There was this awful game that some girls and I used to play on the school bus back in elementary school. We would congregate in a circle, sitting on the tops of the duct-taped seats (real safe), and pick on a girl to stand in the aisle, in the middle of everyone – this girl was “The Chooser." All of the others would close their eyes and someone would randomly shout out a category in a shrill, drill sergeant manner: “best...HAIR!” The Chooser, after careful deliberation, would tap the girl whom she thought had the best HAIR and then we’d all open our eyes after a few seconds. The girl awarded “best HAIR” would say something like, “it was ME, GUYS!” running a hand through her glossy locks to make it known, and everyone would chime in with quiet words of agreement.
Now, obviously this was a highly flawed game, as one could lie if they were tapped, the same girl could keep winning all of the superlatives if she was friends with The Chooser or the people coming up with the categories could tailor them to their personal best assets. But it was a game all the same: competitive as shit, developed carefully by seven-year-old Long Island girls with serious prepubescent Mean Girls complexes. All I know is that no matter how many categories there were, the one that still resonates with me the most is “best...NOSE!”
Now, what made the best NOSE was a mystery to me at the time, because it wasn’t like a NOSE could have a unique and pretty color like HAIR, or accessory parts like long lashes on EYES. A NOSE was a NOSE. Little did I know that even at age seven, the girls of Bus 24 had been trained by a complicated mix of their mothers’ vanity and the ever-present media that a perfect nose was tiny, button-like and had no qualities that made it stick out (figuratively and literally) in comparison to other, more important facial features. These girls were allowed to watch Doctor 90210. All of their moms had gotten nose jobs back in the late '80s to fix the über-common J(ewish) A(merican) P(rincess) bump, à la Rachel Green.
I never got best NOSE. I started putting two and two together. My NOSE was not the typical kind that could get easily straightened out into model condition via surgery for a deviated septum that wasn’t in the slightest bit deviated. My nose was, as some racist and terrible bus girls told me, “like a black person’s, except you’re not black, so that’s weird for you,” and that, “if you got surgery, it would look like Michael Jackson!”
After that comment, I was plagued with nightmares of my real nose falling off and getting a replacement one identical to MJ that kind of stuck on like a magnet. I never understood what made a nose “black” or “Jewish” (or any other sort of denomination in this vast and diverse world), but I fully comprehended what “best NOSE” looked like: not mine.
And so I told my mom at age seven that I was probably going to need a nose job when I grew up, but that she had to promise me that she would tell the doctors to not make it into a Michael Jackson nose. My mom, one of those Rachel Green cases, could not say no; she didn’t want to act like a giant hypocrite, but she didn’t want to enable my plastic surgery fantasy either. She promised me that if I still felt the same way when I was 18, I could get it done.
People usually grow into their faces in high school, and I think I finally did around ninth grade. Suddenly, my face full of large features finally balanced out: long, paisley-shaped hazel eyes (with dark limbal rings that are scientifically more aesthetically pleasing, so that’s cool!), bold, dark brows, fairly-large teeth (covered by large lips) and a more-prominent-than-average chin. My nose is still wide and kind of big, but it would look absolutely ridiculous if it was any other nose in the universe. It is a nose that belongs to a white Jewish girl from Long Island, but it is not a white Jewish nose. It’s just Amanda’s nose, and I dare someone to tell me otherwise. Don’t label the noses – we have too many labels in this world as it is.
Fast forward to age 18. I became fixated on piercing my nose because I liked the way it might look; it would highlight the asset that I used to hate. It would be like...empowerment. Jordin Sparks looked cute with one, so did Joss Stone and Kelly Clarkson. These chicks demanded attention and still managed to stay classy while rocking the glittery, almost invisible ring/stud that only sometimes caught the light depending on the angle of their head tilt. My parents told me that I would never be taken seriously in job interviews. I wrote to the NY Times Social Qs column and asked for writer Philip Galanes’ opinion. He said that he found them disgusting. I found out that my would-be college roommate wore a silver hoop through her left nostril, and I told myself that I could not be one half of the nose ring room. I never got pierced.
I am 19 and finally realize that there is no best NOSE, nor is there anything generally wrong or right about altering what your parents’ lucky combo of DNA gave you – it’s all situational and should be mulled over and reflected upon before any major changes are made. Still, I sometimes experience momentary washes of elementary school-level insecurity and have to force myself to look at the bigger picture: You’re not a freak, you’re a confident woman with a normal face and normal proportions. People have liked this face before, they’ll like it again and everything is going to be okay so chill out and stop tearing yourself apart for no reason.
I’d like to think that if you got those bitches and me back together in that godforsaken circle, I’d win “best...SELF-CONCEPT/RELIANCE/IMAGE/ESTEEM,” which I’d accept graciously and exit the bus while giving them two of my best...MIDDLE FINGERS.