The Myth of the Stray Eyebrow Hair

This weekend, I had the closest thing I have to a recent ex over to my house.

No big deal. We’re friends. We’ve worked very hard to be friends (at least I have) (though, as that last parenthesis may have hinted, I still maintain a very slight amount of hostility). He’s been to my house before. He helped me make my bed once (I am an appalling bed maker and always try to have someone on hand to help out).

But for some reason, because he was coming, the house- at least my part of it- had to be spotless. Sheets cleaned. Bed made. Floor vacuumed. Laundry folded. Cat brushed. Bathroom scrubbed. Because nothing says, “Gee, you shouldn’t have broken my heart” like a spotless shower. Nothing makes a guy think, “Wow, I should have become really, really rich and offered to marry this girl and make children with her- shit” like a lint-free comforter.

It’s sort of like when you’re getting ready to go out and you notice a stray eyebrow hair that MUST GO before you leave the house. No one is going to notice this hair. No one cares. But in your mind, it’s huge. And it could be the one thing separating you from eternal happiness.

I mean what if- WHAT IF- you are sitting at a bar next to Mr. Perfect and he smiles at you and you smile back and he’s considering buying you a drink and whisking you away to Bermuda for a midnight ceremony on his private beach when he notices the eyebrow hair. And then it’s all over. And you’re stuck buying your own drinks while the girl down the bar with the slutty tank top and the butter face gets your drink and your midnight marriage.

At least that’s the way my mind works. But then, generally, I'm running late (because I'm always running late), so I just leave the hair.

In other news, I started a new diet yesterday. I haven’t dieted in a long, long time. I gave it up because it no longer felt healthy. But now I’m back. Because for me…dieting is kind of like a religion. Maybe that’s not quite right, but I like how it sounds. One of the characters in Francine Prose’s ‘Bigfoot Dreams’, which is the novel I am using for my final paper on the Absurd, diets all the time, and I’m writing about how she’s trying to find meaning in her life through dieting.

Which makes perfect sense. Because with dieting, you have a clear goal and a way to achieve that goal. That can be said about so little in life. That’s why, even when you fail, there is a satisfaction to dieting. Because so often, you can see why you failed (chocolate and beer, for instance). And you can blame yourself for everything that went wrong. Not some strange twist of fate. Not God. If a diet goes wrong, it’s just you who gets to shoulder the blame. I like that.

Really, if we're looking at shouldering the blame for what does and does not happen, it's my fault I'm not getting midnight marriage proposals. I should have plucked that stray eyebrow hair.

Anyway, I won’t be blogging obsessively about the diet here, because I started a new blog just for that purpose. It’s linked, if you want to check it out.