Eschew

Eschew: to shun, as something injurious.

Some of us have good judgment and others not so much. We should figure out which we are before we eschew perfectly good advice.

The year I turned seventeen I inherited (helped myself to because she had the good sense not to want it) a jumbo silver eye pencil from someone's make up collection. That and a brown lip pencil represented my makeup collection and sadly, acumen at the time - not suggesting I've gotten a much better, but for what it's worth I now have a lot more excuses for making a mess of my face. Because:

At the time my routine consisted of brown lip liner blended into chapstick (I hadn't discovered any of those fancy glosses yet), and a swipe of silver eyeliner blended out to "highlight" my eyes. I thought I was pretty clever, but my boyfriend's mother said to me once "Why do you wear that silver eyeliner? It looks like you have "mattah" in your eyes".


I thought she was just being uncool - she didn't want me dating her son; she didn't like my nose ring, and she'd told me so with HER nose "skin up" (wrinkled) to imply what she was looking at -and smelling - was actually a small speck of shit on my nose; she didn't like my hair; or me for that matter, so her judgement was questionable.


My nose ring and most of the things she criticised about me can be chalked up to our generational gap and me being a "bad influence" on her son, but if I had listened to her about the eye liner I might have avoided going around for a whole year sporting what looked like huge silver clumps of mattah in the corners of my eyes.


*mattah is what we call that stuff that collects in the corners of your eyes while you sleep.