nobody here gets out alive

Christmas is less than two months away. That means that I will shortly be receiving my yearly bag of bath oils, lotions and perfumes.

I've done a reasonably good job of convincing the rest of my family to give up on the Christmas present thing, but my mother is the last hold-out. I suspect she always will be. And every year she gives all of her daughters a huge bag full of toiletries, just "a little something" that she managed to accumulate over the course of the year. A lot of them are freebies that she gets as rewards for spending a not-inconsiderable chunk of change on her own supply of lotions, oils, make-up and aesthetically-shaped bath beads designed solely to sit in a ornate bowl on the back of the toilet. (One area where I am decidedly Not A Girl. The back of the toilet is where I keep reading material and extra toilet paper. It would never occur to me that it's proper role is to support bowls of sea shells and coloured bath beads.)

So anyway, every year I get a bag of all this stuff. I give away anything I'm actively allergic to, add the make-up to the rest of the stock that's sitting around and collecting dust and sometimes get around to using the rest. I do tend to make good use a lot of lotions because I have chronic dry skin so I'm always slathering myself with stuff designed to keep my outside bits fully functional in their role of keeping my inside bits where they belong. So it's not like her gifts go completely unappreciated.

Except that in the last couple of years she's started throwing in wrinkle cream.

And I gotta' tell yah, I am entirely not sure how to take that.

It just so happens that in the last couple of months we've been digging through the clutter in our house and I stumbled across these little vials in tastefully subdued colours proclaiming their Regenerative, Hydrating, Age-Defying, Gravity-Defying properties. And I figured, what the hell?

At first I eyed them suspiciously. In what way exactly, would they serve to beautify my wrinkles? Make them plumper, fuller and longer? More shiny and conditioned? Cover them with glitter? (I have to admit, the gravity-defying part sure sounded like a hell of a lot of fun.)

I was somewhat mollified when I opened them up to discover they were pretty much just really small really expensive containers of skin cream. OK, not much threatening about that. I rubbed a little around my eyes and examined my face in the mirror. Looked exactly the same to me. I waited hopefully but I showed no signs of levitation so I pretty much shrugged my shoulders, tossed the vial on the counter and went about my day.

Those little vials stayed on the counter and every once in a while I would remember they were there and rub a little more of the glop into my face.

And I started noticing something.

I have wrinkles.

For the first time in my life I was bellying up to the mirror and taking a really close look at the skin on the parts of my face that move when I laugh or cry or have any expression at all. I wasn't looking at my face. I was looking at those little lines and crinkles and the closer I looked at them the larger they loomed.

And I stepped back from the mirror, took all those little vials of coloured creamy crap and dropped them all straight into the trash.

That was about a week ago. And it occurred to me this morning that maybe that stuff really does work.

After all, I haven't seen a wrinkle since.

"I shot a man in the ass with my umbrella"

griffen was kind enough to re-post my last entry on readers_list. Since I'm not familiar with the community I went to check it out.

And that's how I ended up reading this.

I haven't laughed that hard at a LiveJournal entry since bellafiga's last movie review.