Husbands and Heads

I have a bad habit of introducing complete strangers as my future husbands. Jared Leto, Bradley Whitford, James Franco, Dale Earnhardt Junior, Hugh Grant--they're all my future husbands. My mother says I'm going to be a very busy girl. There are worse things.

Lately, though, I've been leaning solidly toward one future husband that I think is a bit more logical than my others. I think it's only right that I be allowed to meet, charm, fall in love with, and marry Ryan Miller, the Buffalo Sabres' goalie.



This isn't the first time I've talked about him. Previously, I mentioned that Ryan Miller and I should never be allowed to meet, charm each other, fall in love, and get married, and for one simple reason: we have the same head. The two of us have the longest faces in the history of faces.

Not too long ago I was in Barnes and Noble with Pedro. He and I were killing time and thumbing through the bargain books. I picked one up that had to do with makeup and finding your true inner beauty. Before I did that, though, the book suggested I needed to fully understand the implications of my face shape. It listed all the common face shapes. It had an example drawn next to the description and a picture of a celebrity who had that face shape. There were round faces, oval faces, heart-shaped faces, square, and long. And then there was mine: Horse.

"You've got to be kidding me!" I hissed and jabbed Pedro in the ribs with the book's spine. "They actually call it horse face! I mean, that's me, right? We can't make a case that I'm just a long face?"

Pedro looked down at the pictures then back up at my head. He looked a little sad and a little bashful. "No," he said. "You're definitely of the horse face variety. Sorry."

At least I'm not alone. If I'm considered a horse face, at least I know makeup artists would consider Ryan Miller a horse face, too. And it's true that at first I thought we should never join our genes to produce long-faced hockey-playing children--mainly because I was concerned that they would have to face the same scrutiny that Hilary Duff gets for her horse face. In my head I could see bullies squaring off with our children on the playground. They would neigh and stomp their feet. They would yell, Hi-ho, Silver! or Who's ready for the Kentucky Derby?! And that's when our children would beat the shit of those bullies--because, really, they are children of a hockey player, and they aren't going to take any shit. But still, the thought of them being taunted for the long faces that had been passed down after their parents so thoughtlessly combined their genes was too much for me to handle.



When I told Ex-Keith this and instructed him to keep me from falling in love with Ryan Miller because if you put our heads together, length to length, they would combine to create The Longest Face in the Milky Way, Keith agreed. "Yeah," he said. "If you two had kids, they would come out looking like that mask from Scream."

But I've since gotten over those concerns. I've since decided that it's important that the long faces of the world unite, stay strong, band together, and, if at all possible, make out.

Yesterday morning when I woke up, there was a human interest piece about Ryan Miller on the morning news. They showed film of him playing in a band, of him taking photographs, of him brooding and looking out over the ice. It looked like he was testing out lines of poetry in his head. And I wouldn't even care if they were lines about the beauty of the ice, the way it smelled, the way it felt, the way the crowd sounded like a pack of wild animals after the Sabres scored. I would take it. He seems sensitive and dark. He's tall and lanky. He can wear a pair of jeans like nobody's business.



He also has some pretty stunning hockey hair. If you say the phrase Ryan Miller's hair in the presence of Amy or Becky, you will immediately hear sighs escape their mouths in staccato bursts. Ohhhh, Amy will say, When he takes his face mask off and whips his wet hair back... Jesus.



So, our children might inherit our faces, but I think it's safe to say my God would they ever have some good hair. Also, they would be hockey players. Little hockey players. Good deed-doing, sensitive, brooding hockey players, just like their father. Maybe one would retire from his hockey career and become a writer like his mother. That would be enough for me. That would be enough to balance out the heads that certain people would consider horse-like.