larkandkatydid:

In my great-grandfather’s spy memoir we found this summer,
he talks at length about how he was able, at the age of 30, to infiltrate the
communist party by pretending to be an at-risk homeless teenager (yes,
literally a “hello fellow commie teens!” move). He also explains, in great detail,
how he was able to do this because he had an unusually youthful, round and
baby-ish face….a face which has been passed down through the generations to me.   (There’s also a long, long paragraph where he’s trying to explain to his intended audience and also to himself the overall concept of empathy as if it’s this strange foreign belief system.)

But that means that now, in our family, we justify all our
skincare and make-up purchases by claiming they support our spy work, “How will
I ever infiltrate the communist party without this $15 bottle of snail serum?”,
or, approvingly after applying make-up, “I look ready to infiltrate the communist
party!”

Or, specifically, in the context of a text I just got from
my mother that said only, “I have to stop at ulta on the way home or I’ll lose
my chance to infiltrate the communists”