April 2nd, 1993
Tomorrow my transfer application to Columbia will be out of my hands and the waiting game will begin. I spent all weekend working my “personal experience that shaped [my] life” essay. It’s reeeeeeeeeal deep:
When I was in third grade I wore a giant elastic band around my head for a week. The cure for my sticky-out ears was not only ineffective, but pressed a purplish-red equator of a migraine into my forehead. Four years later, SUN-IN turned my hair the color of an overripe squash. And when I was a freshman in high school, I put a dab of Wite-Out on my clear braces to conceal a chunk of carrot wedged between the wires. It cost six months of babysitting money to remove the resulting stalactite.
I should have remembered these cosmetic calamities this summer when a manicured and heavily made-up coworker advised me to “avoid natural light” at all costs. After scrutinizing my face with squinty-eyed intensity, she gave me the nitty-gritty truth: I had a mustache. Paranoia sprinted past reason. Suddenly I could feel the abormal amounts of upper lip hair with my fingertips, each folicle growing longer and thicker with every second that ticked by. None too excited about a noctural existence, I asked her how I could remedy this suddently dire facial situation. She recommended that I get my lip waxed at the same salon that removed her own unsightly hair at three-week intervals. She didn’t look like a woman who needed her lip waxed and I told her so. I received a well-deserved “NO DUUUHHHH” before deciding to take her advice. I would be hair-free forever…or for three weeks at least.
When I got home that night, I examined my face in the mirror, wondering why it took 19 years to have this problem pointed out to me. Why had I been oblivious to something so obvious in the bright bathroom light? It didnt occur to me at the time that bathroom lighting, in addition to making the average tan look like a summer spent in Jamaica, makes even the faintest down look downright beastly when one’s face is a half-inch away from the magnified cosmetic mirror. Alas, I made my appointment for the very next day.
If a salon technician tells you that any process involving bubble-hot wax and the tender flesh of your face is painless SHE IS LYING TO YOU. Because a day after her handiwork, a thick, crusty scab formed a perfectly unattractive crescent above my mouth. From a distance, I had Fu Manchu my prepubescent brother would envy. Up close, the scab resembled the chocolate-mouth mess of a little kikd overanxious to eat a frosted cupcake. I contemplated suing the lip-ripping girl. Ultimately, I took comfort in the knowledge that she’d get a karmic comeuppance. Wasn’t a lifetime of octogenarian hair-perming punishment enough?
After two weeks of jokes about my bizarre strain of sexually-transmitted leoprosy (ha ha), my cosmetology injury went away. Fortunately, I escaped this scabby mess without any physical or emotional scars. I know I can never let my vanity and stupidity careen together again. The risk for future deformity is too great.
