Skip to main content

Don't wanna sound gay or nuthin'.

I found myself at a traffic light the other day, watching the other drivers and waiting for my light to change. As I did, a man in no shirt drove by in a sedan. It was the most awkward thing I've seen while driving, I think. I never knew how strange it looked when people drove around shirtless. It looks like they might be naked. It's just awkward. And I'm a guy who drives shirtless on occasion.

I've found that my worst ideas tend to be the ones I think about. Because I have time to consider all the aspects of them before convincing myself that they are good. My impulse decisions, which are also bad, are somehow less bad than those that I stew on for a while.

A friend of mine told me that I seemed like a person who could pull off having shaved legs. I don't think of myself as a particularly hairy person, but I tend to worry about being considered a hairy person. And so his statement stuck in my mind for a long couple of weeks. Ultimately, it came down to this thought: girls have nice, smooth legs when they shave. I could have nice, smooth legs.

But I never felt brave enough to actually set out with the sole intention of shaving my legs. Then, one day, I found myself shaving in the shower. Sometimes, in the interest of saving time during my day, I like to combine activities which actually end up wasting more time. Since I don't have a mirror in my shower, I have to finish shaving when I get out, but then again when am I ever at a loss for time in my days. As I shaved I realized that the stage had been set, albeit accidentally.

And so I took a few swipes at my legs. Where no one would see it, of course. It was an experiment. I took some light drags along my thighs, hoping to be casual about it. I wasn't going for skin, just less hair. Just to see what it was like. When I was satisfied that the whole thing looked pretty normal and not like I had tried to shave my legs in the shower, I washed up and dried up.
And it was then that I found that there is no such thing as casual shaving. There were some random, bare patches of skin on my legs where I had casually shaved off all the hair. And the hair on your legs apparently doesn't grow back as fast as hair you have in other places. Now, almost a week later, the bare patches are getting prickly and fuzzy again and it is an awful experience.

I'd like to say I learned a lesson from this, but, well, you know.

Comments

Ashley said…
Ha. I dont' even know what to say to that.

Popular posts from this blog

Past the butterfly wall.

Spontaneous pneumothorax is a collection of air or gas in the space between the lungs and the chest that "collapses" the lung and prevents it from inflating completely.  Spontaneous means there is no traumatic injury to the chest or lung.   There are two types of spontaneous pneumothorax: primary and secondary. Primary spontaneous pneumothorax occurs in people without lung disease. It occurs most often in tall, thin, young people. I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket but I can't answer it. We are in the middle of rehearsal. It is not an uncommon event. We continue to play. The strap of my saxophone cuts into my neck. The nylon is rough against my skin. I look out of place. Everyone else is dressed casually; shorts, shirts, shoes optional. There I stand, a button down shirt and slacks. I'm entitled to dress up a little. It's my birthday. My phone vibrates again. I always used to roll my eyes whenever I saw those scenes in movies. The phone call. The bad news....

I'm a geologist, not an alcoholic.

I thought I had seen people drink before. Hell, I thought that I had drank before. But, clearly, I thought wrong on both of those counts. I cannot, for the life of me, think of a reason to justify all of the drinking that transpired down there last week. There was no rhyme or reason to it, it just was. Field work just makes a man thirsty. Taking this class was easily one of the best things I've ever done. We worked hard every day out in the field. Wake up at 7, leave the beach house by 8, hit the water by 9. My first three field days were in service on the R/V Acadiana , a 58 foot vessel that towed the CHIRP fish , the air gun, and the streamer to measure all the seismic data--looking at the subsurface of the seafloor we drove over. My second ship was the R/V Itasca using the multibeam , sidescan , and grab sampler --getting seafloor surface bathymetry. They were long, exhausting days and we returned to the docks around 6 or 7 every evening. And then, drinking. So much ...

Yeah, that is not okay.

So stuff is okay, I guess. Things are alright. My friend and I are actually making some decent headway on our project. It's been such a long time since I've made a movie. Actually made a movie. Not just started it. I feel pretty good about where this is going, though. That's good. It's a good thing. I'm pretty excited about it, honestly. I think the scripts we've written so far are pretty funny. They are probably not as funny as I think. I tend to get unreasonably close to my work. That's okay, I guess. I think a lot of people tend to do that. It makes it hard to hear criticism. I have no problem with handing out the criticisms, though. That's always fun. Actually it is not all that fun. I know how they feel. That's okay. We're just having some casting issues, I guess. We're planning for a lot of side characters to come in for one-shots episodes, but we haven't quite managed to fill those out. Or develop the characters...