school

I'm a Woman with a Moustache and I Don't Mind

At the great old age of 48 now, I still have the same whiskers on my upper lip which I have lived with since I was about 13 or 14. I have never tried to hurt, maim or kill my moustache. I have left it alone, in a live and let live kind of way.

It helps that my whiskers are sparse. I do have dark hair and the hair on my lip matches the colour of the hair on my head (or most of it now that I’ve got grey mixed in with my dark brown mane).

I live with my facial hair and I don’t mind it. I even have a bit of fondness for the facial hair – It makes me feel connected to other women in my family who have far more facial hair than I ever hope (or want) to have.

I remember the very first day I actually noticed the whiskers myself.

I was in our downstairs bathroom and I had leaned in for a closer look at my face because I had a zit (also known as a pimple). I still like to get rid of those. I squish them then put stuff on them to finish the killing process and decontaminate so they can’t so easily return.

Seeing darker hairs on my upper lip was a surprise. I’m sure they weren’t there before then. I hated them on sight. They were traitors to the young, perfection of my face. That face being one of the few things I actually did like about myself – and still do. Having whiskers was a shock. Only old women were supposed to get those kind of things, women going through menopause or women from hairy families. I had neither. I was about 14 and my ancestry was pretty slanted to the Celtic side.

I called in for reinforcements, my Mother. She looked and then looked closer. She said they were hardly noticeable unless someone was really looking for them.

So I took a step back from the mirror, which wasn’t much considering my face was almost pressed against the glass to start with. It was true! Once I stepped back and wasn’t focused on that area of my face, I really couldn’t notice the whiskers. If I looked, I did see them. But, I had to be looking pretty carefully.

So I wasn’t turning into some weird sort of man-beast after all.

My Uncle has had a full beard and moustache for as long as I can remember. As children we would buy him shaving cream, packages of razors and so on. Children sometimes have such great ideas but not the common sense to see these ideas through. He laughed about our gifts and after being embarrassed once or twice we realized a man with a full beard and moustache isn’t going to need shaving cream. Later I would try after shave, thinking he could use it like cologne. I never did hear either way about that one. Maybe he thought it was a good idea.

Anyway, at that young age myself and having whiskers I did picture myself growing a beard, thick and hairy as I went through puberty and all those changes. I would check my upper lip for changes, new growth, more growth – dreading to see a whisker begin to do so much as curl.

I was lucky in the genetic lottery. I never did get more whiskers, or thicker whiskers. I did have friends who were less lucky.

One young woman I worked with had to shave her face every day. If she skipped a day she had 5 o’clock shadow. From talking to her I know she tried all kinds of methods to get rid of her whiskers. Waxing was painful but seemed to give her an extra day from having to deal with them. She tried several of those gimmicks from TV ads. Some of them burned her skin and made everything worse. Not only did she still have whiskers but her skin was burned and red or even blistered too. I was so glad for my sparse little whiskers then.

We Women Do Get Whiskers

Women in my family have a small tendency towards whiskers, when we get older. My own Mother began plucking her face (not just her eyebrows) once she was in her 40’s. My younger sisters both had whiskers on their upper lip and chin by the time they were in high school. Mine may have started sooner but they were less visible.

When my Great Aunt Alice died one of the saddest things was the full beard she had which no one was there often enough to prevent for her. She was my Grandmother’s sister (on my Mother’s side of the family).

My Grandmother also had stray whiskers on her face, but I never saw her with a lot of them until she was quite a bit older, when I was far past being a kid myself. She was a plucker too. Interesting to note that I have her same pattern of grey hair mostly in the front too. Maybe we share our whiskery ways too and I won’t have to really worry about them until I’m 60 or so too. I miss her – in that way it’s an honour to share her whiskers and grey hair. I do think about her nearly every time I look at my face in the mirror.

But… I do Like Being Contrary

Having written all that, a funny thing happened when I turned 40-something and began to get whiskers on my chin – I began plucking them, pretty mercilessly, with tweezers. I’m far from being a bearded lady. I only notice one a week and I do pluck them as soon as I feel them.

The only difference with the moustache and the chin whiskers was my age. I did not like the hair on my chin making me feel old when I actually was past the age of high school and beyond. Nature’s little digs about our age are much easier to take when we aren’t old yet.

Moustache Growing Month: Movember

As We Become the Older Generation…

If you are 30, or older, you might think this is hilarious!

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning…. Uphill…. Barefoot… BOTH ways…yadda, yadda, yadda

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they’ve got it!

But now that I’m over the ripe old age of thirty, I can’t help but look around and notice the youth of today. You’ve got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia! And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don’t know how good you’ve got it!

1) I mean, when I was a kid we didn’t have the Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!!

2) There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter – with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox, and it would take like a week to get there! Stamps were 10 cents!

3) Child Protective Services didn’t care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our ass! Nowhere was safe!

4) There were no MP3’s or Napsters or iTunes! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yourself!

5) Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio, and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up! There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car. We’d play our favorite tape and “eject” it when finished, and then the tape would come undone rendering it useless. Cause, hey, that’s how we rolled, Baby! Dig?

6) We didn’t have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal, that’s it!

7) There weren’t any freakin’ cell phones either. If you left the house, you just didn’t make a damn call or receive one. You actually had to be out of touch with your “friends”. OH MY GOSH !!! Think of the horror… not being in touch with someone 24/7!!! And then there’s TEXTING. Yeah, right. Please! You kids have no idea how annoying you are.

8) And we didn’t have fancy Caller ID either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your parents, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, the collection agent…. you just didn’t know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

9) We didn’t have any fancy PlayStation or Xbox video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like ‘Space Invaders’ and ‘Asteroids’… Your screen guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!!! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen.. Forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!

10) You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel!!! NO REMOTES!!! Oh, no, what’s the world coming to?!?!

11) There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I’m saying? We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little rat-bastards!

12) And we didn’t have microwaves. If we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove! Imagine that!

13) And our parents told us to stay outside and play… all day long. Oh, no, no electronics to soothe and comfort. And if you came back inside… you were doing chores!

And car seats – oh, please! Mom threw you in the back seat and you hung on. If you were lucky, you got the “safety arm” across the chest at the last moment if she had to stop suddenly, and if your head hit the dashboard, well that was your fault for calling “shot gun” in the first place!

See! That’s exactly what I’m talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You’re spoiled rotten! You guys wouldn’t have lasted five minutes back in 1970 or any time before!

Regards,

The Over 30 Crowd

via (34) If you are 30, or… .

About Writing

Sometimes it comes easy, usually those are the times when you have a lot to say and can hardly keep up with yourself. It’s good to have nimble fingers. I don’t know how the one fingered typists do it!

Other times it is an exercise in patience when you have interruptions and have to keep yourself getting back to it no matter how far away it gets as the day and the interruptions go on.

Other times, not so often, I just feel there is nothing I have to say, nothing I want to say and the world is a nasty, dark and horrible place. Why should I talk to anyone? Why should I even let them know a bit of me just so they can knock me on my butt again, nasty bugger that they are. Those days I give myself the day off, or I write it all down, DAMN THE LOT OF THEM!

Originally posted as a comment in Ken’s blog . Sometimes I want to remember what I wrote, sometimes it helps keep me grounded in an odd way.

I tried acting when I was a kid. The school wanted me to do it. So my Mother had me join an acting group for kids. We put on a play about fish and a pricness and so on. I might still have the script. I did get a fairly big part. I did manage to do it all and didn’t forget what I was supposed to say. But, I’m not a natural performer in person. I have trained myself not to say “ummm” and other stalling things people do in speech. But, I perform much better on paper, in every way. I like the mystery of making the words up as I go along. I also like having the control of being the only one speaking. People who interrupt when I am talking make me want to do bad things.

I’d forgotten about that old thing, the few months of that acting group. Funny how your life can have so much in it when you look back at where you have been. Maybe I just don’t look back enough and think only about looking ahead so I miss myself.

Steamy and Dreamy

It’s been a really long time since I had an erotic dream, about ten or more years. People seem to write about sex as if they are doing it daily, depending on what kind of site you are reading. I’m more like a born again virgin. Anyway, I was surprised to have a steamy dream. The man was someone I know but now that I am more awake I can’t remember who he was, just a dim kind of feeling that it was the body and personality of someone I know. Kind of odd.

Of course I don’t remember all the details. But, it started out in the backyard of a house with a long yard. He was doing some kind of work and I brought out liquid refreshment of some kind. We got talking a bit. He somehow mentioned dating and his lack of “friends”. I scoffed and said I had even less friendship of that kind. He was nice and said that was surprising. Then he touched me in a nice, friendly way. I looked at him and smiled or something, can’t think of what happened but we went inside the house and then inside the bed and then he was inside me. It was nice. That kind of comfortable, smooth, cuddly sex where you feel valued, even a little adored.

When I woke up one of my nipples was hard. That is only interesting because I’ve come to think of them as pretty damn lazy these past dozen or so years.

So a good time was had by all. I went back to sleep and the dream continued a bit more, but no sex just talk of doing it again. Probably a good thing I can’t remember who he was. I wonder if it is connected to the fact that the first boy who kissed me died recently. My Mother noticed the obituary in the newspaper, it had a current photo of him. It’s been on my mind a bit since then. We didn’t date or anything remotely like that. I went into his backyard with himself and another boy. I don’t know why other than the fact that he invited me over. I didn’t hang around with the boys in school, I didn’t date or really have much interest in them until a lot later, in high school. But, he pulled me close and kissed me. It was a nice kiss. A surprise. He phoned me a few days later (more or less) invited me to his house again. I didn’t go. I was a whole year younger than everyone in my class and a whole lot behind them on the boy/ girl thing. Anyway, now he’s dead at 45. It said suddenly deceased so it wasn’t that he had cancer I guess.

I guess that is at least part of why I had the dream this morning/ last evening. It was a nice feeling while it lasted, to be close to someone again. I do miss that part of sex. (Be honest, the rest we can do ourselves and likely better anyway).

So that’s my blab for the day. Outside to pick tomatos now.

Oh Goodie Goodie

It’s very unfair. We have those tiny tomatoes growing in the garden, they are just now all ripening up and are so juicy and warm from the sun, like biting into summer (only the good edible parts). But, each time I have a few of those tomatoes I feel sick, like I’m getting a the flu, that night and the next day. It is very unfair. I love those little tomatoes. I ate almost a dozen of their little red, orange and yellow bodies this afternoon and now I feel yucky, shivery and cold. Bleh. I still don’t think I can give up eating the tomatoes. Let them punish me for it.

Tomorrow I am babysitting again. Did I mention that my sister is due to pop out another baby in November/ December. As much as I like seeing the kids, especially Zack who started high school this year, I am tired of babysitting. Mostly, I am tired of her house. It is a dump and they seem to not even notice it. When I came over last week she told the girls to clean up cause I was there. She had been home all day but didn’t think to clean up because that is what people should do! No, it’s only because I’m queen bitch who will throw away all their toys and stuff. Get real. I told one of the girls that instead of bringing a garbage bag for all their stuff I wish I just had a blow torch instead. Would be much easier to clear a path through all the crap at the front door that way. I really am that fed up with it all. People who can’t train their children to be something more than feral animals should not be having another baby.

I know she has businesses to run. I know she sees herself as a business woman/ career goal minded. But, then, logically you don’t have four children set lose to fend for themselves. Know yourself. If you aren’t Mother material don’t keep popping them out thinking other people will do the job for you.

I do like the children, I’m not completely evil. Just annoyed, mostly just annoyed. I know when I am there tomorrow the floor of the entryway will be covered in coats, boots, books, games, assorted clothing, toys and other mindless debris. Plus the fish dying quietly in the fishtank placed right at the door for some odd reason. Then the kitchen, dishes and food left out all over the counters. The table will be coated in crayons, papers and assorted other remnants of the feral animals who live and eat there.

I’m sick of being the one who has to bitch those kids around into cleaning up after themselves. I don’t even see the point of doing so any more. Each week it is the same. They do not change, they do not learn and they certainly have proven that they do not care. I’m fed up with caring, with being told I’m a bully and being made to feel that is true. I really could cheerfully set fire to the lot of it. Just as the sleeve of my sweater caught fire for a second tonight when I moved the broccoli off the jet on the oven. (I blew it out and there is only a scorch mark on my sweater which was already one of my rag bag sweaters just for wearing around the house when I work, not a great loss).

Anyway, I can at least look forward to taking Zack out shopping for some school supplies tomorrow. Odd you may think that school has been started a few weeks ago and wouldn’t his parents have already checked that he has what he needs. Why, no. My Mother and I bought him most of his school clothes for starting high school. My other sister, the redhead took him shopping downtown and bought some expensive jeans and a shirt. His parents attended the meeting at the school for parents and gave him the money he needed for a student card which the school asked for. That’s about it. I know she loves her children, she just seems to be attending the school of Don’t Bother. The same school my Father attended all my life and likely his own.

Has this been enough of a bitchy whine? I could go on. I’m kind of tired though and I have to get up early to babysit. Goodie goodie.