Pedicured Hypocrites

From a few months ago:

I love you and I hate you as you come out of your huge SUV with your Super sized Burger shouting curse words into your cell with a smile, filling the cool air of a winter noon with the sight of your enormous red coat and flushed cheeks.

I love you and I hate you, you teenage girls with skinny, shapeless forms and five-colour-highlighted hair, whispering and smirking and staring and pointing, congregating for half an hour before you leave in a savvy hurry.

I love you and I hate you, you are my family and you are strangers. I mock you and then I follow you into Quiznos.

From a few weeks ago:

I went and got a pedicure today. I’ve never gotten a pedicure before, but I was already being a spoiled little brat going to Italy the next day, so I drove my little suv down to CeCe’s Nail Salon and went the whole nine yards. They scrubbed my feet with what looked like toilet bowl cleaner and then they painted them. Admittedly they looked pretty good. The people seemed very surprised that I had never had a pedicure before.

“What about dances?” they asked. Well, I’d never really been to one. “Well.”

“Well.”

“Who are you?”

I had a bad time after all of that. They gave me this ridiculous flip flops made out of craft foam and and I managed to get across the grimy, polluted parking lot to my car with them. But I was locked out, somehow, my keys would only unlock the trunk, and I had to crawl though to the drivers seat with those ridiculous shoes on and and it raining outside and my feet all professionally cleaned and painted with the sort of attention no one should lavish on their feet. Yeah, maybe it should have taught me a lesson.

When I got in the car I drove it half a block down to get my hair cut. I could have walked, I should have walked, but my feet were all pretty and I had a car that let me exchange money and pollution for a bit of honest exercise. I’m becoming… such a hypocrite…

At the hair cut place I suggested a cut I had heard a lot about and they told me that frankly, it would look ridiculous. They didn’t like any of my ideas but they told me I had to tell them what to do and it wasn’t like I had all day. Finally I whispered that they could just take a few inches off and they set to work.

“Can I leave early?” One employee asks. I don’t see her from under the hair my ‘stylist’ has unceremoniously thrown over my face. “Brad has to pick up the kids and I want to go out with Steve tonight.”

“Yeah,” my stylist replies. “All I have to do is blow-dry this one.”

Then she sets to work doing just that. And I’m glad. My tears evaporate before anyone can see.