Werewolf Eyes
Remember Michael J. Fox as Teen Wolf? Remember how he started “wolfing out” and couldn’t control it? (That show terrified me, by the way. I was gonna put up a pic of old MJFox as the Teen Wolf but when I googled the pictures it still gave me the eejeebeejies.)
Anyway, remember how when he first started “wolfing out” he couldn’t help himself, it just happened? Remember how the same thing happened to Benecio Del Toro in The Wolfman? (Which, by the way, doesn’t creep me out at all and I have no idea why. That movie actually had a real looking werewolf in it. I’m pretty sure you could see the zipper in Michael J. Fox’s werewolf suit.)
The point being that 1-I’m terrified of unrealistic looking werewolves and 2-Werewolves can’t control their werewolfing.
But I’m telling y’all that I’ve got the same problem. I’ve got Werewolf Eyes.
They don’t glow in the dark or have some sort of weird werewolf night vision, but I can’t control them.
I can’t control them when they roll.
And roll they do. It’s like they’re not even attached to anything sometimes. I had to go through some pretty serious training for a new job several years ago. My old coworkers placed bets on how long it would take before I was in trouble for eye rolling. (It wasn’t long.) When I hear something really absurd I actually become aware of the eye rolling because it lasts so long I start getting sea sick.
It’s been like this all my life. The phrase I probably heard my dad tell me most often growing up was, “Don’t you roll your eyes at me boy.” I’ve never even known that I was doing it. So my default solution was to take total and complete control over my eyes and intently stare into the ether without allowing any eye movement at all. Do you know what peeves an angry dad off more than you rolling your eyes at him? Staring blankly at the wall, that’s what.
And just like Michael J. Fox, I think my werewolf condition is hereditary. I don’t know if I inherited it from my dad, because like I said my eyes were always rolling around when I was growing up so I wasn’t able to focus on whether his were or not. Or maybe my dad had just matured and learned to control his werewolf eyes. Come to think of it, the dads in Teen Wolf and The Wolfman had BOTH learned to control their werewolfishness, so it’s probably safe to guess that my dad had too.
But I do know for a fact that I’ve passed my werewolf eyes on to my kids. Goodness gracious land sakes alive, I don’t know that KicksTheBall EVER looks directly in front of himself. It’s a wonder he doesn’t walk into walls all day long. I have managed to master the same finger-point-don’tyourollyoureyesatmeboy that my dad used on me….with the same result. I’ve watched Megan tell him “don’t roll your eyes at me” and seen his eyes roll completely back in his head as he said, “I’m not rolling my eyes.” And he’s being completely genuine. I really believe he has no idea it’s happening. Because they’re werewolf eyes.
ReadsTheBooks has what is maybe an even more rare (rarer?) condition. I know I do this, oh believe me-people let me know, but I don’t do it on purpose. It’s the werewolf sigh.
I think the werewolf sigh is even more offensive than werewolf eyes, just because of the amount of time it lasts and the amount of body movement involved. You can miss werewolf eyes if you’re not looking for them. And when you do see them you might not realize what you’re looking at. You could go from “So anyway, Hillary for 2016…” to “Why are you looking around at the sky, is there a flock of birds flying over?”. (Because anyone dumb enough to utter “Hillary for ANYTHING” is probably too dumb to recognize a high quality eyeroll when they see one).
But a werewolf sigh…..Oh a werewolf sigh, you won’t miss that my friends. A werewolf sigh invokes the whole of your being, not just your eyes. Your whole body rises, almost as if you’re giving the speaker hope that you appreciate what they’re saying, and then falls and comes to rest lower than where you first began. The breath you exhale is the proverbial wind you’re taking right out of their sails.
It’s not just a visual thing either. You can hear it. The level of anger involved dictates how clenched your teeth are and changes the tone of the sigh.
And a serious werewolf sigh can be felt. You know how when you blow on a baby’s face it takes their breath away? I think that subconsciously that’s what a werewolf sigher is trying to do….take away the breath of whoever is making them sigh so that they’ll just finally shuuuuuuut uuuuuuuuupppppp.
(Which is all we really need to avoid our werewolfocity from being activated. If people would stop telling us stupid things we’d never unintentionally eyeroll or weresigh again.)
As far as I know there’s no real up-side to werewolf eyes. But if I can ever figure out how to harness my curse’s powers to lead my high school basketball team to victory like MJFox did, you can bet your sweet full moon that I will. And y’all will be the first to know about it.