2001-02-13 - 3:26pm

Who's Who Cheat Sheet
Who I Read

On the internal soundtrack: "Come as You Are", Nirvana

Well, I did it.

I'm a brave woman. A tough broad.

Warning: Possible TMI ahead. Not-too-graphic general waxing and bikini waxing discussion. People who don't like to think about this sort of thing, skip to the next section where I talk about nails instead.

Good lord. It was okay the first third of the time. After that I started to cringe a little waiting for the rip. By the end, I was a bit wobbly from all the cringing I was doing. I did a full leg, bikini, and pit wax all at once. Maybe that was a bit much.

And the bikini wax was a tad embarrassing, even for someone who's been to nude beaches. After all, at a nude beach, everybody's naked, not just me, which makes you forget you're naked after a while. You get nice and mellow and natural and happy and just have occasional flashes of insight: "Hey! Everybody's naked!" But I digress.

I thought I was going to be able to be covered up for the bikini wax, and she'd work around the edges, but no. Full exposure, baby. I tried to think of it like a gyno visit. I was quite impressed with her ability to work in a small space without bumping into any places people really don't want bumped by a stranger. It was all very clinical, really.

I am now the proud owner (wearee?) of a "landing strip", although that isn't exactly what I wanted. I requested a vee, and technically it is, but it's an awfully narrow one.

Overall, I have to say it was worth it. Waxing only hurts for a few seconds at a time, and it's the anticipation that makes it worse, I think. And now I am smoother than I've ever been and I don't have to waste 15 minutes a day carefully shaving and trying not to nick myself and irritating the hell out of my skin. Now that's a vacation.

Last night every single invaded, traumatized hair follicle was red, but today I just look like I shaved last night. Few irritated areas here and there. This is going to be GREAT.

Yet, oddly, some small part of me feels like Samson after Delilah cut his hair. I have nothing to scare men with anymore.

So, what else? I'm all packed. I am bringing lots of blue and violet-blue items of clothing to match my violet-blue nails that my waxer talked me into getting. Half-manicure and half-pedicure, I got.

I didn't need a lot of persuading, though. Vacation makes me girly. The fact is, I would spend more time primping if I didn't have to go to work. Since my free time is limited, though, I don't want to spend it on primping, which is why I look a fright most of the time. Let's face it, long hair with layers in it just looks messy if you just let it air dry. But when the choice is nice hair or more time for reading, guess which one I pick?

I requested that she only do a half-manicure, half-pedicure because I was anxious to get home and didn't want to do all that fussing with scrubbing the feet, dealing with cuticles, etc. I can't really bring myself to care much about my cuticles. I wonder if it bothers salon folks, though, when you don't want to do that. Like, are they grossed out by your messy cuticles? I guess they can't be too grossed out, though, if they can stand to look at and touch feet all day.

All, right, my weekend.

As I mentioned earlier, I saw Amy. I hadn't seen her in a long time. She's one of those people, though, where time doesn't matter much -- it was as though I just saw her yesterday. We discussed this a bit over breakfast, wondering what it is. I'd imagine it has to do with something inside ourselves as opposed to an outside interest. We're fundamentally alike in a way I can't put a name to (part of it is a certain openness). Plus we're both a little crazy. That helps. I do know I've always been able to be 100% myself around her, as opposed to how I have to hide some of myself from other people because they'll just think it's weird or not "get" it.

My grandfather. He seems to be VERY happy with his new digs. He's happy to be managing his affairs again, happy to be getting home-cooked meals, happy to have people to socialize with, happy to have his own place. He's more himself than I've seen him in ages. His medication is working well, too, so he's comfortable. He's only waking up once a night now. I'm just SO GLAD he's feeling so good.

The way I can really tell he's feeling good? He started a debate with me. He and I used to do this a lot -- Mom's mom liked to listen in and referred to it as "exchanging your differences of opinion". He plays devil's advocate, I think -- says things just to see what I'll say in return, not so much because he disagrees.

One particularly famous debate involved something about men versus women, in which he argued that women tempted and tortured men with their "facades", as he called it. He spoke seriously but his eyes were twinkling the whole time.

This weekend's debate came up when my dad was whining about my lack of desire to present him with grandchildren. Pop-Pop said, "You don't want to have children?" I said, "Well, right now I don't have a desire to, but I won't rule it out completely yet." So he said, much to my surprise:

"Don't you think the world is a terrible place to bring a child into? Isn't the environment getting worse? Aren't we going to run out of water and food?"

(Oddly enough, he didn't talk about moral decline, which worries me a little more. Innocent childhood doesn't last very long these days.)

I said that I didn't think we were going to run out of water or wreck the environment, that I had every faith in human beings to find ways to solve these problems. Necessity being the mother of invention and all that. I pointed out how nasty the air used to be when coal was the primary source of fuel -- used to make everything in the immediate vicinity turn black -- compared to the relatively mild problems of today. I mentioned the dire predictions that the world would become overrun with horse manure, back before the automobile was invented, plus the "global cooling" panic at the first Earth Day.

He laughed and said, "Well, if I'm going to get into these discussions with you, I'm going to have to do my homework!"

Unfortunately, this happened just as he was about to leave. I'm planning on going up there again in March, so maybe he'll bring up a topic then. We shall see.

All right, I'm off. I'm bringing my laptop on vacation with me (what's a vacation if I can't read online journals and my conservative columnists?) and might update. We shall see. Otherwise, see you in a week!

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