NEWSLETTER

Vice recently asked me to become a normal girl for a week and document it. I guess a big reason they asked me to do it is because I take a lot of self-portraits and I can come across as a pretty disgusting person. I have a horrible sense of style, and though it may be kind of funny, I think the pictures are probably of interest because I basically look gross and weird.

So to start off, I had to decide what a normal girl is. I pictured the kind of chick who works a boring job during the day, is kind of quiet and opinionless, spends several hours getting ready to go out even though she looks virtually the same when she’s done, is fit and image-conscious, and when the weekend rolls around she’s a party girl wearing Bebe clothes who gets totally wasted with her girlfriends. That’s what first popped into my head and I ran with it.

Just so you understand where I’m coming from, here’s me. I live in Kansas City, Missouri. And no, it’s not a cornfield town where we don’t know what email or sushi is. It’s just a plain old small-ish city. We still know where to go to dance to shitty Top 40 rap, we know what a martini is, we have bars with happy hours, and we have country clubs. So I was basically all set to be normal. YES!

I guess you should also know about my actual life, too. My friends and I throw what I think are amazing parties with weird themes and we dress up a lot and do tons of weird stuff to entertain ourselves. Like we might all dress up really goth to crash a gross punk/ska night at a college bar or we might all decide to just walk the streets as zombies for fun or I might decide to be really punk while waiting tables or we may all decide to be Karen O at the local hillbilly karaoke dive or we might walk around town like we’re in a band and I’m the nasty lead singer in a nudie suit and spandex eating pizza or we might crash some bitch’s wedding-reception party dressed like a fucking fancy fish. Whatever!!

Now this may sound hugely awesome, but the downside to not caring about looking good or acting cool is that you never meet anyone new to impress! I think that the “normal” in me was kind of in to the idea of acting like I was in a new city or acting like the girls who go out all the time acting like they don’t already know everybody they see at the same bars every week.

When I need an accomplice, I always call my lovely friend Chloe. She was more than willing to dust off her oatmeal-colored hand-knit floor-length sweater-jacket and facial bronzer for the occasion, and this way she could snap some pics of me while I tried to “work it.”

I started off by getting everything I needed to really immerse myself in this new persona. I took diet pills twice daily, I spent several hours fixing my hair and doing my makeup, I did my at-home aerobics-tape workouts, I whitened my teeth with those strip things, and I filed, plucked, tweezed, polished, smoothed, coated, lathered, lotioned, de-frizzed, and de-tangled. Though I’m not so used to getting up three and a half hours early to get ready to step outside, I will say that the diet pills gave me a massive energy boost, all while completely diminishing my hunger. I even lost seven pounds in one week! Woo-hoo!

So are you ready for my week of being normal? Here we go!

JAIMIE WARREN

This is me pre-normalizing (I dressed up all punk to wait tables).		This is what normal girls wear.
At the spa.

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