Hardwood vs. Shag

My pal Angela was wearing a swimsuit at a party this weekend, and she looked great, like straight out of a Dynasty poolside cocktail hour. I told her how good she looked and she replied, thanks, I just got a full Brazilian.

I admit, I enjoy a smooth surface to work on. I am, however, quite squeamish when it comes to inviting those outside the medical profession to attend to the upkeep of my better half. Indeed, I’ve gone to great lengths to avoid what for many is a fairly blasé transaction. In high school, for some reason, I tried hair bleach. At a squint, my lady parts could be mistaken for Flock of Seagulls front man Mike Score. In college, I graduated to Poetic Waxing, a product that offers the winning combo of overpriced and ineffective. My college living arrangement was hardly a safe space for clothing removal, let alone hair, so my waxing was relegated to holiday weekends at my parents’ house. I’d wait until everyone was asleep, then set up triage in the living room: expendable bath towel, expensive wax, and bottle of whiskey. I’d turn on the TV to muffle the sounds of my moans. I would not recommend this, as I’m pretty sure my little sister more than once thought I was beating off to a Designing Women rerun.

For some reason, Poetic Waxing makes their wax a sort of aqua blue. Is this so that users will not mistake their flesh for wax and try to peel their own skin? Perhaps this would be a less painful alternative. With any wax, the instructions suggest doing a test area--for me, this involved making an entire cast of wax on my left shin. There’s some sort of pre/post wax salve that’s supposed to reduce topical irritation, but I also find it quite irritating that you have to peel off hardened wax hermetically sealed to your skin with now greasy, salve-laden hands.

My old housemate was kind of a hippie and made her own sugar-based wax. I didn’t quite understand this--it smelled good, but always conjured images of rolling a Twix bar on my private Benjamin. Recently, I’ve discovered that Whole Foods sells disposable waxing strips. Let me tell you, you’d be better served to get a roll of masking tape.

So much money spent, secret rituals, chunks of blue wax stuck to the floor-- and really for like forty bucks, I could get much better results by sucking it up and going to a pro. Still I’m skittish, and keep at it with a shaving razor and those special scissors in the bathroom that no one should ever mistake for kitchen scissors (unless you eat pubes for dinner). I can’t even imagine what ball shaving is like--Do you guys use those special Kojak head razors? Do you go to Dunkin and practice on a coconut-covered Munchkin? Or maybe like all those couriers sporting beards in the dead of D.C. summer, y’all secretly keep it shaggy in your downtown locker room?

Yesterday I was cleaning my house, which has some area rugs but is mostly hardwood. I was working my vacuum cleaner, adjusting the settings for medium pile, shag, etc. It’s kind of a pain in the ass, but I like things looking well-kempt. Meanwhile, the hardwood requires a third of the work, and pretty much always looks great.