Everything Happened | vol. 196

The body electric

Christmas 2020 was a light, made peaceful and joyful by the lack of itinerary, the lack of responsibility. I think we even had all the presents wrapped before Christmas Eve, a first. (We are more typically phone on 3% people, running through the airport people...) We went to the beach in the afternoon, frozen winds attacking us. We ate sandwiches there, the kids horsed around with their new toys.

The normal post-Christmas-morning pit in my stomach never arrived. Later, when it was time for the dinner I had planned, I just didn’t feel like making it. I think the kids had nuggets and cut fruit in front of Netflix pablum. Who knows what Nick and I grazed on. Probably just cookies.

The next day, I made the dinner I had been planning for Christmas, a sort of fussy but ugly polenta lasagna. I enjoyed making it. My heart is almost never in cooking these days. What a waste it would have been to have spent time on Christmas Day doing something I didn’t want to do. In this economy?!!

I felt like I was on quaaludes.

So it’s not surprising that after those days of whatever was tightly hugging my central nervous system, January has been a comedown. A punishing walk-in cooler I’ve been dropped into, alone, while I wait for my number in the vaccination queue. I see at least six more months of childcare being patchwork and unpredictable, of Desi’s school opening and closing again like an origami fortune teller. Jane’s daycare closed this week because a kid there tested positive and when I got the email, I felt nothing. I would have to have once had hope, to then feel that hope extinguished.

Ok, actually January has been surprising to me, because I keep getting mad at myself for being sad!!! You were just having a good time the other week!!!, I say to myself. Why are you crying because “Our House” by CS&N came on Spotify???? It’s not even a sad song, just a corny one. That’s like crying to “Steal My Sunshine”? What the fuck??? I’m not a doctor, but did you know that yelling at yourself for having a hard time is not an evidence-based treatment for having a hard time?

What is there to do during a slump but buy a small device and electrocute my face with it.

My friend Sarah had posted about the microcurrent device on her Stories, saying something like “unfortunately this works.” The “unfortunately” part is because recreational zapping doesn’t come cheap. The NuFACE Trinity, what I think of as the “big boy”, will set you back $325. The NuFACE Mini, what I bought, is a slightly more sane $150.

Cheaper than Botox, I reasoned, and unlike Botox, the amortization was favorable. With every zap session, the cost per use would shrink into oblivion. And unlike, say, an Instant Pot, I actually saw myself using it.

Here is what happens when you apply the NuFACE to your OldFACE: after slicking a gel primer to your cheeks, forehead, and neck (once you run out of the branded primer, you can use sonogram gel from a medical supply store or aloe vera gel from Walgreen’s etc.), the chrome balls send microcurrents of electricity into your skin. You draw the balls outward from the center of your face to the edge, like gua sha attached to jumper cables. If you accidentally hit skin not covered in gel, it stings.

This is what allegedly creates the “tighter” face, leading to more elastic youthful skin, and stimulated collagen production. There is, according to beauty YouTubers, an instant effect as well as a compounding effect. From bloodhound to Bratz doll!!, is what I would say if I did their marketing copy. (ok but NuFACE call me tho)

I don’t know if it works yet; I haven’t been using it that long. Even if it’s a scam, it is a pleasant ritual to send electricity burrowing into my rubbery, Ace Ventura face, feeling my teeth rattle, or is it my fillings? I think about electroconvulsive therapy for treatment-resistant depression, how it is meant to shake up the troublesome Etch-a-Sketch of your brain chemistry. When I put the device to my face, I’m both Victor Frankenstein and Frankenstein’s monster, wondrously alive and yet deadset on revenge for my very existence. When I put the device to my face, I am also usually stoned and in bed for the night.

Nick first encountered it and held it with fear, as though it might hurt him. “This has got to be hokum, right?” he said, and asked me how it was supposed to work. This might have annoyed me on a different day, because how annoying is it when men are critical of anything involving the beauty tax from which they are culturally exempt.

Instead, I just said, “Oh, probably.” He was fidgeting with the portable power bank he had bought in anticipation of his off-grid research “vacation” in the woods. “We all have our gadgets.” He laughed.

The next night, he said encouragingly, “Did you do your zaps??” I had. I will probably keep doing them, my zaps, at least until it’s safe to go do a hobby indoors somewhere else, anywhere really, until I can electrocute my face via a good time instead.

Me in old age makeup for my high school’s production of Frankenstein 🥴

yr mate,
Evie
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