My face is frozen

Lately I've found myself wishing ski masks were acceptable cold weather wear.

When I take my dog on a walk, I'm completely bundled up: coat, scarf, hat, gloves. Everything is warm except for my face, one of the most sensitive and important parts of the human body. The treasure of the temple, if you will....you will, won't you?

The problem is this: ski masks are terrifying. Anybody who wears one is automatically either a rapist or a scoundrel. Sometimes both.

In college, I  worked at a video rental/music/book store, and once someone came in wearing a ski mask. My coworkers and I watched, mouths agape, hearts racing. Yes, mouths were agape, my friends.The masked man wandered into the cd section and browsed for about ten or twenty minutes. This is about the time when my life flashed before my eyes: Sunday dinners at my grandma's, summertime barbeques, me peeing my pants in second grade, the time I played Amped so long, my thumbs bled, etc. This lasted about a minute, as my life had been pretty uneventful.

 

When my life flash ended, I realized my coworkers had mysteriously vanished to the back of the store. I was working the register and was under no circumstance to abandon my post. If the store sinks to an apocalyptic watery depth, I would go down too. I would make sure you were able to rent the 5th season of Grey's Anatomy one last time before Jesus sends you to hell.

So I was alone, waiting for the murderer to work up enough guts to come and blow my precious face skin to smithereens. Like any good minimum wage worker, I kept working: organizing returned movies into different stacks of Norbit. (Norbit was very popular at the time.) I figured this would be the last thing I ever did on earth. I was resigned to my fate.

After a couple minutes of absorbed Norbit organizing, I looked up to see the masked man looking at me. There were several other people in line behind him--like it was completely normal for a ski masked man to be in a public retail setting with cash registers. He placed like five used cds on the counter. I rang them up without saying anything. My hands were shaking. He pulled out a crumpled wad of cash and when I handed him back his change, he said thank you. How polite of him.

I, and the line of customers watched him leave, after which they started observing how odd it was that a man dressed in a ski mask came into a store.

Yes, how odd. Because, usually when a man in ski mask comes into a store, it's not to purchase a pre-owned Pixies album. It's to steal all the money in the register and sometimes it's to kill you.

So even though I do wish ski masks would come back in style, I really don't, because like I said, they are terrifying.

So I have some propositions. What about a clear ski mask?

It's still creepy, but maybe a little less. No?

What about ski masks that look like your face?

The hair would be a wig attached to the rubbery face mask. Or cloth. I haven't decided yet. But there is a problem with this. If someone were to get a hold of your face mask, (which was custom -made to resemble the specific arrangement of molecules that form your special, special face) they could put it on and people would think it was you! They could go around doing a bunch of horrible things in your face mask, like walking around with no pants or offering to squeegee strangers' windshields.


So really, I don't know if there are any viable options at this point. Are we are destined to a lifetime of frozen cheeks and stiff, runny noses? It's 2011, people, let's get this figured out.