{"id":17139,"date":"2012-11-08T00:00:44","date_gmt":"2012-11-08T06:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidmcelroy.org\/?p=17139"},"modified":"2012-11-08T00:23:27","modified_gmt":"2012-11-08T06:23:27","slug":"depressing-portrait-of-a-little-plastic-person-living-a-little-plastic-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/?p=17139","title":{"rendered":"Starved for love: Portrait of a plastic person living a little plastic life"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The woman appeared to be in a world of her own. That was my first impression. I sat down to eat lunch by myself Wednesday at a small place in a part of town where I hadn’t been for awhile. She was beautiful. Around 28 or 30 years old, I’d guess. But the longer I sat there, the more something about her just wasn’t right.<\/p>\n

She had papers and folders spread out on the table where she sat. She was intently studying something, but I couldn’t tell what. She would sometimes pick up a small mirror and look at something closely on her face. Then she’d look back to the papers. She wasn’t aware of anything else.<\/p>\n

She finally looked up and stared out the window for a moment. Then she turned in my general direction and said, “Do you think my chin looks wrong? I’m afraid it’s too wide. Or maybe the angle isn’t right.”<\/p>\n

She could have been talking to the wall, as far as I could tell, but I was the only other person in the place. Besides, she actually looked as though she expected an answer. The question was a little too odd for me to know how to respond. My initial thought was to tell her — honestly — that her face seemed absolutely perfect to me, but I didn’t know what was really going on, so I just stuck to saying that her chin looked fine to me.<\/p>\n

“Are you sure?” she asked. She came over to my table, bringing one of the brochures she had been looking at. It was filled with pictures of close-ups of faces. “This one looks better than mine, doesn’t it? I look so ugly<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

From a closer perspective, something about her face didn’t look quite right. She was stunningly, perfectly beautiful. Yet something was wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it.<\/p>\n

“When I got the nose job, I thought that would fix everything,” she said. “But now that my nose is narrower, maybe the chin should be, too. See this picture? Would I look better if I got that done? I’m so tired of looking at this face in the mirror every day.”<\/p>\n

There was something about her that looked unreal. If someone told me that she was an android and this was a test to see if someone could tell the difference, I wouldn’t have been too surprised. She was perfect in the way she was shaped and molded. Yet she felt fake, lifeless and dead.<\/p>\n

She kept talking to me about her efforts to fix herself, although it wasn’t clear why she was telling me. It was more like she was just talking and I happened to be the one there.<\/p>\n

“I got my boobs done and they look perfect now,” she said.<\/p>\n

She pulled down part of her shirt to expose most of one breast all the way down to her nipple.<\/p>\n

“You can touch it,” she said. “It feels real. I was afraid it wouldn’t feel perfect, but everyone says they look good and they feel good.”<\/p>\n

There wasn’t anything sexual or sensual about her offer. She seemed more like somebody asking a potential car buyer to kick tires to prove that they were good. Her body was just a mechanical device for her to mold and sculpt. She told me she used to be flat-chested, but she got herself enlarged to C cups.<\/p>\n

“I wish now I’d done D,” she said. “Boobs are always better when they’re bigger. I should have made them bigger, shouldn’t I?”<\/p>\n

I asked her why she had had the nose job and the breast enlargement.<\/p>\n

“I was ugly,” she said. “Guys didn’t like to look at me. I’m still ugly, but I’m going to get the rest fixed, too.”<\/p>\n

She was dressed impeccably. Her makeup was perfect. She was wearing a pleasant perfume. In every way, she looked as though she had stepped out of the pages of a magazine. Yet this woman thought she was ugly.<\/p>\n

She talked a little bit more about having liposuction to have little pockets of fat removed from places I never would have even noticed. I finally asked her what she was trying to achieve in all the changes she was making. She answered without hesitation.<\/p>\n

“I want to be perfect,” she said. “If I’m perfect, the perfect man will love me. If I’m perfect, he couldn’t help it, could he?”<\/p>\n

I felt sick at the contradiction she was presenting me. She was physical perfection, but she hated herself and seemed empty on the inside. I was reminded of a quote I ran across a few weeks ago that I never found the source for. It says, “Who seeks perfection never understood the beauty of imperfection.”<\/p>\n

She was physically beautiful and perfect, yet she was fake, shallow, plastic and unreal. Why would any man want this empty shell of a creature? How could anyone love someone who hated herself so much? How could someone love a woman who was so vapid on the inside?<\/p>\n

And then she was back to her own table and her brochures and papers. She never told me her name. She never asked for mine. Those things didn’t matter. I wasn’t a real person to her. She was so absorbed in herself that the rest of the world didn’t exist.<\/p>\n

She’s a sad zombie stumbling mindlessly through the world, on a search for perfection that doesn’t exist — in order to somehow gain acceptance or a cheap substitute for the love she’s desperate to feel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The woman appeared to be in a world of her own. That was my first impression. I sat down to eat lunch by myself Wednesday at a small place in a part of town where I hadn’t been for awhile. She was beautiful. Around 28 or 30 years old, I’d guess. But the longer I Keep Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-17139","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1x9iR-4sr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17139"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17153,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17139\/revisions\/17153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}