Saturday, May 23, 2015

An Unlikely Conduit to Spirituality

This just in from the Department of Tangentially Minded Over-Shares

Years ago - probably in the late 1990s - I bought my first nose hair trimmer. It was a relatively cheap device, operated by a single AA battery. I used it a few times over the following months and it did its job, whacking unwanted nostril hair. 

However, about six months or so after I bought it, I inserted the business end of that bad boy into a nostril, hit the on switch, and nearly passed out from the ensuing pain. It turned out that the battery had reached the end of its little life a millisecond or two after I fired it up, and with its dying gasps of power, the little blades turned just fast enough to rip, not shear, my nostril forestation. After yanking out a few dozen hairs - and let me tell you that nose hairs don't like to be pulled, not one bit - the battery died mid-way through the job, trapping dozens more hairs in the end of the trimmer. 

I am not kidding when I tell you that I let go of the trimmer and it just hung there, swinging from the nose hairs upon which it held in a death grip. In order to extricate the trimmer, I had to pull straight down, ripping many more of them out at the root. Now, I never have been one to cry, but the pain from having dozens of nose hairs yanked out at once is, well, exquisite. 

After getting up from the floor (where I had been curled in a fetal position) I threw the entire trimmer - with countless nose hairs still trapped in the blades of death - right into the trash. I've since had several other trimmers, but I ALWAYS test them OUTSIDE my nostril to make sure that the little blades inside are whirring away happily before I even think about sticking it into my nose. 

And there you have it - the story of how an innocent looking nose hair trimmer resulted in my finding of religion.

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