Beautiful

adjective
1. having beauty;  having qualities that give great pleasure or satisfaction to see, hear, think about, etc.; delighting the senses or mind: a beautiful dress; a beautiful speech.
2. excellent of its kind
3. wonderful; very pleasing or satisfying.
noun
4. the concept of beauty
5. beautiful things or people collectively (usually preceded by the ): the good and the beautiful.
6. the ideal of beauty
interjection
7. wonderful; fantastic
8. extraordinary; incredible: used ironically

I've been collecting childhood photographs to post to our wedding blog. I was a cute kid. Freckles, wavy light brown hair, big brown eyes, quirky little smile...and I have memories to go along with almost every age that has a picture.

I wasn't a girly-girl; I liked to do un-girly things like run around the house in my underwear with finger paint smeared on my face and an old turkey feather and pretend to be an Indian warrior. I wanted a bow and arrows so badly, and I definitely had an awesome sword and shield set worthy of the mightiest tom-girls. But I remember liking to wear one particular dress to church because that dress made me feel beautiful and special. It was very dark navy with teeny tiny little polka dots that looked like stars in the sky. I thought it fit me like a dancer, and I knew I liked dancing because of the ballet classes I took in preschool. I'm not even sure where I got that dress, but I loved it and wore it until it was much too small for me. I didn't have particularly good fashion-sense for a little girl (I also liked to wear a headband with long bouncy antennae with glittery stars on the ends which embarrassed my teenage sister Tracie terribly, because Tracie was born with fashion sense), but I liked the feeling of being pretty.

Sometime around the age of six, my mom gave me a short haircut which I remember completely, because it had a dramatic effect on how the rest of the world interacted with me, and how I saw myself. My hair has always been very thick and unruly, and so this haircut was likely a strategy to save us time getting out the door in the morning (mom was always telling me to "hurry" and I even have a childhood drawing labeled "my mother" with a little bubble coming out of the figure's face saying "hurry!").

The haircut coincided with a particularly chunky phase of my childhood development. My face didn't lose that baby-fat until just recently, actually. Combined with the fact that I rarely wore dresses or feminine-looking clothes during the normal week because I was such a "wild mohican child," my haircut made me look remarkably like a little boy. So remarkably that other little girls who didn't know me started freaking out when I walked into the little girls bathroom, and mean little boys started calling me ugly.

Now, I was an imaginative little girl who lived in her own private little enchanted world most of the time.  I had never been particularly interested in other little kids' opinions (though apparently I was interested in them romantically because my first two boyfriends were in preschool and kindergarten, and I definitely remember my first kiss under the covers at naptime with Danny, bless him). We didn't have other little kids my age living anywhere near us. The only time I really even saw other little kids was at school or daycare. Furthermore, because I was an advanced learner I had developed a habit of being a know-it-all, because knowing it all was required in order to interact with the adults and herds of teenagers who normally surrounded me. So little kids in turn had no particular reason to be nice to me. And, indeed, they weren't.

So the outcome was that I, too, decided that I was ugly. I remember confusing the little boys who called me ugly by shrugging and replying, "I know." I'm pretty sure this was around the time I decided that the planet would be better off without any people on it.

Being ugly didn't really hurt my tree-climbing skills, my snake-hunting skills, my bike-riding skills, or my horse-loving skills, so guess I decided that I didn't really notice it that much. I liked pretty things, had a growing aesthetic sense, and I was good at drawing, so I decided that all of my prettiness was stuck inside my head, and needed drawing to get outside of me. And horses were pretty enough to keep me busy drawing for years and years.

Being ugly made adolescence somewhat more traumatic than necessary. Adding braces and glasses to the chubby cheeks was an interesting aesthetic combination. I crushed out HARD on a few boys. They knew it, and they ignored me out of embarrassment because I had the good sense to like nice boys. So I focused my energy on my clarinet and English homework and avoiding math by drawing horses in the margins of my notebooks.

And horses... horses were, in the end, the replacements for the boyfriends I never had in high school and college. Horses were beautiful. And big, strong, sensitive, warm, huggable, and wonderful interesting intricate puzzles. Lucky was my first love, followed by Wimpy and then Jasmine and Sunshine and Pepper and Sparky. I was so infatuated with horses that I majored in them in college, despite having talent enough to have done almost anything else. It didn't matter... until the reality of finding a job came into focus.

It was in the corporate world that I learned that being ugly had, in fact, protected me in many ways. Despite having majored in horses, I had minored in science and English, and gotten away with a pretty decent education. I had learned to find beauty in ideas, philosophies, cultures, religions, and I was beginning to see it more commonly in other peoples' insides. Better yet, I had avoided all of the distraction that often comes with being pretty.

And a few kind friends helped to teach me how to make myself pretty. But I had a lot to learn, in addition to that. Some of the lessons I should have learned in adolescence, I learned much later. They were counter-intuitive for someone who had always been so independent and oblivious.

And so I recognized in a very mechanical way exactly what modern women give up to be beautiful on the outside. It starts in childhood and progresses from there. Pop culture rarely says anything about it because it's so invested in getting you to fit the image. But it's true. Living in dorms full of teenage girls exposed me to it first-hand.

I can't wait to raise my daughter. She can wear dresses and climb trees and draw horses and choose her own haircuts. And she will be beautiful.

Commencement

— n
1.	the beginning; start
2.	a. a ceremony for the presentation of awards at secondary schools
	b. a ceremony for the conferment of academic degrees

Nearly a year since my last post, but not quite. Warp speed has slowed briefly to something bearable, and blogging for my wedding and considering the future make me want to post here again.

It's always been funny to me how the word "commencement" actually means "beginning," and yet psychologically it represents collapse in exhaustion and gratitude that some academic journey has finally ended.

Of course, if you're southern, you know that "commence" has a place in certain phrases like, "she commenced to hollerin' and cussin' and whoopin' on his sorry no-count cheatin' ass." Which is a whole other connotation, entirely. But anyway.

Speaking of southern, I am leaving the south, and red states I have always called home, hopefully forever. There are pieces of me that will be forever rooted here, but it is time to commence on a new path into western woods and coasts and insect-and-humidity-and-tornado-free life. I don't hate the south, but I am continually dismayed at how an entire region can be simultaneously so nice and polite and hospitable while also being hateful and hostile and ignorant. And hot!!

It is also the commencement of married life and new jobs and new... life. More on that later. I'm still processing it.

Of course, for Doug and for me and for thousands of other graduates everywhere, collapsing in exhaustion and gratitude for the end of our academic journeys is definitely warranted. I have 6 weeks to go.

It is the end, and the beginning, again.