Pandemic Burqa Style
- 3 minutes read - 442 wordsQuoth the New York Times, the kids of today are claiming that the dark under-eye circles are “cool.” This lead me to recall “Billy Madison” where the incontinent field trip farm woman proclaims:
If peeing your pants is cool, consider me Miles Davis.
But I came up with a second take after I thought about it for a moment. The previous Sunday, I had been at Trader Joe’s. Normally I avoid TJ’s on Sunday night like the plague because the plague, it’s busy and, due to occupation limits, there’s usually a long line out the front door into the cold night. But being there on a “busy” night, I had been forced to navigate my other shoppers using non-verbal, eye-contact-driven communication: we were locking eyes often to engage in the telepathy of “I’ll swerve right here to get tortillas, you can keep maximally distant where you are.”
And with all this eye engagement, I had to consider the stories written in the areas near the eye sockets. In one single lady, I could see the circles of being alone and the question “Did I have to try to look cute for this?” In the beleaguered mothers, I could see the reddened eyes tracing a cannabis edible’s track through the bloodstream. In the stout men carrying boxes through aisles, I could see the determination to find a path through the traffic jam. In the father outside’s eyes, I could see them looking up in pride at tot on shoulders whose nose was turning cherry red.
As I marveled within about this, I realized that I was experiencing the allure of the burqa transposed to my culture (and climate).
Buried beneath those layers of technical winterproof fabric, one could assume vital hearts pumped hot blood beneath warm skin, but those surfaces were unavailable to us in this season of plague and ice. Instead, all we could know of each other was through our eyes. It was strange to find so much intimacy in famously-distracted Manhattan. And strangely, nothing suggested complexity, activity, and capability quite like the darkened flesh beneath the eyes.
I then hypothesized that the allure of kohl-rimmed eyes is an analogue to this natural phenomenon. As a cosmetic come-hither, the kohl-rimmed eye, the drizzled mascara, the (per the Times article, bruised flesh pigment) are the cosmetic signs signifying “depth,” “struggle,” and “stamina” — all valuable selectors for fitness.
And I suppose that among the young, upon whom an unknown-in-recent-times demands for depth, struggle and stamina have been place, signs of surviving that struggle are, indeed, cool.*
Footnotes
*: Well, and a proxy for genetic fitness, something young people are famously focused on