Two Terrible Problems!

They’re not really so terrible, but I thought this would make a good blog entry title (though I’ll regret it when I really do have two terrible problems and have to pretend it’s one or three problems so I don’t use the same title again). It also makes a good email subject line.

(Or you can start emails with the phrase, “I insist!”, just to set the right tone immediately.)

First problem: Unwanted hairs! (Plus my mother says when you turn 50, you start growing a lot of unwanted hairs everywhere.)

Solution: My very friendly, well-traveled, talkative electrologist near Union Square. She is Japanese and very short and I enjoy my visits to her very much. We discuss all sorts of things while I’m lying on her table: recipes for tasty dishes, places she’s been to, if Angelina is moving too fast letting Brad adopt her kids so quickly. To make sure no unwanted hair is missed, I put a black dot next to each one with a Sharpie beforehand. Every time I catch sight of the dots, I’m startled: A pox upon me! My electrologist says she’s comfortable working on all areas of the body, but not if someone wants something she doesn’t think is natural, like if someone wants her pubic hair transformed into a tiny (vertical) stripe. Dancers sometimes want this. She writhed briefly to indicate the type of person who might want unnatural-looking pubic hair. Someone who wants her pubic hair shaped into a horizontal stripe is probably even less welcome.

Second problem: Drippy eyes. I’m going to be one of those old ladies with drippy eyes; right now I’m a medium-old lady with drippy eyes. (Plus I’ve noticed my jowls are starting, just barely starting, to sink into two clumps on either side of my mouth, which gives me a stern expression that I find very pleasing; a stern expression comes in handy more often than not. It will be good to have one permanently.)

My eye doctor of the year (I like to switch eye doctors every year, for excitement) said that my tear ducts might be blocked and in need of irrigation. When you have a tear duct irrigation, they use a little skinny sticklike thing to stretch out the entrance of your tear duct, which is in the inner corner of your eye on the bottom side, and then they stick a long needle down the duct. Then they squirt a bit of saline solution down the duct to make sure there’s no blockage. Basically, you’re sitting in the chair and someone sticks a needle in your eye and you can’t move a muscle, let alone scream and flop back and forth in terror. I had several of these, all but one performed by a woman who worked in the office, not my eye doctor himself. The woman seemed pretty no-nonsense and there were no untoward incidents, but I noticed that when the eye doctor himself had to do this, one day after we waited and waited for the woman but she was just too busy, he seemed rather tense and kept reminding me not to move. I figure he had had a mishap or two in the past. I wonder how many eyes you have to put out before you decide to leave the tear duct irrigations to someone else.

As it turned out, I don’t actually have drippy eyes, I have dry eyes, as the following year’s eye doctor told me. Because they’re dry, they get irritated easily, and then they drip. She prescribed some medication that didn’t help and finally she said just to take fish oil religiously every day, to lubricate my eyes from the inside out. It doesn’t seem to be helping, and I guess that’s that. I guess I’m going to start carrying a small dainty handkerchief with which to dab at my eyes, which will also draw the eye to my jowls, though if all goes well, they'll be visible without such artifice.