(Warning: I'm in kind of a bitchy mood that I've been [for the most part] successfully suppressing all day. Post may be insane and/or overly navelgazey.)
If law school was like junior high,1 beauty school is a bizarre admixture of kindergarten, finishing school, and a slumber party where all the girls do one another's hair and talk about who's the cutest boy on death row. (Not that I was ever invited to one of those slumber parties. I'm going to hair school mostly for the right reasons, but I'll admit that one of the wrong reasons I'm here is that I never got over not being one of the pretty popular girls.) Fortunately, I enjoy bizarre admixtures and long moonlit walks on the beach, although I was never a big fan of kindergarten.
This morning we were lectured on using Proper English with our future clients ("guests"; after all, the school's affiliated with a Luxury Salon). Even in the classroom when someone splats a money-shot's worth of conditioner all over her black velvet blouse (uh, not that that was me. Okay, maybe it was me a little), the instructor will come around and tsk that person for saying the only possible thing, which is "Fuck!!" Now, as I've mentioned, I'm a classy lady. I say fuck a lot. I also say the other six words and many more. I have a linguistics degree from a prestigious-ass university and an Eric Cartman pottymouth. I also say like, totally, whatevs, hella, awesome, retarded,2 lame, and other more exotic slang terms. I've been reluctant to let go of them because I feel like they keep me young, you know? And without the swearing and sarcasm, I'd have to develop real defense mechanisms and who has time for that. Nevertheless, I realize it would behoove me to watch my language if I wish to advance in this industry. For instance, I need to stop saying shit like "behoove." It just makes people look at you like you're high.
On an age-related tangent: I turned 33 earlier this month. David Foster Wallace, in my estimation one of the most dazzlingly talented authors who ever lived,3 hanged himself four days after my birthday. (Yeah, it's all about me.) Despite my essential shallowness, I was moved to do some rereading, and by chance flipped A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again open to this passage:
I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I'm starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life's sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it's my own choices that'll lock me in, it seems unavoidable--if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.
Needless to say, that's been rattling around in my head ever since, out-of-context aside though it may have been. Eerily resonant with my inexorable metamorphosis from an overgrown teenager to some kind of grownup, hoping I can live with my own choices and foreclosures.4 But you know what really pisses me off? The instructor who scolded me for swearing and who later admonished me to put my phone away while I was in the building (never mind that I was just holding it without intent to dial; another of their kindergarten rules)? She's TWENTY. And like half my class are recent high-school graduates. 17- and 18-year-olds. I may not look 33 (yet), but I'm starting to feel it. It's enough to drive me to drink.
Which at least I can do legally. Nyah nyah!
In happy hair news, I have begun to wield a mean blowdryer! I was always intimidated by those things before today's test of my mettle.
1I swear, I watched Heathers about 4297528904582 times during my 1L year. I even wrote a paper for my Criminal Law class from the POV of Veronica Sawyer's defense attorney.
2I know that people think this word is especially offensive. Please do not yell at me. Kthx.
3And from whom I may have ripped off certain stylistic quirks.
4I'm gonna get kicked out of beauty school for this, aren't I?
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1 comment:
Dark, maybe, but this post reminds me that you are an exceedingly talented writer. Thanks for giving us this blog.
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