Adventures in Shaving

When I was maybe a sophomore in college, I went out with a bunch of my SAI sisters to Cold Stone after a meeting and one of the sisters starts telling this story about how she had just shaved her legs and needed someone else to feel how smooth they are and ended up calling an ex-boyfriend of hers and... you know how that is. This story was then followed by a complete reenactment of her dance audition to be a cast member on a Disney cruise, in the middle of the Cold Stone lobby. I tell you this so that you have context for the story to follow as I take my place in the proud tradition of sisters sharing more information than is maybe necessary, but just as much information as is pertinent to the amusement of others. With that in mind, let me tell you that I shaved my legs this weekend, for the first time since I left. 

Yeah. I know. Let me tell you about it.

There are several reasons why I hadn’t shaved, which I shall enumerate below.

1. You may remember the packing list fiasco way back when. Razors were on the list of items that I could “more than likely buy when I get there”.
2. When I got here, I reserved all pre-bank account spending for the essentials. I pulled out £200 from an ATM using my American debit card and I figured I’d go on a big cosmetics run once my Scottish bank account opened in a week or so.
3. I had to wait until I had my BRP (basically, my permanent visa for the year, not just my entry clearance) until I could put in the paperwork for a bank account. I couldn’t get that until September 20th.
4. I went to the RBS branch nearest campus, which was swarmed with students. It took them three and a half weeks to open my account.
5. It took a full week after my account was open for my financial aid check to clear. 
6. All of this meant that my big cosmetics run didn’t take place until the last day in October. 

I’m not sure why I stuck to this “wait until you have money” plan- I’ve charged maybe an extra £100 on my credit card than I had planned on in the first place, and I could have just as easily spent some of that money on proper shampoo, conditioner, soap, and razors. I certainly feel more settled now that I have cosmetics that smell more like me as opposed to the stop-gap shampoo and conditioner I bought upon getting off the plane, desperate to no longer smell like I'd been on a plane. But for whatever reason, I waited until now and man, did that have some interesting results.

At first, I was actually pretty excited to be living somewhere where jeans would be the norm and where I would have next to no occasion to show my legs to the world. Not that I’m Victorian about it, just that my legs are nothing to write home about and I'm always ready to cull unnecessary parts of my beauty regimen. Plus, my new bathroom doesn’t exactly offer ample space to work with when shaving and, as I am fond of saying, with complete innocence, there’s a lot of real estate down there. I felt like I was dodging a bullet.

But then I realized that it’s not as frigid here as I expected it to be and that I could have been wearing the one dress or one of the two skirts I brought with me if I wanted. And while yes, I wore them with tights, the tights weren’t exactly necessary for warmth. They were necessary, however, if I wanted to preserve any semblance of my femininity. 

See, my German genes come out primarily in how much hair my body produces. While it’s a benefit when we’re talking about the Disney princess-esque locks that flow from my scalp, it’s less fun when we’re taking about underarm hair or leg hair, both of which I’m fairly certain I could have braided as of Saturday morning. I could feel the hair on my legs move in the breeze when I was wearing shorts in my room, which was not an unpleasant feeling, but also not a feeling that you can openly discuss. Unless you’re a dude. Which, dudes. I get it. I now have an appreciation for why you could prefer shorts even in winter. 

Also, I have weird bald patches on my legs and I’m not sure if I should be concerned about them or thankful for them. 

So, having gone shopping with my newly-recovered cash, I returned ready to take a shower and get down to business (she again said completely innocently). For reference, this is the size of my bathroom:

Itty-bitty living space

It's like I never left the plane.

Clearly, shaving in the shower was not an option. Slightly better was the idea of shaving in the sink, so this is what I endeavored to do. What ensued is what I imagine happens when a teenager finally goes to shave a struggling beard. I had to rinse the razor after each swipe. Pretty soon there were clumps of hair in the sink. I started to worry that I should have invested in a pair of clippers for the first pass. I didn’t think the razor would make it through even one leg. 

I like to think that all my life was preparing me for this moment. Those thirteen years of ballet were not wasted as I balanced on one leg and stretched and twisted and turned to reach opposite sides of my ankles and to get the best possible view of my kneecap, a repeat offender for harboring escapees from the razor. And there was a fair amount of dedication and tenacity required because you haven’t shaved your legs until you’ve waited fifty-two days to get around to that. And I’m going to hazard that there was some physics in there as well, maybe some calculating of the coefficient of static friction of bare feet on a water-soaked bathroom floor. Also some praying. But in the end, I prevailed. I walked out of there with the smoothest legs I’ve had in months and not a drop of blood on the floor. Boo-freaking-yah. 

Now, I’m not one to submit to the patriarchy. I’m a whisky drinking, football watching, action movie loving, change-my-own-tire kind of person and if I wanted to wear my skirts with hairy legs, ain’t no power in the ‘verse that could stop me. But damn, it feels nice to have smooth legs again and toes that don’t look like they could stand in for hobbit feet. It’s a matter of taking control over my appearance. 

I was talking to one of my friends in Sunday School a couple of years ago, shortly after she, her husband, and her preschool son had moved into a new house and she said, “The trick is to unpack the kitchen first. You do that and you can tackle basically everything else.” And I cringed a little internally because a woman, saying that you need to get your kitchen in order? How much more stereotypical can you get? But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. As the Night Vale novel put it, if you know a place, if it is or has been your home, you’re going to know where the silverware drawer is. It’s a way of getting settled, of knowing where you are, of returning your circumstances to some kind of normalcy. 

I can generally be about some kind of normalcy. 

So, my friends, when you move to a new country and you’re trying to “settle in”, take all the help you can get. Even if that comes in the form of pink razors and bathroom gymnastics.