The Evil Rudeness of Even Noticing Cellulite.

This is related to the suicide post below. seeing beauty in others and how it bounces back to ourselves. etc.
in my life drawing class, i was drawing a woman who was so beautiful and suddenly i smiled because when i was even smaller than her, all i saw was a wall of cellulite when i looked in the mirror. i saw cellulite in my eyelids, my earlobes, my curls.

fat is a feminist issue. just like that book about being preoccupied with one's details keeps you from charging across the plains with a saber sword. but not to be left out, boys are also becoming mere hollow caricatures of what it means to be men.

if i am wrong, if in the afterlife, and i'm not reincarnated into a tragic meat cow to be abused throughout my entire life in the midwest, but am standing before st. peter and if he says, "what were you thinking going after being a mini movie mogul! you had all that cellulite, silly girl."

then i will shrug. what's he gonna do with me at that point? make me sit after school for detention with all the other cellulite riddled people who had the audacity to act beautiful in spite of ourselves? would he make me burn in hell for eternity?

that's how i see working retail, so either way i come out ahead even with all of my cellulite.

with my cellulite and all. and as i looked at this model stretched out all vulnerable and beautiful before me with her real and actual breasts, and little beautiful belly, i thought humans are so beautiful and fragile, and as beautiful as she was, when i looked more like her, i ripped myself apart. and i thought, "oh my god. even noticing that such a beautiful creature has cellulite is evil. it's a waste. unholy. as unholy as torturing precious life and flinging it in the gutter."

it seems Rude. Horribly Ungrateful.

oh, i still see my own cellulite. but not my inner cellulite. i used to cringe in shame whenever anyone looked at me like i was insane. now i just shrug and think we are different. that's all.

and i don't see anyone else's cellulite anymore. women with horizon asses good morning thighs are just stunningly real and beautiful and accepting of what the day will bring and then i understand what the word "juicy" means. catching glimpses of poor little paper doll paris hilton enduring a faux sex act is far from juicy. her boyfriend, too. men without pubic hair? i still can't get over bald women, but that is so sick and wrong. so plastic and ken doll.

what makes almost anyone look bad is a bathing suit not individually made for them. but any body without constricting lines looks amazing. but those "before" shots of people wearing hideous bikinis are all lies. you take the same "before" woman and take off that bikini, recline her on a chaise, tell her she's beautiful, and lovingly draw her, and she's a goddess.

the years of training as an artist teaches you to prefer the beauty of different shapes and sizes. to actually prefer bodies with the sweeping and undulating curves--the calligraphic score of a seduction--and i do love the beautiful and quiet autobiographies of scars, stretchmarks, changing colors, smoothness, and time. when my mother got her tummy tucked i was so sad that a piece of her was gone. "Mommy, can you please pretty please make all that extra skin come back?"

i hope appreciation of one's own beauty is as contagious as a yawn. i hope that i have the time it seems to take to become simultaneously blind and open to my own stories.

the changing scenery of our bodies prove we are still alive, yes? why hurry to be leather? Taxidermied for love? We imagine it means more love.

But the moment we even separate, notice, or poke at the cellulite, it's a step away from love.



--e