I have recently re-discovered eyeliner.
I'm probably a little slow on the get-go, here, since I'm 26, and the last time I was at the mall I saw these 10-year-olds who were more heavily made up than a Miss America contestant. But I'm a little on the uncoordinated side, and I've found that I do best with makeup that can't render me blind if I mess up.
I tried eyeliner a number of years ago. It was a bad thing, very bad. I was even pastier in my teens and early twenties than I am now, if you'll believe it, and I was clueless when it came to cosmetics. But I'd started reading Glamour magazine, and their makeup tips were pretty and colorful and they encouraged me. If this 14-year-old Brazilian model in the photographs can do it, I told myself, than so can I! It didn't occur to me at the time that the model probably couldn't do it either, and the makeup she was holding was probably a prop for the photos, and the photos were likely taken in between bits of work by a highly trained makeup artist.
But I was a little slow - I grew up in a pathetically small and isolated town, and I thought I could do it. I bought eyeliner. Charcoal black eyeliner. Did I mention how pale I was? And that I have blue eyes, and that my hair was at the time fairly light? And I bought black eyeliner. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Especially since Glamour was, at the time, spreading the rumor that any woman can wear red lipstick.
Suffice it to say that even my best, most practiced efforts left me looking like a Kabuki hooker.
A few years later, when I was about twenty or so, I decided to try again. I thought maybe it would be okay if I dropped the red lipstick. But I was still terribly pale, and horribly unskilled with an eyeliner pencil. If my hair had been darker I'd have looked goth. As it was, with the beret I'd decided to start wearing, I looked a bit like a mime. I am terrified of mimes and clowns. So once again I gave up on the idea of ever wearing eyeliner.
But recently (I'm a little slow as I said) I discovered Sephora, and I decided I needed to give eyeliner one more shot. I found a Sephora brand pencil in a pretty dark copper color. I practiced. I discovered I actually looked okay if I applied to my heart's content and then used a Q-Tip to remove 75-80% of what I'd put on. I actually looked pretty good, if I say so myself. I started wearing it almost every day, and I thought I looked terribly sophisticated and alluring.
Then one day, in a fit of hormone-fueled frustration, I ended up crying about something. I expected sympathy, at the very least, from my mother. What I didn't expect was the look of abject horror on her face.
"Jill! Are you okay?"
"Do I look like I'm okay?" was my mature, controlled response. Come on, Mom, I'm crying here!
"Your eyes are bleeding!" she said, shoving a fistful of Kleenex in my direction.
As it turns out, a big part of the pretty copper color was red pigment, and my tears mixed with the eyeliner to form a rather convincing-looking sort of fake blood. I had to take my contacts out and clean them and spend a good ten minutes removing the red streaks from my eyes and face.
Oh, well. Maybe I'll try again in a few years.
29 December 2009
20 December 2009
08 December 2009
Whine, whine, whine
It's been a while since I complained. Something must be wrong with me. I ALWAYS complain. I need to rectify the situation. So here goes - the latest list of things that are cheesing me off today.
-It's called the fast lane for a reason. If you want to go 60, get out of the fast lane. 60 is not fast. Especially when the speed limit is 65. Speed up, change lanes, or be prepared for a vicious tailgating.
-I hate it when I want to read a book that has been made into a film or TV show and I can't find a copy at the store that doesn't have Jennifer Aniston's dumb face on the front. Famous actors and actresses rarely look the way I imagine characters to be, and I'm buying the dang book, people, not the movie. They are rarely the same. Did you know they changed the whole bloody end of "My Sister's Keeper"? And Cameron Diaz is SO not the mother I pictured.
-While I'm on the subject, I bought "Flash Forward" at Barnes & Noble the other day and the description on the back of the book is a description of THE TV SHOW. Not the book, the TV show. And they are not the same thing. The book is very different.
-It's not irritating, but when I was at the zoo last, I walked past the primate exhibits, and a zoo employee nearby asked me, "Do you want to go in the monkey house?" which wouldn't have been funny except his tone of voice made it sound like the worst chat-up line in history. I don't think he said it that way intentionally, because he looked confused when I laughed and declined his offer.
-I got a new debit card a few months ago because the old one finally expired. I didn't just get a new card, though, I got a new PIN. I didn't want a new PIN. I'd had the old PIN for 10 years. I wrote the new one down somewhere but I lost it and it's really irritating. I tell cashiers to run the card through as credit but they always forget, and they have to cancel what they did, and sometimes my card won't work again so quickly, and I have to use another card.
-I seem to be missing $600 from my savings account. Last time I checked, I had $700 in savings. Now I have $123. I'd check out my transaction record, but the credit union website no longer likes my password and I'm too lazy to call their corporate office and fix it. I shouldn't have to! I KNOW I have the right password.
-I'm not very funny anymore. I used to be funny. Then people started telling me I was funny. The more people told me, the less funny I got. Now I'm about as humorous as cancer.
-TV Guide magazine keeps cheating and putting together these double issues. It's a double issue because they put two weeks in one. Which means two weeks of listings but only half the other content I'm paying for. And they got rid of the "Is It Just Me?" column, which was my favorite.
-I've had a migraine for three weeks.
-Did you know that the Salvation Army bell ringers make like $7.25 an hour? They can't even be bringing that much in with those little buckets. Which makes me suspect that the money I donate goes to pay bell ringer salaries and not to help the homeless. The bells were irritating enough when I thought they were helping society. Now that I know it's not a volunteer operation, it's extra irritating.
-I hope I never meet Stephenie Meyer, because if I do, I'm likely to hurt her. If I have to hear the words "Twilight," "New Moon," "Jacob," "Edward," or "Sparkly Vampire" one more time I will bloody lose it. It is a bloody stupid book, people! And yet there are women - grown women in their forties and fifties, puff-painting t-shirts and screaming about Robert Pattinson. Can you imagine if the genders were reversed? It wouldn't be cute if a bunch of middle aged men lined up to see Miley Cyrus walk the red carpet.
-Speaking of, WTH happened to Miley? She used to be this cute, age-appropriate, normal little thing. Now she's a cheap skank. I cringe when I hear my 7-year-old niece talking about Hannah Montana.
-I am only going to say this once (once today, anyway): Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, looks good in skinny jeans. Skinny jeans are gross. I'm looking at you, Jonas Brothers.
-Fibromyalgia sucks. I sleep for ten hours and wake up feeling like it was closer to 10 minutes. And I feel like someone was beating me with a sack of unripe fruit while I slept. And you know how sometimes you don't feel like exercising but you know that if you do, you'll get this nice energy rush? Fibro ruins that. I exercise and feel like crap. Worse than crap. Crap squared.
-People keep feeling the need to chastise me for complaining. Because it could be worse and I could be homeless and disabled and have no family and no food, or because I don't live in the coldest place in the world, or because I'm not fat enough to require surgery. Well you know what folks? If I want to complain, I can complain. I don't care if there are people who are worse off than me, I don't care if I'm not the fattest person in the world, and I don't care if you don't consider 50* to be sufficiently cold. I'm crabby and tired and thoroughly miserable and a size 18, and if I want to whine, I'm by gosh going to whine. I'm allowed to, and you can't stop me.
-Someone asked me the other day about "giving away" my baby. Excuse me? I did not give her away. I placed her for adoption with a wonderful couple. I did not put an ad on Craigslist.
-I used to be able to wear my contacts for days, even sleep in them, and these days I get five, maybe six hours of comfortable wear out of them and then they hurt my eyes. Well, that was a fun fourteen years.
Enough about me. I've found a new way to annoy others - or to trick them, in any case. When I'm at the zoo, I'll pick an empty patch of land to stare at and photograph, and I'll see how many people stop to stare, too. My record is five.
-It's called the fast lane for a reason. If you want to go 60, get out of the fast lane. 60 is not fast. Especially when the speed limit is 65. Speed up, change lanes, or be prepared for a vicious tailgating.
-I hate it when I want to read a book that has been made into a film or TV show and I can't find a copy at the store that doesn't have Jennifer Aniston's dumb face on the front. Famous actors and actresses rarely look the way I imagine characters to be, and I'm buying the dang book, people, not the movie. They are rarely the same. Did you know they changed the whole bloody end of "My Sister's Keeper"? And Cameron Diaz is SO not the mother I pictured.
-While I'm on the subject, I bought "Flash Forward" at Barnes & Noble the other day and the description on the back of the book is a description of THE TV SHOW. Not the book, the TV show. And they are not the same thing. The book is very different.
-It's not irritating, but when I was at the zoo last, I walked past the primate exhibits, and a zoo employee nearby asked me, "Do you want to go in the monkey house?" which wouldn't have been funny except his tone of voice made it sound like the worst chat-up line in history. I don't think he said it that way intentionally, because he looked confused when I laughed and declined his offer.
-I got a new debit card a few months ago because the old one finally expired. I didn't just get a new card, though, I got a new PIN. I didn't want a new PIN. I'd had the old PIN for 10 years. I wrote the new one down somewhere but I lost it and it's really irritating. I tell cashiers to run the card through as credit but they always forget, and they have to cancel what they did, and sometimes my card won't work again so quickly, and I have to use another card.
-I seem to be missing $600 from my savings account. Last time I checked, I had $700 in savings. Now I have $123. I'd check out my transaction record, but the credit union website no longer likes my password and I'm too lazy to call their corporate office and fix it. I shouldn't have to! I KNOW I have the right password.
-I'm not very funny anymore. I used to be funny. Then people started telling me I was funny. The more people told me, the less funny I got. Now I'm about as humorous as cancer.
-TV Guide magazine keeps cheating and putting together these double issues. It's a double issue because they put two weeks in one. Which means two weeks of listings but only half the other content I'm paying for. And they got rid of the "Is It Just Me?" column, which was my favorite.
-I've had a migraine for three weeks.
-Did you know that the Salvation Army bell ringers make like $7.25 an hour? They can't even be bringing that much in with those little buckets. Which makes me suspect that the money I donate goes to pay bell ringer salaries and not to help the homeless. The bells were irritating enough when I thought they were helping society. Now that I know it's not a volunteer operation, it's extra irritating.
-I hope I never meet Stephenie Meyer, because if I do, I'm likely to hurt her. If I have to hear the words "Twilight," "New Moon," "Jacob," "Edward," or "Sparkly Vampire" one more time I will bloody lose it. It is a bloody stupid book, people! And yet there are women - grown women in their forties and fifties, puff-painting t-shirts and screaming about Robert Pattinson. Can you imagine if the genders were reversed? It wouldn't be cute if a bunch of middle aged men lined up to see Miley Cyrus walk the red carpet.
-Speaking of, WTH happened to Miley? She used to be this cute, age-appropriate, normal little thing. Now she's a cheap skank. I cringe when I hear my 7-year-old niece talking about Hannah Montana.
-I am only going to say this once (once today, anyway): Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, looks good in skinny jeans. Skinny jeans are gross. I'm looking at you, Jonas Brothers.
-Fibromyalgia sucks. I sleep for ten hours and wake up feeling like it was closer to 10 minutes. And I feel like someone was beating me with a sack of unripe fruit while I slept. And you know how sometimes you don't feel like exercising but you know that if you do, you'll get this nice energy rush? Fibro ruins that. I exercise and feel like crap. Worse than crap. Crap squared.
-People keep feeling the need to chastise me for complaining. Because it could be worse and I could be homeless and disabled and have no family and no food, or because I don't live in the coldest place in the world, or because I'm not fat enough to require surgery. Well you know what folks? If I want to complain, I can complain. I don't care if there are people who are worse off than me, I don't care if I'm not the fattest person in the world, and I don't care if you don't consider 50* to be sufficiently cold. I'm crabby and tired and thoroughly miserable and a size 18, and if I want to whine, I'm by gosh going to whine. I'm allowed to, and you can't stop me.
-Someone asked me the other day about "giving away" my baby. Excuse me? I did not give her away. I placed her for adoption with a wonderful couple. I did not put an ad on Craigslist.
-I used to be able to wear my contacts for days, even sleep in them, and these days I get five, maybe six hours of comfortable wear out of them and then they hurt my eyes. Well, that was a fun fourteen years.
Enough about me. I've found a new way to annoy others - or to trick them, in any case. When I'm at the zoo, I'll pick an empty patch of land to stare at and photograph, and I'll see how many people stop to stare, too. My record is five.
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