Getting a Pixie, Obtaining Self-Confidence, and Screwing the Patriarchy: A Trifecta

Do you ever just say to yourself

“Hey–let’s drastically change my appearance in a way I might horribly regret. I should also totally do it in a way that’s oddly politicized because society is fucked up like that. Sounds good, yeah?”

No? Just me?

I’m talking about my haircut approximately last week Tuesday. Specifically, about how I went from shoulder length hair to oh-my-god-I-have-a- pixie. Roughly the same length as my 12-year-old brother who can barely be bothered to change his pants every other day, much less bath frequently.

I’ve always wanted short hair. When I was five, I grabbed my mom’s kitchen scissors when she wasn’t looking and cut my waist length hair off, exclaiming “I don’t care how many scrunchies I have, fuck this shit.” (Maybe I’m paraphrasing. It was something along those lines. )

Even after the self-styled hair incident and mom put the kitchen scissors under strict lock and key, I’d subject my Barbies to my own dreams and desires.  I’d gleefully snip snip, strands of plastic engineered to resemble hair falling to the ground, living vicariously through them like the father who acts as if their child winning a t-ball game will somehow make up for their dashed hopes of playing professional baseball.

After I’d worked my magic, I’d admire how the plugs of hair sticking out from my Barbies’ surprising tan scalps complimented their cheekbones. Wistfully, I’d wish I could have my hair the same way, short, and not in need of everyday hygienic maintenance. Then puberty and societal expectations and constructs crashed together like the fiery illogical inferno in an action movie that the lead walks away from with no reaction.

The Rock represents your dignity and self-respect waking away when you turn 12.

Puberty is the pits. My body became this awkward entity filled with image-obsession and a lack of knowledge that no, that rhinestone crop top from Limited Too is not ‘super cute’.  Suddenly all the girls around me seemed like graceful gazelles with really awesome, long, shiny hair. I started thinking, “Oh–I should have long hair. I want to prance along all not socially inept and adorbs-like.”

When I got into High School and away from the hell-hole that I thought middle school was, it was like going from the bunny slopes of discomforting self-consciousness to the Mt. HEY EVERYONE IS HOTTER THAN YOU ALSO THEY DATE PEOPLE. Even the girls I knew who looked great with short hair, I somehow got it into my head that they were ‘pretty enough” to do it. On the flip-side, my opinion of myself…well let’s just take a quote from one of the most thoughtful, introspective films of all time.

“It’s like a painting, see? From far away, it’s OK, but up close, it’s a big old mess.”

–The Philosophical Musings of Cher Horowitz

The Blazer screams “intellectual philosopher.” Duh.

I was dumb-ass in high school. I kinda realized this my senior year, and REALLY realized this when I went off to college.

Let’s just fast forward through the past year ergo, the development of my self-confidence. I’ll give you the highlight reel:

• Okay so let’s trying being myself.
• Hey! Being myself gets me friends! Awesome ones, too. This is the best discovery since I googled fanfiction back in 7th grade.
• Maybe I should try dressing sort of fashionably like I always wanted to…
• OMG I get compliments now, this is the BEST.
• Hmm. Maybe I’m not a total Monet.
• Maybe I’m more like a Van Gogh. Different and weird, but in a good way?
• Ugh, growing out my hair is a bitch. It looks like a dead animal that fondles my boobs.
• Maybe I should cut it.
• Jeez, Friend A, Friend B, and Friend C all cut their hair and they look supermegaawesomefoxyhot.
• Maybe I should cut my hair.
• Cut my hair to shoulders! Looks good–much better than roadkill.
• Oh shit, Anne Hathaway looks FINE in a pixie cut.
• Maybe I’ll just google some pixie cuts…
• Why have I spent 8 hours looking at pixie cuts.
• Oh shit. I want to chop off my hair
• No, wait. What if people don’t find me as attractive–
• AW HELL NO, YOU KNOW WHAT I AM A FEMINIST AND I WILL NOT LET PATRIARCHY SHUT ME DOWN, I HAVE WANTED TO DO THIS IN FOREVER IF CATWOMAN CAN DO IT SO CAN I.

So I marched into my hairdresser’s, sat down, and got a pixie.

And I like it. Really, really like it. And even though the impetus for it was all “Man, I don’t need any fools telling ME what’s attractive, I got SELF -CONFIDENCE now,” everyone who’s seen it apparently agrees that my new ‘do is fantabulous. And I’m not going to lie that I like to groom myself with the validation of others on occasion.

Why else do you think I have a blog?

—

A note: Um, I think 2 days ago I had, maybe, 4 followers. Now there are nearly 100 of you. And my Beyoncé post has over a 100 likes and over a 100 comments NOT EVEN COMBINED BUT SEPARATE FROM EACH OTHER OH MY DEAR GOD.  I don’t even know what to say, except you know: Beyoncé gets shit done.

Everybody Wants to be Beyonce

I have a lot of theories about the workings and happenings of the universe and my life. Numero Uno on that list is that people go to grad school because they hope that if they prolong their time in school, they’ll eventually get that belated letter from Hogwarts. Number Two is that my mother will never learn that the grocery store Hy-Vee is not pronounced “HIV”. Number Three is that everybody wants to be Beyonce.

I want to be Beyonce. I’m fairly confident in the assertion that most people who know who Beyonce is want to be her. Everyone else is in denial. I don’t care who you are–your next door neighbor in the high-waters wants to be Beyonce. Mitt Romney wants to be Beyonce. My dog wants to be Beyonce.

Everybody wants to be Beyonce. 

Now, if you’re one of those individuals I spoke of  who might be saying “What, but I have never felt the desire to be a 5’7 Black Woman with a booty and voice like whoah” then I will educate you in the reasons as to why you’re lying to yourself.

They weren’t jealy of her jelly.

1. She coined the term bootylicious and made it into a song. If anyone else tried this, they would be laughed at. Beyonce does it, and it’s added to The Oxford English Dictionary.

My arms are starting to hurt from carrying the evidence of why I’m better than you.

2. She has 16 Grammys at the age of 30. 16. She has more Grammys than most people have friends, 4 times over.

This is payback for making me wear this dress.

3. She fired her father to manage herself. Can you even tell your father that you don’t like the turd-colored sweater he got you for Christmas?

Half my DNA comes from Beyonce. All of you will be my bitches one day.

4. Her daughter is the youngest person, at two days old, because of the her recorded cries that appeared on “Glory”, to debut on Billboard’s Top 100. The two day old product of your genetic material poops and sleeps. Beyonce’s became a recording artist.

I can’t speak it but I can sing it!

5. Beyonce realeased six songs for her B’Day Deluxe album in Spanish, and her accent was praised by Spanish Linguist experts. Beyonce doesn’t speak Spanish.

From one bad-ass to another–looking good, girl.

6. She has girl crush on Michelle Obama. I don’t even need to clarify this.

I use the money I earned from “Bills, Bills, Bills” to keep myself cool during this heat wave.

7. Beyonce made $40 million in 2011. This was “a rather low grossing year for her.” She was also pregnant for most of 2011.

I am Beyonce, hear me roar.

8. Even when Beyonce looks like a lion with teased blond hair and gold lame shorts, she still looks good. And if you can’t respect that, there is no place for you in this world.

Twenty-Something: Entering My Third Decade of Life

On my birthdate, July 24th, I was no longer a mere teenager, evolving like an awkward magikarp into a majestic gyrados. I was–am–now something far greater: a twenty-something.

This means the first two weeks of this blog were a lie, or at least my tagline was. But hey, a little fibbery is worth it when trying to be catchy and witty, or at least that’s how this writer is going to justify it. 19 year-old just doesn’t have the same je ne sais quoi to it as twenty-something.

Back to business-being officially lumped into the category of twenty-something is giving me something convoluted feelings. On the one hand, I am all kinds of okay with not being able to be called a teenager anymore: I can officially say I’ve beaten teen pregnancy. To the Late Great Cobain, I no longer smell like Teen Spirit, which I assume is a mixture of the odors of polyester, large amounts of cheap makeup, and bad judgement. I can feel comfortably displaced from the small, brightly colored scowling hordes that seem to spawn from Hot Topic to roam the mall whenever I’m just trying to buy some shoes.

Most importantly, I now get to be judgemental. I can picture it now. “Teenagers today,” I’ll say with an eye-roll as I condemn today’s youth. Then I’ll go back to  watching re-runs of Rugrats in pajamas on my day off work.

My entitled derision fantasies bring us to the part of being twenty-something that makes me wary. I almost feel as if spending an entire day watching cartoons isn’t the best way for a twenty year old to spend their time–and that thought leads to a line of uncomfortable questioning.  Are my Hello Kitty slippers perhaps, immature? Should I be saving money, rather than spending it on food all the time? Is taking my body’s desire to sleep as a personal challenge to stay up until 4 am watching Beyoncé videos and cat memes the best course to take?

On top of all that, I’ve realized that turning twenty means I’ve entered into the third decade of my life. Christ. I feel like every child fictional character that hasn’t saved the world by the age of thirteen–unaccomplished. I should have written a novel by now. I should have been in a relationship that lasted longer than three months by now. I should have bought a pony by now.

(When I was a small child, somehow I thought that when I was in my twenties, which T.V. had informed was Major Adultness Time, I’d not only be a fashion designer/author/lawyer/jet-setter, but I’d have a pony as well. Because apparently, cocktail dresses and equestrian ownership were just givens for adulthood).

I’m not saying I miss my teenage years–oh dear god no. No. Never. Ever. Ever. No.

I’m just saying I’m a little intimidated by the prospect of being eventually, you know, a real adult. Because honestly, being a twenty-something? Means jack-shit in adult credentials. Or least, it does for me, who is most likely going to grad school later on because 1) I like books as they generally smell better than people 2) It’s like the ultimate form of procrastination, which I excel at and 3)  I figure the longer I stay in school, the better chance I have of that owl finally surviving the trans-atlantic flight, allowing me to transfer and start my REAL education.

The world seems to make it out that your twenties are this time of milestone after milestone occurring, or as I like to refer to it, shit happening overwhelmingly. The twenties are lauded as being the time when you graduate from college, get a job, buy insurance, get married, have kids, buy a house, admit you are never going to buy a pony–shit happening. Lot of it.

Is the world serious? I can barely keep up with this blog.

In conclusion–yes, I am twenty now and this blog is not longer a lie. Yes, I am not longer a teenager. Yes, I suppose I am somewhat of an adult–an adult with training wheels, if you will. And lots of padding, In the form of a suit of armor. With a Kevlar vest underneath.

But no, I’m not quite ready to trade in my cartoons and pjs for babies and heels. Talk to me in 10 years when I’m thirty. You’ll be able to reach me by owl post.

A Review of Magic Mike or, Why Feel Good Stripper Films Don’t Exist

(Note: When I said on this blog I would sometimes talk about Big Girl Serious Stuff, and sometimes I would talk about butts, I wasn’t kidding about the second part. )

One of my greatest annoyances, besides people who use like, like, unnecessarily, all like, the time like, is movie trailers. Specifically, how movie trailers  15/16’s of the time are lying liars who bathe under a high-pressure Swedish engineered sexy showerhead full of LIES.

A lesson for you readers. Never trust movie trailers.

Magic Mike, the trailer, told me I would see dancing and not a lot of clothes and many butts. Magic Mike, the movie, told me strippers can’t be happy and you can’t be happy watching them strip. Other lessons from Magic Mike are that male strippers

1. can have fun for about 3 months before they fall into a swirling teacup ride of drug addiction, narcissism, and self-destruction (the teacup ride and drug montage both coincidentally come with puke).
2. can go on with their blissfully ignorant stripper lives in Florida until they are eventually usurped by the Teenage Abs With a Drug/Attitude Problem.
3. can get together with your ex-douchey best friend’s sister who has a personality that sparkles like a diamond dropped in a septic tank. Also, make furniture. Because that’s what dreams are made of in Florida.

The thing is, Magic Mike started out promisingly enough. As I sat in the theater with my two comrades in tow, the seats all around me teeming with all the upper class, white, middle-aged women in the immediate 5 mile radius, my friends and I realizing that we dropped the average age of the audience by 20 years, the lights go out.  The screen darkens, and Matthew McConaughey enters on-screen in tiny leather pants, with a tiny leather vest, and a not so tiny hat.

Alright, so McConaughey vaguely reminds me too much of that Uncle who’s always trying to get the kids to “wrestle” him at the family reunion for me to be entirely comfortable sexually objectifying him. But, the clothes are miniature. Promising.

When The Tiny Leather Pants Formerly Known as Matthew exeunts, the scene then flashes to Channing Tatum, and then, to Channing Tatum’s ass. A nice, long, lingering shot of Channing Tatum’s ass.

Now this is what I paid $7.50 on a Thursday night to see: Man butt. Shout out also for Olivia Munde’s boobs making an appearance almost immediately following which was subsequently THEN followed by Lady butt. I reclined into my movie theater seat, thinking I had a one way ticket to Carefree Dancing Naked Times.

I forgot to read the disclaimer on the ticket.

“Warning: You are a bad, bad person for wanting to see strippers strip in a movie about strippers, shame on you. STRIPPERS HAVE DRUG PROBLEMS AND LIFE DISSATISFACTION AND ALL THEY WANT TO DO IS MAKE YOUR HUBCAP INTO A NICE COFFEE TABLE.”

In the first half of this movie, Mike does his cool “I am a hot stripper/entrepreneur” act and The Kid, whose nickname I assume comes from the other strippers’ passion for Westerns, is introduced to the world of male stripping wide-eyed and naive, like a country boy arriving in the Big City for the first time. Only this city has a slighter higher thong rate per capita. Matthew McConaughey teaches The Kid how to pelvic thrust, which is funny, and there are some obviously staged-to-be-sexy dark club scenes, which are so awkward and forced it feels physically painful. All in all, the first hour was light-hearted.

Remember the ticket warning? That’s the second hour.

Suddenly people are giving The Kid drugs to sell–$10,000 worth of pills to sell, which seems a touch excessive if you’re a first time dealer–Mike can’t get the loan he needs to be able to craft chairs out of soup cans to his heart’s content, and the Lack of Matt Bomer is astoundingly low and depressing.

From there on, it progressively degenerates into something that, horrifyingly, appears to be a film whose main goal is NOT to provide me with thinly disguised soft-core porn. Then shit really goes down. As in, gets more awkward as a film about male strippers in Florida tries to have substance.

The Kid has a Drug Problem, apparently The Kid’s sister is fascinating and, somehow, THE most important person in the whole wide world to Mike, despite having what appears to be the personality of dry toast, and there’s a pig who is apparently hang around with the wrong crowd.

I won’t spoil the ending for you, in case you still want to see it. Just take these words of wisdom with you if you still want to see Magic Mike.

They are making a sequel, and now I feel compelled to see it when it comes out if only to know if The Kid died in a pool of his own vomit.

An aspiring writer starts a blog. Cue shock from no one.

An aspiring writer starts a blog. Cue shock from no one..

An aspiring writer starts a blog. Cue shock from no one.

The day has come. After all the resistance, denial, and deliberation as to how much time a blog would take away from Netflix and I’s just blossoming romance, it has begun; I’ve started a blog, and apparently, I’m going to try to amuse you with said blog.

I like to think I’m kind of funny. Granted, I’m fairly positive that all homo sapiens think themselves at least decently humorous. When a person admits to you that they are “not very funny” (usually accompanied by a sort of tinkling laugh that allows the other person to know how humble the speaker is), 99.9% of the time they’re actually thinking “I AM THE GOD OF GIGGLES.”

I will hesitantly say I don’t feel like I fall into this category. Mostly because I would never say I’m “not very funny” in the first place. However, I’m aware that I’m rather like a newborn baby deer trying to walk for the first time when humor and writing meet one another–legs all akimbo, flying out from under me, and the managing to get a footing purely accidentally the majority of the time.

See, in real life, when I’m funny, it’s a consequence of my inability to shut up. I puke words at an output greater than most of mankind. Sometimes, the people around me laugh at this verbal vomit, and I pretend like it was intentional.

But writing is intentional, and it’s a lot more fucking difficult to be funny intentionally than unintentionally.

That’s really the impetus behind starting this blog in the first place. I’d been thinking for a while that I wanted an outlet to practice my writing without the stress necessarily of school or my own nuanced, self-critiques of “YOU SUCK, THIS SUCKS” I tend to have towards my fiction. I considered quite a few different “types” of blogs.

• Style blog: No, that requires ironing and pride in my appearance.
• Travel blog: Does leaving my room count as travel?
• Food blog: Images of bringing out a camera to document each of my meals made me want to punch myself. Repeatedly.

I also thought about diving into more serious topics, like feminism, politics, social justice, etc., and I will most certainly touch on these topics on this blog. But, I also wanted to challenge myself, and I’m not used to writing consistently humorously. The themes in my fiction tend to be far weightier, striving for meaning and substance and all the things writers want readers to feel when their words make the transition from page to mind. To be blunt, in the past, I’ve been more concerned with making people cry, not laugh, when I write. That’s started to change as I have realized that constantly writing with my “this is deep shit” switch on is exhausting. And, that vanity, is not necessarily always a bad thing.

I like making people laugh. It feels ridiculously good when someone consumes a dopey little string of letters you composed and cracks a smile. Being funny is unique as it is the only kind of narcissism that really benefits others as equally as it benefits yourself.

I’m certainly going to strain over every word in order that I might cause you to positively clutch your sides and frighten the  family cat and/or small child with the veracity of your laughter. In others, I’ll say fuck it and talk about butts, and maybe you’ll still incur Mr. Whiskers’s wrath when you read it. I’ll talk about my life, comic books, religion, and my hypochondriac mother, all with a spin to make you hopefully chuckle.

Basically, I will attempt to amuse you.

And if I don’t–well. Then this is awkward.