if you don't have something nice to say...

This week has been a rough one for many people. I know that. But I think it has been an exceptionally rough week for me. Why? Well, for starters, I am suffering the stress of packing and moving to my new apartment. Therefore I get little sleep and don't eat much. Also, I had a Very Bad Influence take me out past 4am on Monday/Tuesday, which, although it's my own fault, really sucked for the rest of the week. (But hey, a girl's gotta have fun, right?) So once you add late baseball watching into the mix, I'm just a freaking mess.

So at some point, maybe Wednesday, I woke up and looked in the mirror and saw an 85-year-old looking back at me. I had dark circles under my eyes and wrinkles around my mouth. I hoped that the lighting was just bad, or that I just needed a shower, but in the end it freaked me out very badly.

When I got to work that morning, I asked one of the married guys if I looked old and tired. He said no, that I looked like any other 30-year-old. After I told him several times that I was only 25, which he refused to believe, I took it to mean that I DO look as old and tired as I feel. But I forgave him for falling into my trap. He doesn't know any better.

So then yesterday I went over to ask another co-worker something. She's been working here as long as I've been alive (no joke). Her first words, in a faint slavic accent, were "Have you been reading all day?" My answer should have been "Yes, of course. I'm an editor, after all. That's what I do, read." But in reality I'd been online all day looking for furniture on Ikea, so I didn't know where she was going.

"You look really tired," she continued. "You have dark spots under your eyes. You must be reading a lot."

Now, I know that in some cultures it's completely acceptable to insult you. They call it "honesty," but it's just another way of saying "You look like shit and I'm going to tell you so." For example, many years ago my Chinese professor stopped in the middle of class and said, "Hui Min (me), you are looking fat." After I beat her up and got thrown out of school, I transferred out and dropped the weight.

Now it's happening again. I have dark spots under my eyes, which I'd rather hoped were a figment of either bad lighting or my sick imagination, but it turns out everyone can see them, especially under the harsh fluorescent lighting of the office, which apparently adds 5-7 years.

Didn't their mommas ever tell them? If you don't have anything nice to say, then shut the fuck up or I'm going to kick your ass.