Question of the Day:
If you could increase your I.Q. by forty points by having an ugly scar stretching from your mouth to your eye, would you do so?
-The Book of Questions by Gregory Stock, PH.D.
When I lived in Germany, back in the late 1980's, I went through an....awkward stage. I cut my hair short and had a perm at a local, German salon. I also had it dyed red, but the Germans prefer a sort of eggplant color, so that is what I wound up with. So...you are getting the picture: Short, eggplant-colored, frizzy afro. Top that with big, round glasses (I had just discovered that I could not see that well, and had NOT yet discovered contact lenses) and the prerequisite distressed and tapered Guess jeans and you had a pretty bad looking gal!
Amazingly, this transformation happened pretty suddenly. You know, you walk into a salon one way-leave looking another. Then came the glasses not too long after....and the jeans, well, they were a mainstay so there is no excuse there.
The point of this confabulation is how this new look affected my life. I was working managing a bookstore, and I went to work looking one way one week....the next week I looked really pretty bad. There was a little group of men that visited regularly (not so many women as this was on an Army post that was predominately field artillery and infantry) to buy their copies of the Guardian newspaper and magazines. I knew many of them by name, some just by face...but I was really young, fairly good looking, young, (and did I mention young?) and I always felt that tingle of flirtation with some of them, nothing of consequence, just everyday sorts of boy-girl interactions.
The week after the "transformation"? I didn't exist. Really...it was striking enough for me to remember over 20 years later. These men either didn't recognize me as the same person (not likely) or my charms had evaporated with the perm solution. It should also be noted that at about this same time I made a new friend named Linda. Linda and I became inseparable for two years following, and at one point she said to me, "You know, I didn't know what to think of you at first....you sure are different from the frizzy red-head with the geek glasses that I first met!"
Of course we know that looks are important....very important in our society. We don't agree with it...we try to tell our children differently, we pretend not to notice or to be affected. When my daughter was born she was ugly. Really...I can be honest about it because she turned out to be so beautiful. But when she was born I sobbed and sobbed....because all I could think of was how difficult her life would be as an ugly girl. Most of us are average looking and it serves us well....we don't offend anyone, but we don't stop traffic either. Trust me....I have walked in the uber-ugly shoes and it ain't pretty.
