Monday, March 18, 2013

Hairy Scary

Don't you always shave with your hands like this?  I totally do.  And then I drop the razor because graceful hands don't really hold anything firmly, and it falls down and slices a gash in my leg and I bleed all over the shower.  Lovely, no?

When I got sick in December, I didn't want to do much of anything.  When I stayed mostly sick for the next six weeks, I really didn't want to do much of anything.  Me and the couch got really close.  I did manage to make sure that the absolutely essential things got taken care of.  No one killed each other, we all ate three meals a day, and health inspectors didn't come to the door.  But everything else was gone-ski.

Including shaving my legs.  Teenaged boys can stop reading now, as well as anyone else who may be body-squeamish.  I wasn't yucky dirty, but when I got up to shower, I just wanted to get in, out, and back to resting as fast as I could.  Shaving doesn't fit in the "quick" category.  Besides, it was in the dead of winter.  I was hanging out in long pants or sweats.  If I wore a skirt, it was with tights and sometimes leggings too.  Who needs to see my pasty white legs during a snowstorm?  For the record, I have a very patient, tolerant husband who loves me and knows that I am more than the sum of my parts.

So the hair grew.  And it grew and it grew.  And it wasn't the end of the world and I didn't lose my femininity and it really wasn't that gross.  And the biggest one:  no one really noticed.  I didn't start out not shaving to accomplish anything.  I wasn't trying to see how long it would grow or how long it would be before I felt like a woolly mammoth.  It just happened because I was too sick to care.

As I started getting better, I started noticing that I could feel drafts - ruffling the fuzz on my legs.  Different.  Not disgusting.  I have always felt breezes in the hair on my arms, or in the hair on my head.  Why would leg hair be different?

I could go on a feminist rant here about why a mature woman's body has to look like a pre-pubescent girl, or why some hair is valued (head, lashes, tamed eyebrows), and some hair is tolerated (fine face fuzz or light arm hair), and some hair is taboo (legs, armpits, anything else dark).  Or I could go all ultra-modest and just cover up anything I didn't want to shave.  Actually, wearing a burqa would save a lot of time getting ready in the morning, wouldn't it?  Wish I had the gorgeous Middle-Eastern eyes to go with it.

I have shaved, and I have to admit that I do like the smooth skin feel.  All ten  minutes of it before it morphs into the prickly stubble feel.  And I like the soft fuzzy feel too.  Not trying to start a revolution, just wanting to do things on purpose, not just because everyone else does, and not sure how I feel about this.

Anyway, having smooth legs must make me more sexy.  The hair removal commercials tell me so.

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