Earn More Sessions by Sleeving

Tonight I came home from hanging out with my friends and I watched the Steve Martin movie, Roxanne for the four hundred seventy-sixth time. It's based on the Rostand play, Cyrano de Bergerac.

When I was six, my aunt made me a tape with three movies on it--Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Splash, and Roxanne. I watched the tape in it's entirety every day for a period of time that could easily be considered clinically insane. I learned something different from each movie. From Willy Wonka, I learned that sometimes good things do happen to good people, even if those good people are poor. From Splash I learned that sometimes being in love means abandoning everything you know and spending the rest of your life under water. And from Roxanne I learned everything else I needed to know about getting by in life.

There's a scene where Steve Martin's character, C.D. Bales, is sitting on a roof with an overweight boy who is upset because he's getting teased at school. Bales asks the boy if he's talked to his mother about his problems and the boy replies, "Once I tried, but she said I had to clean up my plate first."

Bales, thinking the boy has just made a joke says, "Now see, that's good. You're way better than those guys who make fun of you. You're smart and you're funny. You can make things up."

All through the movie, Bales lives by his own, smart+funny+the ability to make things up=better, equation. The scene most remembered by anyone who's ever seen the movie is the scene in which Bales has to come up with twenty insults about his nose better than "big nose." One of my favorites, "Fashionable: You know, you could deemphasize your nose if your wore something a little larger--like Wyoming." Or how about, "You must love the little birdies to give them this to perch on."

I applied the things I learned from Roxanne to my own life. I remember being in the sixth grade and making my Art teacher, Mrs. Cadic, laugh. Referring to my hairy self I said, "Gee, now I see why some people think we descended from apes."

These are the things I generally think of when I watch Roxanne--how to be the kind of self-deprecating person that is liked by all and maybe stumbling upon some hot, brainy chick like the movie's title character who will be so swept up in my charm that she won't notice my faults.

When I watched Roxanne tonight though, another scene caught my attention and gave me pause. Towards the end of the film, Bale's is yelling at Roxanne through a closed door. He says, "Ten more seconds and I'm leaving." Roxanne opens the door and asks him to repeat himself. When he does, she turns to go back inside and he asks her what she thought he'd said.

Roxanne replies, "I thought you said 'earn more sessions by sleeving.'" As far as my current station in life is concerned, this might be the most important line in the movie.

I suppose now is as good a time as any to disclose that I have a slight, yet completely annoying, hearing problem. The ability to hear sounds is not my problem. I can hear a pin drop from three rooms away. My problem is in differentiating sounds.

I remember the old days at the cookie store, taking orders over the phone. The customer might tell me that the person receiving the cookies name was Nora.

ME: "Is that Nora or Maura?"

CUSTOMER: "Nora."

ME: "With and M or an N?"

CUSTOMER: "N."

ME: "As in Mary or Nancy?"

CUSTOMER: "What is your fucking problem? It's Nora, NOra, NORA!"

I found that mashing the phone into my ear to the point of giving myself and Indian . . . I'm sorry, a Native American burn served only a psychological benefit. My point is, "bat" and "pat" have always sounded the same to me, and according to an audiologist, they always will.

Now, I'm a smart girl. Context clues are helpful, and I'm a fan of looking at people when they talk to me, so I can see on someones lips what is being said whether my ears can figure it out or not. The problem is the telephone.

Why then, you might ask, did I just accept a job offer for a position that will have me talking on the phone forty hours a week? I suppose this weekend I should spend some time thinking up deaf jokes.

PERSON IN DEBT: "I'll pay it Sunday."

ME: "Sunday or someday?"

PERSON IN DEBT: "Sunday"

ME: "As in the Lord's Day or just when you get around to it?"

PERSON IN DEBT: "I'll pay it right now if it'll end this conversation faster."

Huh, now I think I know what people in wheelchairs mean when they say they're handicapable. I'm going to be the best collections agent in the city of Columbus. See, you really can learn everything you need to know about life from Roxanne if you're willing to connect the dots yourself.

Adventures in Hair Removal

As anyone who knows me could tell you, I am one hairy chick. When I was little, my classmates teased me by calling me Hairy Carrie. Yeah, rhyming is fun. I was so famous throughout my school district that even older kids that I'd never met would shout, "Hairy Carrie" at me from across the mall then laugh to the point of wetting themselves when I turned around and gave them the old stink-eye. I've always had enough hair on my forearms to make it look like I'm permanently wearing long sleeves, and I can grow a mustache that would make most sixteen-year-old boys jealous. Well, no more. And for my Spanish speaking friends, no mas.

I remember a conversation I had as a little girl. "Mom, when will I stop having all this hair?"

"When you're older," she said, leaving me with the impression that sometime during my adolescence, I was going to wake up to discover that all of my body hair had magically fallen out. I wish some teacher would have taken me aside and taught me the importance of follow-up questions, but since none ever did, I just took my mom's response at face value. At the ripe old age of twenty-seven, I found myself still waiting for the shit to fall out, all the while growing more and more self-conscious about my looks.

The one bright spot in my adult life (if being humiliated can ever be considered a bright spot) was one time when a friend and I went out for Chinese. This was one of our favorite restaurants in Dayton, and we'd had this one tiny little Asian waitress at least a dozen times before, but for some reason on this one night she decided that she had to pay me a "compliment." When she brought our check, she started stroking the hair on my right arm and said, "Oooh, so sexy." My friend had to immediately excuse herself from the table. I could hear her crying with laughter as she walked away. Sure, it's a funny story now, but at the time I was mortified. I thought only little kids and retarded people were allowed to get away with commenting on people's physical shortcomings like that. I know. I know. What she said was theoretically nice. How was she to know she was pointing out the thing about which I was most self-conscious?

A few years later, I was working at a bookstore when another Asian lady caught my attention and motioned for me to come join her in the children's section. In a rather broken accent she told me, "I used have hair like you. I know where you can get fixed."

"What?" I asked, not quite sure I'd understood her.

"Hair. Your arms. Can fix."

"Thanks. I'm good."

I wasn't good though. I was again embarrassed by the cards the Geneticist in the Sky had dealt me. And what was it with these Asian people? Seriously, is there some sort of cultural propensity toward inappropriate frankness that I didn't learn about in school?

So jump to yesterday. Yesterday I woke up feeling like shit. I felt unattractive for the 3876th day in a row, and, frankly, I was over it. Carrie, you can't go to job interviews looking like this, I told myself. Looks do matter, no matter what your mother tells you. This hair would have to go. I thought the best place to shop for hair removal products would be with other classically unattractive people, so I drove to Wal-Mart. You would think that in all the places in all the world, Wal-Mart would be the place to take care of all your hair removal needs. I mean, look at the people who work and shop there. I know I'm sounding like a real a-hole, but seriously. Wal-Mart isn't exactly a bastion of trendiness and good grooming. Sadly though, my choices were limited. There were creams. I had tried these when I was 8 and I already had hair under my arms. I think my mother felt that 8 was too young to wield a razor. In the end, she had to entrust me with a Lady Bic, because these hair removal creams, turns out, are total bullshit. So creams were out. There were waxes that needed to be heated up and applied with wands. This seemed like a disaster waiting to happen. I mean, how do you get hot wax out of your eyeball? Or what about 2nd degree burns? I don't need that sort of mayonnaise in my life. Then I glanced the bottom shelf. Nads. I'd seen Nads on tv. I'd seen the Australian woman who created the product rip the hair off her beast-like daughter's arm with three easy motions. The daughter, she didn't even wince. I mean, Nads has kava in it, for Christ's sake. Who else is going to offer me all this in in one ready-made-wax-preapplied strip? No one. That's who. I bought the face kit as well as the full-size strips and went about my business.

When I went home, I waxed my lip. I'm not going into great detail about it, because I owned that shit, which makes it not that interesting and not at all funny. So I'm moving on.

Later that night, all the optimism about life and the feeling less hideous had already worn off. There was still the matter of the arms. How could anyone ever love me with these arms. Did I say love? I meant hire. Is there a difference really? It was 1:00 a.m. and I was as unattractive as when I woke up that morning. For a moment I thought, Carrie, is this really something you want to get into in the middle of the night? I thought, this is one of those mistakes that you know you're making even as you're making it. Like asking a friend for a cigarette or driving to Canada to marry a drug addict. The hair will still be there in the morning, I assured myself as I walked into the bathroom and took out the full-size strips. Well, here's the thing about applying a waxing strip to some part of your body--there's really only one way to get it off, and, whether you mean to or not, you're taking some hair with you. What I'm saying is, once you've got the strip on, you're fucked, so you might as well go for it. I stood there for a moment, looking down at the 3x6 inch strip pasted to my left arm. You're a fucking idiot, I thought. There's a reason people pay to have this shit professionally tended to. Deep breath. Yank. Stars. I saw stars. My eyes teared. I looked down. There was a perfect patch of perfectly smooth skin that I'd never seen in its full, hairless glory now exposed on my left arm. Fuck, I thought. I can't walk around like this. This is the thing you don't think about. Once you start the process, you have to see it through. An hour and a half later, after several breaks to stop the cold sweats and the shaking, I had two bare arms. Well, mostly bare. I spent half of the next day meticulously plucking any extra-fortified follicles which had been strong enough or sneaky enough to thwart the kava-infused wax.

I'm told that the hair will not come back all black and brillo-paddy. I'm told that someday, the hair will recognize its own futile need to grow and I'll hardly ever have to wax at all. I'm told that looks don't matter, and now that I feel a little less like a wereperson, I'm sort of inclined to agree.

The View from the Mountain

So it's been a while since I've written anything. I'll go ahead an apologize now for this not being "typical" Carrie. It's the 40th anniversary of Dr. King's death. I thought I'd post links to the transcript of the "I've been to the mountain top" speech that he gave the night before he was killed as well as a video clip of it.

Transcript with brief clip: www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkivebeentothemountaintop.htm

I just stumbled upon this website when I was trying to find a transcript of the "I have a dream" speech for my mom. It's pretty cool. All these rhetoricians have gotten together and picked the top 100 American speeches. The site has full transcripts of all of them as well as audio and video clips of the speeches that were given at times when that technology was available. I recommend checking it out. http://www.americanrhetoric.com

As for the speech at hand, and for Dr. King's speeches in general, they were the best. Period. He was the best. Period. I'm not saying that Senator Obama's speech on race wasn't a good speech. I am saying that it wasn't soul stirring. I've heard the "I have a dream" speech 50 times and I tear up every single time. When I watched Senator Obama's speech, I just saw an eloquent man trying to keep his poll numbers from sliding, which is, let's don't forget, exactly what he was doing.