Andrew J. Lederer

you know how you're not supposed to lift with your back?

you're supposed to life with your legs to protect your back

and you can choose this -- you can assign the stress to the legs rather than the back.

well, i think i've been lifting with my face. i've been assigning all the stress in carrying and lifting things like my backpack to my face.

and your face can't take that, you know. it doesn't have the strength that legs do.

am i gonna have a bad face the way others have bad backs?

this is even worse than when i used to place all my emotional stress in my upper lip. it looked to me, after a while, as if my upper lip had lengthened and lost flexibility.

i think shelley long, clearly a stressed-out type, had this problem too. when she returned after a multi-year absence for the last episode of "cheers", it seemed like her upper lip had lengthened and lost flexibility.

the rest of her was as it had always been. but that upper lip just hung there, long and still. i couldn't look at anything but that lip.

it was upstaging the rest of her. it was as if all her movements were simply framing and pointing to her lip.

i've feared people have had this same reaction to me.

but if they have, maybe this full-face tugging has been a good thing.

maybe it will restore balance to my face, with everything altered to the same extent as my stress-altered lip

i guess i'm just a cockeyed optimist.

and, speaking of that, have i told you about the period in which i placed all my stress in my eyebrows?


related -- The Odyssey -- Face the Music (Part 1)