Morjes!

Welcome to my blog. I write about fitting in, sticking out, and missing the motherland as a serial foreigner.

Flashback Friday: My first makeup memory

Flashback Friday lives on for another week!

You know my sad, inexperienced history with makeup. Perhaps this story is where it all began.

Sixth grade, 1993ish, Oak Hills Elementary School: my fellow 11- and 12-year-olds and I were weighed down with heavy concerns, such as, which class had ended up with the best outdoor portable? (none of us - the fifth-graders did.) What was the code word we had decided on if one of the girls started her period and needed to discreetly obtain a feminine product? ("envelope.") And what on earth was our class t-shirt slogan going to be, seeing that "class of two thousand" rhymed with approximately nothing? (I never found out the answer to this one. But 1999 ended up with "Last of the century, end of the line, we're the class of '99," which has its own problems.)

Meanwhile, on the home front, my mom had recently cleaned out her makeup collection and passed on the usable dregs to my sister and me to use as play makeup. Or something. It mostly just sat in its case in our bathroom cabinet, but one morning before school I got curious and pulled it out. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, I was applying bright pink eyeshadow to my eyelids. Now, at that age, a lot of girls probably knew how to correctly and effectively apply makeup. As you may have guessed, um, I was not one of those girls.


I think I was interrupted at some point during my clandestine makeup application so I never got a chance to give myself a once-over in the mirror before going to school. I'm sure I thought I looked great.

School was going swimmingly until recess, when in a freak occurrence that still strikes me as being exceptionally unlikely, a boy the next large kickball field over threw a rock out of his way and it flew all the way over to my kickball field and hit me in the chest. Seriously! I fell down on the ground and everything. Some of my friends helped me over to the nurse's office where I lay down for a while to recuperate. I was a newly diagnosed stress/excercise asthmatic at the time, so although the rock hadn't done much physical damage, I was having trouble catching my breath.

Eventually, it was time to go back to class. A couple of my friends came to walk me back from the nurse's office and one of them said something like, "hey Bridget, all around one of your eyes is like, super pink." Immediately, I knew that she was talking about that eye shadow I had put on. Also immediately, I realized I must have applied it unevenly, mostly only on one eye. My little 11-year-old self was mortified.

So I tried to pass it off on what had just happened - "Oh, my face must just be splotchy from crying when that rock hit me," I said.

This must have been a really good friend because she was brutally honest (and perceptive) when she replied, "Uh, no, it actually looks like you just put pink eye shadow on one eye."

Busted! You better believe I headed straight to the bathroom after that and scrubbed my face as best I could. The worst part of this story is that the day was mostly over at that point so I had spent hours and hours of it with bright pink eye shadow applied all over exactly ONE of my eyes.

Yes, I think that explains a lot about my uneven (ha) history with makeup. Quite a lot, indeed.

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