On Being Feminine

Axiom: "One must suffer for beauty."
Corollary: "Whatever is most painful is most beautiful."

Sometimes I do really stupid shit.  In this case, I bought an epilator.

An epilator is one of those devices that people from the future will look back on yellowed period ads for and go "I can't believe they really invented a device made of dozens of rotating tweezers working at great speed to pluck the hairs from people's bodies, and the credulous fools actually bought it!"

I knew--I knew--that I had a historically low tolerance for having my hair torn out by the root.  But reading enough recommendations (while ignoring the ones that said "I wax a lot but this hurt like buggery") and imagining leg hair with softly-tapered, pigmentless tips instead of a harshly-cut end swayed me.

 Hair follicles are amazing little things, tiny organs fed by individual capillaries.  The root of each is filled with dormant stem cells which the body uses to repair itself after an injury.  For this reason they are notoriously hard to destroy, and attempting their destruction is inadvisable even if you would like to be sort of like an egg or a statue.    
 
My main concern was that I would bleed too much.  Generally, I am like the proverbial stone, but I have drawn blood with a home waxing kit before.  My painkiller of choice, ibuprofen, is a noted blood-thinner, so I went to the store that morning and picked up some acetaminophen.  Here's something you may not know about acetaminophen: historically, I have never experienced a reduction in pain after taking acetaminophen. This time was apparently no different.

After a while I got into a rhythm: epilate for ten to fifteen seconds on each leg, wait ten minutes for the pain to subside, and return like a dog to its vomit.  It did get better after a while, both because I had less hair to pull out and because I started getting more able to leave my body during the plucking.  Oh, and I guess I had a beer as well.  

The next night I went back and did it again.  This time, running it over areas whose hairs had been plucked or broken off already, it was bearable.  The sensation of having one or two hairs pulled at once was even sort of meditative.  Running it over areas with more than two or three hairs continued to be excruciating.  But I've kept at it, just tearing out a few hairs each night, like a religious fanatic in a terrible novel about some secret Jesus societies. 

Neither tremendous, crippling pain nor the foreknowledge that I'm potentially endangering my future healing ability are able to prevent me doing something that will make me look, like, 4% better to the only person who ever sees my legs,* my partner, who, as you may recall, already loves me anyway and requires no convincing of my ardour through self-mortification.  I have some kind of brain illness. 

* I guess in retrospect the internet also sees my legs.  That's disturbing to me.  I should really give this more thought.