Tell me I'm pretty

One of my friends used to say it jokingly. "Tell me I'm pretty," she'd say, either imploringly or while striking a ridiculous pose, when she was having a bad day or feeling silly and wearing an outrageous outfit or just feeling unloved. I've adopted the line as my own. I used the same line on the administrative assistant when I was a social worker having a bad day. When I'm feeling particularly lost, helpless, stupid, or vulnerable, that's what I think to myself. It doesn't work so well with the law school crowd. One of the essential circumstances of the "tell me I'm pretty" line is having the correct response, which is something equally silly like drawling, "You are a pretty pretty princess" or prancing around the room with the utteror of the statement.

I emailed my boss from this past summer in regards to my fellowship, since the proposal is based on my summer job, and I also need her to write me a letter of nomination. I asked her whether she thought I should continue to go forward with this. I wrote her sometime last week, when I was feeling particularly helpless and rejected. I got an email back from her today that was exactly what I needed to hear - why the project is useful, I should totally do it, she'd be glad to write the letter, and she also raved and raved about me to the other job. I was so happy to get her email and I could so accurately picture her very boisterous throaty voice and Irish-American energy emanating from the email that I started to get all teary. It's one of those things where you feel like you just want to cry to your mom, except you know your mom always pisses you off, so crying to a maternal supervisory figure is so much better?

Tell me I'm pretty.

As an aside, this post from This Fish Needs a Bicycle got me particularly choked up. She hit it, dead on.