organized chaos

It’s true. While this is not the end of the book, it’s the end of what I’ve written. You know, I just sit around all day and stare at walls. There’s really no excuse for me not to write. Nothing like, umm, I just had a baby four five months ago or anything like that.

But I hope you’ve enjoyed your visit to East Texas through my warped perspective. And I hope you leave some feedback after this post. Did you like it? Did you find it disturbing? Did you like it even though you found it disturbing? Whatever. I’d like to hear your thoughts. Even if you’ve never left your thoughts anywhere on this blog before, and I don’t know you from Adam. Go ahead. It won’t hurt. And now to the final chapter for now.

Mirrors Are Not a Girl’s Best Friend

I have a real issue with mirrors. To this day I can look into one and think, “Geez, I look pretty good.” And then someone takes my picture and when I get it developed, I think, “Geez, I must be The ugliest person on the face of this earth.” Followed by, “That mirror is such a fat liar.”

Picture day at school is crucial for any girl. No matter what she looks like all year long, if she takes a decent picture, that will be the thing people look back at to remember her by when the Swiss Cheese has taken over their brain, and they will say, “What a cool chick she was. So pretty.”

I rode the bus to school when we lived in East Texas. And at public school, picture day was always in the Fall when it was still warm. That meant all those punks on the bus had their windows down for the thirty minutes it took to get to school.

So I would spend all this time in the bathroom, primping it up, crimping it up,(it was the eighties), spritzing and combing. I don’t recall checking my hair do in the bathroom at school before the pictures were taken. But by the time we got our orders back and I saw what I looked like, I felt like jumping into the creek to surrender myself to the Slimy Monster Thing and become his Child Bride because that was the best I’d ever get.

And yes, I still have the pictures to prove it. The hair, not the Slimy Monster Thing.

Even up into High School, I refused to look in the mirror when I went to the restroom for fear of what I would see. It wasn’t just the pictures that did me in. Kids at school were cruel and unfortunately Donnie had his say, too. Like the one time I’d spent so much effort trying a new, albeit weird, hair style and I came out of the bathroom he said, “You’re going out like that?”

What a good dad. The best.

And so, I’ve spent a good deal of my life worrying about who people really see when they look at me. Do they see the person that I feel like on the inside; confident, humorous, sometimes insecure, but mostly happy and smart alecked? Or do they see the dork that I see in all those pictures? First the awkward girl with the hair flying every which way and the buck teeth sticking out and the nose too big for her face. Then, the older girl whose pictures are a little better, but never the person she sees in the mirror, and never the person she feels like inside.

Luckily I didn’t end up with the Slimy Monster Thing. So mirrors and cameras are big fat lying liars after all.