Yes, I'm Italian

I hadn't shaved my legs in over a week. My ankles looked like my freshmen-in-college, testosterone-pumped guy friends that shave every three days: sparse, uneven, dark, and cactusy. My leg hair is wiry and straight; it gets a little sweaty from time to time. If you run a hand in the opposite direction that it grows, I get a slight tickling sensation. The hair from my follicles is especially thick around the knee and ankle. In the winter I let it grow. It helps with insulation under those thin, skanky dress pants we have to wear to funerals and baby showers.

Last night I was tired. Instead of putting my leg up on the hand bar like I normally do to shave in the shower, I decided to take a seat. Sitting solidly in the tub (because there is no other way to sit without sliding around), I lathered up my legs. It was a little hard to rinse the razor, but I found it very beneficial to be so close to the hair while I was ridding myself of it. I don't wear my glasses in the shower, I usually shave by feel; I have a centimeter long scar on my left thumb as evidence.

When I completed my hair-extraction, I knelt down and looked at the shallow end of the tub. There were some soap suds. There was some water. I could have made a Wooly-Willy with the pile of tiny hairs dredged up amongst the regular bathtub scum. It looked like someone had mowed the lawn without putting a bag on the mower. I twirled my finger around in the hairs and they gracefully followed the current of the puddle. I scootched them together in an attempt to make a kind of sandcastle, but the water was slowly carrying them away...

My legs remind me of the hide of a whale. They are scarred and scratched. Pink scars, white scars, brown scars, red scars. Burns, falls, too much shaving without eyeglasses. My shin bones have little bumps on them that make up the backbone. Odd hairs stick up here and there. After almost a decade, my shaving skills still remain imperfect. I just remembered that I forgot about my armpits.

Hello Out There?

It's fall. Goodbye humidity, goodbye warmness. Hello chapped lips and wet leaves blowing into my face. So where do they sell chapstick these days? Target (for only 99 cents), and gas stations (for $2.17). Ridiculous. I live about twenty minutes from the closest Target, and on my daily commute I'm not much closer to it. I'm thrifty...sometimes.

I've been waiting for about five days to get down to Target with a list larger than "chapstick" but I don't really do much shopping there. On my way home I watched a particularly large chunk of flesh fall off my lip and land with a thud on my leg. I got fed-up and pulled into the BP parking-lot at forty miles-per-hour. I grumbled to myself as I stalked into the convience store. The cheery metal bell on the door made my ears bleed and I found the aisle which contained fingernail clippers, tylenol, cough syrup, and those tiny tubes of deodorant which last two hours. I call it the Medical Aisle. I stood in the Medical Aisle for about five minutes. I mistook batteries for chapstick four times. The lady at the counter watched me reach for the batteries a fifth time and then snatch my hand back.

'I'm not trying to steal these...I swear, Lady.' I wiped my nose and sucked some blood off my lip and walked up to the counter.

"Do you have chapstick?" I asked the gas station lady.

"Yes," she said.

"...Where is it?" I asked. 'Watch out Gas Station Lady, I am a Vampire, see the blood on my lip? Vampires need chapstick too...'

"I have it behind the counter here," 'Back with the cigs and chew and other stuff you need to be 18 or older to buy, obviously,' she said with a Vanna White gesture to her right. "Would you like to buy Original or Cherry?"

"The black one, please," 'That's the one with the illegal drugs, right?' I said. Suck, suck, suck.

"That will be two dollars and seventeen cents," 'I need to see some ID for this.'

I paid with a debit card.