Para presumir, hay que sufrir.

Talk about the pains of looking good! Vanity is luxury. It hurts your precious time, patience, and pocket.

Being dealt with like a soccer ball ("Let's shampoo your hair, keep your head steady, let's wash your hair, let's go back to the chair, let's wash your hair, let's go back to the chair, let's blow dry your hair") is no luxury.

It was pretty annoying not to know what it takes to semi-rebond your hair. Just when you thought you are done with the whole process as triggered by a blowdry, you hold on to your bladder to realize that they still need to put more chemicals on your hair!

I thought it would never be over, but boy, am I relieved now that I know that it has ended! All that for beautiful hair (tochang-free) and only good for three months! (Have I told you yet how it costs?) That's what it takes, my friends. That's what it takes.

Taking this topic to a higher notch, it's pretty much the same with making our souls beautiful. It takes a lot of pains to keep our soul clean, healthy and beautiful. Now how does a soul look when beautiful? When our soul only sees the good things in others, and see the bad in ourselves. How do beautify our souls? Difficult. We need a lot of humility to admit that our soul is indeed quite dirty. It also takes a lot of humility to ask advice from the RIGHT people. When our soul has mortal sin (don't know what they are? Check this out: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14004b.htm), our souls are ugly. So, we need to clean our souls of mortal sins and venial sins by going to the Sacrament of Confession. In confession, Jesus Christ, through his ministers - the priests - washes our sins away. "Whatever sins you forgive, they are forgiven" Jesus Christ tells his disciples.

And to go to Confession? Very difficult. First, it takes effort to research the confession schedule in our parish. If there's none, it's diffcult to look for other parishes who have confession schedules. If it's easy to find a Church with confession schedules, it's difficult for us to acknowledge that we have indeed committed a mortal sin.

So you guys might have thought how vain I am keeping such a motto. But actually it's more than physical vanity: it's spiritual vanity.