I’m Really Judgmental But I Would Still Hang Out With Me

I’m back in the southland today, which lends its name to the “southern belle” part of “part time southern belle.” It’s lovely to be back in the land of magnolias and creative town names– see Hoxie, Tallapoosa, and Humansville– but there’s one thing that catches my eye more than any other when I’m in Dixieland: the men’s knees. All my life, men’s knees were shrouded in mystery– or rather, fabric. Shorts that don’t graze the calf are too short for men in the midwest, where they don a look colloquially known as “aggressively straight.” But not in Alabama. Men of all shapes and sizes rock the five- inch pastel inseam, a level of immodesty in the midwest akin to a woman wearing a bikini to a sit-down restaurant. However, unlike a woman in a bikini consuming a steak, these men don’t seem to ask themselves, Am I too hefty to be wearing this?

. . .

About a week ago, someone I had recently become friends with offhandedly mentioned that a mutual acquaintance had told him she wasn’t too fond of me. She reasoned that I was a priss and a snob. At first I was upset– it’s never nice to find out that someone doesn’t like you– but then I thought it over: I already knew this. I know I’m a priss and a snob; I have known this since kindergarten. I know this because I am one of the most critical people I know. I am self-critical, mostly. However, when you’re constantly making judgements, big truths arise. I will always have to stop myself from being a little princess and I work on it– sometimes harder than other times. To have judged myself and known myself is to make myself stronger.

Yeah, that’s me, being a young snob as a Daisy at Scott Magnet school. I like to look nice. I like nice things. I once owned a Juicy Couture jumpsuit. I wear glitter eyeshadow to work. That’s the vibe I give off. It’s not my only trait, but it is true.

. . .

I think many of us have grown to believe the fallacy that to love ourselves we must believe we are perfect as we are. Which is crazy. We don’t believe our friends or families are perfect and we love them still; to say it should be different with ourselves is to be overly defensive. I could enumerate an extensive list of my own flaws, but you were to ask me if I like myself, the answer would always be yes. I want to get better in every aspect, but like the southern men in their short shorts, I believe that I am good enough, cool enough, deserving enough to do what I please. To love yourself is not to give up on any self-improvement: it is very much the opposite. To love yourself is to recognize yourself as human and fallible, and to aspire to be the best silly, flawed human you can be, with the awareness that our time on Earth is both long enough to change and fleeting enough to be forgotten. We will never accept ourselves as totally perfect; we aren’t. It’s cool. It’s fine. We can work on it a little.

Take a Buzzfeed quiz today. Find out what Starbucks drink you are and then accept it and move towards self love because whatever it told you, you probably already knew. I’m a snob and a typical white girl, but I’m also fiercely loyal. I’m ok with that.

Love,

A Pumpkin Spice Latte

I Found The One!

Sometimes in your life, you stumble upon something magical, breath taking, once in a lifetime. You create memories, discover each other, and grow as human beings, together.

This is not about that (I would never write that poorly. I hope you know that). It’s about two hair products and a lipstick.

This is not normally a beauty blog because anyone that knows me knows I don’t care what I look like half of the time. But the other 50%, I love trying (and buying) new and different products, which are sometimes delightful and often disappointing. After many years of restless wandering, these are the (drug store because I’m college poor) products that have proved their loyalty to me, in sickness and in health, till death do we part.

Herbal Essences/ Aussie Shampoo & Conditioner

She’s started out strong, you might be thinking, Two grocery store staples. Classy. Classic. And to that I say, I just listened to a sermon on anger, so I’m going to be very patient with you. I have elbow-length hair. I have tried everything. These chemical laden, skating-rink-packed-with-middle-schoolers-scented products are my salves. One day, when I am a mature adult, I will progress to Aussie, but for now, I’m a Herbal Essences girl. I smell like cheap fruit and puberty, and boys like that, I think.

Frogs kissed: Paul Mitchell, L’Oreal, Organix, not washing my hair

Covergirl Outlast Lip Color

This stuff lasts all night, through drinks and confessions and kisses and pizza rolls and all the way through math lab the next morning. The only things more lasting than this lipstick/gorilla glue hybrid are swallowed gum and embarrassment. Caution: if you apply outside the lines, you may require a skin graft to return to your natural shape.

Frogs kissed: LipSmackers, MAC, Burt’s Bees, literally every other lip product known to man

Not Your Mother’s Beach Babe Texturizing Cream

Am I allowed to be mad that wavy hair is popular now? It doesn’t matter; I am mad. I looooove your hair, everyone says. Really. Because you didn’t love it in 2008 when wavy hair was not even a heard of “thing” and I was straightening my hair every day so I could look like Paris Hilton and everyone else in the seventh grade. I’m still bitter, but if you’re bitter and lazy like me, this is the product for you. It smells like vanilla and manages frizz without being crunchy. It’s also only $5 and it tells you you’re a babe every morning which is more than most of us can say about our dates. Bring this into your life and manage any long-standing self-esteem issues is what I’m saying.

Frogs kissed: TIGI Catwalk Curls, some ginger-smelling salon products, GEL (!!!!!)

This has been a wrap up of the only products I would consistently trust if I was a dead body and I was having an open casket viewing. If you thought this was going to be about my boyfriend, lol, gotcha, you’ve been a victim of shameless click bait. I don’t talk about the boy online. Tacky.

Prank Team Out,

Megzzzz

I’m a Big Kid Now

You know when you’re at an intersection, and you want to turn left, but another car is approaching? And you maybe misjudge the speed of the other car a little bit, so you decide to go for it, but midway through your turn you realize you’ve made a terrible mistake? When this happens to me, I like to accelerate very slightly– not enough to make a difference– open my eyes very widely, and scream for the entire duration of the turn.

This is similar to the way in which I am approaching adulthood.

I bought a suit this summer and felt very serious and very business-y. I’m in the business school so I pretty much spend all of my time reminding people how serious I am and how much easier my coursework is than that of the engineering students. It’s very strenuous. Still, I have butt-length blonde hair and my resume has a headshot. It also has my name in bold lilac letters and lists me as the recipient of the “America Needs Cheerleaders” award. Secret: it’s the resume I created for sorority rush. Yikes.

Simultaneously, I am learning to cook. I don’t have any good or original jokes for this topic but it kind of goes with the “becoming an adult theme” so I thought I would through it out there. Eh.

—

I always thought from childhood that I would grow up to be a writer. I love to write, and as good as I am, I’m much, much faster. I am the Usain Bolt of paragraphs, if Usain Bolt sometimes decided that he hated the race he had been running and turned around. Also if Usain Bolt wouldn’t let anyone watch him run. I’m a very neurotic sprinter is what I’m trying to say. I almost never edit anything, but I often throw things away or let them languish in my drafts until I find them very, very embarrassing. If you’re reading something I wrote, I wrote it in a near manic state of productivity and then pushed publish. This is basically stream-of-consciousness, which is why I sometimes sound like a politician or a serial killer eulogizing someone before they die.

This all adds up to not being particularly employable as a writer. For a while, I thought about becoming a columnist, but imagine if my boss was trying to criticize me. Megan, people can’t relate to your column. Your jokes are very weird. You need to adopt a self-reflective style. You need to let me read your stuff before you just let it go to print, he says. I imagine myself as the writer of the one actual column with words in Cosmo in this scenario. But this is who I ammmmm, I whine, I’m not changing it because they don’t get it. I’ll lose and stay myself. I’ll starve and stay myself. And that’s how I become homeless. I probably also throw myself on the ground dramatically and get stepped on by several leopard/ hot pink stilettos.

—

I have always prided myself upon being a very chill girl; I rarely care about anything. However, the things I care about, I am totally insane about. I am crazy like a fox. I swing from confident and productive to a  depressive bleeding heart. It’s totally unpredictable. When I am uninspired, my work gets very patriotic– it’s apparently a subconscious fallback. If I could, I would write full time, developing the kind of toxic relationship with my own thoughts that couples who work from home sometimes adopt. I care deeply– obsessively– about the integrity of my work, which is why I write 90% awkward jokes, 10% complaints. That’s a body of work with integrity, I think, apparently. There is so little originality left to be said, in some ways I think I am grasping, desperately, violently, to say something shocking or novel before it is all used up. It is an insecurity of sorts that manifests rarely but viciously in my life. I’m working on controlling it. We all have something little and dark within us (oh God that’s cliche) through and to we push ourselves. Adulthood is how you bump into your own ugliness and also the amount of anxiety you get when you have to talk on the phone.

In haste, but with intention this time,

Megan

What I Did This Summer (Megan Anderson, 14th Grade)

This would have a really cool cover photo but I still haven’t uploaded any of my photos to my computer because I am a huge mess!!

So in May I went to Italy, and when people have asked me how my trip went, I’ve responded pretty generically, as if they were asking me how I liked a dessert they had personally prepared. “Cool. Awesome. Great,” I’ve replied in monotony. And it was all of those things, but it was also confusing and broadening and sometimes sad. I loved Rome and the sea. I missed America and fried eggs and clean cut, pastel clothed boys. Do you see how this is going?

Here’s a little more: Italy ruined coffee and pepperoni and Olive Garden for me, but as I type this I’m drinking coffee from the Keurig with CoffeeMate creamer in it, so I guess if I’m anything, I’m consistent. I cried when I stepped off the plane in DC and saw a Starbucks. But I can drink espresso straight now, so I have broadened my horizons as every study abroad brochure advertises. Speaking of studying, I barely studied at all. We’ll leave it at that.

I thought a lot about ownership while I was in Italy. Some days we had nothing planned, and I didn’t want to spend 20 euros for a train ticket, so I would sit in the park near our hotel and just think. I was peeved at iTunes for putting all of my music in the Cloud, because now I couldn’t listen to it without WiFi and I didn’t have a data plan abroad. It seemed strange to me that songs I had “owned” two years ago were now inaccessible to me, like an ex-boyfriend or a pair of size zero jeans from middle school. I thought about 99-year leases on land in Hawaii and all sorts of other ways we fool ourselves into believing that our possessions are constant. I developed a sort of espresso fueled angst, which is to say I assimilated with the Italian youth culture. There are a lot of candid pictures of me looking pissed off from this trip, but I had a good time, I swear.

While I sat in the park, people often tried to talk to me and guess my nationality. I had a solid background in 100 level Italian, so I felt pretty prepared to engage them, as long as they followed a predetermined script and enunciated as though I was deaf. Often, I could physically feel my synapses firing slowly, as though I were a career meth addict trying to take the ACT. The answers were there, somewhere, but I was slow. I was mistaken for French several times, which I attribute to pure confusion because I am both blonde and curly-haired and not particularly thin nor sophisticated. Italians know about California. I explained Kansas a lot.

I never got pickpocket-ed but I’m not sure if the wallet I bought is real leather, which is fine with me because I like it regardless. I grew strong knees (we stood and walked all the time) and a weak alcohol tolerance (I had to lay off the midday wine). I liked dressing simply but hated the clothes I had brought with me by the end of the month. I felt uncomfortable not knowing all the cultural norms. The front desk man at my hotel listened to American country music and I sang along under my breath. I texted my boyfriend, but we lived in a perpetual state of night; it was always 3 a.m. for one of us. I swam in the sea and let my hair get sun bleached. Our hotel in Rome brought us breakfast in bed (coffee and pastries) and it made their microscopic shower worth it. I drank wine and ate pasta and road on a gondola in Venice (the lights on the water at night are magical). The cities never felt romantic, but they were often beautiful or sleepy or exciting.  This paragraph, much like my trip, is a grab bag of ideas. No apologies. Some confusion.