Hair Apparent

Hair is one of those classic grass-is-greener things. If you have curly hair, you want straight. If you've got straight, you want curly. If you're a blonde, you want to be a brunette, and vice-versa. But one thing no one wants is thick, black hair sprouting from every pore of their body. Especially if that person is an American woman. My ethnic roots are in the great hair belt of Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. My friends of Nordic descent sometimes suggest that I'm a bit repressed and backward for caring and complaining so much about hair. Easy for them to say! A pair of chinchillas doesn't magically appear under their armpits after ten days without a razor. If it weren't for my "Trichotillomania Kit" ("T.K." for short and pictured below), I could easily be mistaken for the Bride of Sasquatch or the missing link between apes and early humans sought by evolutionary biologists at Oxford. 

T.K. is my constant companion, but perhaps its moniker is unfair. After all, according to the omniscient Wikipedia, Trichotillomania is "an impulse disorder characterized by the compulsive urge to pull out one's hair, leading to noticeable hair loss and balding, distress, and social or functional impairment." I certainly don't wish to diminish the legitimate suffering caused by this disorder. But while I do have a compulsive urge to pull out my hair, any social or functional impairment and distress would actually result from my NOT pulling it out. For Halloween comes but once a year, and "Frida Kahlo" is a very obscure and cerebral costume. Also, the hair loss is noticeable only to me, because T.K. removes hair that no one wants or expects to see anywhere on a human being, ever. 

I've been told I have "good eyebrow game" (pictured below), and I take this as a compliment. But good eyebrow game takes practice. And in my case, practice consists of poking my face really hard with a sharp object several times a day: at work while on a phone call; in the car while in the passenger seat; in the car while in the driver's seat stopped at a red light; sitting in a chair under a lamp with baseball on TV in the background; and in the bathroom mirror while watching my kids in the bathtub behind me. Fortunately, every one of these scenarios usually provides many, MANY collateral reasons for poking my face really hard with a sharp object. So I'm kind of killing two birds with one stone here. It's very efficient when you think about it, and I'm grateful that my simian genes have given me an unexpected route to multitasking.