coming around

Today, we grabbed my current furniture out of storage and moved it back into Maison Pants.  Seeing my place with the paint and new floors and my stuff?  Awesome.  We didn't unpack it all; I still get zombie-tired rather quickly.  However, Mama Pants made my fridge absolutely sing, it's so damn clean.  And Big Daddy Pants did some sort of voodoo magic on my washer/dryer because it was drying like whoa; he also hung hooks in the loo so that I can hang towels and toilet paper and such.  I unpacked books and books and books; 5 bins of books and stuff.

Yesterday, Mom and I hit various stores to get various "moving in" stuff.  Funny to think I've lived in that apartment nearly 10 years and we're buying "moving in" stuff.  We also bought curtains for 3 areas in the house: the living room (which are decorative and won't really be closed), the Area sliding glass door, and my bedroom.  Picking curtains is hard!  Inevitably, I'd pick a curtain option and it would be out of stock.  I did this several times before I found three options that worked.  My new furniture arrives Friday.  Photos will be forthcoming.

I had my hair chopped last Wednesday.  It's shorty short now; a cut I've had before but years ago.  I really like it!  The gal who cut it is my mom's gal and good at what she does--she didn't even blink when I pulled my mop out of the rubberband to show her what she was gonna be dealing with.  In the end, we got four ponytails that measured over 10 inches each.  It took a long time for the ponies to dry (I put them over a lampshade with the bulb on) but they're ready to go off to Locks of Love now. 

My head felt so much better once she cut those damn ponytails off.  In radiation, I was often called "the one with hair" because, well, I was.  I was the only one that didn't have breast cancer, that hadn't gone through the chemo with taxol, the hair stealer.  I started to associate the mop of hair with the whole radiation/chemo process because I was The One With Hair, because I had to braid it on Tuesdays so it didn't bug me during chemo, because it was a general pain in the ass, because it came out and was absolutely everywhere during the whole treatment.  It was a lot of damn hair, overpowering.  Great to donate, but damn.  I'd look in the mirror and all the hair would scream "Sick!!  You're sick!!"  It was time; I'm still getting used to the bit of vulnerability that I find with shorter hair but I love my curls.  Funny thing is, I swear it's curlier than it was before when it was this short.  Chemo is notorious for making hair grow back curly--I wonder if it made mine a little curlier even though it never fell out.

Things are coming together.

herpes to papparazzi

I went to a birthday dinner for a friend on Tuesday at a Mexi-Kinda place downtown.  The food was less than mediocre but I hear the mixed drinks were awesome.  I just had beer, as I don't do frozen margaritas.  (Frozen margaritas are a scam; they have almost no alcohol in them.)  Anyway, that's all beside the point, other than the fact that I will not really recommend Teala's to anyone because it was so lackluster.

During the evening, people would occasionally break out cameras.  I understand that.  It's a festive occasion, people photograph those.  And I used to love having my photo taken--I'd ham up with a silly pose and be done with it.  (Mama Pants used to roll her eyes at me.)  However, I'm not 16 anymore and the sight of cameras does not make me strike a silly pose.  Generally, it makes me hide altogether.  I no longer like having my photo taken.  I know this is because of what I look like, specifically, how fat I am.  (Shut up and read.)  I don't like how I turn out in those photos because I know it's how I really look.  I don't want to look like that, I certainly don't want records of me looking like I do.  So I now avoid cameras, especially those that belong to people that don't give first right of refusal like I do.  (If I take your photo and you hate it, I delete it.)  The people who had cameras out were not the type to offer FRoR, so upon sight of the snappers, I immediately took my hair down and made like Cousin It.

(Sidenote:  I forgot how handy hair can be for that sort of thing.)

Whenever a camera was pointed in my direction, I'd move my head a little towards the side and hide behind the hair curtain until the flash went off.  When people specifically pointed it at my face, I held hands up over my face and asked that they not take photos, that I really didn't want my picture taken.  There are two kinds of people in the world when this request is made:  those who respect it and move on, and those who think it's a challenge and pursue relentlessly as if it's funny.  Guess what kind of people were at dinner.  Hint:  the asshole kind.

On several occasions, I held my napkin up in front of my face.  When I was really fed up with it, I held it up with one prominent finger on each hand showing.  When I was behind the wall-o-hair and people were trying to get me to look at the camera, I again employed the message finger.  On several occasions, the guy across from me sat with the camera aimed at me, me behind my hair, and waited for me to check to see if he was finished trying to snap me.  Being the idiot that he was, he didn't realise I could see the infernal orange light that indicated he was still depressing the button on the camera halfway.  In the end, all they got was hair and fuck-you fingers.  I've a very keen awareness of my surroundings when I need to and I wasn't about to be caught unaware by these people. 

I've been thinking about this since it happened.  I don't understand the relentless pursuit of someone who is so obviously opposed to having her photo snapped.  In hindsight, I suppose I could have given a speech about how I don't like photos of myself because I'm unhappy with my physical appearance and that photos of me just generally pull me further into the self-esteem pit of shit and kinda make me want to slit my forearms wrist to elbow and I could really just use a break from hating on myself could you please shove that fucking camera right up your pooper?!  But I don't see why I should have to be Debbie Downer at a festive event by giving all of that up to someone simply because I'd rather not have my photo taken.  (Plus, is that anyone's business?  No, it's not.)  No one is obligated to sit for a camera.  No one is entitled to photographic evidence of someone else without their consent.  What is so difficult for people to understand about that?  Why is respect and decorum so hard to grasp for some people?

It pisses me off. 

Viva la Hair Curtain.

an entry about hair that you can skip

I dyed my hair over the weekend. Earth shattering, no? Well, my hair parts naturally and the zipper of roots down that part was fug so I needed to take care of it. I dye my own hair because I am cheap. Also, because my hair is curly, it's more likely to hide horrific mistakes should something go horribly awry. (That's only happened once and it was an extreme situation—trying to go from deep red back to blond without professional help—and the curls were useless then, so why I think they help hide mistakes is somewhat of a mystery.) I use boxed colour and I'm not consistent with the colour I choose. I like to keep my hair on its toes, I guess. Though generally, I wind up with Revlon's Colorsilk colour because it's consistently inexpensive (under $5—told you I'm cheap) and it doesn't smell like napalm.

I haven't had a haircut since before busy season, February possibly. While it's a testament to my girl's talent that my hair has grown out in a manner that doesn't suggest a pack of wombats resides in it, it also means that no one has used those magical thinning shears on my head in a good six months either, so there's plenty of room for those wombats. My hair is now long enough that I have to put it into a ponytail when I sleep so that I don't have to spend ten minutes untangling knots before I get into the shower in the morning. It's not especially long to the average gal—barely shoulder length—but there's a massive amount of it. I could have probably dipped my head in the gulf a few times by now and cleaned up all the damn oil from Deepwater. Just wash it with Dawn, right? I mean, I did that back in the day when I attempted to dye my hair blue. (Hey, remember? Yellow and blue make green. Just FYI.) Dawn and Tide get Manic Panic out of your hair best, should you need to know. But you'll need to follow up with a whole bottle of Three Minute Miracle.

Anyway, I found that while I was dying my zipper roots, I now officially have more hair than a dye kit has dye. Had I needed to do my entire head, I'd have needed a second box of dye. I haven't needed more than one package of dye since the aforementioned Yellow-and-Blue-make-Green blunder of 1994 and my hair was loooooong then. The blond I'm using might be the same as the last batch I used, or else it's close enough that I didn't think it necessary to go get another box.

Totally unrelated—I'm trying to figure out how to post the list of cool etsy finds. It might just be easier to do it as a whole separate blog, but do I really want to go that route?