How To Get Your Friend To Stab You In The Face
Has your mother ever told you not to pick your face? It’s one of those bits of advice that your mom actually knew what she was talking about. I can just hear her, “Do not pick your face!” When filling out the paperwork to get a full-body massage the other day, I wrote “hourly” when asked how frequently I like to get massages. To say I like massages is like saying children like candy. I FUCKING LOVE MASSAGES. This is not to say that I get them very frequently, but I would if I could. For reasons that are unknown to me, I do not feel the same way about facials or pedi/mani’s. But then I have this thing that I sometimes get on my face called milia. Milia is what infants get on their tender faces a/k/a baby acne. Milia is the tic of the acne world. It’s not a zit. It’s a vicious skin plug that you have to dig out with a metal tool or you’ll leave its gnarly milia cyst head in your skin like a tic. I’m not going to waste my dermatologist’s time making an appointment for what is really a tiny cyst that looks like a pimple. Instead, I keep trying to pop the un-poppable thing knowing that I’m just giving myself a face wound. I do this knowing it will take days to a week to heal and the milia will still be there after my amateur attempts to dig it out. I just can’t leave it alone. It seems like it’d be so easy to remove. I’m not very bright sometimes, especially when I’m letting an un-zit on my face irrationally torment me like an itchy shirt tag.
Not able to stand it one more day, I made an impromptu appointment at a local facial factory to pay the nice ladies there to lance my un-pimple. I paid for the mini-facial and was highly annoyed to discover that the aestheticians only “pamper” you at the beauty sweatshop. In other words, they don’t poke your skin with sharp instruments, even when you pay them to. The gal performing my relaxing facial was clearly in a big hurry. She kept swiping my face quickly with cloying butterscotch-scented elixirs and sickeningly sweet lotions. Then she rubbed a bunch of oil that smelled like Werther’s hard candy into my hair and left the dark rings from my weeping mascara underneath my eyes. Relaxed AND gorgeous.
The moment I hit the parking lot, I called a friend who lives nearby and asked if she would stab my face with a needle because “I got no love at the glamor mill.” And, you know what? She didn’t hesitate. Maybe she’s secretly been wanting to poke my kisser with a sewing needle for years now and I finally gave her the chance. I won’t know if she got the infernal milia off my face until my face gash heals and I can see if it’s pearly white head is still there. I’m sorry. Were you looking for a lesson at the end of this? It doesn’t speak for itself? Okay: This post is really my way of reaffirming that it’s better when I teach my children to do what I say to do and not what I actually do, because what I do is frequently moronic.