That's it...I give up.

Relax, I'm not done blogging. This is about a completely different subject. For years now I've been fascinated (some would say "obsessed - but they would be passionless crazypersons who lack vision) with developing the ability to raise one eyebrow. I've always felt that those who had this trait were somehow God's Chosen People - able to express themselves with so much more depth and aplomb than me. A single raised eyebrow means so many things in our society; think of all the signals it can be used to send: skepticism, surprise, puzzlement, sexual interest, distress, challenging repressive authority figures, the list goes on and on! Conversely, raising both eyebrows simultaneously only serves to signal surprise and or fear – neither of which I have much need for.

Friends of mine who have this ability have heard me rant about how jealous I am of their obviously superhuman powers. The truly devilish ones would use my weakness against me and taunt me by using the single-eyebrow in wholly inappropriate situations like asking what my weekend plans were or discussing which dining hall we would go to for lunch. Chuckles would echo all around as I tried to be a good sport but inside I was damning my own inadequacy – cursing my weak genes which made me a chucklestock* to my friends.

So I decided to train myself how to do it. I thought that it is nothing more than a trained muscle action so if I just focused for a few months I would be able to figure out how it works. For years, if I had a few minutes in front of a mirror I’d try to figure out which muscles controlled which parts of my forehead and try to master the art of telling some of them to move while the others stayed put. After a few years, I hadn’t quite succeeded, but I did develop a bizarre substitute, where the left and right sides of my forehead would stay smooth, but the middle part (right above my nose) would pull up – creating a series of ridges in the middle of my forehead that made me look somewhat like a Klingon** from Star Trek.

This last weekend, on the way home from the GF’s (who also can move one eyebrow but has been good enough not to taunt me about it***) I was stuck in traffic so I used the rear view mirror to see if I had made any progress. Naturally, I hadn’t (although the pseudo-Klingon comes quite easily now), which was somewhat frustrating. My frustration was probably quite evident to the couple in the car next to me, who had witnessed my practice session and were trying very hard to maintain their composure. The dog in their backseat was not trying at all.

I am taking this incident as a sign - I’m giving up hope of ever moving just one eyebrow. Obviously this is God’s way of telling me that I have a genetic defect and my eyebrows are not meant to be moved independently. Rather, they are locked in perfect synchronization for the rest of my days – never one without the other. Kind of romantic, actually.

*Like a laughingstock, but not quite as ridiculous.
**No, Microsoft Word auto-spellcheck, this is not supposed to be “Clinton”. Honestly, how is it that a company filled with uber-geeks writes a software application that doesn’t recognize the word “Klingon”?
***That will probably change once she reads this, naturally.