A Certain Smile

Your day goes the way the corners of your mouth turn.

-Anonymous

When I saw this quote I fell into quite a a debate with myself. (Do you ever do that? Debate with yourself? Do you do it out loud? Come on, just between us, do you find yourself walking around your home and sort of muttering to yourself? You might say something along the lines of “I just can’t lose a single ounce!” And then you’ll answer yourself “Well why would I expect to lose any weight when I ate a third of that carton of Chunky Monkey last night. I have absolutely no will power.” And then of course, you’ll have to respond to this rather harsh attack with “But I just had to have something sweet, and if my son hadn’t bought it and put it in the freezer in the first place I probably would have had an apple. And where are my glasses? Where did I put my glasses?”)

So you do know what I mean about debating with myself.

I asked myself “When ‘Anonymous’ wrote this (and, who, by the way, is this Anonymous Guy? I figure it is a guy, not a gal, because women are just more likely to take credit for what they say, not so much because they are proud of it but because they feel responsible for it, whereas some guy will just blurt something out and leave it there on its own.) But when ‘Anonymous’ wrote this, was his mouth turning up at the corners, or down?

Because you can see that it could make a great deal of difference. What kind of day was he having by the time he picked up pen and jotted this little ditty into some kind of journal, or did he just scribble it on a cocktail napkin? Of course, if he was having cocktails in the middle of the day, I bet the corners of his mouth were turned up.

In my case, it’s hard to tell whether my mouth is turned up or down because frankly, after a certain age, the mouth kind of does whatever it feels like. You might think you have a slight smile on your face and catch a glimpse of yourself in a store window and wonder who that grumpy person is. In fact, after a certain age the mouth tends to take on a life of its own. It eats things like pickled pigs feet and smelly cheese. It comes out with tart observations of life that embarrass the kids, and complaints about various aches, pains and unappetizing disorders like excess gas, which don’t make for scintillating dinner conversation. Sometimes you just have to leave the mouth home when you go out.

So who cares whether the corners of your mouth are turned up or down? I say, let your mouth alone. Put a little lipstick on it, perhaps some lip liner but only if you have a nice upper lip. Otherwise you don’t want to draw attention to it.

(And you thought this was going to be another one of those dreadful little motivational self-help articles, didn’t you. )