Not an Exit, but an Enterness

I went to get my eyebrows threaded — Why? Who can tell? — and had a moment, thanks to the threading lady. So there she was, with a piece of string between her gritted teeth and hanging out of the corner of her mouth, looming over me. Below her, I was doing breathing exercises and telling myself to be strong because who knows how painful it would be (the pain is proportionate to the length of your facial hair and the doer’s skills). This is when Madame asks me, “You want to thread your forehead or wax it?”

Let’s ignore for the moment that I barely have a forehead. Why does a forehead need depilation? I decided I had misunderstood her.

“No need to shape or anything,” I said imperiously. “Just take out the extra.”

She shook her head. “Your forehead. It’s hairy. I’ll do it?”

“No. Just the extra around the eyebrows.”

 

While she did her thing and yanked every ‘extra’ hair in the eyebrow region out of the epidermal layer, I thought to myself about how this is the reason I hate coming to salons, whether this was the sort of thing that nudged women and girls into subscribing to stupid beauty constructs, if this woman genuinely thought foreheads could be hairy or if she’d been taught this by clients who asked for their foreheads to be threaded… etc etc.  And of course I thought, “I must jot this down on the blog.”

I haven’t been jotting much down over here in a while. For a while, it was because I was swamped. Then, I blamed it on me being lazy. Then I blamed it on Twitter. There’s a little bit of truth in all of this, but the big truth is that time’s up for this blog. It wasn’t bad while it lasted, and I actually do find myself searching through older posts, looking for details of art shows/ books that I’ve written about, so I’m very glad it’s here and online. Yet somehow, it feels like a thing of the past. Something that I can’t refashion to match my present.

Today, this blog is only quasi “anon” and it isn’t “going on” by a long shot, and I find myself missing the “anon” part. Maybe that’s what’s unfolded in here and rather than continually trying to find and follow the creases, it’s probably better to stop with the failed origami and fold it up. This isn’t an exit as much as it is entering something else, like cracking open a new notebook before the old one has run out of pages, or starting a new blog, anonymously, again. (Because, boss, it’s been YEARS — ok maybe one year — since I started one. Honest.)

But as I officially and formally fade out, I wanted to thank everyone who’s come here, read and laughed and argued and come back. Much appreciated. And when exactly no one reads what I write in the newly-anonymous enterness, that’ll teach me.

Nevertheless, thank you.