that’s okay. We’re 12 hours ahead, and if we have to do an interview at 3 p.m. ET, it means we’re awake at 3 a.m. Saigon time. And we know we’re missing all sorts of fun things at home—parties and the Barneys warehouse sale and Halloween and most important among them, the Phillies in the World Series. We’ll watch the game from Hanoi, though, and it will all be okay.

If you are thinking of going walkabout, we really recommend the book above, called The 4 Hour Work Week. We think he glosses over things here and there and maybe makes the transition a little bit easier than it actually is, but in general, we’re obsessed with this book, which is sort of like being obsessed with the Tao of Pooh, but okay, and have literally recommended it to a half-dozen people this week, from a management consultant to a social worker. If you feel like you’re wasting your life in a cubicle—and your stupid company is going to go out of business anyway (we’ve been there)—we say (we always say) get out now. Corollary: It’s never too late. Corollary: It can be a miserable, hard thing at times. We interviewed Alyson Fox for Nylon a few months ago—we love her work beyond all rational measure—and she kept talking about the point of being self-supporting. We went fully freelance in February 2007—not of our own volition, but because Microsoft decided it wasn’t interested in a full-time blogger (like us) anymore. We sat in the cafeteria of our art school and cried. Stressful! It took us a year to get up to speed, and even now, we’re (slowly) paying off the bills we accumulated over the last 18 months. Our credit rating, we are sure, has gone to shit. And God knows what this economy is going to do to us all. We’re hopeful, though. We remember not being hopeful, at all, as we walked to our old job in DUMBO every morning. Well, we were hopeful that a comet would strike this woman Laetitia. (We remain hopeful on that score.) Otherwise, not so much. To say it’s the difference between night and day is not quite it: more like the blackness of the darkest corner of the galaxy farthest from a star, and the surface of that sun.

We got so excited about this contest that we kept typing in the wrong log in on our computer, convincing ourselves that we were having some kind of mental episode. Really, we think our coffee cup got in the way of our keyboard and we were typing 3 letters over.

Oops.

Anyway! We have a simple contest! Y.E.S has offered us one of their Dynamic Duo as a prize, and we are stoked. We haven’t tried it ourselves, but we are most intrigued by their anti-aging serum and moisturizing cream. How do you win?

Easy peasy. In the comment section, post the best skincare and/or makeup tip you ever received. It can be as simple as taking your eye makeup off with something special at night (this is still something we don’t do). The one that makes us go whoa the most wins. This’ll start at 9:00am EST and end Monday at 9:00EST.

Post your comment, and then we’ll post the winner!

-LB

We would like to think that we were developmentally beyond the part where we put the tube of toothpaste into our tote bags, thinking, Oh, no, that’ll totally not end up being a really, really bad idea. Like, come on. Honestly. We spent half the day licking all of our stuff, because tap water was too uncontrollable and tissues got too sticky. Argh.

Anyway, we’re in the market for a new tote bag, and we’re thinking we’ll be able to deal with this in Vietnam, which is where we are now. This city is fucking crazy! They literally have these helpful guards to walk you across the street since there is apparently not so much of a functioning pedestrian crossing system going on.

That’s tomorrow. In the meantime: We were telling our best friend that these Japanese girls—and she was all, “How did you know they were Japanese? Couldn’t they have been Korean? Or Chinese?” And we were like, “Because they were holding their passports! Snap!” We did not say “snap,” but we certainly did think it. Anyway, we saw three passport-holding Japanese girls at our hotel yesterday, each carrying an LL Bean bag. We had no idea. This is, in any case, a super-cute bag for not much money, even if we would without a doubt find some way to destroy it with a beauty or health product. LL Bean regimental stripe bag, $22

We’ve noticed that one of the weird things about this trip has been that we’ve been watching the Discovery Channel non-stop. (It’s on right now, as a matter of fact. Mythbusters! Busting the myths!) Besides being the network that finally got around to coining “Mandays,” it keeps us from watching CNN, which has just absolutely nothing to offer us or our ongoing development as a clear-headed adult. (We do not think Barack Obama is a terrorist. We do not think John McCain is a bad person. We think the idea of Sarah Palin running for president in 2012 is more Orwell than Orwell. We know who we’re voting for, and we have for months, oh absentee ballot, silently winging your way to us!)

Anyway! We are not sure if you have seen this ad, but we swear we will leave Discovery on for 10 or 12 hours while we work, and then we’ll hear the opening words—”It never gets old, huh?” the hairs on our arms stand up and we stop whatever it was we were doing (reading Perez Hilton, probably) and watch. We want to go to the fireworks beach!

We need to add that when we got this video from YouTube we watched it, and then we looked up to see it starting from the beginning on the Discovery Channel. We were equally delighted the second time.

So we were walking through the monkey forest this weekend, thinking that the only thing we’ve really loved about being in Bali is the monkeys. We saw these monkeys above and were like, adorable! So adorable! We were trying to get them to take a picture—obviously, they refused—but we were like, it’s okay. They’re monkeys. They’re adorable! And then, while we were still standing there, trying to get our picture, these monkeys started hooking up, except that it was much more vulgarly expressed than that. One minute you’re trying to get the adorable monkeys in the frame, the next you’re front row at the monkey porn show. Time. To. Go!

We’re still working on our shopping guide here, although we’ll say now that we’re not going to be tempted out of more than $10—except for our cooking class. Now this, unlike the monkeys, we can absolutely recommend to anyone who might be on their way to Bali. We’ve eaten nearly all of our meals at this place called Kafe, and we liked it so much that we called them up to see if they offered cooking classes. Previously: We could not cook toast. Now: We can still not cook toast, but we can, however, make delicious garlic prawn stir-fry, gazpacho, and salad! We know this is pretty remedial stuff, but we’re below-remedial students, so it works out.

In any case, we’re on to the next—briefly back to Singapore for a few interviews and then onwards. Onwards!

So we spend a good percentage of our time in one particular cafe, because it has delicious foods and free wifi. It also has the highest number, per capita, of whining expats who are in constant competition for a role on a sitcom called "Asshole Americans Who Live in Bali." The guy sitting next to us just yelled at the waitress because she’s not sufficiently distinguishing between coconut milk and cow milk:

 

Waitress: I don’t understand.

 

Man: Moo! Moo! (Angrier.) Moo!

Seriously. The guy sitting across from us is explaining to a woman, who apparently left her family behind in the US to "achieve peace" in Bali, how the Mayan philosophies have been corrupted by "New Age hooligans." We are quoting because we can’t believe these people talk like this. Now they are talking about owning gold-mining shares and asset management firms and what they are going to do when "the rest of the world goes bonkers." We cannot help but think that that would actually be their first choice, so they can continue to be smug about abandoning their families.

There is an American couple who, like us, are within earshot of this conversation, and we think they are as mortified as we are, because they are speaking very softly and staring at their hands.

Ooh, trying to be less judge-y, and clearly not succeeding. Last night there was this giant rainstorm, and we thought we’d avoid careening motorbikes by walking home through the Monkey Forest. In the dark. With banana bread in our bag! We were freaked out enough by the monkeys and the dark—we tried to take a picture of how dark it was, and we were not successful. It’s not a very long walk, but—monkeys! Everywhere! And this crazy sound that was either drums or a TV or monkeys preparing to attack! And then we remembered the banana bread! We. Freaked. Out!

We did, in any case, survive.

The Mayan guy is talking about how he’s taken his astanga practice to another level. We don’t know; complaining about rich people interested chiefly in their chakras is like complaining about New Yorkers in New York: They’re just part of the (quasi-)native flora and fauna, and have more of a right to be here than we do.

We still hate them.

The moo-man is now arguing about his bill with the waitress.