I Mustache You a Question

I bleached my mustache the other night.

I know. Weird, right?

I know I'm not supposed to talk about this because women aren't supposed to have facial hair. Women aren't supposed to have facial hair and they're definitely not supposed to talk about getting it removed. Fortunately for me, I am still allowed to talk about it because I win on a technicality. I didn't remove it. I just bleached it. Before I started waxing, when I was 8 or 9, my mom would mix up a small batch of bleach from a home kit. I'd smear it all over my upper lip, wait 10 minutes, and then wash it off. Easy as that. That's why I did it the other night. It was easier than finding a new salon in Chicago, easier than spending money, and easier than explaining to a well meaning woman that No, no, really, I want my eyebrows this thick. For as long as I can remember, my hair and I have been in a fierce conflict with one another. My mom bought me a little grey and purple electric razor when I was little so I could start shaving my legs. I started getting eyebrows, upper lip, and miscellaneous face regions waxed not longer after that. And I remember getting so pissed off at friends who wanted to take random trips to pools because I needed at least an hour's notice so I could shave everything. For a lot of years, it made me very, very miserable.

This is what I thought I looked like

I've been getting every square inch of my face waxed since I was 12. You can personally decide how much of that previous statement is hyperbolic. I have deep, decade old callouses on my face where the wax has been ripped off hundreds of times. I don't even feel it happen anymore. I remember a hot summer day when I was 13 or 14 and I was already sick to death of the trips to the salon. My mom told me about electrolysis and how my hair could go away forever. Yes, I thought, this is the answer to everything! I was surface level aware of what electrolysis meant but all I cared about was the part where my mustache went away. I remember pulling up to the woman's office, which was really just an old home tucked away on a hill. We practically climbed up to and stood on its great porch, waiting for her to get the door. I don't remember what the woman looked like or what the woman sounded like, but I was positive that she might try to murder me. She asked that my mom wait downstairs while she took me up for a consultation. She led me down a long hall to a wood paneled room, in it a reclined chair like that at the dentist's office. She told me to sit. She talked to me about the series of procedures I would undergo, all while shining a bright light at my face so she could take a closer look at my pores. I looked up at the ceiling in hopes of distracting myself and I was met with a picture of a good looking man, shirtless and posing in a swimming pool. She saw me looking at it. "Ha, oh that," she said. "That's a little something for you to look at. When the pain gets to be too much."

And then I got the fuck out of there.

When I was a freshman in high school, my face heavy with braces and pockets of grease, I spent a better chunk of my time trying to figure out when boys would start liking me. I didn't care to know how to get them to like me, or who it was that would eventually like me, but I was more interested in when. Time was of the essence and everybody knew that if boys weren't interested in you after the month of summer gym, then you were NOT a hot girl. Based on that criteria, I was definitely not a hot girl. I was a girl....who had come from some alternative middle school....who was funny sometimes. I didn't play a sport, so I wasn't a hot sporty girl. And  I didn't have a reputation, so I wasn't a hot allegedly slutty girl. I was hoping to blaze a trail of my own, get noticed for something cool, and make people stand back and say, "Wow. She really is all that." But there was one, huge, really embarrassing secret about myself that was acting as both a mental and physical hindrance in my plot to become the Coolest Girl Ever. It was my mustache.

I wanted my mustache to be this cute. Trust me, it was not.

I happened to overhear a group of boys at school talking about a girl's mustache. They said she should shave it, and it's disgusting, and they couldn't believe she left the house looking like that. My immediate reaction was that they were talking about me. They had glimpsed my whiskers before I had the chance to get them taken care of, and now they were repulsed by me. After further sleuthing, however, I realized that they were actually talking about somebody else. A relief, yes, but it still scared the hell out of me. I couldn't ever let them find out about my mustache. And I couldn't ever let them find out how hairy my arms were. And I especially couldn't reveal my legs, which I felt were in a constant state of five o'clock shadow. I was convinced that these boys would totally freak out if they ever realized how gross I was.
But it's not my fault! I wanted to tell them. It's hereditary! I come from very furry people! Then I would eat a plate of spaghetti while wearing a Russian hat.

In order to distract boys from both my mustache and my braces, I took to wearing very dark eye make up. I had read in some teen magazine that any time you want to distract a guy from something else on your face, you should wear a ton of eye liner. So I did. I don't think that worked very well. In hindsight it's obvious that I should have shown more cleavage, but the past is in the past. I blamed everything on the patches of black fuzz that sprouted at the corners of my lips, actual noticeable facial hair that was way darker than anything my guy friends could grow. And then I would go get it waxed off, and my eyebrows would be perfectly shaped and lovely, and I would just feel better. I've never understood women who need to get their nails done, but when I think of it as something similar to waxing then yes, I am totally on board.

In study hall my senior year of high school, I had my head down doing work. A friend of mine was sitting across from me and he said, "Hey. I can see your mustache. It's like, really dark."

In all my years of mustache-shaming, I had never once been called out on it until that moment. And by a boy. I had no idea what to say. I, of all people, had no come back. I think I mumbled something about an appointment, but as far as I can remember I didn't respond. I hated the way he made the comment. I hated that he sounded so much like those boys whose words I had tried to out run. They finally caught up to me. He looked at me with a crinkled nose and small eyes. He was seriously disturbed by my mustache. And he was also incredibly pleased with himself for getting the chance to point it out to me, like he was doing me a service. I asked the study hall monitor if I could go to the bathroom. I stood in a stall and immediately made an appointment.

After all these years of dealing with my facial hair, I can't say that it doesn't bother me anymore. Of course it still bothers me. I think it's a huge pain in the ass. I must think it's a pain in the ass if I whipped up a batch of face bleach and applied it myself. But I do it because it's something that's important to me. I know how easy it would be for me to make a really fantastic statement about self-worth and loving yourself. I believe in those things, don't worry. But I also believe that as human beings, we are vain. We are vain and impossibly unforgiving when it comes to ourselves and when you wanna look good, you wanna look good. When I told my mom I was blogging about my facial hair she said, "Be kind to yourself." And I think I've done just fine. But do you want to see something awesome?

These are my eyebrows

Those babies are mine. I've been stopped by strangers who tell me I have great eyebrows. Who would have ever thought that such a heavy browed woman would get to flaunt them with such pride? You may have noticed that I've given shout outs to heavy browed women before. I mean it every time. I have love for the blondes and red heads but to anyone whose life has revolved around hair removal, men too,  I salute you. We are stronger because of it.

Check out this article for further reading. You go, girl.

And I haven't plugged twitter in awhile. @markovichsays yay!

Art stuff, kind of

Raise your hand if you noticed I haven't posted in two weeks!!!

Right, well I noticed the same thing. I can't say I'm terribly pleased about it, especially since this "blog" is supposed to be treated like a "job." I read that in an article somewhere. It advised me to think of this blog as my job, that way I am working on it constantly and I am always giving my readers the product that they more desire. That's a precious way to think of this old girl. But until KatieMark.COM becomes a thing, you (as in vouz) will have to deal with the creative entity known as A Small Blog Thing. Of course I am making a pretty sizable assumption in suggesting you (vouz again) care, but pretending is half the battle when you're trying to be a writer.

In terms of my writing endeavors, that's still happening. The process feels slow, especially after last year when I had the most amazing writing schedule, but I'm figuring it out. Time management is a weird thing when you're navigating early adulthood. Odds are, your only commitment is work. And if your mind functions like mine does, you picture the "Things To Do" column and you only see one item. One obligation a day is way less than what I was doing in college. But somehow, I am more drained now than I ever was when I was rushing from work to class to meeting to rehearsal to college fair to library and back again. And that's because, and say this with much respect, college wasn't real. It was real in the actual sense but it was ultimately four years of being unbelievably self centered and doing things for me. College is very me centric, especially if you went to my college. You get your own spot in the library, you get your own holiday, you are guaranteed an active advisor from the time you send in your deposit check. You demand your friends go drinking with you on your birthday and then you get pissy with them when they don't leave you alone to study. College felt busy because we made it that way for ourselves. But now we're out here handling someone else's products, someone else's kids, someone else's money, someone else's research. We are on someone else's time. I've worked since I was 16, so I'm certainly not shocked that I actually have to do stuff. Now that "work" is the only thing in my obligations column, I suppose I understand what it means in terms of amount of ilk carried. This probably explains why I downloaded so many GRE apps last week and I now have to re-learn 10th grade math by February 9th.

Speaking of time and it not being your own anymore. Chicago has this thing called the Chicago Transit Authority, or the CTA. The CTA is both the L and the bus system. It's fine, a totally acceptable means of public transportation...until you need to be on time. I'm not necessarily being an asshole when I say that, I just think that's the most direct way of explaining the CTA. It's super cool to jump on the L on a Saturday afternoon and then spend the day in Millennium Park, or at the lake front, or shopping, or whatever. Anything that can be described as "recreational" is a okay. But if you NEED to be anywhere, the buses and the L run in windows of time. For example, the bus I need to take in the morning is at the stop anywhere between 5:27 and 5:31. Those minutes matter, because if you're not standing on the curb the bus will not stop and another one does not come for a good 15 minutes or so. I need to catch a train that leaves at 5:48, and the next one doesn't leave until 7:20. The minutes really matter and watching that bus fly by you because you were 10 feet to the left of where you need to be is the worst. I have to admit that being sans car has been more difficult than I had anticipated. Granted, my work/transportation  is not what I thought it would be so of course my expectations are a little off, but still. Just because I live in a city doesn't mean that everything is right around the corner. Waiting on trains. Waiting on buses. Or missing them. I think that's been the most difficult adjustment.


And speaking of adjustments.

At work there's this coffee mug that I try to get every morning before I fill it with the Caribou Daybreak blend. Sometimes I keep it at my desk over night so I know it will be there the next day. It's an official Art Institute of Chicago souvenir mug and not only is it huge, but it also bears the image of Caillebotte's Paris Street: Rainy Day. 

Caillebotte, Gustave. Paris Street: Rainy Day, 1877. The Art Institute of Chicago. 

I've seen the piece twice in person and I loved it both times. Man friend and I like to turn museum trips into free verse oral narrative time, in which everything is a part of some plot happening somewhere at some point. I remember rounding a corner and seeing this piece displayed at center and I immediately pointed at the man with the umbrella's face. "Look at him," I said. "Who is he looking at? Some one from his past. Or maybe that's who she sees. Whoever it is, the other doesn't know." And I became a little obsessed with this question. Who are they looking at? What are they looking at? So it's kismet or cosmic justice or because it was in the clean cup stack, but I love that look at this painting every day while I sit at my desk. I can't stop thinking about what they're looking at. (I also can't stop thinking about how many times I've ended these sentences with "at" but for the sake of flow and limited brain power, I'm just going to leave them.) The Art Institute is open until 8 on Thursdays, so I could feasibly take my train back into the city after work, run into the museum, and just stare at this for awhile. The painting is post-Napoleonic, visual commentary on the modernity that was sweeping Paris, and it kind of whispers, everything is different now, isn't it? But it's a hesitant whisper, wishing that someone will say that nothing's different. But yet, here's the change, the transition, the "It's all happening!" moment. Just look at their faces. What are they looking at? 

I hope I haven't dissuaded anybody from growing up. It's not so bad. You get to do cool things like go to the 96th floor of the Hancock Building for 14 dollar martinis on your 23rd birthday. You get to enjoy Saturdays in a beautiful, pure way that you never imagined you could love a day of the week. You get to buy different bread than whatever it is you grew up with. And you get to find things to look at, every day, for as long as you want to. 

Coming up this weekend: The aquarium! I wonder who the fishes will be when I see them.