Don't Judge A Girl By Her Bitch Face

I was born with a disorder. A disorder that, while more common than you think, is only spoken in hushed tones. It is misunderstood and incurable, it does not discriminate, affecting young and old alike.

I have Bitch Face.

"What?!" you might gasp.

"Say it isn't so! She's so young!" some will cry, crumbling to a heap on the ground while others hide their faces and pound their fists against the wall in agony.

Alas, it is true. I, Alexis, your in-house charming and witty blogger, have been afflicted with this socially crippling ailment for well over two decades.

Luckily, as a young lass, I had an adorably chubby face to match my adorably chubby body. (And by "adorably chubby", I mean the room shook when I dragged my three-year old self through the house). My cheeks, which were partially pudgy by nature and partially pudgy because I constantly had large quantities of food in my mouth, masked my adolescent Bitch Face fairly well. No one can look at a child that's younger than ten years old and think, "Christ, that second grader looks like a twat...". No no, you look at a child and think, "Heavens to Betsy, I want to squeeze those juicy little arms and pinch those puffy little cheeks!" (Hopefully you're saying this about a child you know...no white vans with 'Free Candy' spray painted on the side are welcome near my bloggy blog).

No, I skated through years of potential judgement purely due to the fact that massive, angry looking babies will always be adorable.

Please refer to two of my quasi-embarrassing baby pictures below, as a visual of Baby Bitch Face:

But then Junior High happened. Ooooh, did it happen. As I grew taller, my weight decided to play a fun little trick on me and stay the same. This resulted in me spending my teenage years as an impossibly scrawny, pissed-off string bean. A devastatingly misshapen legume, if you will.

Unfortunately for me, as with many kids struggling with puberty that took its good ol' damn time to arrive, all of my schoolmates who had the fortune of growing boobs and hips and/or enjoying said body parts, chose me as a target for ridicule. This made me less inclined to smile or talk, let alone look people in the eye. Therefore, my bitch face came out swinging.

Let's pause for a moment so I can properly explain Bitch Face. It means, in case you haven't caught on, that your mug's natural state looks absolutely fuckin' miserable. And angry. And borderline violent. The key thing to remember is that just because a person may look shockingly miserable does not mean that they are. It simply means that a temporary absence of visible emotion results in facial features that are lacking any degree of pep in their step.

Ok, back to the good stuff. The first time my Bitch Face was pointed out to me was by my very own brother- my blood, my hero, my childhood tormentor. The person who was so loved that for years, teachers referred to me not as Alexis, but as 'Mike's Sister'.

Anywho, dear old Mikey was two grades ahead of me so when I was in 7th and 10th grade, we went to school in the same building.

One afternoon, little 12-year old me was trying to make it from my orchestra class to my math class. This may not seem like a giant feat, but please factor in the following ingredients:

* It was the very end of the day so I naturally was a little tired.

*My backpack weighed roughly 3x's my body weight.

*I had most likely just endured a full day of being teased.

*We only had 4 minutes to get from one class to the other.

*Orchestra was on the ground floor on the right side of the building, while math was up three floors and the last classroom on the left. This distance was roughly the equivalent to the diameter of Montana.

So there I was, schlepping my 4,000 pound schoolbag down the hall in my jeans that were too big yet still too short, and my training bra that I honestly didn't even need for another five years. The hallways of the Junior High were located on the outer edges of the school, and I distinctly remember oppressive amounts of heat and sun pouring in through the windows that day. I had given up trying to make it to class within the four minutes allotted and I was slumped against the wall of the now empty corridor, dragging my feet.

Suddenly, a dark shadow appeared in front of me, quickly approaching. As the figure and I moved closer, sunlight beamed down upon him and revealed the shadow to be my brother.

We both looked at each other and kept walking. Suddenly my brother turned and let out an exasperated, "Oh my god, as least pretend not to be miserable. Just smile or something!"

No thanks, bro.

That night at dinner, my brother threw me under the bus.

"She looks like she's gonna kill someone!" he told our mom, waving his fork around in the air. "People are gonna be afraid of her." Mike then turned to me.

"You look like a bitch is what it is."

Ouch.

I turned to Mommy Dearest and laid out my defense.

"I was tired!" I yelled. "I don't mean to look angry, that's just how my face is! Am I supposed to skip down the halls grinning like an idiot??"

"People have said stuff to me, you know." my brother stated matter-of-factly. "They say you look scary."

I opened my mouth to respond but our mom told us to drop it and eat our food. So we did.

From that fateful day forward, I was acutely aware of my Bitch Face. Sometimes I would try to hide it by turning the corners of my mouth up ever so slightly (rumor has it this is some kind of fad referred to as 'smile'), but most of the time it was easier to just let my face be the way it was.

Nowadays, I expect to be asked, "Are you ok? What's wrong?" roughly thirty times a day. I've been told that when I do smile it actually looks quite nice, but who has the time for that really?

I do have one new rule though that I try to stick to as often as possible. When I first walk into a bar or party or restaurant, any room full of people actually, I walk in grinning. That way, people's first impression of me has a higher chance of being, "Look how thrilled that girl is to walk through a doorway!", as opposed to, "Holy shit, that bitch is gonna kill us all."

So there you have it. To be That Guy and quote my own Facebook profile- I'm not sad, mad, or a bitch. That's just my face.

“There's Nothing To Writing. All You Do Is Sit Down At A Typewriter And Open A Vein.” ~Red Smith

Once upon a time there was a little girl who wrote and wrote and wrote, all the time time time. And when she wasn't writing writing writing, she would read read read, hiding under her covers at night with a flashlight, savagely digesting every fat, juicy word printed onto the pages that she gripped with such tenacity, it was as if the book would up and fly away if not for her small-handed security.

Eventually the little girl would hear her father's voice coming from her doorway.

"It's late," he would say as the girl poked just her eyes above the covers, glaring at this unwanted yet completely expected interruption.

"Your mother would want you to go to sleep."

The little girl's mother was always already asleep because it was always, in fact, quite late. Always.

The father would leave and the girl would return to reading. Whenever she heard footsteps she would click off her flashlight and pretend to sleep. She wasn't always quick enough, and so her father would poke his head in and, while still whispering, bark, "Bed! Now!"

So the flashlight went out for good but the book stayed safely under the covers.

Two counts of ten for good measure and the book resurfaced. Straining her eyes until they refocused and became used to the blackness, the little girl read in the dark until she blinked and didn't un-blink till morning.

But back back back to when she wrote wrote wrote. She produced stories like a first grade one-woman assembly line. She never knew what her stories were going to be about when she picked up her pencil- she still doesn't-, little movies just played out in her head and she wrote down what happened. She had very little control. This became problematic years later, when the girl's college professors would try to get her to tweak a storyline and she flat out refused.

"But that's not what happens." she would protest, confused as to why her doctorate-weilding teachers did not grasp this.

Professor So-And-So and Dr. What's-Her-Face never seemed to take this as a valid excuse so the girl would snatch the paper back, go to her dorm, and bitterly change a few words here and there, take out a couple of sentences- but just a couple- and maybe add a slight change to a storyline, depending on how critical the paper was towards her final grade. Then she would stubbornly write three more pages that returned the story back to its original plot, just for passive-aggresive funsies.

In time, her teachers finally caught on that the girl, who was seemingly shy and introverted, turned into a no-holds-barred beast when it came to her writing- fiercely protective of every letter, word, and phrase.

The bottom line was, the girl cared more about what she thought of her writing than what other people thought of it. Prose before hoes.

She wrote her first story when she was five, and finished her first book (that's right suckers, I- er- she wrote a book. A BOOK.) when she was in high school.

In elementary school she wrote about animals, in junior high and high school she wrote depressing poetry, and in college she wrote about sex and boys.

Now she writes about writing. And boys. And sex. Not so much about animals anymore.

One thing has remained the same, though. When the girl writes, she goes deaf. Her sight is limited to the paper or screen in front of her. She feels wave after wave of happiness, anger, inconsolable sadness, frustration, and hope- all while experiencing the most comforting and serene calm you could ever imagine. When the girl writes, you don't matter, and you don't matter, and neither do you. And you? All the way over there? You don't matter either.

So that's that. A little anecdote about a little girl who wrote wrote wrote and read read read. And always will will will.