You're Doing It Wrong

I decided to grow out my bangs. I’ve been thinking about it the past few years but I expected it to make me crazy so I kept putting it off.

I had bangs when I was a little girl (example). I can’t remember the whole chronology. My hair has almost always been long. I cut it so I could do the whole feathered bangs thing in middle school – what a stupid hairstyle. It only looked nice the day you left the hairdresser or if you had magical hair. I did not have magical hair.

In college I started getting my hair cut by this young stylish woman named Britta. It’s hard for me to figure how this came about since I was always broke and over-scheduled but somehow I drove to downtown Santa Barbara to get my hair cut. I think I felt so terrible about the way I looked I thought this was a good use of my time and energy. It was not. I think I’ve burned most of the photos from that era but if you do an image search for Carol Brady and look at the photos under “mullet” you can get an idea.

For reference, this story takes place in approximately 1985.

The first time I met Britta she thought my name was Pat and I am so socially awkward I didn’t say anything. It turns out Britta is one of those people that says your name 1000 times. “Let’s wash you hair now, Pat. Your hair is so healthy, Pat. I have this amazing shampoo, Pat. How do you like UCSB, Pat?”

Of course by that point it was way too late to say something and obviously when I paid or when I made another appointment she would see that Pat isn’t my name. So I began to develop this story in my head, you know, to save her embarrassment, about how lots of people call me Pat. My Aunt is named Pat. I just thought she knew that. (No one except Britta and this woman at my old law firm has ever called me Pat.) She called me Pat at my next appointment so I guess she decided to just go along with it, too.

Britta came up with the idea to cut a few wispy bangs which I went along with. They were just wisps, why would I object? But every time she cut my hair there were more wisps. And more wisps and then we crossed over and the wisps were bangs. I had bangs.

Meanwhile, decades have gone by. I have no idea what happened to Britta. I have never loved the bangs but I do have a fivehead so it never seemed like a terrible idea. But also they were a pain because if I let them dry on their own they would curl up so I looked like I was wearing a decorative handlebar mustache on my head. I always had to style them.

I thought growing them out would be more terrible but so far it’s mostly painless. They are light enough that if I brush them back with a tiny bit of product, they will stay put.

I will update as needed.

I’m always having these random ideas for things to post but then I forget when I finally sit down to write.

I had this brilliant idea how I would start making notes and save them as drafts in WordPress that way when I opened WordPress there would already be things to write about.

This weekend I saved a bunch of notes and while I had WP open, I found two other draft posts with saved notes. I already had this brilliant idea and completely failed at implementation.

Oh well!

This photo is the office fridge. We have a dorm fridge since there are only two of us. 99% of the time the only items in there are ginger ale and Coke and my stash of sweets which at the moment is a half-finished box of Big Island (dipped!) shortbread cookies and a half-finished special lunar new year box of Godiva chocolates. Colleague brought these to me from Hawaii.

I partially defrosted it once before because we had to move it out of the utility room for a day to fix the floor.

This time I noticed that the ice accumulation had gotten so bad it was bending the plastic on the little tray below. (I don’t know why this fridge even has a freezer. It’s completely worthless.) The problem is that the defrost takes longer than a full work day and I didn’t want to leave it unattended in case water ran everywhere. Sure, there’s that tray to catch water except it was frozen in place. I did have a plastic tub inside to catch the drips and I brought a bunch of towels.

Colleague and I took turns going in there and breaking off pieces of ice. We also brainstormed various stupid (“don’t we have a mallet somewhere?”) and non-stupid (“what if we pour warm water on it?”)(Okay possibly also stupid but we couldn’t because there was no way to get the warm water on the ice unless we set the fridge flat and everyone knows you aren’t supposed to do that.) ways to get the ice out. The problem is that there is an electric cord in there that the ice formed around. At the end of the day I plugged it back in and then restarted the process the next day and by noon we could break off all the ice. Our useless freezer is ready for business again.

Remember the story about the dead tree planted outside my building? Here it is.

I started this post last night and I’m not sure what happened but I went from tired to dead-on-my-feet in about 5 minutes. I saved the post to draft and got ready for bed and figured I’d read until 9pm. I don’t like to go to bed earlier than 9 because that’s for babies and it also seems to upset whatever fragile sleep rhythm I have.

I was reading a story that took more than 2 brain cells firing against each other so I had to give up. Instead I picked up a romance novel that doesn’t need more than 2 brain cells firing against each other and I couldn’t concentrate on that either.

Bob said the last thing he heard me say was, “I can’t make it until 9.”

Here’s a close up of the dead leaves.

Then I woke up at 11:30p which usually means that I’m doomed. I was thirsty and had to get up. But I guess I fell back to sleep because the next time I woke up it was 6:30am. We’ll see what happens tonight.

Here are the new trees planted across from the bus stop. Since it was hard to see, I helpfully tried to highlight them, and then, still not trusting the viewer, I used the big glowy arrows. Maybe I should go back and type “tree” on there, too.

I think my hit youtube series would be to record me going through my tortured Photoshop steps to do the most simple things. Photoshop teachers could use my videos as tips to avoid and the people who work at the Photoshop factory could watch my videos in the lunchroom and laugh their faces off.