2005-05-18 - 12:28 a.m.
File this one under the “don’t try this at home” category:
So I’m a dancer and as such, I dance…a lot. Of course, I also happen to be a guy of Middle Eastern descent, so as it turns out, I sweat a lot too. Normally, this isn’t a problem. After all, everyone gets sweaty and gross in dance class – it’s nothing about which to be ashamed. However, in the dance for which we are currently rehearsing, there is one point where I am partnering a girl and the poor thing ends up with her nose right in my under-arm. Now, I would like to think that I am as hygienic as the next guy, but after an hour and a half of ballet technique, there isn’t enough deodorant in the world to keep a guy's underarms smelling good. This isn’t the first time I have thought about this – I don’t like smelling bad, ever. I want to be in a perpetual state of cleanliness. I want there to be a cologne named “eau de Nicholas”, even when I’m sweating buckets in tights and a dance belt. No problem for most of your body, but those darn underarms keep ruining my Obsession-by-Calvin-Klein dreams.
So, today in class, I was lamenting this to one of my dancing friends. He is my age and gay, and I feel comfortable talking with him about anything. I brought this up to him and he said matter of factly “why don’t you shave your underarms?” “Really?” I responded. He went on to tell me that lots of dancers do it, along with swimmers and wrestlers and, well, lots of men in very manly activities, so I tried it. What he neglected to tell me is that shaving your underarms involves feeling a pain and discomfort equaled only perhaps by the act of skewering your own eyeballs while standing naked in a shower of acid rain. SERIOUSLY – THIS HURTS LIKE A BITCH!
Actually, it’s not the pain as much as it is the humiliation. You see, tomorrow, I am going to walk around the office all day long with my arms held away from my torso like I am carrying a giant invisible hula-hoop around my waist. The humiliation is made even worse by the fact that half of this country’s population endures this every day of their lives – how do you DO that!? I mean, all the bitching I hear about menstruation and child-birth I can pass off as selfish – at least with these, you get something in return (a kid and the right to be a cast-iron bitch for a few days a month) – but this? Seriously, I think you could have won suffrage two hundred years earlier if you had made some of the founding fathers shave their underarms before signing the Declaration of Independence. If we knew you had pain tolerances like that, we probably would have sent you off to do the fighting while we cooked, cleaned and complained about how our wives never romance us anymore.
