Old Man Eyebrows.

OK, so the people that have known me for a while also probably know that I have some degree of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Not with regard to EVERYTHING, but with a lot of things. And while I am on a medication for this weirdness, these are just a few of the things I still have issues with:

Personal hygiene. I suppose that there are worse things to be obsessed with. But honestly, I would shower 12 times a day if I could. I used to shower 3 times a day, sometimes more, before I went on my meds. And I would walk out of the shower and immediately feel dirty again. So, needless to say, anytime I did ANYTHING--whether it would be washing some dishes in the sink, or vaccuuming a small room, or going to the grocery store--I'd have to shower afterwards. I ALWAYS felt as if I had dirt all over me or I smelled bad. Now that I'm on meds (which I don't take as regularly as I should, but still take them somewhat on schedule), I only shower once or twice per day, mainly because my parents threatened to kill me for nearly drying out the well.

Clutter. I hate clutter. Especially unnecessary clutter. It is perhaps the reason why I always feel uncomfortable in my own home. You see, my parents LOVE knick-knacks of any variety and adorn their home in them. I have a select few in my room, but not many. And I keep them clean. If I didn't dust my house (which I admittedly don't even do that well as I tend to miss large areas), they would be covered with years worth of dust. As a result, I feel the need to keep the random clutter to a minimum. My room is small and while I don't have THAT much stuff, the stuff I DO have seems more prominent in my tiny room, causing me to always feel as if the room is cluttered, when in actuality, it isn't. Clothes on the floor drive me nuts, too. Laurie--I'm sorry for picking up all of the clothes you put on the floor in our hotel room last weekend. I'm crazy. Blame it on that.

Hand-washing. Despite taking meds for this, I still feel the need to wash my hands about 30-40 times per day, especially at work. My hand-washing tendencies are still ridiculously out of control. My hands and cuticles are already dry, cracked and bleeding from a combination of colder weather and copious hand-washing. And I'm not a fan of hand-lotion because anything I put it on my hands makes them automatically feel dirty and I just have to wash them 3 minutes later. So, I'm screwed.

And finally, eyebrows. Holy shit. Crazy eyebrows drive me bonkers. Now, when I say that I am obsessed with tweezing, I truly mean it. I tweeze my eyebrows at least 3-4 times per day. I keep a pair of tweezers in the car because the natural light is optimal for those pesky little fine hairs. I tweeze in traffic every morning. Not only do I keep tweezers in my car, I keep a tiny pair of scissors so that I can trim my ridiculously long eyebrow hairs. Seriously, I have old man eyebrow hairs.

You know what I mean, too--old men's eyebrow hairs are typically ludicrously long and they refuse to groom them in any way once these gentlemen hit 70 years of age. I don't fucking get it.
So, anyway, despite tweezing and trimming my eyebrows, they still seem so horribly fucking unkempt to me. And my skin is so damn pale that no matter how much I tweeze, even the finest, little dark brown eyebrow hairs seem so noticeable to me.

I think my tweezing compulsion comes from one day, pulling my head out of my ass and looking at a picture of myself closely, only to realize that my eyebrows looked like enormous catepillars crawling along the upper portion of my face. WHAT THE FUCK? WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME HOW RETARDED I LOOKED? So, it consequently clicked in my head that I needed to make my brows as thin and as PERFECT as humanly possible.

You may ask why I don't get them waxed. Here's the answer: they start to grow in the VERY NEXT DAMN DAY. It's a waste of money. And wherever I go, the waxer never makes them look right anyway, so I finally said "screw it."

So, anyway, eyebrows are my archnemesis. For the life of me, I cannot figure out why it isn't stylish for a woman to shave her eyebrows completely off. I mean, many of us shave our pits. We shave our legs. Hell, many of us even shave our arms (yours truly included, even though I hardly had ape-arms). Why, for the love of Buddha, can we not develop an eyebrow-shaving feminine mandate?

Maybe, just maybe, the old men would follow suit.