Aging with grace and style

My body doesn't want to do that at all.

Really. Because if it did? If my body wanted me to age with grace and style? I wouldn't notice every month or so while scrubbing my face at the mirror the small fucking beard of blond hair on my god damned chin.

It started with one. Just one, innocent, fat, long blond hair that was thicker and far more rude than the fine blond hair that has covered my entire face for my entire mammalian life. Eyeing it with suspicion and hatred, I did what many braver women have been doing long before the dawn of chemicals--I grabbed an implement of tor--I mean, tweezer, and yanked that motherfucker out of my chin. Satisfied, I continued on about my life marginally pleased with my beardless face.

And then it happened some time last year.

There were more. There were more of these longer, thicker christly little hairs on my god damn chin.

Well. They weren't dark, it wasn't like I was growing something that I could mousse and style into a fine upstanding British monstrosity that shits the queen--but, I had noticeable hair. On my chin. Longer, thicker, hair. On my chin!

So I pluck again. But instead of a one second of pain that passes quickly, I now have four or five seconds of eye watering, butt clenching pain. Have I tried slathering sticky shit all over the bottom of my chin, then pressing a piece of fabric or plastic over it, smoothing it in, then ripping it away with a sound that I imagine flesh being shred from bone sounds like? Have I for that moment, experienced the shrieks of my skin as I tear hair, root and all? I have. Did it work? No.

It got some but not all. Forcing me to still pick up those hellish little forceps of face-rape known as tweezers.

And so this morning, as I am recovering from another round of grooming myself before I turn into a passable beer-gutted trucker from Mississippi, I try and reflect upon aging gracefully with style as I imagine other great ladies in my family, past and present have done.

None of them warned me about the growing a god-damned beard.

I suppose by the time I hit 60+ and my hands get too arthritic and palsied to hold a tweezer, I can always buy myself a packet of those terribly pretty little glass beads and make myself look like a female Captain Jack Sparrow.