#5:

Okay, I'll admit that I've thought recently about tweezing my eyebrows. Here's what happened: Ellen and I went for makeovers and the makeup person-20-ish, with perfect skin-started asking me whether I realized how easy it was to do something with my eyebrows. Would I like her to show me? No. Well, it would be difficult to do a lot with my eye makeup, since my eyebrows really needed to be, um, cleaned up. No, not reshaped, just kind of tidied. This was actually quite shocking to me, since makeup people usually compliment me on my eyebrows, even remark on how lucky I am not to have to do anything to do.

I fell immediately into a spiral of self-doubt and began examining the eyebrows of every woman I saw. On the El I'd look at women who were dressed stylishly or just neatly, women wearing gym clothes, women wearing men's clothes, even women who seemed to have paid no attention at all to their appearance-all of them looked like they'd tweezed their eyebrows. Eventually I noticed a few who hadn't, but I realized that eyebrows are like underarm hair: the majority even of women who show no other interest in conventional feminine markers take part in the ritual removal.

I'm an agnostic on underarm hair. Every once in a while I'll switch from shaving to not, or back again. What usually happens is that I suddenly look at myself in the mirror and think, gee, that (whichever I'm currently doing) looks odd. I suppose some day I might look at my eyebrows the same way.