Mascara FAIL

I have been wearing mascara every day for the past little while because of The Rules.

The Rules, if you didn't know, is an entirely offensive and ridiculous set of rules that some desperate women imposed on themselves so that they could get husbands.  Then they wrote a book about it and a whole bunch of other women were all like "We want husbands TOO!  GIVE US THE RULES!!!  If we don't have a husband yet the only thing that can be blamed is the fact that we have been too busy selfishly having a career and a life of our own and dumping our neuroses* on men instead of being beautiful roses for them to carry around on their arm!  THANK YOU RULES, YOU'VE SAVED MY LIFE FROM THE HORROR OF NOT BEING MARRIED!!!"  And they followed the rules and all got married.  Or at least bought the book and talked about it a lot and made it really famous.

Then 15 years passed and it's today and I am trying to follow the rules as a sort of personal challenge/project that wasn't supposed to be an exercise in masochism but probably will become one.  There's an explanation but right now you'll just have to trust me that I am not trying to hustle a man into marrying me by crushing my personality, because there are greater issues at hand: The Rules is making me go blind and ruin my eyelashes.

Here's how: one of the rules is that you're supposed to always wear make up.  Specifically, they say to wear lipstick all the time, even when you go jogging.  Problem #1 with this rule is that I don't jog and never will and they can't make me because this is not supposed to be a masochistic project.  Problem #2 is that I hate wearing lipstick because it makes my lips feel all greasy and it always rubs off the middle of my lips and gets gummed up around the edges of my mouth making me look like some kind of slack-jawed crack stumpet.  Not pleasant.  So I have chosen to wear mascara instead of lipstick, since, you know the eyes are the window to the soul and all that crap.

It's been a couple of weeks of daily mascara-wearage (as opposed to my usual a-few-times-a-week mascara habit) and suddenly my eyes are getting all itchy towards the end of the day, but not in the usual-for-this-time-of-year allergenic kind of way.  More like when you are wearing a bodysuit with sequins around the arm holes for your dance recital and it's the dress rehearsal and you've been dancing in it for 3 hours and you can't take it off so the sweaty skin and sequins are combining into a scratchy/itchy death and you spend all the time when you're not actually dancing trying to pull the sequined arm holes away from your skin for some momentary relief.  That's how the tender edges to my eyelids feel right now, and the problem is that there is nothing I can do to get relief!  There is no arm hole to pull away from my skin - what am I supposed to pull away in this scenario?  I'm pretty sure the end result here will be crippling blindness.

Also, I'm pretty sure that my eyelashes have gotten thinner, weaker, and more sparse since I've started wearing mascara daily.  This smacks of a conspiracy theory.

I may have to take a day off mascara tomorrow.  Sorry Rules, I may be dedicated enough to my project to risk driving away any guys that I might actually like by acting like an idiot around them because I'm doing what you say, but I will draw the line at a blindness/skinny eyelashes combo.  That is TOO FAR.

*The Rules seems to assume that every woman is neurotic and has all these psychological problems and anxieties to weigh a man down with.  It's constantly telling me not to plague a beau with my neuroses or burden him with my abandonment issues or phobias or problems that I should be talking about with my therapist.  They're one scalpel short of just cutting out my uterus and taking care of the root of the problem.  Probably the only reason they don't is because the husband they help me find will inevitably want me to have his babies, and a woman without a uterus, while joyously relieved of her natural hysteria, is an empty and useless shell unable to bear children.

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