Stay of Execution: All Request Day: Girly Stuff

First, let me say that I'm not very girly. I'm a late blooming girl. I'm still learning a lot about girliness. For example, last night I just learned that I should be using light eyeliner on my top lid, because it will bring out light eyes. I had to ask whether my blue eyes qualify as light. I was told they do. I've been very proud of myself wearing a nice smoky brown eyeliner and now need to cash it in for a light one. Live and learn.

I think I'll direct my readers who want to read girly posts to This Fish, and to Stephanie Klein. They're both excellent writers and a kind of feminine that I'm not.

My own girly thoughts have been a hodgepodge. I've noticed that mousse makes my hair look good for a few hours and then really bad later in the day -- flyaway and stringy Is it better to have flat but shiny clean hair all day, or a flippy full style for half a day? I've been considering cream eyeshadow. I suspect the new birth control pill I'm on of making me feel sadder, more fragile. I rediscovered a bra that I used to love at the bottom of my underwear trunk and have been delighted to reintroduce it into circulation. And, since it's winter, there are lots of camisoles to wear under sweaters, and considerations about whether it's acceptable for a little border of camisole to peek out from under. There are the usual moisturizer dilemmas. Etc.

And then there are boys. There's been a little activity of late, some flirtatious overtures from hither and yon. Enough to have me alert and confused, and to trigger a bunch of reactions in me. I'm not sure I like my dating self. I am critical and indecisive and defensive and alternately vulnerable and careless, impatient and skittish. It's not the me I am most of the time -- in other areas I'm more generous, more playful, more relaxed. I've been listening to my own inner narrative and can't tell if this is a set of outmoded defense mechanisms that I should dump, or the manifestation of a promise I made to myself when I got out of a long, lousy relationship that I would never again ignore the little voices of doubt in my own head.

I've been thinking, too, about the Ghosts of Boyfriends Past. This is part of my pondering about failure. If I'm not going to be afraid to fail this year, what does that mean, exactly? What do I consider failures thus far in my life? The answers that are most resonant involve boys. They're not so much failures as much as missed opportunities, risks not taken. I should have taken the year after law school to go off sailing in the Bahamas with the surfer. I should have followed the scientist, my first love, to the West Coast after college, to see if that could have worked. I should have realized, before it was too late, that the really handsome one was, in fact, smart enough.

Stay of Execution

In which Scheherazade postpones the inevitable with tales of law and life....

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2006 Blog Party

All Request Day: Girly Stuff

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