What my upper lip and garbage bin at work have taught me

My upper lip was left battered and bruised last weekend in a waxing incident. Yes, sure, I volunteered to do it and even paid the big dollars. Unfortunately, now it looks like I have poison oak on my upper lip and it's not very attractive. Ironic, right? I got my lip waxed so that I could feel better about myself and if anything, it's left me feeling self-conscious and stupid. Yet, even if I didn't have a killer rash I would likely still be feeling self-conscious and stupid... and I'll tell you why.

That little layer of fuzz covered up the fact that I'm starting to get little fine lines radiating down in a diagonal pattern to my top lip. My mom warned me about this. She told me when I was 20 and started using lipstick regularly that I needed to use a lip brush, otherwise I'd get lines like she had. Mmmhmm. "Right Mom, the fact that you've been smoking a pack a day since you were 15 has NOTHING AT ALL to do with those lines," I'd always think.

But I digress. My real point, the more horrifying thing about this is that I've caught my reflection in the mirror since last Saturday and it looks like I'm sucking lemons a lot of the time. No, not horrifying because of the way I "look". Horrifying because of the way I must be feeling and/or projecting.

When I worked at the Renaissance Faire back in the day, this guy I had a crush on started calling me the "Poop in the Mouth Peasant" behind my back. Finally my best friend at the time told me, so I'd stop making that look. "What look?" I asked. She replied, "Dude, sometimes you look a little... pinched."

Imagine my horror when I caught myself in my rear-view mirror this Monday morning after having flipped someone off. I won't go into specifics but I get cut off, on average, two times in the span of just this one particular block on my drive to work every. single. morning. And on this particular Monday, I'd had it. I honked briefly as I passed the latest cutting-off offender, to catch her attention, and then I gave her the big ol' finger as I sped away. Then I looked in the mirror. Why, I have no idea... but I looked. And there I saw a stranger. A really angry woman with a poop-in-the-mouth, pinched, sucking lemons look on her face. "I'm not that person!" I thought.

Over the course of that day, as I tried to glimpse myself in mirrors at various other times, I realized that yes... yes, I can be that person. I just don't want to be. So, I decided to use my upper lip as a barometer this week, and without a mirror. Say I'm feeling crabby. I ask myself, how does that lip feel? Ah, it feels pinched. If I remember to think about my lip just randomly and it feels tight or drawn, I ask myself how I feel. Huh, strangely stressed and I don't even know why.

When Honey Bunny and I go to personal training, Yoga Trainer constantly tells us we need to "practice with an inner smile." At first I just didn't get it. Why would you do exercise with a smile? HOW do you do exercise with a smile? His theory is an old one: fake it until you make it. I think I get it now.

*****

Also under the category of "I'm not that person" is a story about my personal garbage bin at work. You see, Joe the Janitor comes in my cube every day at 5pm to dump my garbage. I don't know Joe personally, but he's a nice enough guy. One day about a month ago, after he asked me how my day was, I started wondering what Joe's job was like. He must see at least a few of us in our cubes every day when he empties our trash. Does he check out what's in our garbage bins? Does he make note of patterns in what we throw away? Because I would, were I Joe the Janitor.

On the odd day when my ear canal itches, and I bust out the emergency cotton swabs and scrape out some ear wax, I can barely put them in my bin because I'm afraid of what Joe will think. I mean, gross. Sure he's got latex gloves on and probably sees some gross shit in the bathroom trash cans, but at least there it's expected!

But again, I digress. At some point I started monitoring what I threw away in terms of food, food containers, wrappers, etc. For starters, at my job we put out tons of mini chocolate candies for our many customers, and so we have giant Costco-size bags of them in bulk. I'm a chocolate whore, and I admit it. I sometimes steal up to 10 pieces of halloween candy per day from our storage cabinet, I admit that too. The wrappers all go in my personal garbage bin. You see where this is going?

It doesn't stop at my choco wrappers*. I also have a bad habit of eating at my desk at lunch while perusing blogs and Facebook. All wrappers go in my personal garbage bin. I thought I was a healthy eater. I thought I was making healthy choices for lunch. At some point, I said to myself, "I don't eat crap like this! This was just an exception for today." Well, after you say that to yourself for an entire month, the truth is staring you in the face. It's sitting in an open-top garbage bin three feet away from where you sit all day in your cube, to be exact.

What must Joe think of me?, I kept thinking after my realization. Such is the peril of having a nice janitor, right? Then it dawned on me that the real person I was letting down was myself. It's strange how something so random can motivate you. I started taking my lunch to work more. Soon Joe would see the pits of summer peaches, a smear of homemade hummus on a paper towel where it had squished out of my whole wheat sandwich, and maybe, just maybe, a choco wrapper or two (not twelve). It also started to inform how I purchase lunch as well.

How random is it to think, "what do I want to see in my garbage can when I leave work today?" rather than, "what do I want to eat today?" But hey, it works.

* = Believe me, the painful irony of my admitting that I eat a bunch of halloween candy every work day after my last ranting post is not lost on me.