Ugly is The New Presentable

The key to understanding me is this: I am an indie douchebag/nerd trying desperately to be a hot girl.

I spend about half an hour on my makeup every morning. I piss away another 15 or 20 on my hair, which is a bush (a wild tuft of 70s pubes, not a shrub) that rarely, if ever, looks decent. I check myself in the mirror twice or three times or four times before I leave for the day.

I want you to think that I'm a naturally hot girl who takes care of herself, but whose priority is something other than her appearance. The truth, however, is that I waste rather a lot of my time on looking good, and the only reason I don't waste more of it is because I have no idea what I'm doing. Things even go awry occasionally, and I end up looking like a seventy-year-old hooker with the complexion of a greasy-faced adolescent.

And then people say thing like, "You look so much like you love to read!" and I'm left thinking to myself, "While that is true, that is not the look I'm going for!"

So I continue to slather products on my face every morning while I listen to NPR or some douchey shoegaze band, hoping that this regimen will grant me beauty and grace.  "It's cool that you don't care about your appearance. You're just that kind of deep individual, aren't you?" I hear.

How does one admit to not only caring (and failing to produce the desired results), but also to being a vapid loser whose depth is about ankle deep?

Last week, I showed up at Finnish class without any makeup. I had slept two or three hours, so I couldn't summon the will to give a shit about anything at all. My regimen went undone. At break, a classmate greeted me and we exchanged pleasantries. She paused. "Are you...sick today or something? You look...different."

And it was then that I realized that my regimen does not grant beauty. It merely staves off ugly. So many of the best things in life are ugly. Genitals are said to be ugly. Chocolate mousse looks like it came out of something or someone's backside. Horror movies are the best. Maybe staving off the ugly is a stupid idea.