Quality of Life

July 12, 2010

If I could do one single thing to drastically increase the quality of my life--you know, besides something completely obvious, like earning $20,000 every time I log onto facebook--I swear I'd do something about this facial hair.

I don't know what it is about being almost thirty, but now that I'm almost there, I almost have a beard, and I almost have a mustache, and I almost looked kind of trendy last week--but, as the story goes, I haven't quite arrived in any of those arenas.

There's something about the combination of dark hair on my upper lip and small town living that's absolutely killing me. Get a load of this...

On Saturday afternoon, James and I drove to the library to return a few books. Because I'm an awesome mother who allows my child to have an appropriate amount of independence under safe circumstances (or a lazy ass mother who refuses to unbuckle the nine-month-old baby from her carseat three million times a day--depends on how you look at it), I let James go into the library to return his books all by himself.

As he ran up the front steps of the building, I flipped down my driver's side sun visor and was appalled, APPALLED, to find not one, but THREE black hairs growing right out of my chin. Without hesitation, I whipped open the center console, grabbed my emergency tweezers (tell me I'm not the only one), and started plucking those suckers one by one.

When I finished that job I glanced up at my eyebrows, and let me tell you, they were just about connected to my hairline. Remember when you were in seventh grade, and the boys in your class insisted that you could kill someone by punching them square in the squishy temple part of their head? Well I had eyebrows sprouting up all over that death trap part of my face! So I plucked those, too.

Then, I swallowed hard, clenched my teeth, and worked up the courage to inspect my upper lip. And much to my horror, it was just as bad, if not worse than it was two weeks ago when I nearly lost half of my face to an unfortunate run in with a tube of Veet.

So I did what I had to do, and I started plucking my lip hairs, too. By this point I really didn't think about the location of my son. So what if it was taking him fourteen minutes to move three yards to return a stack of books in a slot!? So what if he was gnawing the Assistant Librarian's ear about action figures and ninjas!? So what if he'd asked some unsuspecting mother to wipe his nose?! Lip plucking hurts like an absolute bear, and I was in the zone.

It was going something like this:

{pluck} Shiz. {pluck} SUPER SHIZ. {pluck} OWWWW!!!! {pluck} Smite me with locusts, just spare me from the friggin' lip hair!

And then the blood kicked in. You know, just a teeny little, microscopic drop for every hair I'd uprooted--but when you have three thousand of 'em, the blood starts to take on a certain intensity.

So there I was, plucking, swearing, plucking, swearing, when I was suddenly disturbed by a tap on my driver's side window. Startled, I quickly looked to the left--tweezers in hand, upper lips spotted with blood--and saw....wait for it....my neighbor.

You know, the one with the perfect garden. Who gave me the number to his lawn service on a post-it note. The one who told me that my weeds might actually be kind of pretty if I ever decided to mow them.

Yup, him.

So I rolled down the window, smiled, and said, "Hi George."

And he said, "Hi Amy. Just thought I'd let you know, that if you water your tomato plant, it won't be so brown."

I thanked him, and that was just about the moment James came flying out of the library, crashed into the rear driver's side doo, looked up at my neighbor and said, "Who tooted? Wasn't me."

This town gets smaller and smaller, every single day.