Acupuncture Barbie

Over the last several months, I have been discovering the world called "Being a Girl". Mostly this involves clothes and shoes and maybe lip color, but for me it has been a big transformation. When I was a teenager, I wore all my clothes in size etxra large. I do not know why I did this. I am a twee thing, and I am sure I looked silly drowning in my clothes. I also had a thing for black. Which I still do. Black is the new black, no? I had the requisite middleclass college girl phases: punk, crunchy, et al. It seems I have always wanted to be invisible, or to hide my assets, because I thought I was ugly. I can remember sitting in the chair at the haircutter when I was about 13 and getting a haircut and looking in the mirror and hating myself ten thousand times for being such a dog. This was not a revelation I abandoned.
I got to Oregon in my late twenties and saw everyone here wearing jeans to the symphony and pile jackets and sandals! And I thought: well well well. I have arrived. But dammit I got tired of wearing boxy Gap jeans and chacos every day and black turtlenecks, but I did not know how to go about finding other kinds of clothes. I needed a consultant, and lucky for me I had one handy: my girlfriend Goldy-locks.
Now Goldy-locks is a shopping maven. if you want something, she knows where to get it, and who has it on sale, regardless of the item. You could ask her for a pink sparkly chainsaw and she'd mull it over and say, "Oh they have them at GI Joes, but you can sometimes get them for cheaper in the very back of the bait and tackle place in Estacada." She is also lovely and beautiful and is always wearing Just The Right Thing. I called upon her to help me figure out what to wear, and she was delighted to come to the rescue and very gently introduce me to colors that are not black and Discount Shopping. It was in very short order that I was able to shop on my own without buying only black things, much to the chagrin of Goldy-locks. She is very observant and notices everything I wear, and she knows if it is new or not. There have been certain unforseen issues arising from her tutelage--I have discovered other places in the Girl World, namely Shoes and Skirts. Shoes is the more dangerous of the two places. And almost every day somebody tells me how great my shirt is or asks me where I got that coat or some such thing. Strangers, even.
Today I came home from work and then errands and I put on an old pair of work pants and a tank top, and I mused over how good it felt to wear these clothes I have been tossing willy-nilly into the Goodwill pile. And it occurred to me that people who don't know me, they don't know how conspicuous I am in my flouncy skirt and my heels as I am inspecting a nectarine in the grocery store. I'm just another girl in the produce section to them. They don't see the neon sign floating above my head some days that says: "I'M A FAKE. I REALLY BELONG IN A BURLAP SACK. DISREGARD THE BANDOLINOS." Nope. They just see a girl who likes shoes and flouncy skirts.