Stankface: Is It Really Worth It?
Written By Taylor Tash
There’s a vicious epidemic running rampant throughout young urban populations. It is an equal-opportunity affliction, and knows no boundaries of race, gender, or sexuality. First starting to rear its terrifying head amongst retail workers and receptionists, it is growing. It has spread from financial cubicle inmates to out-of-work actors waiting tables, and it’s casting a storm cloud of pissiness over every American urban center. This plague has no known scientific label as of the writing of this article, but colloquially we refer to it as stankface.
Symptoms of stankface may include flared nostrils, tightened lips, and an overall vibe of unpleasantness that radiates pure negative energy. The causes of stankface are hard to pin down, however. Are these cases more likely to show signs because they were popular in high school, even though what little frenemies they have remaining probably secretly despise them due to their pervasive sense of pomposity? After all these years, have they been unable to shake the teen princess persona although they’re almost in their thirties? Perhaps their perceptions of themselves are far greater than how we see them, and we deserve nothing but their unmitigated contempt because we are simply too stupid to realize that one day they’re going to be the next celebutante. I should’ve asked the example I had a run-in with earlier last week where the roots of her stankface lie. I hope she is reading this, because I would like to take a quick aside to say this to her: I’m sorry, Madame, that my bag accidentally grazed your leg while we were being jerked around in an overcrowded subway car. I really appreciated the opportunity to see your interpretation of the stankface, and it went really well with your blouse.
A sufferer’s biggest problem is that they never realize that stankface is completely ineffectual. They flash it at people, believing it to create a sense of empowerment and dominance, but it ultimately brings nothing but alienation from everyone else. Let’s imagine a situation in which two hardworking parents suddenly become fed up with their adult child’s stankface. To punish them for disfiguring their once-adorable mug with their perpetual snooty grimace, these hypothetical parents stop paying their hypothetical son or daughter’s rent. This stankface-sufferer suddenly can’t afford his or her four-thousand-dollar-a-month apartment with the twenty-five-grand-a-year salary they make ringing up customers at American Apparel or answering phones, and can’t find a better-paying job due to their apparent inability to turn the stankface off. This individual is too self-obsessed to analyze the situation objectively enough to find a way out of this financial rut and eventually he or she has to move back home to the suburbs, where they will spend the rest of their lives in miserable isolation. This will happen all because whenever they went out in public, they made it quite evident that they were absolutely disgusted by the mere concept of being around other human beings.
Will there one day be a cure for stankface? Only time will tell, but hopefully future generations will learn from our mistakes and realize that our self-importance got us nowhere. To the enlightened it sounds obvious, but life is a lot more bearable if you stop taking yourself so goddamned seriously. Don’t look so offended just because the confused German tourist is asking you how to read the map or that the new hire simply wants to make friendly conversation. We’re all in this together and I promise you it makes everyone so much better off if you would just try to be a little bit more humble.
No matter what you may one day achieve, it’s never going to warrant such a frosty disposition. Even if you do somehow gain some kind of success in spite of your total deplorableness, it probably won’t last very long because people simply don’t enjoy being around delusional assholes. Whether you like it or not, it’s the ‘little’ people buying your products or supporting your ideas who ultimately decide for how long you’re going to be around. So trade in that stankface for a smile every so often, and if that’s too much to ask for, then simple impassive indifference towards petty or nonexistent problems would work just as well. And best of all, it might actually make you feel a little bit better, and judging by that stankface, that’s all you really care about anyway.
