The challenges of kugeling up

So I’m having to kugel up these days. Growing up in Sandton, I’ve been surrounded by these creatures all my life, and yet I have never become one of them. Now, it appears that this will have to change.

Last weekend, for instance, I had a manicure and a pedicure, my first ever. I found the whole experience both pleasurable and mildly perturbing, allowing strangers such confiding, intimate contact with my extremities. All that massaging and filing and painting by a young woman who told me, in all seriousness, that she is passionate about nails. I imagined myself standing like an antelope, a roan perhaps, being inspected by oxpeckers.

The old me would have dismissed this sort of thing as frivolous, a needless expense in which other women indulged (and I was not like other women). Now I am wondering whether what I once considered an essential part of myself is morphing into something else, a something that likes being able to wear open-toed shoes because for once there are neat and shiny toenails on display.

First, you see, it’s the hands and feet. Next it’ll be spray-on tans and facials, then blowdried hair and, heaven forbid, pierced ears. I must be one of the only women on the planet whose earlobes remain virgin, intact, and last week I very nearly made a decision to violate them.

I’m glad I didn’t.

The thing is, I really do have to change. My reliance on the absent-minded professor persona, the one that allowed me to get away with tying up my hair, forgetting to brush it, and going to the office where I wander around deep in thought, has reached its sell-by date. I can’t be part of a campaign for a car that boasts an interior designed by Victoria Beckham and not make some important adjustments. Hence the more probing attention being paid to my toenails.

Now I’m not saying that I’ve never spent money on making my appearance more publically acceptable. I’ve long since forked out for highlights and overpriced haircuts (including what was quite possibly the most expensive hairdo in the history of even Joburg’s most larcenous hair salons). But I’ve never gone further. I’ve always been too busy wanting to compose essays linking Walter Benjamin and the idea of the flâneur to the modern consumer haunting the local shopping mall, rather than necessarily being the modern consumer haunting the local shopping mall. The notion of investing that kind of money in girl stuff actually frightened me — as if those phalanxes of beauty therapists ready to take on my case knew how clueless I was, that they could see through my attempts at middle management bravado to the bushy-eyebrowed, bespectacled creature beneath.

Now that I have made this first tentative foray into personal beautification, maintenance will be required. The nail technician was very quick to inform me that because my nails grow fast (she could tell, somehow, much as geologist can infer the presence of hydrocarbons by the examination of a gravity gradiometry survey), I would need to return to have them filled or there would be a gap. This means regular visits for touch-ups, or the investment I have made will be in vain. I have opened Pandora’s Box and it is filled with nail varnish and exfoliating scrub; I have been sucked in, and there is no going back, and in time this will lead to Botox and boob jobs and lipo.

Still, there is a certain reassurance in submitting to the attentions of others, and placing one’s trust in their ability to turn me into something fit to be seen in public. It’s my own abilities I worry about. I can’t even blowdry my own hair, for Pete’s sake, and heaven knows I’ve tried; I need an elf or something. Nonetheless, I must keep on at the kugeling up; there is no room for failure. It is a process, and there is no telling when it will be complete. Or, for that matter, the kind of something will come into being at the end of it.