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My face is doing better now, thank you, but last week it looked like it had been punched, then sat on, by a diseased prostitute. I had two separate hockey accidents, and these accidents happened because I let my vanity get the best of me, and this vanity was of the deep-rooted, long-harbored variety, so really, it was only a matter of time before my face got the crap kicked out of it in a hockey rink.
What happened to my face, specifically, was I got tripped and slid mouth-first into the goal post on Tuesday night. Then on Thursday, I was turning one way, looking the other, and a shoulder plowed into the pointy part of my face. The result of all this was a swollen, purple nose, and a mouth full of open wounds. My Brazilian coworker Helton asked me if I had slept with cats the night before, which is probably a common phrase in Brazil that doesn’t make much sense in English. But actually, I did look like I had slept with some kind of tiger, probably Siberian, who had tried to angrily slap me or coquettishly shush me (either way, I looked clawed).
None of this would have happened if I had been wearing a full facemask, and ironically, this is the first year I’ve worn the less protective half-shield.
Did you make the switch so you could see better?
A Nope. I see worse.
So why’d you switch?
A To look cool.
But you play in a men’s league and nobody watches.
A I know.
But when I was little, I was convinced that I’d play in the NHL. I even wrote an essay in third grade called “The Future,” in which I showed concern for the world’s environment (self-call), and speculated that I would be a retired hockey player and motivational speaker. That’s probably not going to happen, but this is what’s important: I wanted to be a pro, so I wanted to look like a pro, and that’s why I couldn’t wait to wear a half-shield. But as the Brazilians say, you sleep with cats, you get the horns.*
It was my vanity that got my face banged up, but that seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? If one makes a deliberate choice to wear less facial protection, this usually means that they don’t care what they look like, right? Unlessthat person thinks that wearing less protection is the cool thing to do. For example, if I were competing in the Tour de France, I would rather wear a bike hat with a flip-up visor than a bike helmet, even if the helmet had flames on it, head injuries be damned.
Vanity, in this case, has an extra, and extra confusing, dimension: I liked having a beat-up face. This was my opportunity to look like a tough guy, like a real NHL player. So yeah, maybe I got my injury in a men’s league game, and maybe nobody was watching, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t feel like a badass skating to the face-off circle with blood dripping out of my mouth. I liked the aftermath, too, telling people about the goal post and the shoulder and that I wasn’t contagious because actually it was not a violent outbreak of avian herpes.
Since vanity is such a complicated matter, not black or white but rather containing as many hues as my bruised nose, I decided to make a chart to explain the Degrees of Vanity. This is not an arbitrary chart, but one born from a formula.
Here is the formula:
V = A x I x N, where
V= Vanity
A = Affort
I = Intentionalness,
N = Noticeability.
(Originally this equation spelled out VEIN, but I realized VAIN would be more appropriate, so I changed effort to affort. Both words mean the same thing, I think.) Affort is a measure of how much work it takes to look good. Intentionalness is a measure of how much thought has been put into the affort. And noticeability indicates how obvious the act of vanity is.
Apply the formula to the following commonplace act: Hanging a mirror in your bedroom. Sure, it’s vain, but not that vain. There’s very little affort required to hang a mirror; intentionlalness isn’t really a factor because everybody hangs mirrors in their bedrooms; and noticeability is negligible because it’s in your bedroom and it’s just a mirror.
But let’s say that you built the mirror, cut it to fit the entirety of your largest wall, and constructed a frame for it out of fluorescent tube lights. This would take a huge affort, lots of planning, and it would be pretty noticeable. So mounting a huge mirror with a neon frame is much more vain than hanging a regular mirror. The formula works.
With that in mind, here are the eleven Degrees of Vanity:
FIRST DEGREE – Naked troglodytes. Cave men and women fresh from the womb of genesis. Maybe they could look at their reflections in pools of melted glacier water, but all cave people had dark greasy hair, prominent brows, and British teeth, so there wasn’t much to distinguish one troglodyte from another, especially given the poor reflective quality of melted glacier water. There were no Us magazines to make them feel fat, no cameras, and if they asked a friend to describe their physical features, the friend wouldn’t be able to because cave people only knew one word, and it meant “multi-purpose tool.” And if they asked a different friend to draw them, all they would get is a stick figure throwing a spear at a mammoth. These people didn’t care about their physical appearance – they just cared about not getting eaten by saber tooth pterodactyls.
SECOND DEGREE – Clothed troglodytes. At some point, one of these cave people decided to put on a loincloth or a suede mammoth shawl. Maybe they made this move for warmth, or maybe they wanted to start a label envy war. I was watching the Discovery channel the other day, and they did a piece about a caveman who bought a tooth necklace at Old Navy, and all his buddies made fun of him so much – not because they didn’t like the necklace, but because he had bought it at Old Navy of all places – that he threw himself off a cliff. So obviously clothes (and therefore vanity) make people competitive and suicidal.
THIRD DEGREE – Basic hygienic upkeep. Anything that must be done to keep pace with societal expectations goes here. That includes teeth-brushing, showering, nose-hair plucking, leg shaving (if you’re a woman), circumcision (if you’re Jewish), or clitoridectomy (if you’re a member of the African Sumburu tribe).
FOURTH DEGREE – Male body hair trimming, female hair dying or highlighting, etc. I was tempted to put this in the third degree with basic hygienic upkeep, but it gets its own category because not everyone does it, even if they should. However, please note that the hair dying and highlighting only applies to women. If you’re a guy and you’re dying or highlighting your hair, you’re probably in the seventh degree of vanity, and you’re probably also in a boutique pet store right now, reading this column on your Blackberry while buying your dog a sweater.
FIFTH DEGREE – Conventional plastic surgery. You might be surprised that plastic surgery isn’t occupying, say, the ninth degree, but I usually don’t have a problem with the practice. Everybody should have the right to make themselves look the way they want to look. Some people are born with huge noses, some people are born with flat chests, and some people are born with penises that are plenty big – it’s just that an abnormally high percentage of the penis is hidden in the body – from what I understand (but I haven’t really looked into it) the penis starts somewhere in the middle of your body, maybe back where your tailbone is, and they have procedures that kind of snake-charm the penis into an above-average length. That’s what I hear, anyway. But yeah, if you’re one of those people with a big nose, or a flat chest, or a retracted penis, you should be able to fix yourself.
SIXTH DEGREE – Sex change operations. Basically, ditto. If you’re born a man, but want to be a woman, sure, it’s an act of vanity to grow breasts and stuff, but whatever. I back it. Sex change operations gets a higher degree than plastic surgery because it takes more affort to switch locker rooms than it does to get implants.
SEVENTH DEGREE – Male body shaving/waxing, or tanning. There are three things on a male that may be shaved:
1. Your beard.
2. Your head, if you’re already going bald or you’re getting hazed by your pledge master who is a 23 year old former offensive lineman who quit football to concentrate on “frat stuff” and refuses to take enough credits to graduate on time.
3. Your balls.
Nothing else should be razored. If your legs are shaved to show off your calf muscles, or your arms are shaved to show off your forearm muscles, you will look like an overgrown, muscular baby. The only guys, in my opinion, who are allowed to shave their bodies, are swimmers, cyclists, and porn stars. If you remove all your pubes, but have hairy legs and a hairy stomach, you will look like aliens landed on your body and made crop circles. Your pubic region is supposed to be the opposite of that.
As we move on to waxing, in the interests of full disclosure, I should admit that I got my eyebrows waxed a few weeks ago. But I didn’t pay for it, and I didn’t like it, so it doesn’t count as seventh degree vanity. A co-worker paid (and videotaped), I think because she was imagining a screaming bloodbath like the one in The 40 Year Old Virgin, but I took my waxing like a real man, like a warrior. I resembled a mannequin for several weeks, until the hairs started to grow back, and I felt normal again.
And then there’s tanning, the vainest level of the seventh degree. Tanning is a form of lying. But it’s bad lying, not white lying, or cunning lying, just obvious, unnaturally pinkish lying. You’re not fooling anyone. Why don’t you just put on a toupee and stuff your crotch with socks while you’re at it? Once again, I’m not addressing women here (because they don’t wear toupees or stuff their crotches with socks). They get a free pass because a high percentage of them tan on a regular basis, so the entire gender, in the winter, is supposed to look kind of orange-brown, just like their legs are supposed to get hairy because they know they don’t have to wear shorts, a skirt, or a bathing suit anytime soon. (This is also why some of them think it’s okay to get fat).
EIGTH DEGREE – Not upkeeping your hygiene. It took us six degrees to arrive at the antithesis of the second degree. People who don’t wear deodorant or wash their hair probably think they’re less vain, but au contraire. Sure, it sucks that women have to shave their armpits from time to time. But it sucks way worse to have to ignore the scorn of their peers. So if you total the net gains versus the net losses, it actually takes more affort to distance yourself from the best interests of your friends, coworkers, and fellow public transportation riders – in other words, to be a woman and not shave your armpits while wearing a tank top and high-fiving people on the subway.
NINTH DEGREE – High profile tattoos and unorthodox piercings. What’s the difference between every aforementioned personal appearance “improvement,” and the ones included in the ninth degree? Humanity. Plastic surgery, hair dying, sex change operations – those, at least, are all afforts to make someone look like a different human being. The ninth degree is for people who want to look more than human. It’s for people like this janitor I knew in high school who thought it was cool to have a tattoo of a clown, who either smiled or frowned, depending on the angle of the janitor’s elbow.
TENTH DEGREE – The Goths, the punks, and any other movement that requires a “fuck the mainstream” attitude, and an “I don’t give a shit what I look like” image, when really their outfits require about four hours of jewelry attachment, flare pinning, and makeup application. And if you’re wearing a trench coat in July, you’re going to sweat a lot (in the name of fashion), and smell, which is probably why you’re not popular in the first place. This is hypocritical vanity, which is something that we’re all probably guilty of from time to time, but which is deplorable, and which is especially prevalent amongst people who play Magic: The Gathering or dress like the Sex Pistols.
ELEVENTH DEGREE – People who transform themselves into cats. This actually happens – there are men and women who get plastic surgery to give themselves a feline mouth, implanted metal whiskers, and tattooed cat stripes. If you apply the formula to these people, A=a billion (it takes multiple surgeries to look like a cat), I=another billion (they really, really want to look like a cat), and N=a billion billion (because everyone’s going to look at them and say, “I think that person had multiple surgeries to make themselves look like a cat.”) So V=infinity.
When you compare me to a cat person, I mean a real catperson, I’m not so vain. I’m just a guy who had a beat up face, and who liked his beat up face. Because that’s the way real hockey players are supposed to look.
*This is probably not something that Brazilians actually say.
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adam@theadamwhite.com |
