It May Be Big, But It Can Smell Bug Spray a Mile Away

I hate my nose. At some point in my childhood, I decided that it was the most hideous thing on my body. I think that my intense dislike may have begun the day my sixth grade teacher moved me, the quiet girl, in between Aaron and Steven, two of the rowdiest boys in the class, because she thought that my calm presence would somehow make them behave. It didn't. Instead, I wasn't in my new seat five minutes before Aaron asked me, "Has anyone ever told you that your nose is the biggest thing on your face?"

They had not, but I didn't tell him that. I just pretended that I didn't hear him and tried not to cry.

In retrospect, his question really wasn't that big of an insult. Technically, unless you're Angelina Jolie or Octomom, your nose probably is the biggest thing on your face. If you're them, however, your lips win hands down.


Just the same, the insult stuck with me. Every time I looked in the mirror, all I saw staring back at me was the gigantic honker. I even used to say that my nose was so big and bulbous I looked like Bill Clinton's love child.

After law school, I maxed out my line of credit with MBNA and got a nose job, a very botched nose job. Even though my surgeon had been practicing for 20 or 30 years, was board certified, and answered every question like he was supposed to, he still ended up being a total quack. Today my nose is a just-as-big, messed up version of what it once was. Thanks to the surgeon sewing that little strip of skin between my nostrils on crooked, my nose now appears lopsided. The bone or cartilage between the nostrils and below the tip peeks out from behind the skin in the right nostril. I have a chunk of scar tissue hanging down inside my left nostril, and there is still a bit of unattached cartilage left on the bridge of my nose.

(A little background info: Surgeon #1 took cartilage from the bottom of my nose and put it on the bridge between my eyes because he said I needed it there for my profile to look like it was supposed to look. However, he in no way, shape, or form anchored that cartilage to the existing bone. As a result, every time I sniffed post-surgery, the cartilage would move in this s-like shape across that part of my nose. My mom used her bonus a couple of months later to pay for Surgeon #2 to remove that piece of cartilage since Surgeon #1 refused to do it. In his own very loud words, "[He] never should have operated on me. [He's] not God." Surgeon #2 thought she had removed all of the floating cartilage, but she had not. If you pull the skin tight on the upper part of my nose, you can still see little pieces of it.)

I will never like my nose, not without additional, corrective surgery, something I hope to have one day. I can't even pretend to like my nose for purposes of Flat Ass Fridays. The hatred is just too ingrained at this point. However, I can see a couple of advantages of having a big nose.

1. If I ever walk into a door, I would more likely bruise my nose than my eye. In other words, there is a lot more padding to work with for the gravity-challenged like myself.
2. I never have a problem getting the end of the neti pot to fit in my nostril.
3. I never have to worry about my glasses falling completely off my nose.
4. Chances are, I'll never be mistaken for someone else in a lineup. The nose is just too distinctive.
5. No parts of my Biore pore strips ever go to waste.
6. Slap a little bit of red lipstick on me, and I could easily play Bozo at your kid's next party when the real one cancels on you at the last minute.
   
   (What the unemployment line looks like for us big-nosed boys and girls.)
7. If you call me nosey, I won't automatically assume that you are accusing me of being annoyingly inquisitive.
8. The tissue companies love me because a bigger nose means more snot and therefore more tissue when the snot runs southward.
9. People with their own nose issues love having me around because their noses always seem smaller by comparison.
   
10. If Walmart won't hire me, I can always freelance as a K-9 drug sniffer for the local police department or the feds because my sense of smell is practically supersonic.
    
    (No, I'm not that hairy yet, but a few more days of dizziness, and I might be.)

I'm sorry, but those are about all the advantages that I can come up. Now I'm going to go grab a handful of old Glamours, cut out the smallest, perkiest noses that I can find, and glue them to my driver's license. It's the only nose job I can afford at the moment.