in my recent quest to adulthood (because being 18+ doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a grown-up) i picked up the habit of wearing blush. i would be lying if i said i haven’t tried this before; for a breif period during my senior year of high school i was wearing this bronze-brownish blush to look tan in the winter months. my latina girlfriend did and she looked great. then one day in my graphic design class i caught my friend Rob staring at the side of my face. finally he asked me, “yo, you got crayon on your face or something? like, did you draw on yourself?” and i’ve always thought of that everytime i’ve considered putting blush on again.
but recently, this container of pink blush resurfaced in my girl-things bag a few weeks ago (i remembered a few days later that my convict boyfriend in high school bought it for me, or stole it for me, from sephora right before the aforementioned blush phase I) and i thought “let’s do this.” cause all the mature women that come into the shitty coffee shop i work at-the women who wear the clothes that are on the mannequins at Anthropologie, not the knock-offs on the sale racks at Urban Outfitters-they wear blush that’s probably from the Mac store, not from their spoon-burning shitty exboyfriend who used to call them from jail.
so i started going real light, and even kind of wiped it off a little to make sure i didn’t have crayon face. but every week i’ve gotten a little bolder. and then today, shortly after i got out of work and got my bike fixed, i rode by a parked car and saw my reflection in a window and i looked like this
awful.
so my quest to adulthood hit a speed bump. no big deal, right?
another problem i’ve been having that i feel at liberty to discuss openly here is my place of living. renting sucks, hands down. especially when you live in a glorified garage in an old yarn and asbestos mill that would be a death trap if there was ever a fire. the same building called The Cracker Factory by my Puerto Rican neighbors, the same building that can be blamed (partially) for all the outrageously priced “lofts” refurbished within tie factories and other old buildings of similarly glamourous industry. and honestly, i don’t even know if i want to stay in this damn city or not, but i hate answering to people and being asked for thousands of dollars in deposits for even thinking about moving into a different house. like most people in this part of the city, i live paycheck to paycheck. do they think i have some cash stash somewhere? that sale rack at Urban Outfitters? i only hit that once when i was given a gift card to that store for my birthday. but i know i’m better off than a lot of people in Rock-Bottom America, so sometimes i think about taking this adulthood thing a step further and buying a house.
i think i can afford this
and after i complete my degree in preservation, it will look like this
home-owning excites me more and more each day.
oh, and step three of my pursuit of adulthood:
the pantsuit. the day i put this thing on, you can say good bye to the underacheiving derelict you once knew me as. i’ll be too professional to even look in your general direction. party mode will be off, imperialistic money making mode will be on. and, once i finally succeed at JUST THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF BLUSH, i’ll be a self-made ambitious adult woman, not the freeloading hourly-paid chick that your mother would cringe at. really, i don’t think anyone’s mom wants their son to marry me now.
but they will soon.
