No, you cannot groom yourself in public

Brushing hair while walking down the street, painting fingernails in bars, even picking a wedgie or two- all personal things I've seen performed in public that can be dismissed as semi-passable.   Then there are the things you should only do in the confines of your own home.  Take for instance the time I was riding the Long Island Rail Road when I heard a faint snipping sound coming from a few rows in front of me.  After craning my neck into the aisle to figure out what it was, I was appalled to find a woman clipping. her. toenails.  Not only was she clipping those suckers off, she was letting them fall right onto the floor to mix in with the other various articles of filth.

My friend Alex stumbled into her own unsanitary situation on her flight to New York this morning.  Being sequestered on a plane for over an hour with no sign of take-off leads one to look for alternate forms of entertainment.  While searching for something more interesting than the Sky Magazine stuffed into the seat pocket in front of her, she noticed that her neighbor had too decided to find a distraction.  Compact mirror in hand, this woman took to shaping her eyebrows with a pair of tweezers, all while buckled as the seat belt light was still on.  Listen, nobody wants to see signs of a unibrow but there is a time and a place for erratic tweezing and a seat 5 inches away from a place that I cannot escape from is not that place.