tuckova

Why I don't

This one is like
nobody you've ever met,
She is not like you.
The music she likes is music
you've never heard of,
The books she likes are books
you've never read.

She goes to parties
and talks to nobody
seeing everybody talking,
Or holds forth on topics
til there are no topics left.

Her hair was wild until everybody's was,
then hers was wilder;
shorter the year they were wearing it short;
she's paying attention
to ensure she never fits.

She has nothing in common with you.
Nothing at all, to be sure, to be sure.
This girl is a bore.

bad haircut

I'm not talking about the haircuts where you think that when you get your hair cut like Brad Pitt you're going to come out of it looking like Brad Pitt. I'm talking about the haircuts where your total inability to articulate what you want and/or the hairdresser's total inability to understand you ends up with you crying. And how in the first case (Brad Pitt's hair) you are just being really silly, but in the second case the problem rests in the disconnect between what you want and your ability to express it so that other people will do it, and that disconnect is what makes you cry as much as the bad hair.

People have been trying to give me long fringey bangs and cute little side fringey things ever since I came into my face. It's a big face, like I'm coming at you through a peephole, and some softness around the edges would probably make it less whoa, but the thing is I hate having stuff touching my face and ears, and I'm the one who lives with it. So lots of "soft little fringe" experiences in high school wound up with me coming home making cat splutters and (because i could never cut a straight line) eventually doing something with my mother's pinking shears. Sorry about that, Mom. But if people had just done what I said, instead of what they thought would be best for me, tips would have flowed instead of tears.

Once I wanted my hair like a cross between Alannah Currie and the Heat Miser, bald on the sides and dramatic chunks standing up on the top; it was long and there was a perm growing out on the top, perfect, and I cut the sides up very short myself but was perplexed by the back. I went to a proper hairdresser who "shaped" it, oh my heavens no. My boyfriend at the time came home to me crying hysterically because there was nothing I could do to fix it. He took me to a barber and the barber shaved it all off,  and vacuumed up all the stray hairs with a wall mounted vacuum, which was a hundred kinds of awesome and cost about a tenth of the proper hairdresser.  Still, I didn't get what I wanted and  I was so close, and I know that haircut would have been so embarrassing to look back at now, and I mourn it.

In Japan I went with my terribly well groomed and fluent friend to get a haircut- I'd been cutting my own hair there, because it's superfine hair and my Japanese was atrocious and I was scared of what might happen, but I was getting seriously tired of sweeping hair out of the tatami and ready to take a risk. "She wants it exactly the same, but about 2 cm shorter" he told them. They cut it 2 cm shorter than his. I even got a nice shave for my gaijin sideburns. Yay.

All things considered, my trip to the hairdresser today was not the worst thing that has happened to my hair, but man. I came home today looking like a mushroom. A mushroom that cries. I told her "cut it jagged" which every hairdresser here has understood, and she gave me some ass-symmetrical emo thing. We are not emo, although I was beside myself with unhappiness for a full 20 minutes over a haircut which is the stupidest thing ever. I tried to explain it to her again, but she was all huffity "I don't know what you want" and I thought I might take her stupid straight scissors and poke her in the eye so bah, I left and cried a bit on the way home and then did it myself. I got out the clippers and stuck my fingers in and sort of jabbed at all the bits that stuck up, only grazing my knuckles a few times. I look fine. Mainly it's not around my eyes or my ears or touching the back of my neck anymore.

The thing that comes to me this time is that it's not just the haircut. It ties in to my hesitation to ask for things from others that I can do for myself, and my utter fury when it doesn't go well, because I feel like partly it goes wrong because the other person screwed up, but partly it goes wrong because I explained it badly and shouldn't have delegated and paid for what I'm perfectly capable of doing anyway. It's a whole life lesson or something. I'll work on it once I'm done sweeping up all the hair bits.

high school update: Let's make a deal.

So the teaching one class a week at the art high school? Okay: the students are lovely, the work is not impossibly hard, and I'm over my terror of teaching. Yay.

However, should I agree to take a teaching job ever again, I would like you to handcuff me to a drainpipe and rub my face with a pumice stone, because doing this so as to get good intel for Squire is one thing, but under no circumstances should I get confused and think I'm doing this because I love it more than I hate getting dressed nice, putting on shoes, standing in line at the photocopy store, and waiting for trams in the freezing rain.

bullets grazed my brain

Things I've been thinking about but can't seem to write a whole thing on:

• I found what I believe is the first book I ever read to address the mutability of time, which is one of my top weaknesses. The book's out of print, but the magic of the internets brought it to me. I read that book in the bathtub until it was literally falling apart, and when we moved to California I left it behind, which means I hadn't seen it for nearly thirty years. It was really weirdly great to read it again and have whole sentences ring with familiarity in my head. The persistence of memory is another weakness of mine. I feel quite resonant.
• The kids in Squire's class have moved on to "faggot" as an insult. Is there no creativity in the world of ten years old or what. Talking to him about words and then I read this great Steven Pinker article, which makes me feel surrounded in a good way by the power of words. The concept of being able to fairly mock people for what they choose instead of what they can't help doesn't seem that complex and I don't understand why it doesn't get pursued more. I do understand that unfairness is part of the fun of bullying, but it seems like saying "don't bully" isn't terribly effective and maybe more clear rules about how to democratically make fun of people might be time better spent.
• Squire has fully mastered the dirty look. It is really impressive; I finally taught it to him ("finally" meaning I was finally patient enough to push through his stubbornness and he was finally bored enough to try doing it my way) during a particularly dull train ride. Even though it's my tutelage at work, I shrivel a little when I see it. It is extremely awesome. He also has a sympathy face that does not fail.
• Presently there will be a rule in the house that people who buy food that is not on the grocery list and then do not mention the purchase and possible preparation of said food to the primary cook, nor (as secondary cook) do they themselves do anything with said food... well, not to put too lawyerly a spin on it, but those people are going to be force fed moldy mystery vegetable or something. Here's what we currently have rotting in the fridge, none of which is my doing: a pot of ...looks like it wanted to be chicken soup, a greenish thing that's maybe in the eggplant family, a whiteish thing that looks like alien spawn, and corn on the cob, which I do not eat.
• I found a picture of a man about whom I was once quite serious. He's the vice president of his company now. I'm vaguely happy for him. I am more happy for myself that I am not with him, despite his meteoric rise to moderate heights, because he still looks like he borrowed his dad's jacket and tie to get dressed up, which is a particularly unappealing look after 40. I hope he finally got a pet dog and that he either learned to kiss or found a girl who didn't mind having her lips bruised; I hope he's happy.
• Friar and I were talking about condescension, which is not a deadly sin but should be. I've been told I'm arrogant prickly and some other stuff. I don't know. I don't work well with others for sure but that's generally why I avoid others. If I'm hanging out with you, it's probably because I like you. I really didn't mean to hurt your feelings.
• If you are my friend, I mean good friend, I will probably not like the person you date. This is in most cases not because the person is actually unlikeable, but because I do not think they are good enough for you. Perhaps at some later date we can discuss why it is that most of my friends like Friar, and some, including those who have not met him, will even go so far as to say I do not appreciate him enough. Compare and contrast. For the record he seems to think I appreciate him just fine. Of course I haven't told him about the forcefeeding of the alien vegetable.

It was what it was. Wasn't it?

There were dozens of things I was going to do, crazy things and sensible things. I was going to be a mover, driving people across the country to start new lives, meeting people and bonding and then moving on like a 70s television hero. Or I was going to own a small home near the woods where I could touch the opposite walls with my fingertips and be a mad hermit poet. Or I was going to be a ballet dancer, since what else can you really do with perfect turnout.

Everything seemed probable. And everything still sort of does; I could pick up at any minute and we would be sleeping in the back of our moving van, or we more simply could move and live at the cottage. The ballet dream is pretty much done. But I still could mostly do what I had wanted to, except I think I don't want it anymore.

The difference is that the life I have is also a life I wanted, one of the possible trajectories from who I was then. I don't feel in any way like I betrayed my truck driving self by becoming an editor, because I had an equal number of feature fantasies in which I had a green visor and sleeve protectors. The costume changed, but the dream I wanted was the same.

To me, there is a web of lines emerging from every choice, and each choice makes others possible. I don't see it as having a choice, and that choosing one thing is endlessly cutting off the other, because lines can loop back; I don't see Billy Pilgrim's centipedes exactly either, where everything past is linked to an inevitable now, but I also don't see a series of captured moments, unlinked. To me, you get to where you are from where you were, and the lines can be traced no matter how entangled, no matter if some snapped as you ran across.

And so I have trouble sometimes reconciling the person you've become with the person I thought you were. I can't see how you got to where you are from where you were back then. Perhaps my choice to stop willfully charming people makes me as different from who I once was as you seem now different to me. Or perhaps I've made smaller choices slowly along the way, not even noticeable individually but cumulatively changing me and it's me who's different and you're moving on a consistent path. I don't know. I do know that it's strange to look across a table and see the eyes I once knew looking at things I don't really understand; the mouth I once knew forming words I never thought I'd hear, not while sitting with you.

I like a book with characters.

My first day teaching at the high school went pretty well. I liked the kids a lot.

Although I do not have the magical head-tingling feeling I once had as a teacher, it appears that I do remember the basics of getting through a class. Also, some key points were recently refreshed by Squire's previous teacher, such as: 1) making eye contact with the students is a good thing; 2) smiling periodically is a good thing; 3) wearing clothes that cover your body is a good thing; 4) telling people that they are doing well tends to make them do better. So I'm already ahead of the game, what with my pretty blue eyes and my magical molars and my muu-muus and my tendency to blush-inducing praise.

Squire has been fantabulous this past few weeks, funny and sweet and incredibly easy to live with. Partly this is the new teacher, who is not a twelve year old eedjit; partly this is two years of extensive training in the effectiveness of "so?" as a response to any stupid commentary; partly this is just growing up. I don't mean we've taken up living at Unicorn Junction-- the darkness surrounds us, as always. But it was never the dark that was scary, but ever what was hidden in it, and this seems more manageable lately for him.

We have mice at the cottage. This would bother me except that they are so courteous, the way they open up the carton of cigarettes for you and pull out a pack and then tenderly open that as well, dragging out and destroying the first cigarette so you don't have that "20 wedged in a pack" problem, and then they scurry around leaving little nicotine-addled poops! Adorable.

Friar is cracking me up nearly daily, too, which makes me think there's magic in our water or something. What's with all the smiling around here?

Perplexed by Clarence Thomas, by the left leg in Ingres' Odalisque (seriously, what IS that?), by adults who still choose books by genre, and the other usual suspects, but generally I'm doing well. And you?