Don't Cut Off Your Eyelashes: A Public Service Announcement
February 20, 2015
I’m not a super attractive guy. I know I don’t turn many heads. Rarely do any ladies want tickets to my gun show.
I do have one redeeming quality, though: My eyes. They’re gorgeous. I also have really long eyelashes that drive the women (or men, or anyone) wild. I have eyelashes that most girls I know would kill, or at least cause severe bodily injury for.
It’s been that way my whole life. When I was a kid, everyone used to say, “Zachary, what pretty eyelashes you have!” That’s the last thing a little aspiring macho man wants to hear. I wanted to hear compliments about my muscles or how good I was at the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game, not my eyelashes.
When I was eight years old, I finally got fed up one night while I was lying in bed, reflecting back on all the women who told me how pretty I was. I’d show them that I was really manly and rugged. I crept out of bed and tip-toed to my closet. I dug around in my my toy box and retrieved my pair of scissors that were shaped like Santa Claus.
That night in my bedroom, in the dark, I put those scissors up to my eye, and hacked away at my eyelashes.
Keep in mind that I can’t cut things straight now at thirty-three years old in broad daylight. Just imagine how well I did at eight years old in the dark. I’m honestly really lucky that I didn’t poke my eye out or slice open my eyelid. One thing is for sure: those eyelashes weren’t pretty anymore.
The next day was Thanksgiving or Easter or Groundhog Day or something, and all of my family was having dinner at my Grandma’s house. We were having a lovely time until I heard someone exclaim, “WHAT DID YOU DO TO YOUR EYELASHES?”
Now I was hideous. My whole family was disgusted. My mom cried and my dad threw up. The next door neighbor caught a glimpse of me in his rear view mirror and drove his car into a volcano.
My parents forced me to wear a paper sack over my head until my eyelashes grew back. It was hard to eat through that sack since they wouldn’t cut any holes in it, due to fear of seeing my hideous face. They usually just poured chicken broth or pancake syrup onto the bag so I could suck the nutrients through the paper. Eventually the bag got really moldy and I kept getting bitten by horseflies. I caught a pretty bad case of malaria.
But a couple weeks later my eyelashes grew back and I was once again allowed back into decent society. Although my mom and sister still bring it up all the time, and that eyelash removal tax still comes out of my paycheck every two weeks. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I wouldn’t recommend cutting off your own eyelashes in the dark with Santa Claus scissors.