A Month of Shame

Hi, my name is Dani, and I'm disgusting.

I've had a sneaking suspicion for a while about my disgustingness, but I finally rowed my ass out of the River of Denial and let reality kiss me full on the lips.


And now I know for sure:

I. Am. Disgusting.

It started out simply enough... I have nowhere to go, for the most part, winter is arriving and wearing shorts is pretty much out of the question, and if I ever need to don a dress and show some leg, I'm pretty sure I'll have a few days notice.

So I got super lazy about shaving my legs.

(The following is TMI... you may want to stop reading right about... NOW.)

Since my legs are covered like 100% of the time, it got realllll easy to not notice the prickly stubble growing in patches here and there along my calves.  

Showering and drying off were pretty much the only instances in which I said, "Ewwww..." and thought that perhaps I should do something about it.

Thoughts are fleeting.

Slowly but surely, the stubble turned in to full blown hair.  I'm not a hairy girl, despite my ancestry (and my mother, aka Ape Woman) so it's not like I was King Kong from the knees down, but still.  Had my house caught fire in the middle of the night while I was sleeping and during my escape I had somehow lost my pants, eyes would have been drawn to my leg hair.  Subtle glances would have become awkward stares.  People would have talked.  I would have been self-conscious and embarrassed about the condition of my calves. 

Has anyone seen my pants?

Meanwhile, as grossed out as I was by my slothfulness, I was also slightly fascinated by the growth of hair.  It became something of a science experiment.

Why, for instance, did hair grow in some places and not in others?  Why is my leg hair patchy?  Why are the strands on the backs of my legs longer than the strands on the front?  

And finally, how long would the hair get if I just never shaved it again?  Would it continue to grow indefinitely, until it was sweeping the floor like a Yorkshire terrier?  Would I receive Best In Show?  Or would it reach a point where it just... stopped?  And then what?  

I'm too sexy for my leg hair.

As I am (still) unemployed, I really had nothing better to do than monitor the growth of my leg hair.

It made me feel slightly productive.  Like I was contributing something to science.

And then, last night, this happened:

Not really me... but totally could be.

Me:  *absent mindedly scratching my calf*

Dan:  *suddenly, after a month, noticing that something was slightly amiss*  "What's all over your leg?"

Me:  "Huh?"

Dan:  *eyes widening*  "Is that... hair?"

Me:

Dan:  *staring rudely*

Me:  "Ummm..."

Dan:  "Is that hair??"

Me:  "Maybe..."

Dan:  "How long has it been since you've shaved your legs??"

Me:  "Uhhh... I dunno, maybe a week?"  

(I am SUCH a liar.)

Dan:  *incredulously*  "A WEEK?"

Me:  "Ummm..."

Dan:  "I will pay you to shave that shit off."


I have been unemployed for 7 months... I would shave my freaking head for cash.

So today, the leg hair is gone.  Shaving it off was even grosser than growing it, in case you were wondering.  

Amen, Sista!

Further Adventures in Aspergers

I know I've blogged before about my husband, Dan, having Asperger's Syndrome (which is somewhere, but not quite, on the Autism Spectrum). It amazes me, when I hear the stories about him as a child and young adult, that no one ever thought his behavior was, you know, ODD.

(Dan wasn't diagnosed until I dragged his ass to a doctor in 2004 and said, "Will you please tell him he has Asperger's?" Which they did. Promptly. It was kind of like a "Duh" moment.)

One of the things he did, as a teen-ager and into his early 20s, was wear the same shirt every Friday, eat out of the same bowl, and drink out of the same cup... and use the same towel. They were his Friday shirt, his Friday bowl, his Friday cup, etc. I asked him one time why he did that and he said, "Because I really like Fridays."

Alrighty then.

(I may or may not find this so damn funny that I ask him about it a lot, just because it makes me laugh so hard. I may or may not be real sensitive and thoughtful like that. *cough*)

Anyway.

So let's flash forward 20 years or so to this morning:

Dan was getting ready for work and I was lying in bed with the two dogs and the covers pulled up to my nose. (It's cooooold outside today... I'M SO HAPPY!) Dan was rooting through his sock drawer and came up with a grand total of two socks, neither of which matched.

(Sidebar: There were only two mismatched socks, but at least 12 pairs of underwear were still in his drawer. I'm afraid to ask how that happened.)

Dan: "Did you do any laundry yesterday?"

Me: *guiltily, because I'm home all day and the fact that Dan doesn't have two socks that match is pretty embarrassing, considering he owns approximately 200 pairs* "No... sorry."

Dan: *very patiently, even though I have no good freaking excuse* "I don't have any socks."

Me: *because I'm a problem solver... it's what I do instead of laundry* "You wear work boots... just wear those socks. No one is going to see them."

Dan: *agreeably... which actually kind of shocked me, because if he's ever had a legitimate moment to bitch about me not doing laundry, this was it* "Okay."

He held up the socks and looked at them for a moment and said, "Well, isn't this going to be a special day."

Me: "Why?"

Dan: "Because my socks don't match."

Me: *because I am that person who will beat something I find funny into the ground* "They can be your new Friday socks!"

Dan: *very seriously* "They can't be Friday socks."

Me: *trying very, very hard not to laugh* "Why can't they?"

Dan: *even more seriously* "They're not that special."

I give myself huuuuge amounts of credit for not laughing myself into a coma until AFTER he left.

I'm a giver, yo.