May 19
I am not what you'd call a girly girl. About 5 years ago, I'd get my nails done because I bit them, and Tina, my sister in law, thought it was a great idea that she have company while she was getting hers done. It was a great idea in theory--pain for beauty. They'd (I assume you all know that by the "getting my nails done" and the "they" I mean that I'm going to a nail place. Every town has at least 20. They are mostly the same.) and scuff off the top layer of my painfully short nails with a gritty nail file. The whole thing ended up being about as painful as you'd expect if you were having your nails scraped and glued and giant acrylic nails adhered to your very tender natural nails.
My problem wasn't so much making it through the whole (endless) ordeal, but not fucking with the new nails afterwards. For whatever reason, maybe it was the unnatural curve of the plastic so tightly glued to my real nails that they wound up aching for days. To make this part of the story shorter, I stopped biting my nails in about 1998, and I never started again. I leave them alone, and they grow. It's really quite miraculous.
I never screwed around with, or paid attention to, my eyebrows. I mean, I notice if someone has a unibrow, or if I get a hair growing on, say my eyelid, and I tweeze. That was it. I didn't pluck. I didn't groom. I didn't think about eyebrows. I have no idea what changed, but about a year ago, I started noticing my eyebrows, and I realized that I didn't much like what I saw. This started a relationship between my tweezer (there are two tweezers in my posession, and I have no idea where either of them came from. I don't recall ever buying one, until very very recently. Seperate story) and I, and those hot wax strips. I fucked with my brows constantly, and I couldn't exactly say why. Clearly, I had (heh, have) no idea what I'm doing, I am brow impaired and saw that intervention was necessary. I put the tweezer down and stepped away.
This weekend, after years of coersion, I went with Nicole to have a manicure and pedicure. The manicure was not a big deal, I've had one since I stopped biting. The experience was a little tragic (I wrote about it, but am not going to go through my horrible archives. It was the time I went to the spa, and my car overheated on the way there, and it was about 367 degrees outside, and they made me wear a skin tight plastic bathing suit in the hydrabath. Ugh. Thinking about it gives me the shivers), and if it taught me anything it would be that I'm not great at being pampered, so the whole idea of having a pedicure also kind of gives me the shivers.
For years I've held out, insisting that forcing someone to touch my feet would make me feel like a pimp. I have no idea what made me change my mind--it seemed like a fine idea, we wanted something to do this weekend that wasn't going to the casino, whatever. The story, surprisingly, isn't so much about the pedicure (which I tweaked about so badly Nicole had to tell me to stop talking. Folks, I was freaking out. A person! SCRUBBING MY FEET AND MESSING WITH MY TOENAILS!!! There was a pedicure CHAIR with bubbling water.)
Anyhow, the pedicure was very much not a big deal, except in a stranger is cutting my toenails kind of way. The manicure, other than choosing a color I'm not in love with, was nothing. It got funny when I told the guy (it was A GUY touching my feet and painting my nails!! A GUY!!!) I wanted to have my eyebrows waxed. He nodded, led me into a room and closed the door. An absolutely evil looking woman looked at me skeptically, not speaking, indicating that I should hop up on the table. I am not ashamed to admit that I hesitated, wondering what other, not so, um, public places people had had waxed right there where I was about to lay my head, but I pushed the thought away and hopped right up.
She slathered up my brows with hot wax and pulled. That wasn't so bad. As she stared down at me she said three words I don't think I've ever heard in my life. Gentle reader, the words were:
"You have moustache!"
I was aghast, and said, quickly, "Well, Jesus, GET RID OF IT!!!"
She clucked dissaprovingly of my brows ("Why you did this to brows?? Too short!!") and smeared wax on half of my upper lip. When she ripped the cloth off, I do believe my heart may have stopped for just a moment. I don't have the pain of childbirth to compare it to. I haven't ever had a bikini wax (fyi: did you know that when you get a Brazilian, they WAX YOUR ANUS?? I'll let that percolate in your minds, while I continue the story) but I imagine that this pain is a close runnerup to how horrible that would have to be. My eyes teared. I kind of screeched. The woman (who'd introduced herself to me as Grace, oh, sweet irony!) just laughed and showed me the cloth. "Look! Too much hair!! VERY hairy!".
I was so stunned by her showing me the removed hair, that I didn't quite register the second time she did it, until right afterwards. Surely, that was a sadistic thing to do. Why show me the hair? I lay there, weeping involuntarily, waiting for her to release me, and when she finally did, and I saw myself in a mirror, my face was an angry red, but I had no trace of the moustache I didn't really know that I had to begin with. I am not a hairy person. Really, I'm not. I don't get weird stray hairs on my chin or cheeks. I don't have hairy arms or fingers, and yet, for my moustache, my upper lip has been numb for TWO DAYS. Two days.
Waxing is HORRIBLE. Consider yourselves warned.
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