No really, it's true. Without a diligent daily hair-removal regimen, I could grow a uni-brow that a Chia pet would envy. It's so bad that, even though I get my eyebrows waxed every five weeks, I still have to pluck them every evening. It goes something like this… I wash my face... brush my teeth... crawl onto the bathroom sink... stare into the mirror... and manically attempt to maintain my mono-brow for ten minutes straight... all the while hearing Rod Serling do Beat poetry in my head, "landscaping your face is a journey *pause/tweeze* to the land of the different *pause/tweeze* the bizarre *pause/tweeze* the unexplainable *pause/tweeze*… a journey that knows no limits.”
And that's where our story begins. In the space between our master bathroom (where I very recently had my first truly psychotic thought) and the salon (where I honestly just learned that men actually get Brazilians), a space, no doubt, eerily reminiscent of the Twilight Zone.
However, before I can tell you that part of the story, I have to tell you this part first.
The other night, as I was reading about electrolysis, I accidentally stumbled across a blog for women who suffer from Hirsutism, a rare condition of extreme hairiness. And, although it was mostly one heart-wrenching post after another about expensive and painful procedures that failed to produce permanent results, some of the stories were simply bizarre… including one about a woman who became so obsessive-compulsive that she took tweezers to work so she could go into the bathroom and pluck all day long. At which point, I found myself thinking, “That woman’s brilliant.”
Now… just for the record, I fully understand that wasn’t the appropriate response. I do. Unfortunately though, it wasn’t even the worst mental note I made. That went something like this, “I’ve been tweezing since I was twenty, and I probably pull five to ten hairs a night, every night. To do the math, that’s three-hundred sixty five (days) times twenty (years) times ten (hairs)… or 73,000 pieces of eye brow that I have removed from my skull.”
And instead of thinking, “Go me! I should have been an Algebra teacher because I rocked that word problem.” I thought, “Imagine if I’d put each one of those hairs into a jar. It’d be the size of an Ewok by now.” At that moment, the world slowed to a pause, and I realized that I was only one traumatic life event away from having become a serial killer. Because, let’s be honest… they’re the ONLY people on this planet who think about storing hair in jars. But… that’s still not the worst part. This is… I actually wondered, “If I HAD a jar of hair, to whom would I bequeath it when I died and what would the note say?”
The list of possibilities was long but distinguished.
Later, when I was at the salon, telling my stylist about it, we agreed that it was a slightly fucked up thought but definitely agreed that the world was an unkind place. Men… men can get blue boner pills for things that damage their self-esteem, but women… we just have to deal with waxing and tweezing. Minus Xanax, there is no magic pill for our problems. And that’s when it happened. A man began screaming at the top of his lungs. Every woman in every chair in that salon immediately stopped what she was doing and looked at each other wondering, “What the hell was that?” Until my stylist, whom I adore said, “He’s getting his nuts waxed.”
The universe may be unkind but at least it’s just. Talk to you later.
