update and face washing, in that order

First of all, I want to thank you for the prayers and kind thoughts that have gone out on behalf of my pop--I appreciate it so much. He's doing better today; still in the hospital, because they aren't exactly sure what is going on, but he now has all his wits about him and is starting to feel like his old and remarkable self again. They ruled out many of the scarier diagnoses and are leaning towards it being viral, in which case they are already fighting it while he is in the hospital, hooked up to...well, whatever it is he is hooked up to.

I went to art school, folks; outside of having some decent compassion towards living things, I am about as unlike a medical student as one can get and have no idea what it is that doctors do.

Okay, I have a few ideas. But I don't know how one fights a virus in a hospital.

I talked with my pop tonight and he is quite irritated that the whole thing even happened in the first place, which is a good sign, I guess. They won't release him until he has maintained a normal temperature for 24 hours and he was pretty disappointed that he was given a menu to place food orders for both Thursday and Friday.

And no, they weren't take-out, so it looks like he might be staying for a bit.

Hopefully there won't be a repeat of my little stunt that I pulled last time I was incarcerated hospitalized and, in complete exasperation at still being in a hospital room after what seemed like a lifetime, I took my jello off of my tray and threw it right at my mom's face.

Granted, I was five years old and didn't know much better. Well, okay, I did know better, but I was certainly under extreme duress and so could not be held accountable for my actions. My pop is a good deal older than five, so I am thinking my mom's face is probably safe from flying bowls of jello.

Speaking of faces, I really hate to wash mine.

(how's that for a segue?)

Honestly, most nights I'd rather have someone throw jello at it.

Because of the amount of makeup I have to wear on stage every night, it feels like a tremendous undertaking to wash all of it off.

Especially the mascara.

It's amazing what a two-sided coin mascara is for me. I love putting the stuff on. Love seeing it transform the blond tips of my lashes to a nice and thick black spray. I spend time agonizing over each lash at my dressing station, separating them, going over them again and again with the wand. And the results? Yep, you guessed it--I love the results, too.

Well, those results, anyway.

The results after the show are not so cute. The stuff holds like a son of a gun. And when it is late at night and I've put off washing my face for all the hours I can afford, it's like removing tar or something. Not that I've done it, but I can only imagine that it sticks and is gooey and is generally unpleasant to remove from any given area.

Which is why, more often than not, I simply jump in the shower and wash my whole body, makeup-caked face included, rather than stand in front of the sink and wash my face in an isolated event.

This might sound like a lot of extra work when I was already dreading the chore of washing my face, but it isn't.

It's actually a lot more like stepping under a gloriously strong current of water from above that simply does the dirty work for you and in a piping hot stream of water, the mascara melts right off.

Problem solved, easy peasy.

This abhorrence I have to washing my face forces me to take many more showers than I ordinarily would. Which is probably a very good thing, considering that I don't even shower daily as it is.

There. So I have told you one of my daily chores that I detest. What is it that you hate to do, but simply find it unavoidable considering that you want to be socially acceptable and all?