South Bend—IN
Family, Eggnog, those delicious peanut butter chocolate kiss cookies that look like nips. Aunt Laura on a tirade about banned Christmas songs. Just another standard Hoffman family Christmas? No, bitch. This year is going to be different.
Your 15-year-old cousin, Holly, walks in. You turn to look at her. You immediately realize that she is a glorious, beautiful, instagram princess. What. The. Fuck. Last year Holly was wholly unimpressive and moderately annoying. What happened?
Relax, clearly she has reached that age where she realizes that as a woman, nothing else matters so long as you appear universally and undisputedly beautiful to society as a whole. Is undisputedly a word? Apparently not. STFU Denise, I’m not here because I’m a mediocre-or-better writer. I’m here because I have a severe complex.
Where was I going? Oh, yes, society hates women who aren’t beautiful.
When/why/how did this happen? Not society hating imperfect women—I don’t have time to unpack that right now. I mean the beautiful, glamorous 15-year-old. Last year, Holly was playing Bananagrams and wearing industrially tie-dyed T-shirts purchased from the gift shop section of Joe’s Crab Shack. Now she looks like a beautiful, radiant, perfume ad mermaid.
She leaves her purse on the kitchen chair, essentially inviting anyone to rifle through it. Idiot. Her purse must not be filled with crumpled up mini-Reese’s wrappers and loose generic brand ibuprofen. I look inside. Suspicion confirmed.
Not only is her purse not filled with eclectic bits of trash, it contains a pristine Sephora-brand makeup bag. The contents: Fenty. Kat Von D. Benefit. NARS. Too Faced. tarte. The cost of my little cousins’ makeup bag far surpassing my monthly health insurance premium. And my premium is hiiiigggghhhhhh.
You are not being surpassed by a more beautiful, much more technologically savvy and more globally organized version of yourself! Wait, no, that’s exactly what is happening! You don’t even know what globally organized means, but Holly does—she used it in a sentence earlier.
Panic.
Holly walks back into the room. Panic harder. She catches you looking through her bag. Think of a lie. “Oh whoops, I thought this was my bag for a sec.” She doesn’t believe you. She’s furrowing her perfectly outlined eyebrows at you. She knows you’ve purchased the last two bottles of 60% off clearance foundation in cvs and sloppily attempted to blend them together to match your skin tone. Warm sand and cool light #2? You stupid bitch. Holly knows you did this because you drank too much last year and told everyone said story thinking it would be cute. It was not cute. You’re 29. You’ve never understood the difference between warm and cool as it pertains to foundation. You never will. You’re a monster.
Back to the matter at hand. How is Holly affording this lavish makeup lifestyle? Holly doesn’t have a job. How is she able to spend $54 on a Fenty Beauty Highlighter Palette?
You are an adult, with a big person job. A job selling insurance policies. That job is in an office, a very boring office. A boring office that pays you money to be there everyday. It is dark outside when you leave at 4:30 pm. You definitely have seasonal affective disorder. Among other things. You don’t have time to unpack those other things right now.
You think to yourself, “when I was 15, I looked like a glitter-covered potato.” You did look like a glitter-covered potato.
Goddamn it.
You make a mental note to destroy the patriarchy. It is the only way.
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