Of Looks and Bigger Things
Me So Pretty: Confessions of a Wilted Flower Girl & the Princess That Turned into a Toad
Once upon a time, there lived a girl who used to play the beautiful fairytale princess. But when she grew up, she got fat, got skeletal then got fat again,, grew a mustache, dressed like the love child of a crazed hobo and a discount-priced hooker, sometimes forgot to shower and made combing her hair more of an annual event than a daily ritual. And when she realized that people no longer remembered what a lovely little princess she once was and became very insecure, she started swearing like a sailor on fire and threatened to beat their faces till even their mama won’t recognize, let alone love them anymore. The End.
I must admit, for someone who doesn’t seem to own a hairbrush or a mirror, I’m rather vain in the most common sense of the word. I don’t look like it but I am deep down. Blame it on the fact that I spent the early formative years of my life as a professional flower girl of sorts. The attention and compliments one receives for basically looking pretty and holding a flower does wonders for a little girl’s ego and a whole lot of damage to her psyche. It taught me that you could be a demanding, disrespectful little tyrant just as long as you looked pretty; the world will love you. In other words, it made me think that people valued looks in females more than anything and thus, I learned to treasure it above all else and behold - vanity is thy name! What I didn’t learn was that the older you get, the more effort is required in looking presentable and since I’m also as lazy as they come well….
Oh, how the flower girls have wilted and fallen! Here is the winter of my adolescent-awkwardness that seems to have amplified, instead of diminish in my young adulthood. My mother thinks I sabotaged myself. Perhaps I did but to make it easier on myself, I choose to believe that my dad and her didn’t give me any kind of supermodel DNA so I really don’t have that much to work with (It’s easy to be cute and pretty when you’re 5, it’s a different story altogether when you’re 21). Some friends say it’s because I’m “not superficial” and have more important things on my mind that I seem to pay little attention to grooming as compared to the hot babes on campus. Oh, they give too much credit. I’m really not that deep. My superficiality is only surpassed by my laziness. A Hot-Babe classmate of mine once mentioned that she would get up at 5 a.m in the morning so she can look good in time for an 8 o’clock class. Fuck that, 5 a.m is the time I go to bed and I need at least some sleep, thanks. I’d be lucky if I even showered before showing up for an 8 o’clock class. I say, “what does it matter what I look like? It’s school/ college, not a fucking beauty pageant.” But secretly and ridiculously enough, I get a little miffed, when people start choosing the word ‘smart’ over ‘hot/pretty’ to describe me. I don’t want to be smart, you damn confederacy of fools! I wanna be hot, damn it!
When I was a lot younger, I used to get the roles of the pretty princess a lot in school stage plays/ shows. But by the time secondary school came around, I somehow found myself being typecast as the brutish male lead (I went to an all-girls school, remember?) – I was Petruchio in Taming of The Shrew when I really wouldn’t mind playing sweet, pretty Bianca or even the shrewish but in the least, female Katrina; I was the male prosecutor in a pantsuit, ridiculous cape and dodgy mustache in the afterlife trial of the aristocratic and elegant Lady Margaret Fontaine, a role which of course, went to the pretty Eurasian girl with the long, tumbling tresses. The one time I got to play a female role, it wasn’t of the hot babe or the darling damsel – it was of a battle-scarred, sword-wielding, religious loon with a bowl-haircut by the name of Joan of Arc who ended up getting flame-grilled on a stake. I can tell you that there was nothing pretty about that role although people did compliment me on “playing crazy really well.” By the time college came around, I had virtually seized to appear on stage or onscreen and instead was relegated to the behind-the-scenes role of writing, directing and barking at cast and crew members, earning myself the nickname of Jantan Macho and Dragon Boss. “Maryam, you’re a quack. You’re more twisted than I realized. Most people would think that writing and directing is a step up. It means you have more substance than the rest of us,” said a friend. Shut up, you fool! Writing and directing is for people that are too ugly to appear onstage – people who have something to say are only making up for being nothing to look at. (Okay, okay, not true. Little girls don’t listen to this crazy lady who has fallen victim to the very thing she often criticizes in society. I’ve just been damaged by my childhood. You can be both smart and beautiful!). As for having more substance, honey, back in my first two years of college the only kind of real substance I had was a substance abuse problem.
A friend recently said that I should try for a job on TV upon graduating. “I think you would do a good job, you’d be really entertaining.” Then another girl who was only there because we were “friends” by association said, “Really? I think Maryam would be better suited to radio because for TV over here they usually look for someone more…….” More? More what, bitch?! More Pan-Asian? More supermodel-like? More of a vacant husk of FHM-worthy features? Yeah, stick a microphone in my mouth and cover the face, won’t you? Sure, I wouldn’t mind working for radio, the public won’t really know or see what I look like so I’d be able to get away looking like a victim of a bear-mauling more than I would if I had a job on TV. And I know that since my flower-girl days, I’ve grown into more of a talker than a looker. Still, that’s no reason to lock me up in some Hitz.FM bell tower somewhere like a mass communications version of Quasimodo. I could always work for RTM. Haha. They’ve got some serious ugly going on there.
Over the years, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’m not commercially good looking. The older I get, the more obvious it is that I’m not all that gifted in the looks department, average at best, that my Cosmic Order-given gifts lie elsewhere, somewhere, I’m sure it’s somewhere, perhaps in the ability to fool people into thinking that I’m smarter than I really am. Or perhaps, the people have fooled me into thinking that I’m smarter than I really am (but that’s another story altogether). Of course I say that it’s unfair that society seems to heavily judge and evaluate young women based on their appearances as if nothing else about them mattered. So thank you for choosing to describe me as smart or entertaining or “playing crazy really well” or “someone of substance” but sometimes, a person of so-called substance also wants to be a person of style because of late, I feel kind of utilitarian; like a communist-era apartment block in a street filled with glitzy, capitalist architectural marvels – functional and that’s about it with a crazed developer somewhere raring to bulldoze me. It would seem that in an effort to be more than just a cute girl in a pretty dress with a flower, I seemed to have torn the dress, crushed the flower and become a faceless yapping voice or a bunch of rambling words on a page which isn’t really a bad thing. But you know, sometimes a former flower girl/ stage princess also feels the need to be validated and cherished just for looking pretty before she completely forgets that she has some kind of corporeal form.
“If you’re so worried about people not finding you pretty anymore then make the bloody effort to look pretty, ass!” a hundred voices snap back at me. What?! Make the effort?! Dude, I’ve got better things to do, like staring into space for 8 hours running. If Angelina Jolie can roll out of bed looking like Angelina Jolie, then why can’t I roll out of bed looking like Angelina Jolie? Uh…because you’re not, for one.
“There’s no point in being insecure over something you don’t try at,” the voices snap at me.
Okay, okay, they’re right. Bah, I don’t need to be Miss Universe or a fairytale princess! I’ll take over the world and be QUEEN of the FUCKING UNIVERSE – you little people won’t even see me coming. You’ll read something. You see a brain in a jar and hear it yapping away and then I will CRUSH you like a bug. You will have to crawl with your face to the floor in servitude towards me and your inferior eyes will no longer be allowed to look directly upon my face. Yes, call me smart instead of pretty then! You will have no idea what my face looks like then anyway, not with your nose sniffing the back of my ankles.
Uh, do you think this is how tyrants and evil dictators are made? Because people stopped seeing them as ‘pretty’? I’m just saying……….. “Dude, you’re not vain” says a friend, “You’re more than that -you’re a freaking egomaniac!”
Brains without a Brush
The other day, I was re-organizing my bookshelf when I came across my senior yearbook from secondary school. I was suddenly overcome by a feeling of nostalgia and decided to flip through it. I wished I hadn’t. Most of my favorite memories from school weren’t exactly yearbook material. Instead I found photos of me in the dumbest poses ever – one that was a half-hearted Charlie’s Angel thing, the other seemed right out of a cheap deodorant commercial – and a caption provided by my classmates: Maryam- this crazy, messy girl never bothers about work or anything but has quite a brain in there. Really? I have a brain in here? Why, gee whiz Gepetto, I’m a real boy! How insightful. I’ve had my teenage years immortalized as nuts, lazy and unkempt but with a brain, apparently.
Still, I didn’t have it that bad as compared to some of my other friends and classmates. One friend was “tall” and that’s it. Another, a girl called YL had a “just look at her and you’re guaranteed a laugh” while her friend had “makes more sense than YL”. There’s also the girl who “is so quiet, you’ll hardly know she exists” and another one who “we’re all still trying to get to know” except if no one knows you after 5 years, it’s kind of game over isn’t it? Jeebus, kids can be cruel. By the way, if you happen to have a copy of this yearbook, they printed my name as being partly responsible for the class captions but I swear I was only responsible for three not mentioned here. Some other idiot and her gang of verbally-challenged and wit-deficient friends were responsible for the rest, I swear. I sort of flaked out because I couldn’t bear the responsibility of reducing a whole person into a sentence so they took the job over for me.
Anyway, today, I bumped into a former teacher of mine from secondary school while on a mission in PJ State for breakfast and cigarettes. It was too early in the morning and perhaps, the worst time for me to be bumping into anyone that I used to know from school that I had someday hoped to impress so I can watch them eat their words, choke and die. Today just wasn’t the day. And while I think in general, I’ve improved in my grooming a little since my Mowgli Jungle-Savage Days in school, today I suffered a relapse. I hadn’t slept much the night before; I had dark circles and my face was puffy making me look like the result of a cross-breeding program between a raccoon and the Pillsbury Dough Boy. I was wearing the same t-shirt I had slept in the night before, a t-shirt which boldly proclaimed in gold that I was “Queen of the Effing Universe” and so busy was I in running the universe that I couldn’t find the time to shower or comb my hair before leaving the house. I did make it a point to brush my teeth, if that counts. Heck, I was hungry alright and hunger beats vanity.
“Maryam!” said The Teacher.
Crap. I had seen her earlier, she of the helmet-head haircut and Mary Poppins-skirted glory but I was hoping that she wouldn’t recognize or remember me. I wasn’t exactly her favorite student in school nor was she my favorite teacher. I pulled out the best forced smile I could muster, a great feat seeing as how I don’t usually smile before lunch.
“Girl, I haven’t seen you in four years!”
Oh how four years is not long enough.
“What have you been up to these days? Still studying?”
Yes, final year of Communications and all that boring detail.
The Teacher looked disappointed. “Why
Hah! Law is better?! Screw you. Like any idiot, my career ambitions have been influenced by TV and I can’t remember one law drama that I liked, just a whole lot of lengthy monologues yelled out at the top of the actor’s lungs. No thanks. I wanted to either be Buffy the Vampire Slayer which was not a feasible option no matter which way you look at it or like CNN chief international correspondent, Christiane Amanpour. But I didn’t go into straight up journalism because I wanted to keep my options open. Mass Comm. it is.
“You look well,” said the teacher. “But still as disheveled as always. Some things never change!” she laughed her evil, little laugh. “You know, we always felt like you were such a bright girl. It’s a pity you took so little care of your appearance; always had messy hair.”
Eh? When did bright have anything to do with neat? Do you see Einstein’s hair nicely tied up in a bow? Sure, I’m not Einstein and working on a weapon of mass destruction. I’m working on a weapon of mass communications. Now stop picking on me, alright? It felt like I was 15 and about to be hauled up to the quack school counselor’s office again. I used to get sent for counseling for all sorts of reasons (most of them dumb) – some lonely, whiny classmate complaining that I was cliquish, wearing red socks instead of regulatory white, making some jibe in an English essay about photographing a Taliban leader for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover, playing Blackjack in class, not doing my homework, defacing an anti-drug poster by changing its motto from ‘Drugs Kill’ to ‘Drugs Thrill’ but guess what was their number one reason for sending me to the counselor’s office? Messy hair. Seriously, I kid you not, they said it themselves.
The Teacher just kept yakking but I realized that I no longer had to take this shit. “Sorry, Miss. It was nice meeting you ,” Liar , “But I’ve really got to go.”
“Busy day?” she asked.
“Yes, very – I made plans to comb my hair.”
