If you don’t want to know about tweezers and nose hair, you might want to skip this one.

You know, older men, they get hair growing in the strangest places. I once knew this doctor who had hair growing from the inside of his ear canals. He was an Indian guy, like, from India, and so his hair was really dark and thick, and it was really noticeable. I wondered about why he left it there, but maybe it was just because it grows back. As for me, my ears remain hair-free, but my eyebrows have been getting bushier and bushier over the years. Nobody but my family has ever commented about it, but about six months ago, the bushiness got so wild that I actually, you know, combed the eyebrow hair to make it not stick out in weird angles. In Seattle, a barber offered to buzz them for me, and when he did, suddenly, my eyebrows looked… familiar. They looked the way they had in high school.

Well, I’m having another familiar experience, now. It’s because the inside of my nose isn’t at all itchy. Yes, at the age of 32, I’ve finally discovered that if one uses tweezers to pluck out the hair just inside the nostril, one gets much less of that Is-my-moustache-getting-so-long-it’s-poking-into-my-nostrils? sensation. My nose is suddenly comfortable again.

Maybe a week ago, maybe two weeks ago, Lime found a stray hair sticking out of my nostril, and said, “What the hell? Hold still!” And then she yanked it out. “Like an ajeoshi,” I think she said, laughing. A middle-aged man, that word means, and though I didn’t take it seriously, it’s true. So last night, finally, I decided that I would see just how much hair was actually growing in there, just in the first bit of nostril, and see how much tweezering it out would hurt.

I know, I know, nasal hair is an adaptation, a great way of catching airborne particles that come into the nose. And believe me, I haven’t gone and plucked my whole nasal passage. Just the first little bit… kind of like cleaning out the verandah of weeds.

Anyway, I can’t complain. It wasn’t painful–the little jolt passes far to quickly to register as pain. But it’s not fun, and has given me a new respect for the pain-bearing abilities of those women who get their legs waxed. Whatever I think of the pressure to leg-wax, to not have body hair, to be less-mammalian than men, I certainly have to salute the women who can undergo such pain regularly. I know, the inside of the nose is probably more sensitive than the legs, but then, I was just yanking a few stray hairs. (Well, in spots, more than a few. It was weird how much they clustered in certain spots, but… anyway.)