Day 43: Pressing On

Today’s lesson: letting it go is a constant experience. In the midst of yet another setback, or at worst a disappointment really, I’m playing my “Happiness Is A Choice” card and telling myself to suck it up. My first ever drugstore.com order arrived in yesterday’s mail, and I was tickled pink as Aaron carried it into the house for me. I ripped into it immediately to reveal the five products I had purchased with such careful consideration.

First, the natural/organic hair color I bought looks like it might be drastically darker than what I want. But nothing short of gothic black can be darker than my natural color, so I’ll just go with it. I dug further to lay hands on the crown jewel of this shipment, the Burt’s Bees Toffee Lip Shimmer – the Holy Grail of all lip shimmers, the Red Rider BB Gun of this very box. I had read countless rave reviews of this toffee lip gloss. I am a fan of the Radiance lip shimmer, but not quite so crazy about the peppermint oil they use in it. The minty-ness makes my eyes water (finally nailed that trigger!) But ladies online in various sites had touted this toffee color to be the absolute one color they could not live without. “All my girlfriends want to know what color this is when I wear it!” “I keep a tube of this color everywhere I go!” “I get so many compliments on this color! It’s so natural looking.” And of course, it was the one color I couldn’t find in all of Shreveport. So, it made sense to me that everyone was buying it up before I could get to it in my local stores.

With Aaron close on my heels for all the excitement I was generating, I ran up the stairs with all items of my shipment, ripped through the tamper-evident packaging of the lip shimmer, and approached the bathroom mirror to witness sheer cosmetic genius in a tube. One good swipe to the bottom lip, two swipes to the top, and…wait a minute…

(Smacking my lips together) “Aaron, um, what do you think, honey?”

Aaron (wide-eyed and beginning to wrinkle his nose): “I think your lips look blue.” And then two seconds later, “No, wait, they’re gray. Silverish, but mostly gray. Mommy, is it supposed to look like that?”

“No, sweetheart, I don’t think so.” We ran to the other bathroom at my suggestion that maybe it was just bad lighting. As I looked into the mirror again, I was devastated to realize what Aaron was already saying out loud: “Nope, it wasn’t the lighting! That’s definitely gray!”

So I gotta get over the fact that I just paid $5 and waited nearly two weeks to find out what I’ll look like as a corpse. Except that my lips were sparkly gray! So, the up-side of all this nonsense?

At least I now have the perfect accessory to go with my Goth black hair!