Tag Archives: hair

And Then I Was Like…

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“Fuck it, hair grows back.” So I cut off 7 inches.
And I really, very, truly love it.

“I’m going to timezone terrorize* my bff because it’s his first presidential election.”
 And I was glad we understood each other so well.
*Timezone terrorist: an asshole (me) who sends 7AM EST text messages to people (my friends & family) on the west coast.

“Thank God all the sensible voters that Obama won, but this nation is, as it has always been, a secular one.”
 So I followed the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s suggestion and wrote a letter to The Big O asking him to refrain from taking a nonsecular Oath of Office at his inauguration next January. And frankly, if you’re also fatigued by the politicization of religion, then you should, too.

Same Blog, New Name

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Do you ever just desperately need a change? In middle school I got a terrible haircut (it was a bad time for my tresses) and my dearest friend Scooter laughed at me and asked, “Oh my God, did you cut that yourself?” I think I kicked his shin in response – that seems like something I’d do at 12. Actually, my mom had paid a “stylist” at Supercuts, and the result was bangs that ended about two inches above my eyebrows. Like I said, a bad, bad time.

Lately that ennui I mentioned in my last post had me itching for a change. I decided wanted a haircut and I wanted it the second the thought entered my mind. Patience is not a virtue of mine, so I grabbed some dull office scissors and went straight for the bangs. When B. noticed me, he jumped up yelling, “What are you doing? Stop!” The wise man knew I was going to regret trying to give myself a haircut and, perhaps more importantly, that he would be the one to hear my whining until the damage grew out. He’s a keeper, that one.

I still felt like I needed a change, so I started fiddling with my blog instead. An ugly style sheet is much easier to fix than an ugly haircut. The blog has been in a state of disarray for the last week, especially in regard to a title. Having grown tired of my whit-icisms (see? so lame) and blatant Nabokov theft, I just could not come up with a new name. Finally, this morning, I came up with something on which I think I can settle: Notes from the Darkroom. 

Notes because writing is what I like to do, darkroom because it’s where I like to be, and homage to Dostoyevsky (i.e. Notes from Underground) because Russian literature is what I love to read. It’s kind of perfect, but then again, I’ll probably hate it in a week. To be determined…

Did You Miss My Lists?

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Here’s a non-comprehensive list of
Things We Are Definitely Not Discussing:

1. How I went in for a trim and came out with a quarter of my hair missing. I’ve grown it out from chin-length for nearly four years and this dude hacks off a year’s progress in 20 minutes. B. says I look like Lara Croft now, which makes him the third person to say I resemble Angelina Jolie. (Feel free to discuss that last part.)

This is a “before” picture. I’m too pissed to take an “after” picture.

2. My average quantitative reasoning score on the GRE. That word right there is a fighting word.

3. The case. If you don’t know what this means, I’m delighted. If you do know what this means, then you should really shut up about it. If I wanted to talk about it, I would bring it up. You bringing it up is just bad manners.

4. How long it’s been since I last went to a yoga class. 

Now here’s a non-comprehensive list of
Things We Should Totally Talk About:

1. My punishment for ending a statement with a preposition. Lines? Grammar Sets? “The Essay of Pain and Suffering?”

2. In fifth grade, we either went to “Fun Friday” or wrote “The Essay of Pain and Suffering” depending on how “good” we were over the week. You know how many times I went to FF? Once. I basically had the essay memorized.

3. My fantastic GRE verbal reasoning score. 165/170 = 96th percentile. Or my fantastic analytical writing score. 5.5/6 = 96th percentile.

4. The Magicians by Lev Grossman. LKP gave it to me almost two years ago and I’m just now getting around to finishing it. It’s surprisingly droll if you can get over how pretentious it is. You can read my full thoughts about it on my upcoming post for The Canary Review.

Wild Thing

By Posted in For the hell of it Tagged , , , , , , , 3 Comments

I showed Bobby this baby picture and asked
(with shameless sincerity),
“B., do you think I should cut my hair like this again?”

He looked at me, somewhat perplexedly, and said,
“Chief, that is your haircut. It’s just longer now.”

I’ve been wearing the same haircut for 20 years.
Which is hilarious, but also a little bit sad.

What these pictures don’t show you is that I have curly, frizzy hair. Or, as my good friend LKP once called it, “sexy jungle woman hair.” I much prefer her description over the characterizations that the other kids made up. Middle-schoolers are really the biggest assholes ever.

 Anyway, being that it’s poodle sexy jungle woman hair, it’s not easily tamed. Once, in 7th grade, I went over to this popular girl’s house after school. She promptly shoved my head under her shower faucet, moosed me up, and blow dried my “mess” straight. I didn’t shower that night and the next day at school everyone was like, “OMG you don’t look like a wild animal anymore… but you do smell like one!!” I’m just kidding. They totally still thought I looked like a wildebeest.

But that was the night I begged my mom to buy me a hair straightener, and for the next six years, even though straight hair never made me cool, I was hostage to the beauty judgments of bastard preteens, a blow dryer, and flat iron. I couldn’t get out of the house with less than 50 minutes of nearly lighting my hair on fire unless I wanted to look like a jungle woman. Nobody wants that.

This story has a happy end, though. I grew up to love my hair. Once I realized how much easier it is to work with nature rather than against her, I stopped resenting my curls and started appreciating them.

I’ll never give in to that unibrow, though.