No Makeup Saturday

Tags

alex trebec, beauty, entertainment, fashion, female, friends, hair, life, makeup, style, women

I wish it were Monday. No make-up Monday has such a ring to it. And Mondays are a nice excuse for anything. You know, people have heart attacks on Mondays more than any other day. Alex Trebec knows this for sure.

The point is, today’s a day to get ready the regular way. Jeans-n-boots, my favorite t shirt, with pencil sketches of the band Cream on the front. New gray jacket from H&M, mustard seed necklace, wedding and engagement bands. My hair styles are simple, but there are lots of them. I never like to wear my hair the same way. All my friends know that I’m the best nonprofessional hairstylist they know. I don’t know how it happens; but it does.

And then only lotion on my winter-chapped face. Out the door. You see, I’m often caught in the white lie that I don’t wear any makeup. Ever. And, to be fair, no one ever actually calls me out on this, but I know that when I say it, it’s only a half-truth. I wear exponentially less makeup than everyone I know. Except my girlfriends, Sarah and Charissa, they really don’t wear any. Not in the half-truth way. They may not even own any; you’d never know, pretty faces. Even my little sister, ten years my junior, (parental-style digression diverted) wears more makeup than I do.

For so many reasons, one of the primary being that I like sleep far too much to spend so much morning in front of the mirror, I don’t invest in all the accoutrements that the female population create a market for. Some cover up, a bronzer that has lasted me 6 years and sometimes a touch of nude eye color. The end. But today, the end is the beginning. None.

The circles under my eyes that have puffed up from crying for my best friend, for my girlfriends all 800 miles away, for enduring change and working too much, they stay gray and deep. The pimple that just mysteriously appeared on my right cheek is red from my rubbing it, and it stays red. Bummer for anyone who has to look at it. My eyelids are sort of veiny, I noticed the other day. And today, they remain such. My skin is a little flush in the winter, unevenly so. And tonight it remains.

I’m dressed and ready. I have my bag, my water bottle and a book for the train. I am makeupless and don’t feel self-conscious. Here I come, world. Look at me.

Spontaneous Modeling

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activity, applause, audience, beauty, fun, groupthink, influence, life, modeling, people, reflection, students, teaching

There was a few minutes of free time at the end of one day. Two out of four student groups had given presentations. Not presentations by regular standard, for this crew…star performances. Magnificent deliveries of spoken words, rehearsed and organized. The most hot-water students, names almost permanent on a blue sheet of paper for athletic ineligibility, stepped forward during Questions & Answers, teaching their classmates about the book they read. Confidence. Beauty.

In these post-performance precious minutes before the bell, students congregated in empty spaces, filling the atmosphere with words they use too frequently, relaxed from their pressure-cooked performances, creating friction unnecessarily between their bodies.

I started to clap my hands from behind my desk, slowly at first. Then louder, more emphatically. They heard me and clapped. Twenty students, clapping with eyebrows raised, heads shifting in surprise like swivels on their skinny necks. No idea why they had started to clap. I heard a few exclamations, questions at the nature of our celebration, but the clapping didn’t cease. I said nothing, just raised my applause above my head and sped up. They clapped along, faster still. By no prompting, they started to woot and cheer. Just general ah-ha’s and woo-hoo’s. Not for any one person, just for the clapping itself.

Soon, laughter at the spectacle, and the speed of it’s escalation brought tears to my eyes. Floods of them. I had to stand up and make amiable acquaintance with the tissue box near the sink. When I quit, they quit, clap by clap.

The groupthink concept overtook them. The aura of peer pressure swept them into action without reason or sense, without command or repercussion. They all just clapped and clapped, cheered and rejoiced for nothing, for no one–because a spontaneous clap grew from the somewhere.  An anonymous leader emerged from the bowels of the classroom and they followed, carried it on, curiously, but without needing a reason, any instruction.

I loved the momentary rush it gave us all in the minutes before the bell. Their questions, their surprise, amazement at the superfluousity of the experiment. They loved that I was as purposeless as they were.  This was before they knew that I am really a lot like them.  Most of them still don’t realize.   

All the laughing, the clapping, the wooting together.  Immature and unreasonable. Adults and children.  And children who think themselves adults.   One unified spontaneous classroom noise.  Beautiful.

Rings on Her Fingers

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beauty, character, girl, life, observation, people, relationships, storytelling, subway

There are rings on all the wrong fingers, slender knuckles, long nails, no polish. Chunky stones set in silver, twisted metal caressing smooth skin, beaded trinkets hanging from bent wood. From her fingers I decide that when they choose her it’s only for one night. Or for weeks at a time. Never—yet—for a lifetime. And I can’t figure why.

I fell in lust with her on the one train downtown. Her long hair, tousled, hadn’t seen a brush yet today. It was late in the afternoon, locks still latched on skyrise buildings, Wall Streeters not yet freed to the streets, and only the running of her fingertips through the curls on the ends of her locks had kept the thick mane tame. Her perfect form, bronze glow, curves of all the right sizes in all the right places, wrapped casually in subtle straps, a gray tank, woven shoulder-strung purse, jean shorts, torn.  She fit like a whisper between two faceless bodies on the plastic blue infinite subway seat.  Her almond eyes, lashes long, that blinked curiously around the train car as it cushioned with late-lunching New Yawkers. She never squinted cruelly at them. Never bristled. Only slid back effortlessly into her headphones.

And as she wondered, I wondered about her. About what makes her, impossibly, just a one-night girl, with rings on all the wrong fingers.

Prompt #13: Holiest Temptation

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13, beauty, Beauty of Who You Are, Cold War Kids, cryptomnesia, exercise, intimacy, life, love, lyrics, Marc Broussard, prompt, relationship, sensual, sin, temptation, touch, Willet, writing

I have a confession to make: I haven’t been faithful to my own exercises. I haven’t been drafting responses to the prompts that I’ve been writing. You already know this if you’re a GoogleReader subscriber or another variety of regular visitor, because you took note of the way I skipped two posts this weekend. I don’t apologize. I was driving to New York City, and my absence is, by my standards, excused. But still. I’ve failed, leaving blank pages where I should be crafting responses to my own efforts at squeezing out our collective creative juices.

My friend, Jenn, made me respond. She sometimes makes me do things I didn’t intend or want or plan. She’s a junkie for a challenge; if you knew her, you’d see how it flows so naturally. And so many days the flow is unto me, forcing me out of my comfort and into unnatural poses, positions, postures. What results is praise. It’s good, this process, this intersection where we engage.

Anyway.

Marc Broussard sang me into hours of wandering around with my own words this afternoon with his Beauty of Who You Are. The lyrics swim in and out of seamless lines like this: There’s a soft sweet space on the back of your neck/Smells like rain/There’s a way you look at me baby/Heals my pain/I’ve studied every inch of your body/Baby what’s on your mind/The touch of your skin just pulls me in/Every single time.

They’re words I wish I’d have said first.

His lyrics are intimate, but not sexual in an uncomfortable way. I don’t know what he means when he says “touch of her skin,” but if cut and pasted into my life, they don’t mean anything they shouldn’t mean. They mean my hand, his fingers laced with mine when he calls for my paw, he means my bare, sunstruck shoulder in the summer, he means his thumb a brush over my temple when my hair falls in my face on the subway platform and my gloves are snug over my hands. He doesn’t mean every actual inch. Not today anyway.

He doesn’t mean my stomach when my shirt creeps up; is that what they think? He doesn’t mean sneaking up my legs, cheating my skirt or my shorts for a rush. He doesn’t mean his hand on my back, skin on skin, sensual, creating heat, more than what’s already burning between us. Lustful child’s play doesn’t know this kind of intimacy. If Broussard sings about lust, he has me fooled and the pieces don’t quite fit.

With invisible seams, Broussard stitches these last lines in: You are a sensual salvation/You’re the holiest temptation/Baby I’m never, never, never gonna be the same/I can’t explain it or begin to conceive/All I know is that you make me believe.

Holiest temptation is my favorite line. Maybe for the supposed paradox in its nature. Maybe for hours of philosophical depth I can see it cultivating. Maybe for the way, when I stop to think about how these months have stacked up, the play on words starts to soak, naked, towel around the waist, in a sauna of truth.

Tempted without pause, without break or breath or aberration, but never the negative pull, the spiral of sin, the darkness that swallows us whole, isolating from all that which is good. Never once. Only freedom and moving forward. Temptation takes on a connotation of a different nature, just for an artistic moment. Just to shift perspective, to shine light, to reflect a slice of beauty in this intimacy. I can dig that.

So Broussard had me wrapped up today, humming his lyrics, adopting them as my own for the day. Pretending I had written them. Maybe even slipping for an unnoticed second into cryptomnesiac state to take them as mine own, though it will be no fault of my own (see Willet).

Good Morning, Gorgeous

Tags

beauty, Jesus, love, makeup, mistakes, morning, natural, relationship, Savior, truth

You woke me with a message, Good morning, gorgeous. I was too sleepy for the turns and twists you’d already started in my stomach. I’d slept comfortably without this nervousness for hours. And, now it’s back. I sighed and buried my flushed face in my pillow. I was alone in my room, you were miles from me, maybe in yours, or dancing like a fool in the apartment below yours to nineties music with your brothers, our friends. There was no reason to be embarrassed.

It’s like every morning when I wake and my Savior loves me like this. Good morning, gorgeous, He says. He’s ready for me and all my mistakes, teeth unbrushed, hair all a mess. He wants me a part of His day just like that. And so while I eat breakfast, I try to accept that love and say okay. And live the day.

I haven’t worn makeup for weeks, now. When I wash my face, I put on lotion so my skin doesn’t dry up, so it doesn’t itch. But I haven’t been dabbing concealer under my tired eyes or bronzer over my cheeks so my smile looks smiley-er. When I met you, I had just gotten out of the shower and thrown on jeans and a t-shirt. It’s been the same these past two weeks. So, it’s a little strange the way you called me beautiful today, and last night.  And the way you will again next week.  But it’s the same as how my King wakes me up and takes my hand and runs through the day with me as I fall and trip and make the same damn mistakes.

The Moon

Tags

beauty, creation, description, language, moon, nature, night, story, words

On a night I was stuck inside, a night when I couldn’t see, I had a friend tell me of the glory in the night sky:

It’s so crisp, the way the shape bends and ends. There’s just enough crescent-ness for the arc to be seen clearly and the shadow of the rest rests beside. Ah, so sweet.

Thanks to my sister. The Body shares beauty in this way. Have you shared beauty today?

Billboards as Art

Tags

art, beauty, California, Chicago, city, dowontown, LA, Los Angeles, truth, urban

I recently received an email about a new initiative in Los Angeles, Billboards as Art, and I think it’s brilliant. It’s what I truly believe art should be and how it should be displayed, interactive with the quote real world; alive, inviting.

These are the things I think about when I sit on the EL or the CTA buses in Chicago, involuntarily reading advertisements in every nook and cranny about apartment finders and food delivery services.  These are not the things you or I want to be reading, and yes, I’m speaking for us both.  We want to be enriched and grown.  We want to be reminded that even with our twelve degrees in-hand, there is still a whole world of stuff that we don’t know.  But, we are willing to learn.  Yet, we are made to stare at advertisements where there could be poetry or paintings.  We waste space where we could be making art happen.

Clouds, part of the Billboard as Art Series in LA, CA

My thoughts have since been imprisoned by how I can mimic this project.  If I cannot, my only refuge is to set Los Angeles as my next geographic destination and become a part of what’s already happening, if they’ll even have me.  I don’t know anyone in LA, except my one friend’s dad…and I don’t even know him at all.  So in lieu of moving to the West Coast, what can I do to bring art to the forefront?  How can I punctuate the media madness in which we live with beauty?

Neil Postman has some thoughts on the current state of culture, but hasn’t yet offered the solution I’m seeking.  Check out Amusing Ourselves to Death here.