So after the absence of 'real' updates on my personal eljay for God-knows-how-long, I return with a bizarre vignette and a rant I've wanted to get off my chest for a long time. I originally wanted to be funny, but found I couldn't - if any of this makes you laugh then I swear it has nothing to do with me.

---

I am a stranger in a strange place. There's an unfamiliar, chemical scent in the air, something both flowery and at the same time jarringly ersatz. The back of my throat itches but I won't sneeze, I won't draw attention to myself, I can't - not here.

Nobody's really doing anything about their predicament. They're milling about, but there's nothing martialled or decisive about their movements; there's no attempt to escape, which personally I find obscene. We wandered into this place as docile as lambs, but now we are abductees, avoiding the gazes of the orange-tinted creatures lining the chamber lest we are fallen upon and mercilessly probed. Not all of us are successful in this endeavour, but those who find themselves at the mercy of the tormentors go to their fates with a strange sense of peacefulness, even gratitude in their eyes.

Experiencing a moment of claustrophobic light-headedness, I reach out to steady myself. My hand touches cold metal - that's all there is here, cold steel and plastic tubes and mirrors and hard, antiseptic whiteness. There's nothing organic here - if not for the cold rush from the overhead fans, even the air around us would feel dead.

Too late I realise that my sudden shift has attracted their attention. The closest one wears a long white robe, its face streaked with unnatural colours. It wears an unthreatening face but I know better, reading the tiny strained lines around its eyes and mouth; its expression has arisen from rehearsal, not from any genuine emotion.

"Did you know," it says, "that if you spend twenty pounds or more on No. 7 cosmetics today, we'll give you a free anti-ageing kit worth over thirty pounds?"

I hate wearing makeup.

~

Actually, that's not technically true. I don't mind the physical act of going around with makeup on; what gets on my tits is everything that leads up to wearing makeup. I hate buying it; I hate going to Boots (see above) and trying to make a well-informed, cost-conscious decision about purchasing something that I don't even want. I hate the process of application, the do-I-just-look-even-worse-now anxiety, and - more than anything else - the feeling of obligation. The feeling that, as a woman, I may be judged as lazy and feckless by opting not to wander around society under a thin layer of beige chemicals.

I can't quite remember the year, but I can pinpoint the day when I started to hate it. It was Christmas, and I had an obsession with Polly Pocket. Most other girls I knew had Barbies and My Little Ponies, but this was my girly accessory of choice. I think I was on the older side of six, but could have been older - although a quick eBay search has dated a lot of the compacts I owned to 1992, when I was five. As an aside, the Polly Pocket of today sets my teeth on edge - seeing the ads for the 'new' Polly for the first time was when I felt that some of my precious childhood memories had been assaulted by a faceless corporation.

But I digress. My parents bought me a Polly Pocket makeup centre for Christmas - I think it was purple, and it included palettes of blusher and eyeshadow, a tube of lipstick, and a little bottle of flowery perfume. Newly equipped with these accoutrements of womanhood, I did what any self-respecting 6-year-old girl would do - I took myself off to the nearest mirror and did some experimenting.

I have absolutely no objective memory of how I looked afterwards. I remember feeling both accomplished and goddamn stylish, which made it all the worse when my mother took one look at me and dragged me off to her room to remove whatever aesthetic horror I'd perpetrated against myself. Looking back, I don't recall whether or not she actually laughed. I do remember her applying a fresh layer of real (ie. her) makeup and being told to stop crying because it would spoil the mascara.

Needless to say I did not use the Polly Pocket makeup again, and may or may not have decided at a subconscious level that the act of smearing that sort of crap on my face was at best pointless and at worse humiliating. Throughout primary school, secondary school and sixth form, the closest I ever got to wearing makeup was dabbing some foundation on, during the few occasions when my spots started looking more like the Black Death than the average adolescent affliction.

Of course the reasoning I have given for this throughout my formative years had nothing to do with the aforementioned event in my early childhood - not unnaturally, I jumped on the feminist high horse. Boys don't have to wear eyeshadow, so why should I? And to my pride, everyone I have ever faced with this largely rhetorical question has spluttered a bit and then said that I should just because. Because there is no reason. And yet eventually I was forced around to accepting the fact that by not wearing at least minimal makeup, all I'm doing is cutting off my nose to spite my face.

If a woman goes out with a huge spot on her face, she looks awful. If a man goes out with the same huge spot, he also looks awful - but he's protected by the addendum that it's not as if he can put makeup on it. Yes, I realise that one or two of the men creatures (I'm referring here to those not in the public eye) will put on a tiny bit of slap as long as it's not noticeable - and I honestly can't wait for the point in our society's development where men start getting as insecure about their appearance as the rest of us. To quote Nicole Hollander, we can help...after all, we've been there before. But first we'll let them suffer a little.

In a way, though, that's also quite terrifying: on the way there we'll come to a point where if a man wears makeup, he should be lauded for making an unusual effort to be attractive - but a woman wearing makeup is still only doing the absolute minimum that this society expects of her in terms of self-presentation. Once men have joined us in our cosmetic hell, no doubt they'll introduce some fresh gender-specific torment to keep the ladyfolk at bay; I expect foot binding will be ready for a comeback by then.

I am perhaps being faintly melodramatic at this point.

I'm also wavering off my original point - every issue that boils down to 'senseless, unecessary discrimination' makes me froth at the mouth and I'm given to ranting about it. The fact of the matter is that I've surrendered. If I'm going any further than the local supermarket, I will now put my war paint on as a matter of course.

It's not as if I was doing okay on my own. I'm overweight and bespectacled, and my 'at rest' facial expression makes small children cry. It's a sad fact but it is a fact: historically, Mother Nature and I do not get along. If I want people to give me the time of day, I need all the help I can get from other sources. And makeup hides a number of sins, not least the physical evidence of long sleepless nights and a life spent almost entirely indoors. I will grudgingly accept that my little gold bag of cosmetics is the one thing that prevents me from looking like a whey-faced sociopath.

But I still hate it. And all I can really do now is congratulate my six-year-old self for sensing that there's something badly wrong with the whole affair.

Love,

Naomi

P.S: People who are actually interested in my life as it progresses should probably be told that I've gone back to university, taking Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan. Hooray. Also, I'm sorry about not having updated naomisketchpad for a month, but I've been busy with other things.

ETA: A little bit of fun with technology. BT Internet's security division phoned me today with the news that they've had some reports of copyright infringement from Warner Brothers. Naturally my internal response was 'oh shit'...and then the guy rattles off a long list of WB movies that I've never seen, legitimately or otherwise. Sensing that something is up, I finally got around to working out how to properly secure our wireless interweb...and how to check the traffic stats. Guess how many devices have been piggybacking on our connection? Seventeen. SEVENTEEN. We've been servicing half the bloody street. No wonder my internet's been so slow lately.