The Quest for a Hairless Leg (or Two)

Women: Do you ever scratch your leg and realize, "Holy shit! I'm hairy as a sasquatch!"

How gross is that?

I used to be fanatical about shaving my legs. I'd shave at the first sign of dasterdly sprouting hair--even if it was the middle of the day and I had to strip down and prop my leg up in a sink to achieve my goal.

Since living in an apartment with no bathtub--just a shower stall--I've become less stringent on my leg-hair standards.

In fact, my legs right now could accurately be described as hirsute. It's like someone drugged me in the night and transplanted David Hasselhoff's chest hair on to my legs. It ain't pretty.

It's not that I want to resemble an orangutan, it's that shaving my legs in my shower is an elaborate undertaking that requires a great deal of skill!

Unfortunately, I do not possess the balancing acumen required to complete this task with any degree of grace or speed. Speed is of the essence in my world, particularly when that damned snooze bar is so appealing.

My shaving ritual goes a little something like this:

1. Locate the place in the stall that is being assaulted by the least amount of water from the shower head.

2. Place leg in the aforementioned area in preparation for the (often fruitless) "Attempt to Apply Shaving Cream".

3. Attempt to Apply Shaving Cream: This process is hampered by a few obstacles. For one thing, in order to achieve adequate shaving cream coverage, I must bend down. When I bend down, the water I had previously been blocking spews forth, rendering my cream-covered parts bare and usually filling my eyes/mouth with water.

Note: You may be thinking, "Why not turn the water off for application of shaving cream?"

My response to that is as follows:

a) It's fucking cold in my apartment. It's a basement. And a particularly cold basement, at that.

b) It's all well and good to turn off the shower for shaving-cream-application, but what happens when I need to rinse the blade? You do the shaving cream math.

4. Usually by this point I've abandoned any kooky notions of of creating smooth, supple, hairless, shaving-cream-protected skin and decided to simply hack away at the offending areas with my razor, hoping to at least trim some of the larger patches. This is also not easy. You try reaching your ankles with a sharp object, in what amounts to an upright coffin, without doing any of the following:

a) Banging your head

b) Knocking over large objects (usually in conjunction with (a)), such as shampoo bottles, that fall crashing to the shower floor, usually cushioned by one's foot. Luckily, one's footal area is replete with extra fat, so this hardly ever hurts.

c) "Nicking" oneself with the razor so that the resultant drain-swirl is a Hitchcock-esque mixture of water and blood.

My legs are hairy. Sue me.