dragonlady7

Ooh. Ahh. Ooh. Eeeeh. I'm not making any noise out loud because I am a brave girl and Dave is sleeping, but I just Solarcained my skinned knee and it stings like OW and aren't you proud I didn't write a cuss word there? I didn't. I'm so good.

It is now 7 am and I have been awake since 3 because of the dog and the thunder. She has not been awake this whole time, but I have. I bravely put up the gate so she couldn't go up the stairs to wake up Dave, because he has to go to school today from 10 am until 11 pm and I don't want him being sleepy.

So I gave up sleeping with him the last night I would be able to (his mom comes home tonight), for the DOG. Aren't I a good person? Dammit, I am a good person and this stings and I'm not making any noise.

Somebody give me a goddamn cookie. All right? That's all I'm asking for-- a freaking cookie.

Sadly, there are none in this house.

More: haircuts, moving plans, minivans, and how my knees got skinned:

This is just generally the post where I am going to update about all the things I've done lately and am about to do. You all can laugh about how self-absorbed I am, but I started this journal so that I could remember what the hell I was thinking, and if I only write witty and entertaining things that aren't really about my life, it doesn't fulfil its purpose. Not that the other things I've been writing about have been witty or entertaining, but anyway. I am a person of pathetically inadequate memory, and I cannot honestly remember what I thought was important three days ago unless I have written it down. I do not understand who I was unless there is a written record. I also cannot keep a diary. But an online journal, which gets read by other people-- although that is against everything I used to believe in, I can't really remember what I did used to believe in, so now it is perfect for me. See, the supremacy of written-down things is proven.

Anyway.

So i got a haircut yesterday. I hear that's not such a big deal for most people, but I have had precisely 4 haircuts since December 31 1993, so it's actually a fairly momentous event for me to get a haircut.

The first haircut since December 31 1993 was sometime in '95 or '96, during the summer. i sat on the kitchen porch of my parents' house (a wide porch with pillars and a roof and skylights, and dark-stained wood in the ceiling of it) and let my sister Katy "trim" my hair. Unfortunately she trimmed each hair the same amount, which means that the bangs I had been growing out for two or three years got to be trimmed shorter than the rest of my hair, which was sort of against the point of growing out bangs, and meant that I couldn't put my hair properly into a ponytail or a bun for more than a month until it grew back.

The second haircut was in the summer of 2001. My friend Liesl came to visit me at my house in Rochester, and we trimmed each other's hair. We each only took off a tiny bit at the end where it was kind of ragged. Her hair is to her waist or beyond, and is a lovely pale brown and is of a texture that is not curly and not straight, but sort of wavy. She looks like Drew Barrymore in the movie Ever After, and got marriage proposals every other week in college because a) she's beautiful and b) she was the only woman most of the boys there knew. (This was RPI. If you are not familiar with RPI, I will mention that they have a very good hockey team, and the team is called "The Engineers". You can take a wild guess at what kind of a school it is.)

The third haircut was May 17th or so, 2003. I went with Dave to the hairdresser his parents use, and we both got our hair trimmed so as to look presentable at Dave's father's funeral. I asked her to take off the raggedy bits at the end, and she took eight inches.
Eight inches.
I could no longer sit on my hair. Nor could I wrap my pigtail-braids twice around my head.
However.
My hair was now entirely healthy, no longer had split ends, and could be worn down without looking sort of ... stringy.

The unfortunate side effect was that it swung so much more and moved so much more freely that it distracted me, and I spent the entire goddamn wake (meeting Dave's extended family, meeting all the circle of family friends, meeting the first grade teacher who hadn't seen him since he was three feet tall [he is now six-three], etc) alternately embracing sobbing people, weeping into a linty Kleenex, and... tossing my hair like a flirting barfly. Yes. I was sombrely dressed in black, and flipping my hair around like a goddamn stripper. It was so distracting.

But anyway.

So, getting a haircut was kind of a big deal, and this time she only took like two inches off. I don't really notice, except that the very ends aren't at all brittle.
The hairdresser praised my hair, asked incredulously whether I colored it at all (I am far too lazy for dye and lest you think I kid, I have been fully intending to dye parts of my hair purple for eleven years now and never have. My mom even bought me the Kool-Aid.), and proceeded to tell me that I had the healthiest long hair she had ever seen.

If anyone wants the secret to my success, they are as follows:
1) Dumb luck. Both parents were blond and turned brunette in their late teens or early twenties. I will be 25 in less than a month and am still blonde, and do not know why. My older sister was always brunette, and my two younger sisters were both tow-heads who are slowly turning dark-- Fiona doesn't even get called a blonde anymore, and Ann is much taken with the red dye.

2) Never do anything.
I wash my hair either daily or every other day (my skin, which is not nice at all, cannot always cope with daily showering, and since independent sources have verified that I am not naturally a smelly human, I do not feel the need to shower precisely daily. I tend to need a shower every day and a half, and that is not an easy schedule to maintain...). I shampoo twice, gather into a ponytail and condition the ponytail, leave the conditioner in a little while I wash my face or shave various bits of myself, and then rinse it.
I may or may not brush it. Never comb it. Don't usually leave it down, but don't do it up either. I've used gel once or twice in my life. I usually put it into a bun with one of those fat elastics with the metal bit on them. Sometimes I braid it and wrap it around my head. I don't think it will reach right now, though, so I may need to use more clips to hold it so it doesn't look dumb. So sad.

Anyhow. That's as much of a saga as my hair ever is.

I was going to be all organized and write something sensible here. You didn't really care about my hair, and I didn't need to write it down because I know it anyway, but I feel like since I've just spent all that time typing that, i should leave it there.

Sigh.

I was going to tell you about moving plans, minivans, and my knees.

I will be brief, because i should since I said I would.

Tentative moving plans are all over the place because Mom and Dad need the minivan to move Ann back out to school on the 23rd. This is sort of my minivan, the Penguinmobile, my loyal steed. It's only got 125,000 miles on it and it's only been totaled once. I love and hate this car, and am going to get it as a self-motivational kick in the pants. I will need to have a job, see, to afford the insurance, which I will have to pay for on it.
Also, i will be able to drive around and look for work.

Also, I will be able to move the World's Ugliest Couch from Dave's mom's garage to our new place, two blocks away. (Just barely too far to carry the damn thing by hand. If there weren't a wicked-busy street in between, there'd be nothing stopping me. But the WUC doesn't have handles, either, and that's a pain.)

So whether I get the van so we can move before the 23rd (and then take a little trip home for my birfday and to help drive to Ithaca laden with cargo), or whether I wait and make that little trip home around the 23rd and we move after that-- that's still undecided. I need to figure out whether the current occupants of our goddamn house (they said they'd be out Aug 1 at the latest, so we're a little tired of waiting, but y'know, it's not the end of the world) whether they're actually leaving the 14th, like they said most recently, or whether that was yet another crackpipe idea. Shrug. It's not their fault; buying a house is tricky.

So, at any rate, by the time it's my birthday, we'll be in that house, but may not be done moving yet.

As for the knees...

It's really boring, actually. I've been stalling, trying to think of a better story. I mean, i hadn't skinned my knees in... well, I skinned them junior year at college tripping down some stairs onto some gravel (and then had to walk the 2 miles home with blood running down my leg, because I lived off-campus).
So it's not unknown for me to skin my knees. However.
This time, boringly, I was bike-riding with Dave and hit a raised bit of sidewalk a little bit sidelong with the bike, causing it to tip over at high speed. It cut the bike ride short and you know, doesn't hurt at all now that the Solarcaine has taken effect and I am thoroughly distracted.

But man oh man, Solarcaine freaking stings.