Why My Confidence Does Suffer So: 15%

15%

she tries to get things
out of men
that she can’t get
because she’s not
15% prettier

-Richard Brautigan

Somehow I came across this delightful site the other day, and I sat transfixed while clicking on photos of celebrities before and after Photoshopping them into fantasy land.  Just click on Portfolio, then on each photo.  When it pops up, it’s retouched and reverts to the original when you mouse over it.

No one is named, but it’s obvious who some of them are, and I found myself shocked and wondering, “Can you really make Halle Berry and Penelope Cruz more gorgeous?”

Yes.  Yes, you can.

You can make someone who’s a little tubby (in a cute way) a bit tighter and narrower (witness the girl in the purple shirt leaning against the door); you can take someone who has that “rode hard and put up wet” look and make her look thirty-something and wide awake (the pink sweatered hag).

And as a little aside, what’s up with Julia Stiles’s shirt?  I swear to Oz (props, Tannerleah) I hate that if I wore a shirt like that, which has the potential – nay, the probablility - of showing boobage, it would totally be fine, but if I should, say, discreetly sneak a boob out to feed a kid, air raid sirens would sound and everyone would start to vomit from the Oh! Offensive!! 

I confess I’ve longed for the ability to Photoshop my body in real life, in ways that the 30 Day Shred just can’t manage.  But also, I have more important things to worry about.  There was a time that my body and face could get me what I wanted; now I’m stuck relying on my brain, and it turns out, that might be a pretty effective means of getting where I need to be.

Anyway, maybe it should make me feel better about things like my freckles and my less-than-spectacular figure.  I guess I didn’t believe that it’s a never ending thing, this quest for perfect beauty.

And maybe the Brautigan poem isn’t really me, after all.

Too Long For Twitter

It’s hot and my feet are old.  It used to be that I had time to make myself into a girl, but now it’s all I can do to make myself get up.  All I want right now is to put down this laundry and this sad life and put on lip gloss that smells like fruity bubblegum.  I want to walk down the street and get whistled at.  I want to climb trees.  I want to skip school and meet you in the Chinese gardens again.  I want to hop trains like we used to and end up somewhere new.

I want to make sangria and drink it around a bonfire with everyone happy under the trellis that I helped build so many years ago.

I want to swim naked in the creeks again in the moonlight and pretend it will always be like this.  I want to jump off the rock by the waterfall and into the water and go under and this time maybe never emerge from the cool, sweet darkness of being young.

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It is Therapy Thursday, after all, and I have bills to pay.  All this psychological help isn’t free.