Last night, I used a depilatory on my upper lip.  For anyone who doesn’t know what that means, I decided to put a burning chemical cream that smells vaguely like old bananas directly over the orifice in which I take in nutrients in order to get rid of my mustache.

Until last weekend, I didn’t know I had a mustache.  Admittedly, there were days I would look into the bathroom mirror and notice a “slight discoloration” over my lip that I attributed to too much strong coffee out of travel mugs (why can’t they make a travel mug that doesn’t slosh coffee up over half of your face while alternatively dripping in your lap?), and sometimes if I got too aggressive with my Almay Cover Stick on one of those lip pimples, I would realize that there were some fuzzies that looked pretty odd to be slicked down in flesh-colored White-Out, but in general, I would have said, “no, I do not have a mustache.”  However, I visited my sister last weekend and she did a lot of complaining about HER mustache. Which I also didn’t really notice, though I guess if you stare hard enough, hers looks like she drank grape Kool-Aid about a week ago and there’s still a little bit of a stain at the corners of her mouth.

Anyway, ever since our Saturday side-by-side stare fest in her unforgiving bathroom mirror (her apartment used to be a school, so you can imagine what the lighting is like) I’d been spending time stroking my upper lip. Who’s that famous (dead) guy who twirled his mustache in mischievousness?  Or was that guy a cartoon?  No matter.  I was totally being that guy, except I was stroking my mustache in terror.  What if it starts to grow?  Egad, what if it spreads totally across my lip (instead of just being regulated to the corners like a nerd at a mixer) and what if it starts talking to the other hair on my face and they all decide to have a party? What would I look like with a beard? 

Somewhere between Magnum PI and Rip Van Winkle I got a grip.  First of all, I fancy myself all indie rock and chill and cool, and I have a really hard time believing that Zooey Deschanel spends a bunch of time in front of the mirror worrying about whether or not she’ll start to look more like M. Ward after a trip across the country in a Silverlite.  Even part-time punk people don’t have time to worry about their mustaches (except for the boys – we’re in the era of mustaches and beards and all sorts of other scratchy stuff for the masculine set.); even part-time punk people are figuring out how to play the mandolin (or something even more esoteric) and working on how to get into Conor Oberst’s next project, not vainly staring into the mirror at four hairs that may or may not be darker than clear.  Second of all, no one’s really said anything about it and I still get the opportunity to kiss boys and such so maybe it’s not really that bad.   

But then Zooey got to me, AGAIN.  Because here’s the thing.  While she might not be obsessing about the hair over her lip, she is TOTALLY secretly obsessing over this red / pink lipstick that a person MUST have if they are going to have any indie credibility whatsoever.  I mean, it’s totally a coincidence that Zooey and Katy and Ingrid and other wide-eyed artists wear this color because really, they all just “happened upon it” while shopping in a quaint vegan general store somewhere in the Midwest on their way to a gig at a dusty bar in the desert, but anyway, you just canNOT be progressively cool and hip without it.  So of course I have to have it.  I know this ruins my hipster vibe, both talking about it and wasting several hours inside Sephora with lipstick streaks running up the inside of my arm like some sort of tribal ritual when I could have been learning the Bouzouki (look it up, ye with no indie cred!), but I’m past that.  I needed the lipstick. 

So I found it and spent an exorbitant amount of money on something that, you know, Zooey was able to find digging through her grandmother’s Sunday purse but once it was on, my lord, could you see my mustache.

Five dollars and five minutes later, I was mustache-less.

And today it looks like I smeared my new red / pink lipstick all the way up to my nose because while I now have no upper lip hair, I also have no upper lip skin.  I am so damn indie rock I can’t stand it.