Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Some days, gender literally hurts. It's not that I want to be a man, physically or culturally. It's that there's something wrong with there being a gender whose members consider it entirely proper to pluck each others' facial hair out, because they aren't supposed to have any in the first place. Yes, I knew, abstractly, that this happened--but that's different from having my friendly, competent hairstylist convince me to let her assistant do this to my face. Denise--that's the hairstylist--after doing a good job on my hair, sold me on this process, something called "threading", claiming that it would look good for job interview, and that it wouldn't hurt much or take long. One out of three, I hope. It took a lot more than ten minutes, and hurt quite a bit more than I expected.

Once I agreed to try this, Marina-who-removes-hair wanted to do my eyebrows, too. I said no: "I like my eyebrows. They're good eyebrows." (If there's one good thing about this, it's that I've realized, consciously, that I like my eyebrows, and not just for cattitude to nibble on while talking about anchovies.) "Threading", in case anyone offers to do it to you, involves looping thread around hairs and yanking them out, sort of a wholesale version of tweezing. After doing this for quite some time, Marina admitted that it wasn't succeeding, and suggested using wax and then thread to get any remaining bits: she could see how much I was in pain, and it was bothering her. I wasn't up to arguing. The wax, indeed, hurt less than the thread had--the selling point of the process, in the first place, had been that it wouldn't hurt as much as waxing. And both Denise and Marina were surprised when, told that, I said I'd never had my hair waxed. Okay, now I have. If this is some kind of rite of passage, please give me my certificate so I don't have to do it over. Ever.

So I got through that, and I think Marina expects me to have her do it again: as I was wincing and demanding breaks every minute or less, she kept urging me not to shave, because, she said, the hair will come in thicker and be harder to pull out. This is, frankly, about as relevant to my life as the current list of pretenders to the French throne. Last time I was in there, she tried to sell me threading on the grounds that shaving was a male thing. Gender. Feh. As far as I can tell, the common factor in "feminine" methods of hair removal is that they hurt even when done right.

Also, my face was red and tender for a couple of hours afterward: there's not much point in having soft smooth skin if being touched on it hurts. Even after it was otherwise improved, yawning was painful.

I soothed my spirit, if not my skin, with duck and sweet ginger at Excellent Dumpling, then came home and Cattitude provided tea and sympathy.

It's almost six hours later, and my chin still hurts just sitting here at the computer, typing and drinking tea, not even touching it.

Oh, before all that, I went to the gym.
( gym numbers )