Kate’s Blog

Here is a picture of my new eyebrow plucking mirror. Isn’t it lovely? Frida provides great motivation to get rid of those out-of-line offenders.

Yes, I do have a special mirror dedicated expressly to the purpose of eyebrow plucking. As you can see from the following photo, I am not a girl who is particularly particular about personal hygiene. However, plucking is one of my few personal grooming obsessions.

I’m not sure when this habit launched itself into full-blown obsession status, but it was definitely after high school. I had some BAD brows in high school. I will spend up to a good 25 minutes daily on my plucking ritual. One of the first thing I notice about a person is their brows. I spend a large percentage of my people-watching time critiquing brows.

Two of my biggest brow-breakthroughs happened on my mission. The first one occured when I was still in the MTC. I wrote my friend Amy and told her that I was SO busy I didn’t even have time to pluck. She wrote back very alarmed, “GET UP EARLIER!” Which really reinforced the pivotal importance of a properly plucked brow. I went through the inevitable, overpluck stage on my mission as well. After some furious plucking, all I had left were two hideous half-moons. I was walking down the street with my companion one day & I spotted it. THE PERFECT BROW. It was a picture in a Spanish magazine. I immediately cut it out & started my regrowth period, newly inspired.

I recently came across a brilliant article called Highbrow Eyebrow Fashion, where I got the quote for the title of this entry. It goes on to say “Eyebrows tell a story of cultures, eras and politics. For example, in Iran “un-groomed” is a sign of virginity. The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sported a unibrow. It became her signature, an expression of independence and feminist strength.” Clearly my strength lies in another area, namely having clearly defined brows. As much as I adore the art of Frida, the unibrow just ain’t my style.

I usually hate it when my husband takes random ugly pictures of me, which he is oft prone to do. But, this one is quite telling of how I currently feel. I have an AWESOME confluence of maladies including sore troat, high fever and Montezuma’s revenge.
I consider my biggest mistake of the week, as a vegetarian in Mexico, to be eating random chicken dishes in the “campo” with Mexicans. They must have stomachs of steel, because the effects have been crippling to me.
Cursed meat. Cursed!

Mexico is fabulous, don’t get me wrong. If I could, I would stay indefinitely. However, there is one thing that I will not miss when I return home. The white price. You see, for every item here there are two prices. There is the (albeit flexible) Mexican price that is reasonable and cheap. And, there is the price for people like me. Tall, thick accented-whities who have “I HAVE A LOT OF MONEY. PLEASE RIP ME OFF” written on their foreheads. You hear one price for the first guy & when you ask 20 seconds later the price has doubled or tripled. In Thailand things are even less subtle. The prices are stated publicly and are listed one for natives, and another higher price for “falangs” or foreigners.

I just got back from a trip to a border town between Guatemala & Mexico, La Mesilla. Not sure what it is about border towns, but they seem to be magnets for cheap souvenirs & the generally nasty.

I went with a friend who regularly visits the border to buy clothing to re-sell to clients. She convinced me it was the land of quality apparel at amazing prices. I went with lots of hope & money with the intentions of buying some uniforms for the girls I’m in charge of at church.

Turns out it is just the land of thin non-absorbent towels with large tigers, plastic Chinese ballerina fountains & horrendous skirts with bad flower prints, for the most part. The majority of the wares, tacky as they were, did not seem very cheap. She later told me that every vendor offered her the “white price” because I was with her, looming in the backround of the transactions with dollar signs for eyes. When she insisted that the prices where twice what they had offered the week before, they simply shrugged and nodded towards me as they said, “things change, prices change.” With my caucasianess, I brought a big white curse for her bargaining that week.

I don’t mind paying for things like weird souvenirs this way. After all, there is no Mexican price for them since Mexicans don’t buy chili magnets that say “Cancun” on them, tie-dyed T-shirts with kokopelli dancing across the front or nesting dolls made out of painted orange peels. But, for food in the market, local transportation and event admissions I would like to pay the price, not the white price.

Before we took our Mexico City break, Neil & I discovered a new form of meatless meat. It came in a can and looked so equally scary to raw meat that it convinced us it would also tasted like meat. It turned out to be a salty disaster & also gave me food poisoning. As it turns out, even all vegetable “meats” can go bad. Caution is recommended when dealing with tofu derivatives… especially when they look like this.