Miss Cellaneous

I owe an apology to Possum Princess for not saying a big thank you for the blog award you bestowed on me. I will post it and pass it on soon, I promise. It's just that I want to take my time to think about what I write and at the moment life is just getting in the way and hassling me a little bit. So this is just a quickie post because. . .

Because I was plucking my eyebrows and thinking about all of the things that we are not warned about when we are young. So I'm warning everyone under 50 now, before it's too late. I hope you are listening.

Firstly, relating to eyebrows, did you know that grey doesn't happen as a nice gradual lightening? They seem to pop out overnight. One minute they are not there and then they are. You suddenly get odd entirely grey ones in amongst the dark ones. This is so that the contrast in colour shows the grey ones up more garishly. Not only that, but from your 50th birthday onwards you suddenly find that eyebrows have developed the ability to grow to enormous lengths. I can't help wondering why they never did before that. Up until 50 they seemed to just know when to stop growing at a nice respectable length, but after that 50th birthday you wake up looking like Albert Einstein in a nightie. But maybe some of that was from the celebratory/commissoratory drinks.

The news just keeps getting worse too, because these extra long, glaringly silver, eyebrow hairs like to stick out at right angles to your face. Not all of them, but just enough to bring attention to themselves. It helps them to catch the light in a way that makes passers by dive into their handbags for their sunglasses. Now you have the mental picture in your head of a sexy, well-dressed and immaculately groomed, young-middle-aged women stepping out in public with not a hair of her brunette head out of place but, going before her like a silver lance about to strike unsuspecting strangers is a huge shining eyebrow hair. But wait there's more. . .

I hear you ask, "Why doesn't she just pluck the b... things and stop whingeing?" That is just the point. When you reach the time of life when you need to have all of your faculties sharpened, what happens? You can't see anything that's too close, too small, too far away, too pale, too dark and you definitely can't see a hair. So you get glasses. I haven't yet found a pair of glasses that allows me to see my eyebrows while trying to pluck them. I try though. I've poked myself in the eye with tweezers and I've plucked tiny pieces of skin and I've plucked huge bald patches in my eyebrows in the relentless pursuit of a single hair and I've given up and gone bushy.

But now I have a solution. I could wear my glasses and pluck someone else's eyebrows because I wouldn't be relying on a mirror and glasses wouldn't get in the way because the pluckee doesn't need to wear glasses, only the plucker does. So we need to form some eyebrow plucking mutual support groups. This could work. I pluck yours and you pluck mine.

Any volunteers?

In the future I'll share some more warnings to the under 50's. There's so very, very much they didn't tell us.