Y'all can just skip this, if you're afeard of too much TMI. (Too much Too Much Information. In the dictionary, under recursive: see recursive). Anyhoo....

I've never really been much of a girlie-girl. Even when I was, I wasn't. If that makes any sense. In high school, I wore make-up for a while, but I never actually bought any. I used my mom's makeup that she didn't want any longer. (Which, if you've ever seen my mother, was a bad idea, as we look almost nothing alike. She's got a perpetual tan and I've always been almost Vitamen D deficiently deprived of sunlight. She's blonde, I'm dark-haired. She has nice high Indian cheekbones and the nicest thing you can say about my facial structure is that I did, finally grow into my nose. Which is good, because when I was thirteen, you could see me coming from half a block away because of the nose. Then again, it may have only been eclipsed by my chest, which grew out to a DD in the same time span.)

I was never much of a shoe-person, either. Even when I could wear heels, I tended not to and I wouldn't know what a "kitten heel" was if you threw it at me. Before I started dating my husband, my collection of shoes consisted of one or two pairs of ratty k-mart canvas shoes and one or two pairs of "dress" shoes that would have as absolutely little heel on it as I could find for less than $12.

I haven't painted my fingernails much voluntarily since high school, either. (Karen, if you're still reading, you probably want to skip ahead a paragraph or two. This is gross and will probably upset you.) I used to paint my nails a lot. And painted them some exceptionally nasty colors, like bright orange with blue dots on one hand and blue with orange dots on the other. Anyway, on the particular day in question, I had painted my nails rainbow: thumb black, then red, orange, yellow, blue, etc, etc.

My mother's allergic to bees and she keeps an epi-pen in the house. For those of you who don't know what this is, it's a self-injecting shot-kit that carries a dose of epinephrin for people with severe allergies. Actually, I ought to have one, but as I haven't actually had an accidental injestion exposure to pineapple in... years... I never bothered. In any case, I came home from school - my mother was gone again, who knows where - and the cats had knocked her epi-pen off the table and were batting it around on the floor. I did not think this would be a good plan, so I reached over and picked it up, meaning to put it back on the table. The thing injected itself through my thumb. And I do mean through. In the pad, out through the nail. Personally, I think I ought to be granted a Purple Heart for this, as I pulled the damn thing out of my own thumb. Actually, it didn't really hurt although it looked bad enough. What did hurt was going to the ER and having them have to pour an awful lot of acetone on my thumb because that was the one painted black so they could look and see how much damage I'd done. My thumbnail ended up falling off as a result (and god, that was painful... not the falling off itself, but all the endless amounts of bumps and nicks and stuff while I was waiting for it to grow back in. You don't really realize what your fingernails do for you until you don't have one anymore.) and I didn't paint my fingernails again for like... eight years, maybe?

[Ok, Karen, you can look again....]

I'm not much of a hair-person. My idea of a hair-style is something that I can either totally ignore or I can pull up into a pony-tail. I don't use hair-goo or blow-dryers. I wouldn't know what to do with a curling iron if my life depended on it (so it's good that it never has). My hair's pretty bleh looking most of the time - it's dark brown and extremely, overly coarse. It rarely stays where I put it and has a tendancy towards bushiness.

I'm also not much of a clothes person - or a shopping person in general. I don't shop for the joy of hanging out in the mall and I'm never fashionable. (Of course, I'm pretty heavy, too, so even if I wanted to look fashionable, it's difficult. )

Which brings me to this whole dress-party shindig we're going to on Saturday. I feel completely ridiculous. I've spent well over $150 now on a dress, shawl, jewelry and undergarments for a party that we'll spend about 2 hours milling around uncertainly before going home, since Kevin's got to work the next day at 4am. And I still need to schedule a hair appointment to get an up-do.

On the plus side, while shopping, I indulged just a little and bought myself two new bras and five pairs of underwear that all match. There's something very girlie about matching underwear. Especially that isn't black, white or that horrid beige color.