There are a lot of things I'd like to write about Rexburg, and I'm going to start with Rexburg's concept of beauty. After living here for about three weeks, I've got a pretty good idea of what men and women in Idaho consider beautiful.
The ideal look involves electrocuting yourself and rubbing Flaming Hot Cheetos dust all over your skin while in a state of impregnation. This may seem like the beauty advice of a clinically insane person, but how insane is something if every single person within a 200 mile radius is doing it? I never had much of an inclination to pretend to talk to my spoon as if it were a cell phone, but if all my neighbors were carrying spoons and talking into them all the time, and the people at the grocery store were doing it, and the librarians were doing it, and the police officers were doing it, and parents were giving spoons to kids and telling them to do it... I mean, I'd eventually give in and start doing it myself, right? If girls walked around holding spoons in both hands while their thumbs rapidly moved up and down them in a texting motion, it wouldn't seem so weird any more. Right?
No.
Talking into a spoon would never appear or feel normal to a right-thinking person. This is because pretending a spoon is a cell phone is an insane thing to do. This woman, to anyone born outside of this place, would appear to have the look of someone who was probably born with fetal alcohol syndrome and taken advantage of all her life. If she was alone, I would have assumed just that. But no, this woman represents the vast majority of women who live around here. And you may be saying to yourself, "Sure, sure, but that's just a cartoon exaggeration of a human being. Surely no one looks like that." Oh, how I wish that were true. And yet, there are thousands like her, all of them orange, all of them pregnant, all of them with hair sticking out nearly on end.
The appearance of the women here is probably the most foreign part of the whole experience so far. I have no idea where this look came from. I've never seen anything like it on TV, not even on CMT. It's as if it's a completely native Idaho look. It's as if someone took a bunch of girls and placed them on a deserted island in the South Pacific. The only reading material they had at their disposal was an issue of Country Home Living from 1978, and they formed their entire civilization and culture around the women from this one issue. As hundreds of years and generations passed, the styles became more and more exaggerated as they tried to out-do each other on the crazy, eventually evolving into the orange pseudo-humans we see now.
The funny thing is that I had a student a couple of years ago (let's call her Jessica) who had just moved to Montana from Idaho. She was your typical teenage snotty little brat-girl. I could tell she had been considered popular in her former school. She had that air of confidence and stupidity about her that cheerleaders and other popular sluts often have. She made friends quickly in the new school because of this and because she wore expensive clothes, and there was no denying that she was fit and "attractive." I put attractive in quotes because she was only attractive in that Idaho way. The orange-tan skin, the big poofy country hair with skunk streaks, the raccoon eyes, etc.
I remember a time when the kids were talking about her in class.
"Who's Jessica?"
"She just moved here. You sit next to her in biology!"
"I don't know who you're talking about."
"You know, the girl who got in trouble for texting?"
"Oh! The one with the crazy hair?"
"Yeah!"
At that, all the kids started chiming in. One of them even asked me, "Mr. L, why does that girl do her hair like that? She looks crazy."
I tried to explain cultural differences. The thing was, Jessica thought her hair was the epitome of stylishness and beauty. You could tell she took great pride in making it bigger and bigger. Her makeup, too. It was visibly caked on to at least a millimeter off her face.
I thought it was precious how all these teenagers found her hair freakishly huge. They were so young and innocent! It reminded me of the fable of the Emperor's New Clothes. These kids were still young enough to tell it like it is: your hair looks insane.
This place is just different, though. Everyone goes around like it's a contest to see how impractical and the most like the hide of a rabid animal their hair can get without anyone saying a word about it. I carry a notepad around at all times just to sketch pictures of some of the hairstyles, like a birdwatcher eagerly drawing the most exotic of plumage. I'll post more as I find them.
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