On Fleek

Lately, this meme is pretty popular:

It's a nice variant of this:

I have a problem.  I don't have nice eyebrows.  

This problem is I hit adolescence when this was the feminine ideal:

I am not blonde.  My hair is so dark I cannot even convincingly purchase blonde.  I also had thick eyebrows.  My mom always drew comparisons to Sela Ward or Brooke Shields, but they were passe when the girl next door poses for Playboy.  So for years, I mutilated my brows with tweezing and waxing.  There was one awful experiment with a tool that was akin to sandpaper.  It would have been a fantastic case study for Sheila Jeffries.  

The brows worked for a while.  They were complimented for their sheer perfection.  I think you call this "on fleek."  

But then Cara Delevinge hit the scene.  A girl was learning motor skills when thin was in.  Ever since then, it's been we like big brows and we cannot lie.  

Big brows are the signal of youth and beauty now.  What would have been considered abominable during the years I trained to be an acceptable woman is now a near obsession with endless vlogger eyebrow tutorials, eyebrow makeup products, and even eyebrow transplants.  

The ones who believe the dictum to "never trust someone with bad eyebrows" probably haven't become tired of being yanked around on the fashion hamster wheel where women are subject to the constantly changing whims of patriarchy, shelling out time and money to keep up, but you will.  

But never mind me.  I have bad brows.  It's hard to tell.  You are too distracted by my perfectly cut bangs that rival Zooey Deschanel to notice they did not grow back in to my teenage glory and require help from a pencil.  But it really important I do not leave the house with that.  Otherwise, my two graduate degrees would be completely useless and nobody would listen to me.  My life must be on fleek.  

I am glad I manage to squeak by.  Some women not only have bad eyebrows but bad hair too.  Others wear mom jeans and tapered pants.  Definitely do not trust them.  Some lead large agencies that perform critical missions and others made breakthroughs in medicine.  A few even wrote prize-winning works of poetry or fiction while a handful drafted legislation.  But they are irrelevant.  Their lives are not on fleek.  

Barnard College president Debora Spar wrote once about the number of hours she spent achieving beauty standards, hours that men do not spend.  She write about the pressure to be a Wonder Woman. Sometimes I wonder with the time I spend flat ironing my hair everyday how many journal articles I could have written for peer-review.  I was once told at a major conference that I was "too pretty" to work on a PhD.  So don't take it from me.  

Frankly, I am tired of "on fleek."  Rarely do my dinners appear anything like my Pinterest cookbook. My desk looks less like studyspo and more like a nuclear disaster area.  I am also tired of drawn on caterpillar eyebrows.  

I had a professor some years back who was very attractive and svelte but wore clothes that appeared to harken from the 1990s.  "Come on, Sarah," one of my classmates whispered.  "You would be a knock out if you didn't wear those frocks."  She was young and youthful, stunningly intelligent, but even I wondered what she would look like if she colored the silver streaks in her hair.  

It is kind of funny though.  Her frumpy dresses and tinseled hair did not make an impression on my life.  The interviewing techniques I learned to memorialize oral histories did impact my life. Eliciting narratives from men and women so they tell their stories, narratives, thoughts, desires, fears whether it is about their medical care to facing discrimination.  I still have not found a useful medium for drab jumpers.  My hair is starting to develop a silver lining.  

I hope you enjoy your life on fleek.  But don't tune us out so quickly.  One day you may even laugh at your brows.  A double-chin or skin tag may appear and there is nothing you can do about it.  But you will still have a lot to say.  

 

Thanks for Taking Rio De Janeiro

Earning a PhD is an out of body experience.  Often I see other people living my life and I want to say, "Hey, that's mine, give it back."

I fell asleep when I should have been writing my methodology section and my methodology section is just of the many days standing between me and anywhere but here.  That some people garages and can warm up their cars on 16 degree mornings or Rio De Janeiro.  I just have enough.

They say there is enough to go around, it is such a common commodity.

We All Dreaded Today

That's all.  The first day back at the university after winter break.  We survived and are all back to normal.  Sleeping without an alarm clock puncturing our dreams.  Forgetting what day it is.  Eating lunch at 4 o'clock in the afternoon.  Reading books for fun.  It's a past time for another year.

As for me, I wasn't there.  After celebrating Christmas with friends and family, I took off for my annual post-Christmas trip.  I was heartened to hear feedback from a coworker who remarked, "We just didn't know where you would turn up next."

Unfortunately, between traveling, visiting, and fooding, there was little time for all of the leisurely and required reading I was supposed to do.  The books accompanied me in each hotel I checked into, but only on the last leg of the trip did any serious reading get done.  And that novel I brought along is earmarked at page 108.

I used to be a voracious reader.  One could not feed me books quickly enough before I devoured them, one after the other.  Grad school stole my joy of reading.  The truth is, you have to speed read to finish the required and supplemental texts of a class and to produce solid research papers, you must be able to hunt, peck, discern, accept, reject, and synthesize at lightning speed.  Combine this with learning to code qualitative text and the next thing you know, Stephen King is just a bunch of lifeless words on a page.  That is, I have lost my imagination.

I think in abstracts, statistical significance, and theoretical frameworks.  I still have a strong craving for nonfiction, which has replaced fiction and poetry if done so artfully.  When I found copies of "Quiet" and "Rosemary" waiting for me at my desk this morning, I could not resist thumbing through the pages.  My coworker eats books like air; she finished nine over her break.

As I edited an article I started writing, my red pen dripping over the copy, it occurred to me that I no longer know how to write.  I lamented about this in an earlier blog post, but not sure what to do about it.  It is not the free flowing thoughts and words that are problematic.  It is crafting them, pruning sentences, designing paragraphs, that I see so clearly yet not quite sure how to do it.  Writing has always been so natural and raw; to do any refining is almost an admission that it could have been better and will never be good enough.

Lately, I rekindled my interest in journaling.  I have kept a journal consistently for years since high school (aside from the mandatory marble journal assignments in elementary school, slam books, and girlish attempts at a diary).  I stopped journaling for a three year period but intermittently maintained this blog.  I can forget those years now.

I resumed about three years ago and not terribly committed.  There are still blank pages from where I meant to memorialized last year's trips and I still have not recorded this year.  Frankly, I am intimidated by Pinterest.

Journaling on Pinterest includes an array of art journals, bullet journals, gratitude journals, and smash books.  Then you have Wreck this Journal.  It seems without washi tape and Copic markers, your journal sucks.

I am a decent artist when I apply myself, but I really don't have to the time when I am writing prose. I am also not particularly savvy with conjuring cute doodles to accentuate my articulate musings.  I also don't have a lot of patience to cut shit up and paste it into a slam book, which sounds like something you do in middle school.

Gratitude journals are great and I am grateful, but I am even more grateful to have a sacred place where I can occasionally bitch without reservation while sounding like Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf.  This is why Oprah runs a magazine and I am finishing a PhD.

God bless bullet journals.  Kept by brilliantly organized women who color code their days, tasks, and grocery lists.  But something about gauging every task I complete or don't complete with a color-coded chart for every minute of every day seems daunting and depressing.  There are some people who are really good at using every minute wisely.  I am not one of those people.  I thrive on surfing deadlines just as the wave is about to crash to shore.  Nothing is more pleasing than pawing at a project like a cat does to a mouse.   Maybe it is the secret to scores of publications and managing my career, but trying to document, measure, and quantify all of my activities seems like it would take more work than actually doing them.  Plus, why does anything efficient have to be a "bullet-something" these days?  Last year, it was bullet-proof coffee, which was supposed to help you run like a champ and lose a ton of weight.  This year, we are all fatter having sustained a diet of drinking butter and chronicling our fitness schedules in bullet journals.

I was intrigued, however, with this concept:

I found this on Pinterest, which was posted from Tumblr, which apparently came from Planet Millie, although the original page cannot be retrieved.  I am at least trying to give credit here.

This is a weekly Moleskine planner.  I searched high and low for this planner.  Moleskine is out of stock.  Amazon is mostly out of stock, albeit third-party sellers overcharging.  According to my local Barnes and Nobles (multiple), they were out of stock too, although they had the best too-good-to-be-true price.  I attempted to reserve two copies at two locations and was told they were out of stock despite the website indicating they were in stock.  Apparently, everyone and their mother purchased this journal promptly in November and it allegedly contains the secret of life.

In some sort of delayed Christmas miracle, I received a text from one of those vendors saying, "Just kidding, we got one for you."  So it will be mine.

But now, what will I do with it?  At this point, I have a large Moleskine for general dissertation notes, another one for methodology, and a third one for topic specific notes.  Perhaps the planner can be like Millie's charting my personal life with a splash of the personal, along with daily tracking of my $$ (not pounds sterling silver) and the weather.  

I always carry a black Moleskine with me which is a hodge podge of grocery lists, things I like, phone numbers, and scraps of paper.  It is mostly practical but I keep them because they say something about the time I keep them:  Places I go, what I pack for a vacation, my diet for that time, deadlines, songs I like.  But it is messy and disheveled.  My planner won't be as vibrant and playful as Millie's or organized like the bullet journal, but it will tell a story.  

My story this week is preparing for my conference.  I need to finish writing the paper. . .  I also need to reach out to a law school for more data and materials.  But I am not sure what to ask for or if this task is feasible to complete before the presentation.  I am also a little sheepish to explain to this librarian that all of his kindness last summer preparing materials cannot be used because I changed my topic.  I mostly don't want to look like a flake.  

I also need to write my methodology section.  I am looking forward to this, but afraid I am going to miss or forget something.  I kind of need fear to step aside and a serious dose of energy from a good night's sleep.