It’s not all my fault, that’s my story and I am sticking to it. The spring board to my maiming and woeful miscalculation was Oprah and her damn O magazine. I was innocently sitting reading a copy that a friend had given me sipping some bitter but good for me green tea when I paused on an article about picking out glasses for the shape of your face. No matter how they described the steps on how to determine if you have an oval, square, heart shaped face, I can’t see where I fit on their charts.  First off I got a cheek on me and they are ever so slightly heading south.  At some point in my future I will be able to hide small children in the folds. I know this to be true by looking at my mother. She looks like a Sharpee. My only saving grace is I don’t like the sun so I am holding out that I will stave off the jowls from Turner and Hoochdom till my 70’s. Of course then I will still be wearing my hair flaming red so people will be catching that eye pop “glamour don’t” first. After reading the article I ponder the options of shapes they talk about: square, oval, heart, round, club, what have you. I go into my bathroom and stand there pushing my bangs off my face and study my mug, finally I gave up on the shape and took a good hard look at my face.

Just the act of trying to see what I have going on is a problem because I am blind as a bat, I wear contacts plus readers. Honestly, I am steps from a dog and a stick kind of blind. To add to that attractive quality, I have a hearing deficiency. Not that I need sonar to gauge my reflection, but then again, maybe it would help. I mostly hear folks mumble and take a wild guess at what they are saying. Not good in social situations. My beau keeps waiting on the mute part to kick in along with the existing blind and deafness so he can claim me as a true trifecta of girlfriends. I recently bought a magnifying mirror; they really should put some kind of warning on that for women who are over 40 who have never used one. I pulled it out of its velvet bag and decided to use that to take a look at the aging process. Whoa, I had no idea the face I had been shepherding around looked a lot like a Thomas’s English muffin filled with all those nooks and crannies. No wonder women talk about putting on makeup with putty knives. The mirror would help however when I need to find my eyelid to put some eyeliner on, not using it for this makes me do bad things with tiny inky brushes that have a very Japanese art effect.  So the mirror can only help me appear saner to the world and less kabuki.

Staring in the mirror I think, “Hum I should pluck a few stray brows now that I have that magnifier mirror.” On a side note here I rarely tweeze my brows. They are a decent shape and size and when I have had them waxed they only change them a little. A clean up you might say. As I am thinking of doing my own clean up on the brows the phone rings and the beau, oh yea he has a part in this too, says dinner will be closer to 6:45 instead of 6:00 at his house tonight. Ok more time to putz it seems. I hang up and wander back to the bathroom. Granted I am not thinking too much about the 2.2lbs I went up at Weight Watchers, the note from the unemployment folks inNew YorkStatesaying “You quit a perfectly good job and moved toSan Diegowhich is more expensive so you are on your own babe.” Nor am I thinking about the 40 odd resumes and applications for jobs I have filled out over the last 3 and ½ weeks with not one interview. And definitely not about the hours and hours I spent on the phone in the purgatory of holding for the California Credential Board andCountyOfficeof Education only to be told, “We don’t know when you will be certified inCalifornia. Send your documentation in and we’ll get back to you in 50 days.” I wasn’t really thinking of any of this when I picked up the tweezers; and thought “Maybe I can do a little clean up. Maybe if I tidy up the stray hairs on my brow I would feel better, more confident. Less like a fuck up loser who can’t land an interview, lose weight or collect slacker unemployment.”

The answer is no. I can not. I, it seems do not see well enough to be handling tweezers even with a magnifying mirror that is as strong as the Hubble Telescope. The basic problem was I had trouble seeing where exactly the root of the brow was, and the effect of pulling said eyebrow hair till after it was gone. It took me a few tries to realize this however. I started around what I thought were the edges and circled in, that might be a good plan in ground war but in eyebrow maintenance it was not. Oops. Oh fuckity fuck me what I found out is there is no way to even out your brows to make them look normal when you have butchered one eye. I knew I had to try to have them match just a little so’s not to look like that half man half woman at the freak show. I tried to do damage control but I spun out and hit the wall bursting into flames and put the tweezers down. This was bad, this was women paid professionals.  Finally with a sigh of resignation I resorted to another tactic.  I took out an old eye brow pencil in the attempt to make the wisps seem more, uh, well just more really. This mostly ended with me looking a lot like Edith Piaf. At the time of writing this I have gone for the Moe. I was still working the pencil and was getting a little close to Joan Crawford and a very surprised look when I came upon the idea of the Moe. Yes Moe, as in the Three Stooges fame. For those unfamiliar with bad hair and those who sport it, I have combed what short spiky bangs I had over the now very thin wisps of what used to be my eyebrows. I didn’t know how long it takes eyebrows to grow back; I do know I will not be picking up a tweezers or the magnifying mirror to be doing anything that can’t be washed off with soap and water for a long time. I can’t be trusted to tidy anything just yet so I have sworn off neatness in favor of a more musical approach. Let it be, which strangely enough also made use of the Moe.