I'm a Halloweenie

Tonight was a nice, relaxing Friday evening at home.

I baked and decorated cupcakes and chocolate La Choy Chinese noodle spiders for our Halloween party tomorrow night, while M. caught up on a few things.

Then we rifled through our donated bag of Halloween decorations from RJ and made our apartment look festive.

Then we hugged goodnight, only to recoil quickly from one another due to a horrifying pain in both of our torso areas.

Because tonight, shortly before the cupcake decorating and not long after we'd resolved a brief but tense argument over which soda -- Mountain Dew or Mexican Lime-Ade -- would make our Halloween punch a more pleasing shade of green, M. and I also removed all of our upper body hair with Nair; I, in an effort to make a more convincing Vampiress as part of my ongoing annual Halloween-based excuse to dress like a woman -- an effort complicated this year, I will admit, by my misguided choice of a size 10 gown which refuses to zipper beyond my third rib -- and M., more or less, because his curiosity was peaked and he's the middle child.

And I must say that, in addition to the stubble which is apparently left behind in the process -- hence the painful embrace -- the sight of one's denuded chest and abdomen is jarring at best. I can't remember when I last saw myself looking quite so Baby's Bottomly, although it must have been around the same time that I began to compulsively shave the horrifying, solitary chest hairs growing around my nipples, a biological turn of events so unexpected and overwhelming that it should come as no surprise that I lost track of the pilatory processes elsewhere on my body.

And while it has been said that shaving and/or waxing and/or Nairing and/or otherwise depilatating one's chest leads to better visible muscle definition and tone, the only thing I have noticed thus far is that my nipples are even smaller than I'd thought (and redder, although I feel this must be due to chemical burns sustained in battle), and the skin around my torso has become slack and easily wrinkled, much like that of a seventy year old grandfather. Of course, anything will look smaller and/or wrinklier the longer one stares at it and/or contorts and crunches one's stomach in ways one hasn't previously attempted.

I suppose my point is that I am headed down a dangerous path. Because marriage, it would seem, inevitably leads to quiet nights spent at home in quiet places, which in turn lead to idle hands and minds which, when all is said and done, can only lead to me, night after night, completely hairless and zipped into a dress six sizes too small, high on eyelash adhesive and Mexican punch, feeding the cupcakes and frosting my children. But at least I'll have got the dress zipped.