Dave’s Holiday Party

Fun was had by all…

Dress up

I think it more tasteful to refrain from posting the "before" picture...

Well, Stacey’s wedding is coming up, it’s this Saturday in fact, and I’m flying back east (yet again!) on Thursday.  So, today, in the interest of being able to wear an actual dress for the event, and for the first time in many years, I waxed my legs.  Stac, don’t ever say I never did anything for you!  (Though really, I don’t find it painful–more like annoying, and messy.  If you’ve never experienced it, leg wax is approximately the consistency of pine tree sap, and it has a similar ability to stick itself it any number of unexpected and remote surfaces.  I had to scrub down half the bathroom with “Goo Off” when I was done.)  Interestingly enough, now that my legs are more “girly” in a sense, they look more muscular than they did before…

I haven’t worn a fancy dress for about ten years, so I think it’ll be kind of fun to dress up.  I have also been attempting to apply eye makeup–again, I haven’t tried to do this since I was about ten years old–so that I’ll have some hope of being able to make myself look presentable this weekend.  There is a whole genre of videos on YouTube in which young ladies demonstrate how to apply eye makeup to achieve certain effects. This is very helpful, if, like me, one has a limited understanding of such things.  I watched a tutorial last night on how to create a purple “smokey eye” look, a process that involves about twenty steps, half of which require black eyeliner.

In thinking about it, when I was younger I rejected a number of the trappings of what I saw as “socially acceptable” femininity–makeup, girly shoes, “doing” my hair, and whatnot–many the things girls generally have to do to be seen as attractive in a mainstream way.  I feel like as I get older I care less about how people read my appearance.  Maybe because of that, many of the things I wouldn’t have been caught dead doing/wearing seem more and more like they could be a fun option.  I started wearing nail polish just last year for the first time in maybe a decade, and it occurred to me that I like painting my nails.  (Preferably with a safe and relatively green brand of polish, insofar as those things go…)  For a long time though I didn’t do it because I didn’t want others to read my nails as a sign that I was someone who believed that women have to paint their nails, or wear makeup in general, in order to look good.  It’s taken me a while, but I think I’m figuring out that keeping a couple of pairs of heels in the closet, as an option, doesn’t necessarily make me less of a feminist…

Hi Stac!

Then...

This is me and Stacey, my best friend since we were three.  In this photo we’re about twelve, I think, and on a Girl Scout trip to Alaska.  Can you even imagine how many damn cookies we had to sell?  I tell you, it was a lot of cookies.  I remember my parents’ whole basement being full of cases and cases of cookies.

And then below, that’s us, just maybe a month ago, at my mom’s 60th birthday party in Tyngsboro.  Amazing that we grew up to be decent looking people, no?

...and now.

It’s raining

I'm probably fifteen, sixteen here. That's OJ, he was a Maine Coon, and a huge cat.

Well, it’s finally happening, I am in the thick of the application(s).  (I add the (s) because it doesn’t stop with AMCAS; once I finish this I have a bazillion secondary applications to do.)  For each “work/experience” entry you get 1325 characters–that’s about 200 words–and spaces count as a character too–to describe and elaborate.  That’s not much room when you’re talking about, say, five job titles in five years at OPB.  However, the people who will read it have to read an awful lot of them, so I imagine brevity is exactly what they want. I intend to use seven of the fifteen spaces.  I mean, who really has done fifteen important things in their lives, anyway?

Today I got my first letter of recommendation!  That’s exciting.  From Max Apple, my writing teacher at Rice.  They’re all confidential, these letters people write about you, so I just hope the folks I ask say nice things about me.  I mean, that’s the plan, anyway.  Max was my teacher a long time ago, but the idea was that since my degrees are actually and still in English and Art, I should have at least one recommendation that represents that.

On another note, I saw someone this past weekend who I haven’t seen in, what, thirteen years?  And who, if you’d asked me, I would have said I never expected to see again in my life.  This guy here, sitting at my kitchen table, is Brian Deshler, one of my first boyfriends ever.  We were fifteen, I believe.  He found me on Facebook, and was in the area for a conference.  It’s funny, seeing people from high school–it doesn’t happen to me much, as I’ve been out west since college–but when I do see anyone, it always amazes me how little people change.