TKOG Who looks PERFECT, for once

NTKOG #240: The kind of unabashed glamour puss who spends half the morning primping before she deigns to run to the convenience store across the street.

I am: the lowest-maintenance person you’ll ever meet. As in, 95% of the time I am growing out my armpit hair. On purpose.

I am not: opposed to other people going to extraordinary lengths to look gorgeous – in fact, I’m glad they do it, as it gives me something to look at on the bus. I’ve just never felt the urge to go there myself.

The Scene: A perfectly ordinary lazy Sunday, with a hint of pizzazz. After my morning run (week six, baby!), took stock of myself in the mirror: drenched with sweat, PMS acne clusters dotting my cheek and forehead, dark circles under my eyes, erratic tanlines, squishy bits, body hair – to your average glamorous girl about town, I looked like a down-market Picasso. So, I set to work changing that. All of it.

At 10:30am, I hopped into the shower, armed with an arsenal of clay-based microscrubs, scented soaps, fresh razor, and nerves of steel. On a normal day, I spend a quarter of an hour getting ready: shower essentials, comb through the hair, dry off enough to throw on clothes without them sticking, then out the door, ready to electrify the world.

By a quarter hour into my GlamorBot primping? Tsh, I’d barely even shaved one leg.

I was halfway through my Empowering Ladies playlist by the time I’d finished all the hair removal (damn you, toe knuckles!). Afterwards, scrubbing, soothing, moisturizing – I was exfoliated within an inch of my dang life. (Seriously, have you ever exfoliated the inside of your belly button? If you haven’t then, uh, don’t.)

And that was just the pre-show! Afterwards, played some Peggy Lee and flipped through all of the candy colored silks and chiffons and laces in the “don’t even think about it” section of my closet, before settling on a black lace cocktail dress that wasn’t totally inappropriate for daytime.

Then the eye shadow, how it glimmered; the earrings, how glitzy. If I did this every day, you’d have to fucking commit me.

After a solid hour and a half of work, took a deep breath and looked at myself – made-up, coiffed and perfect sartorially attended for the first time in my life since, I kid you not, senior prom.

Quick twirl in front of the mirror, then met my eager eye and I looked – good. I looked, y’know, perfectly nice. Pulled together and even a teensy bit stylish. But I felt kind of underwhelmed.

Still, I reckoned, maybe when I ventured out into the world, I’d begin to feel that glossy halo I always imagine around Girl With Great Shoes And Store Credit Accounts. Ran to CVS, took myself out to a decent lunch, and spent a while perusing the sale bin at a book store and, dude, nothing. No one treated me differently, I didn’t feel any more or less confident about myself. It was just a normal Sunday with the only exception being that I was wearing a dress I was afraid to get grass stains on.

Eventually I gave up on the whole glamour game and walked to the Common, where I threw myself down on the ground (grass stains be damned!) for an afternoon of writing. At one point, before I packed up to head into Starbucks, the light was such that I caught a reflection of myself in my MacBook screen.

Glasses on, make-up melting down one cheek, grass in my hair, shoes kicked off – an hour and a half of primping totally undone, but it was the first time that day that I looked at myself and felt great about what I saw.

The Verdict: I know there must be a reason that some women go through this torture every single day, but damned if I can figure out what it is. I think this probably has something to do with the fact that my body isn’t the source of my superpowers. In fact, I look at myself in the mirror, on average, three times a day, and the time I’m happiest about what I see is almost always the same: after my morning jog, hair up in a disgusting frizzy pony tail, shapeless tank top liberally bibbed with sweat and all of my skin flaming seventeen shades of fire engine. It’s not People Magazine cover material, sure, but for some reason, it speaks to me.

In fact, I think I’m breaking all the rules when I say this but, dude, I just straight up like the way I look. I have since I was a teenager. I’m not gorgeous or even particularly good-looking, and the laziest photographer would find a dozen things to PhotoShop in every quadrant, but I just don’t understand the insecurity the world seems bent telling me I should feel. I like my thighs, I like my belly, I like my stress-acne and the stupid toe knuckle hair and the fact that you could see me randomly on the street and just know I’m the kind of girl who’s going to breast-feed her own kids. I truly cannot understand on even the most basic level why anyone else would feel differently.

I like my whole package, and time and make-up are expensive, so fuck it. Not that kind of girl with a bullet.

That said, you other ladies are more than welcome to keep spending hours getting yourself gorgeous before work, ‘cause the rest of us need something pretty to look at on the bus.

Tagged as: beauty, boston, boston common, glamour, i really thought i'd have something nice to say about this one, i was going to include a picture of my casually disarrayed wardrobe but dan savage totally distracted me (bastard), is the armpit thing too much of an admission? i shave before dates. but that's a big deterrent for going on dates, later i wandered into Shakes in the Common production of Othello -- rounding out a perfect afternoon, listening to peggy lee while getting dressed was SO a reference to the awesomeness that is cher in "Mermaids", low-maintenance, self-confidence