hairless cat with a fucked up rash

do you know what it feels like to pet a hairless cat?make that a hairless cat with a fucked up rash. if you know what that is like then you know what it feels like to pet my arm.

so back to the whole purple thing, my friends are all, yeah, you should probably shave or nair your armhair so that the paint goes on and looks better. which for some reason made perfect sense to me at the time. i was like OH OF COURSE. because sometimes i am not very smart.

well it is just now growing back but i have a really FUCKED UP rash and i'm not sure if it's a result of the veet i used or the purple. i am rather self-conscious about my fucked up rash because i feel as tho it points out to the world, LOOK I SHAVED MY ARMHAIR. and i would rather that the whole world not think that i shaved my armhair (you would think that feeling this way would prevent me from forcing everyone to pet my arms but it doesn't). and it's not like if i were to explain to the whole world WHY i don't have armhair it would sound much better. oh well.

so i was going to write a whole post on what it was like to walk around a festival with thousands and thousands of people all over the place while wearing a bathing suit and being painted purple. but i dunno, the magic has kinda worn off by now and i'm not really feeling it. i will sum it up i guess.sometimes i felt ok in a this is kinda liberating/fun/out-of-body/artsy kind of surreal way and then every so often i would feel a surge of panic and realize what i was doing and think what the FUCK am i doing?? this is ridiculous and bizarre and EVERYONE IS STARING AT ME OH GOD EVERYONE IS STARING. and then after a few minutes i'd forget and be ok again. LISTEN this sort of thing for me is NOT easy to do sober. also without smoking. i wanted to smoke because then at least i would have had SOMETHING to do with myself.peoples' reactions were mixed. sometimes we'd walk by people and they'd say WOW AWESOME! and high five us and that was nice. other people would come up with crinkled up faces and say all snotty-like uh, why are you guys all painted?also people were constantly taking pictures. this is a weird thing for me. when it was just random drunks i would make ridiculous death-metal faces and strike insane poses. my signature was the mary katherine gallagher "SUPERSTAR."this one always went over very well.

however when photographer people wanted to get pictures of all us together i was like OH FUCK because i have no idea how to do that sort of shit. i blame my mom because she ONLY took posed pictures where my brothers and i would have to stand side by side for like 10 minutes in front of a certain bush outside or against a special wall or something that she felt would make a particularly perfect backdrop while she tried to figure out how to operate the camera. our faces always turned to stone so that is the only thing i know how to do in these situations. then people always say shit like what's wrong? you look ANGRY. i never understand why they would think that until i see the actual pictures.

also i cannot SMILE on demand. as soon as i realize that a camera is on me my face contorts into some horrible configuration that tyra banks would be ashamed of. my mom always called it "the smirk." year after year i would bring home my school pictures and my mom would freak out: OH NO [MURL] it's the SMIRK again!!! why can't you just SMILE like a NORMAL PERSON??

so the other girls were launching into these cute/sexy-type poses and i was standing there wanting to die. HELLO how much more OUT OF YOUR ELEMENT could you be murl? those were the moments that i realized i would never be america's next top model.

wow i wrote a lot more than i thought i would.