Off the prompt "cuddles."

My copy of Merchant of Venice was printed in 1898. Some young woman with beautiful handwriting wrote her schedule on the flypaper in 1900. I suspect she was left-handed and also that she didn't think her handwriting was beautiful. Also there's a really hilarious drawing mocking the hell out of corsetry.

Back to my main problem: 1898! There's endnotes but they aren't marked in the text. Oh god. I will go crazy.

What shall I wear to Club Vivid?

Financial aid just doubled my aid for the summer so I actually have some money to play with; I could buy a new dress and/or other things to wear. I could also afford Lady Gaga tickets now! echan won't play dress-up with me tomorrow; she said maybe Monday and. I don't even know. I want pretty shiny things now.

Welcome to the land of shallow.

I keep wanting to tackle deep and being unable to figure out how to phrase my issues.

So I am at: I want to wear pretty, shiny things to Club Vivid.

(ETA: well, that was a spectacular failure, and I am now in tears.)

(ETA2: FUCK. Completely unrelated to the previous eta, I am now flailing about picking out things to wear for club vivid because I FEEL TOO FAT TO COSPLAY. I KNOW THIS IS DUMB. I DO THIS EVERY YEAR. Can I go back to the year I spent entirely too much time deciding if I was going to shave my pits? I think I prefer that level of intellectual body image dissection.)


(ETA3: So I'm considering for my primary expenditure on costume this year, demon contacts. Who wants to lick red corn syrup off my arm at Club Vivid?)

There's a patch of my scalp that's a little tender right now, because I was bleaching the hell out of my streak (I'd let the roots get out a couple of inches) to re-dye a new shade for the wedding. I'm only using 30 peroxide, not anything rougher and tougher and salon strength, so getting my hair bleached enough to take cool colors takes a few runs--the first go gets me from dark black-brown to vibrant orange; the second to a paler orange, around where I can drop a magenta or red on it; the third bleaching gets me to a light gold that can slide under violet, though I'd probably twitch at trying to get it under blue, because blue will green out on you. (Two or three more runs gets it to proper platinum, but I don't so much do that all at once--it's just what happens with the length of the streak when I'm working on the roots.) So all told I spent a cumulative two hours with bleach in my hair tonight, and yeah, my scalp is sore.

Beauty is pain, right? /irony

(In an ideal world I would just naturally have a white streak up front like Rogue or Sam Beckett, and when I felt like dyeing it an accent color to go with my dress and my mood as I periodically do, I wouldn't have to bleach it first.)

My mother likes my streak bleached but undyed; she says I look like a marbled cake with blonde and brown hair. I did that look for a while when I first got up the gumption to bleach the streak--and it took gumption; when I told my mother on the phone, because I was away at college at the time, my lead-up made her think I'd gotten a tattoo or something permanent, because I really thought she'd disapprove like crazy. Maybe that's why I didn't finish the job with the dye, then, and yeah, it felt unfinished, the bleaching's always just to make a canvas for the color. But I really did feel that my mother wouldn't get it, would make me feel guilty about it--not for doing something non-conformist with my hair, no. For using beauty products, for falling prey to societal pressure to do things that are bad to my body to try to look pretty.

I think I'm the wannabe punk child of a wannabe hippie flower child.

Growing up, I absorbed from my mother that: make-up is a waste of time and clogs your pores and by the way, lipstick is to make your mouth look like labia; leg and pit hair is natural and women in Europe don't shave it off, so why should we; that mustache ain't going anywhere no matter what you do to it (this was probably my mother's longest hold out in the vanity department, she was bleaching her mustache long after she'd called it quits on a lot of other regular beauty work); heels will screw up your feet and back; Barbie is not a natural shape and not one to aspire to--I nearly added it's okay to be fat, but that one didn't quite stick, because my mother did pressure me to diet with her all the time. By the way, we're both still fat. I think she still tries to lose weight. Eventually I got her to leave me out of it. My stance is I don't want to work specifically to be thin; if I lose weight because I'm working my ass off, then yay, but I'm not going out of my way for it. This seems to me to be the natural extension of everything else she taught me about rejecting society's urges to prettify, tempered with an acknowledgement that all false images of what health is aside, I am actually fatter than is healthy.

So there's all of that. The anti-pretty, where pretty is defined by glossy magazines and Hollywood movies. Except that on some level, I do still want to be pretty, even though I know how false all of that is. The first time I acted in a theatre show in college and the director showed us how to put on make-up, not street make-up, pancake make-up, but you know, with cheekbone shaping rouge and eyeliner to make your eyes big and dark, everything exaggerated for stage--I looked in the mirror and thought, "I'm pretty," and I hadn't known that was possible, I hadn't ever thought of myself as pretty before.

I didn't start wearing street make-up. I don't do that for everyday life. There are occasions when I'll do measures of it for performance, and I don't necessarily mean stage performance, because not all performances are the official kind. Part of my rebellion and part of my queerness is that I don't do that performance for men--the most frequent occasions are Club Vivid at Vividcon, which has an overwhelming majority of female attendees. But pretty isn't who I am on a day to day basis, and though pretty still gives me a little surge of guilty pleasure, I am content to look like what I actually look like here in real life.

Except for the hair.

Here's another thing about my hair: getting my hair braided, especially braided in some fancy, intricate way by someone else, is a guilty pleasure for me. I don't know why; braiding doesn't fall under the same stigma of pretty in most cases for me--I braided my mother's hair when I was a kid, and it's not load-the-chemicals-on alteration of self that she taught me to rail against. But there despite that sanction, I still feel like a pretty, pretty princess when someone does my hair, and feeling like a pretty, pretty princess is a guilty feeling for me. Ironically, it's an act of defiance against my (personal/familial instead of societal) norms to ask for it.

And then there's the bleach and the dye. It has been eight years since the first time I bleached my streak in; I have been inconsistent about maintaining it (see also: a couple of inches of roots) but it's been part of my self-image ever since. I guess that's an act of defiance against my personal/familial norms too, but one specifically designed to be outside the conventional definition of pretty too: unnatural colors, and just the one streak, not the whole head of hair. But it makes me hugely uncomfortable on a philosophical level that I have to buy into artificial beauty products to do it. I have this tender patch on my scalp right now, reminding me that everything my mother taught me to resist in the idea of hurting yourself to look different than you are because society thinks you should. There's a push-pull of how I want to look and how I look without alteration and how I want not to look specifically because the world says I should want to look that way. It's hard for me to sort out. I can't quite solve it; the contradiction is rooted somewhere primal in the construction of my personality.

I have a whole hell of a lot of identity tied up in my hair. The other day at work I said something about being butch, regarding my badassery at moving boxes of books--mostly in jest, because the butch/femme binary is not quite synonymous with my issues and not really how I think of myself. My boss said I'd need to cut my hair off if I wanted to look butch and my automatic answer was No. I also said that short hair is not a requirement for being butch and it's an attitude more than a look and that my boss was being reductionist and on some level I believe all of that and on some other level, that was all rationalization for that instant answer, No. No, my hair's not going anywhere. There's too much me there.

But a me I need to manipulate, to alter. Why is that? What is it about me that I need to look different from what I am?