Inside the guide is little list of yiddish words with their english translations, and I think to myself no way is judiasm dying if we are all still covered in hair and coming to places like these. By the time my treatments are done, I'll be fluent in Yiddish and look like a goy.

The consultation is highly succesful. Apparently I am white enough and hairy enough (uh good?) for treatment to begin immediately. I book an appointment for two days later and watch a years salary in Calcutta slide through my fingers.

The two days between treatments I can't do anything to my little hairs at all, so by the time the apoointment rolls around I feel really self-conscious and kind of miserable and what-not. So of course that's when I run into someone I don't know very well on the metro and have to engage in small-talk while trying to jam my chin into the collar of a vneck sweater. Not so good.

I arrive early at the place, and don't want to go in and read about Seigals magic cookie diet again. (The office doubles as a medical weight -loss clinic - I tell you the irony is coming at me thicker than plum paste I almost can't believe I am doing this, sitting in snowden with a bunch of Japs trying to make myself pretty - it's like a hell of my own devising but I tend to think the outcome is going to be worth it so I persist). Anyways, no seigel magic diet, no sitting in a waiting room surrounded by pictures of blond people hugging each other while wearing skimpy bathing suits.

**Nota bene: the people who work at this clinic are all actually incredibly nice and friendly and helpful and encouraging and all the things I would not associate with staff at a laser hair clinic so please read this as the creative output of someone who is in safe hands being treated very nicely. And I haven't actually seen a single magic weight-loss cookie yet.**

Anyways, while waiting I find a really stellar second hand bookstore nearby. For some reason the owner has set it up so all the tiny tiny books are grouped together and all the really big books are grouped together. I spend some rewarding minutes looking at tiny books and then pass over to the science book section where I get all hot under the collar about a book called "controlling nature" - which I don't buy, but start thinking that the idea of controlling nature is the perfect entry point to a masters in philosophy of technology thinly disguised as an MA in communications.

Than I go upstairs to the friendly but ultimately surreal waiting room full of pictures of hairless people, my nurse/laser technician karen is waiting for me and we go into a little room and I lie down and put on the pink glasses and she leaves for a minute.

(Does it seem weird to you that I should be wearing rose tinted specs for this - it's to protect my eyes, but really I think the whole exercise requires that I be wearing rose tinted glasses).

There are actually two different kinds of decoration in this clinic. There are the sexy people pictures. In this room it's a couple, he of burnished and brawny arms lifting her of lissome tanned (hairless) legs and cleavage out of an emerald lake. (Why are the only two people I know who are getting this done queer as lords yet the pictures are all of perfect straight people, Obviously I have been fed a line about what I need to do to belong, worse yet I believe it).

The other kind of decoration is just above my towel covered couch, it's a three-dimensional cut away diagram of a patch of skin with a bunch of invasive and ugly hairs twirling out of the surface. each section of the skin is described so that when my nurse/technician returns she can explain how the laser is going to burn my hair without affecting the delicate nerve-endings, glands and pores which surround it.

Mostly the diagrams function is to remind me that my hair is ugly. I can accept that, I already think my hair is ugly , I don't need the sign to remind me. Personally I think there should be pictures of kittens and puppies and pirates and cossaks on my side of the room, where the couch is. Then the underlying message would be something like, "hey look, right now you're in a club with hairy little animals and outlaws. Relax, soon you will go the other side of the room, and spend time with vacuous blondes and their boyfriends, aren't you excited?"

Whatever, it's too late Karen has come back and is applying some funny gel to my head, and punching things into the massive grey plastic laser machine to my left. Which is when I finally realize that all this time I thought web design was where I was going at it tooth and nail with nature, but really it's me and this machine and my ally Karen that are going to take whatever is natural about my bodys hair production mechanism and wrestle it into submission using a technology that I don't even understand - except that it could blind me, and that's why I am wearing these glasses.

So I kiss an all-natural miriam goodbye as the tiny little hairs burn down to the root while karen quizzes me about what class I teach friday morning. I tell her I teach web design and she askes if I also design websites. I respond in the affirmative as the little gun goes csnick, csnick csnick and a smell of burning fills the room.

I should add that the other odd thing about these appointments is the immediate familiarity and the nurturing quality of feminine beauty establishments. Karen calls me 'hun' which is a word an ex of mine and I used to use mercilessly to make fun of typical heteronormative culture." hey hun, are you going to go out and buy us some beers, yes hun I'll be right back, oh hun, you're such a card etc.."

So karen and I are hunning it up, and she says, " hey what do you charge to make a website, my manager and I were talking about this the other day." So I start my quickie lecture in CMS technologies by the end of the appointment I am staring at draft copies of web content and discussing baseline pricing with the manager.

Which is double triple quadruple weird, now I can add to my roster of feminist web design projects a site for the oldest laser hair treatment centre in montreal with the url:

http://www.killhairnow.com

That's right, from digitalgirls.org to killhairnow.com. How the mighty are fallen.

** addendum***

Lauren just called, she's weeping about the cost of this adventure; "I know I sound like a mom now but that is a lot of money you just spent - that is a lot of beer we could have bought and drunk.." "Did you find someone with a taser and hand him some money and tell him to just point it at my chin?!"

Posted by Miriam at December 2, 2005 6:54 PM | TrackBack Posted to girls+tech