September 29, 1999

Last night I had an interesting discussion with Keith. It was prompted by our trip to the movies. I wanted to look nice, so I put on my new wrap skirt and blow-dried my hair and just generally made myself look pretty. He complimented me on my appearance before we left, and everything was good.

I had this weird uneasiness, though, and it occurred to me that EVERY time I get dressed up or "make myself look pretty", I feel weird and uneasy. So after the movie when we got home I brought this up with Keith.

I told him that it felt odd to me to dress up, because it sort of feels like I'm selling out. He said he thought he knew what I meant, that it was like when he was in high school and the really cool thing to do was hang your ski lift tickets from your jacket, to prove that you were cool enough to go skiing. Well, he never did that, because he was so uncool that it was cool (if you don't know what I'm talking about, you were never in high school). So, he said, he can understand that if I felt like I was an outcast in high school -- and this, I think, is something that most smart kids go through -- then it would make sense that looking pretty and "fitting in" would feel like selling out, somehow.

I think he's right. When I was in high school I made a conscious decision that I wasn't going to wear makeup or dress up every day, because people who did that were shallow. I wasn't going to be shallow. I wasn't going to alter my appearance just to make people like me. If they didn't like me for the way I was, they could go fuck themselves.

Keith pointed out last night that it's only shallow to dress up and look pretty, if the reason you're doing it is because you don't think anyone will find you attractive otherwise. If you're doing it to enhance yourself, to add beauty to the world, or if you're doing it to make yourself even more attractive to someone who already finds you attractive, it's not shallow at all. I agree with this.

Granted, most of the girls in high school who wore makeup all the time and dressed up every day WERE shallow. But that was high school, and I'm not there anymore. I'm in the real world, with real women, and it's OK if I want to put on a dress and make myself look beautiful sometimes. It's taken me a long time to get to this point.

I still don't believe I'll ever wear makeup. I wore it sometimes in college, and it always made me depressed to look in the mirror and see someone who didn't look like me. To me, makeup is only a way of masking my real face, and that's not something I'm particularly interested in doing.

In other news.The movie we saw last night was The Muse, which is an Albert Brooks production. I had previously heard very good things about Albert Brooks. A couple of my friends think he's God's gift to comedy. So I was pretty psyched to go see it.

There's The Muse spoilers in the next couple of paragraphs.

Boy, was I ever disappointed. Albert Brooks is even whinier than Woody Allen, and in all the wrong ways. His character spent the whole movie whining and wishing that someone else would do his work for him, and complaining that ... well, complaining about just about everything. If I were Andie MacDowell, I would have divorced him in the first fifteen minutes. I was really rooting for the gods to come down from heaven and smite him, but unfortunately it never happened. The movie just sort of limped along for awhile and then ended, not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a slow fizzle. I didn't care about Albert Brooks' character, I didn't care about Sharon Stone's character, and I didn't give a rat's ass about the plot.

Keith pointed out that often, Albert Brooks is more interested in setting up (or even forcing) an interesting situation than he is in, oh, I don't know, making that situation interesting or believable. During the entire movie, I couldn't see the characters as anything but that -- characters. When two doctors show up late in the movie, I found myself thinking, "Oh, two new characters, maybe the plot will become interesting now".

It didn't. What a gyp.

Addendum

Carolyn pointed out that this entry could be mildly confusing. Let me clarify. If you wear makeup every day and you like to dress up and look all pretty every day, I don't hate you, and I don't think you're shallow. It all depends on the motivation.

Does that help?

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