I have a stray hair.

My sister first spotted it in a coffee shop about 10 years ago. She reached across the table to brush a hair from my face. Much to her delight (and my sheer horror) she discovered it was attached. Right there, dangling from the outermost peninsula of my face a random inch-long hair, glistening golden in the sunlight. Thus began my decade-long practice of routinely scrutinizing that spot for its untimely arrival. And despite my diligence, I'm never the one who finds it first.

Recently, over a sushi dinner with friends I caught my boyfriend leaning toward me squinting curiously, the way old guys in the food court read their scratch tickets. Before I knew it, his fingers were pinching the air around my nose and then - me, gasping at the sharp tweak of extraction. Nothing like a little plucking at the dinner table to grind the conversation to a dead halt.

My mom has two flesh-coloured moles on her cheek, which sprout barely imperceptible hair. She's been plucking those bad boys for years. Her worst fear is that when she gets really old, she will not have the faculties to pluck them herself. This is the reason she had children. I am fairly certain that when my mom looks at my sister and I, she sees human-sized tweezers with pants. We have each been assigned a mole to maintain carefully through my mother's adult diaper years. Sometimes mom will fix a stare on my sister and I and point slowly and deliberately to each mole. No verbal communication required, we are pluckers-in-waiting. Yeah mom might be pooping her pants and eating cigarette butts but she'll have the best-lookin' moles at the nursing home.

Honestly, you have to wonder why women take such pains to rid themselves of unsightly hair, when there are men walking around in public with entire shag carpets crammed up their nostrils. I am not sure if anyone has ever died from nosehair asphyxiation but I wouldn't say it's entirely out of the question.

You gotta admit it though, individual hairs are just creepy. In your food or on the tip of your nose - they just don't belong there. And after a 10 year game of hide and seek with my particular 'problem' strand (with me consistently on the losing end), it looks like I'm gonna have to figure out another line of attack.

I guess I gotta do like mom did and birth me some tweezers.