Showerific Musings

The shower, for me no less than anyone else, is an existential moment. I get in the shower, and time stops. Past, present, future cease to be. I am Taking The Shower, the only shower that ever was, with the last few drops of the only shampoo that ever will be* and scrubbing myself off with the Possible Loofah.**

This sort of the thing puts me in a philosophical mood, and I find myself musing on that most vital of all topics–what the hell is up with nipple hair?


A number of men–and, James informs me, a few women as well–have hairy nipples. Not so much hair sprouting from the nipple, but a little ring around it, a follicular Stonehenge arranged around the ancient Altar of Nipple, suitable for sacrificing very small druids and not much else. The hair is pointless. If it were just men, I could maybe chalk it up to weird chest hair patterns, but women get it too, so I’m just going to have to take it as argument #2486000007 against an intelligent designer.

I don’t get that kind of hair. The matter doesn’t arise. No teeny druids for me. What I do get, very occasionally, is a rogue hair, something that I suddenly discover in the shower, a dark, perfectly straight hair rearing up from the increasingly gravity-affected Plains of Boob.

The weird thing is that I don’t ever see these growing. Any normal hair, presumably it would start small, uncurl, and I would see it coming from a mile off. Leg hair does this. Head hair does this. Other varieties of hair that shall remain nameless do this. But no. These hairs do not grow. They simply appear, the size of small sequoias, without going through any of the intermediary stages.

Admittedly, I am not maintaining a 24-hour surveillance on my breasts, completely with weekly review of the tapes. I know they’re there, they’ve never taken the day off, I trust them. It’s possible that I am simply deeply unobservant. But unless these things grow like mushrooms after a rain, you think I’d catch it in the act at some point.

Aliens may be responsible. Just in case they’re tracking me through it–and also for aesthetic reasons, admittedly–the rogue hair is slain as soon as it is discovered. On the off chance that this is some kind of desperate attempt by the mammary gland to grow whiskers so that it won’t run into things in the dark, I may be sentencing myself to a lifetime of walking into the doorframe when I try to get up to get a glass of water at night. This is a sacrifice that I’m willing to make.

And–this is the weird bit–they don’t grow back. Not right away. Months will pass before another invasion. And then suddenly, six or eight months later, wham! It returns!

This is both totally abnormal behavior for a hair, and probably a terribly common experience.

*Which I will not replace, and when I take my next shower, there will still be the last few gelatinous drops, thereby proving my point, damnit.

**Not nearly as cool as the Possible Sword, but nicely squooshy.

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