Hair Disasters Part II, Killing Boredom and Bob Cowsill Makes Me Think Deep Thoughts

You know your hair is a disaster when you take a photo of the disastrous results and your friend – who has been cheerfully hopeful through your description of the horror – now suggests you look into a wig or extensions.  When SHE gave up on improving the style – which is to say, there wasn’t a “style” anywhere in sight - I knew there was no hope for it.

I have never worn a wig, never expected to ever wear a wig or an extension ... my hair was beautiful just the way it was, if a little straggly at the ends ... and now I was considering it, that’s how big a disaster my hair was.  I can’t imagine that one stupid salon could completely trash someone’s hair, but this one did.  This salon cut aged me 20 years, I looked so bad.  (And no, I will not post the photo here.)

If – a few years down the line – I post something stupid, like:  “I’m thinking of getting my hair styled”, I hope someone will jump online immediately and scream, “DON’T DO IT!”  Trust me, I’ll be forever grateful.

So, I bought my wig, which matched my original hair as much as we could, and I look actually unchanged and okay in it, if I can figure out how to pin it properly. How odd that I had to buy fake hair to look exactly like I did before the hair cut.  It turns out I’m allergic to the hair “cap” that holds it in place – as soon as she put that on me, my scalp started itching so badly, she had to take it off and use pins.  It is not dramatically different than my hair was before the disastrous hair “cut”, other than there are a few more highlights than I had.  I can live with that.  I know I won’t have to wear it for a very long time; once my hair grows back out again, I won’t need it.

They also said (and by “they” I mean the very nice wig lady, her daughter, and a random customer who happened to be sitting in the daughter’s hair cutting chair):  “Don’t ever take any pictures of yourself!” – they unanimously agreed I look nothing in a photo like I look in person – I’m just one of those people who take bad photos – who look good in person and look horrible in photos, I mean.

THANK YOU!!!  I already knew that, but people who thought they were being nice kept saying, “Noooo, you look fine!” while looking at photos of me.  No, I don’t.  I knew I didn’t.  Thank goodness three other people completely agree with me, and were honest enough to say, “Yeah, you look like shit in that photo!”  I felt so relieved to hear that, you have no idea.  For the longest time, I really thought I looked as bad in person as I did in photos, and if that doesn’t mess with your self-confidence, nothing will.

Rule #1 of True Friendship:  if someone looks a lot worse in a photo than they do in reality, don’t lie and say they look just the same.  All you will accomplish by doing that is messing with their self-image.  I could never figure out why I looked one way in a mirror, and like someone entirely different in a photo – in a way that had nothing to do with the face being reversed.  I just take really bad photos.  Thank you, thank you, thank you to those three people who never met me before and had nothing to lose by lying – she’d already sold me the wig, so it wasn’t like they’d lose a customer by lying.

Not only that, they all said that before they knew how I felt about the photo/selfie – their first reaction after the comment was, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” in the fear they’d offended me; I was the one who grinned from ear to ear and said, “THANK YOU!!”  And meant it from the heart, it was so nice to have people tell me the truth at last.  They were right, I take crappy photos.  After I said “Thank you!”, they all felt free to elaborate, “You don’t anything like that photo!”, and “You look at least 10 years older in this photo than you do in real life” ... it was such a relief to finally be vindicated!

The clothes that were altered look great too; I finally look OK, and I may have the courage to face my childhood crush now ... who apparently was into hiding out in tents when he was younger; don’t ask me to explain that photo, I have no idea what he was doing hiding out in a tent, or why he was suggestively inviting drooling and oh so willing readers of a teen magazine to come into it with him.  I just remember sighing dreamily over the photo scotch-taped to my wall when I was 12 and wishing he was within tent-invitational distance.

I am not betting on a surge of courage when I actually come face to face with the man, but the chances are greater that I’ll somehow find the courage to say more than “Bluh bluh bluh ergle duh ...” than I was before I fixed the hair disaster, anyway. 

But hopefully he’s used to people – who under most circumstances are outgoing, outspoken and confident - turning into blithering fools in front of him ...?  I mean, think about it:  I can face an entire class of students without blinking an eye, yet I completely fall apart at the seams at the prospect of facing Bob Cowsill?  Yes, it seems I possibly could.  Let’s face it, he’s not just anybody ... he’s (wait for the capital letters now) BOB COWSILL.  The same one I created a bewildering shrine for on my bedroom wall when I was 12.

But I was thinking last night – “Why him, of all people?” – and maybe it’s because of who I thought he was at the time when I was still 12, naïve and inexperienced:  at the time, I thought he was handsome, yes (and how!), but also intelligent, funny, thoughtful, poetic, gifted ... if you’d listened to me for all those years, since he and The Cowsills disappeared from public view, trying to answer the question, “What are you looking for in a soul mate?” – the same question you all had to sit through when I started this blog and didn’t even know he was still performing –  that’s what I had been looking for and never found - or at least not yet.  Not Bob Cowsill himself, obviously, but someone who was also handsome, intelligent, funny, thoughtful, poetic and gifted. The guys I got crushes on never lasted because they were none of those things, they were other things.  Maybe just one of those things, not all of them.  The guys who liked me unrequitedly had NONE of those things, which is why I ignored them for the most part.  Bob, in my young and inexperienced eyes at any rate, had it all.

So here was the question:  did the preference already exist before I caught sight of him for the first time, and he just seemed like he fit the bill - or is he the one whose imaginary image created the preference because he was my first crush?  Did every other guy since then have to live up to who I thought Bob Cowsill was, when I was much younger?  I say, “thought” because I never met him, talked to him, interacted with him ... maybe he was actually dumb, unfunny, incapable of deep thought, unable to rhyme two sentences sequentially without aid and not as talented as ... well, no, I can’t say he’s not musically gifted, he is.  And no, I really don’t believe he’s dumb, unfunny, etc., or any of those other things, or someone would have made mention of it by now.  Instead, everyone who has met him has said just the opposite.  He’s funny, he’s bright, he’s charming, he’s witty ... so maybe I had it right, back then.

But maybe he’s also a serious pain in the ass or something.  Maybe he is a “curmudgeon” as his sister Susan said once – although I can’t remember why she said it.  Oh yes, because he put Louise Palanker off for so long about doing the documentary, and was so unwilling to do it at first.  (And thank goodness he changed his mind about that, or I never would have rediscovered them!)  But, in all the successive years, was I looking for guys to live up to a standard of perfection that never existed in reality?

Something for me to think about, anyway.  I’m not at all sure it would change anything.  I would still search for someone who had the same qualities.  Or, if not all, at least a majority of them.

So I am now back to looking forward to the trip to New York.  I love going home ... I am always more energized when I’m home.  The city gives me energy; I feel more alive and more present when I’m there.

I’ve been practicing with a cane and took a major header into the kitchen counter.  Yeah, this is going well.  I’ve been drinking my dandelion tea with lemon and unsweetened cranberry juice ... and have no idea what it is supposed to do; I’m just stubbornly drinking it.  Purge me of toxins or something?  Increases my metabolism?  Makes me grow cranberries out of my ears?  Something useful anyway.  Well, when I find out, I’ll let you know.

And MEANWHILE ... I went back to sewing clothes again.  It took a while for me to unpack all of the fabric, patterns and sewing supplies and put them where they belonged ... but I finally started doing that again as well, while working on “Beautiful Beige” ... which is actually looking quite attractive at the moment.  At least sewing gives me something creative and productive to do ... while reading Paradise Lost and letting it percolate ... while preparing for a trip to New York ... while dealing with doctors, physical therapists and everything else.  Well, at least I’m not bored.

Bad Hair, Bad Products, Bad Blood and Paradise Lost

WHEN WILL I EVER LEARN?  I just don’t learn, do I?  Again – the hair styling was a complete and utter disaster.  Complete.  Total. Absolute.  I’d jump out the window were it not for the fact that (again) I live in a one-story and it wouldn’t accomplish much beyond giving me a scraped knee.  Went to a clothing store, bought stuff that was too big for me and had to return to the seamstress and have it fixed.  Went to Tallman’s for new glasses only to discover that they were closed.  That closed the window on my getting new glasses in time.  On my way back, stopped at Sylvan Grille and drank myself into a stupor.  Came home.  Cried a lot.

The disaster now required me to find something that will shape the straight-hanging mess into something less awful.  Tried a hair oil that is supposed to help hair keep a curl, thinking I could get the hair to turn under a little.  Instead, I was allergic to the oil itself and spent the next few hours with tears running down my face, sneezing repeatedly and with my nose running like a faucet.  Bought a curling iron.  Haven’t figured out how to do it right, and only ended up looking even more goofy than I already did.

Whatever self-confidence I once had (and it wasn’t much) disappeared in the blink of an eye.  And I will be seeing my childhood crush in exactly 9 days.  Of course I will.  Why strut out of an expensive hair salon looking like a quadrillion bucks when it’s so much more typical to slink out of it looking you were just run over by a leaf mulcher?  I just never learn, do I?

Well, while I battle the utter horror that is my hair, I’m also battling a never-ending round of doctors, appointments, physical therapy, more doctors, more appointments, more physical therapy - and my life shrinks to the dimensions of my appointment calendar – I started reading an annotated version of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which I’m finding inspirational, and I’m only in the Introduction.

I cannot get my head around Milton’s point of view ... by the time he started writing his Paradise Lost, ships were already sailing their way across the Atlantic, depositing colonists on the North and South American east coasts, so he is already aware that there is an entire continent over here, chock full of people who had no knowledge of the supposed “truth” he was espousing, which had originated within a very small tribe of nomads based in a very tiny region of the Middle East – of which, needless to say – none of these North and South and Central American continental natives had any knowledge.  So why – at some point – didn’t that “a priori” truth he was basing his entire epic poem upon stop making logical sense?  The Far East was already well known.  The beliefs of China, India ... they were well known.  Where is his logic?  His “lost paradise” was intelligence?  That isn’t saying much for him and his ilk is it?

From his first book, he is only making reference to Greek and Roman mythology, as though they were the only civilizations with which he had to parry and thrust.  It may be that he looks at Egyptian later in the work, but at least in his first book his entire glance towards Egypt consisted of Moses.  That’s it.  Just Moses.

True, the fact that most historians are seriously questioning the Biblical story of Moses altogether may be a more recent development, and ancient Egypt wasn’t really discovered by western culture until the time of Napoleon, so perhaps I can’t fault him for that as much.  But the other regions?  Makes no sense to me, none of it does.  So much of his initial argument makes no sense I can’t even find a place to start, as far as making a counterpoint is concerned.  Maybe with the original Lilith or something, to squash his Eve?  But he doesn’t focus on Eve so much anyway – Adam is his guy, which, for a man steeped in the toxicity of an extremely conservative, religiously fundamentalist patriarchy – much like the Republican Party of the U.S.! - isn’t surprising.

I have just discovered today that I really love tea made from roasted dandelion roots.  Why stupid suburbanites (the evil “Manifest Destiny” lunatics)  have this passionate need to destroy, slaughter, poison or trample everything worthwhile, I have no idea, but it seems they do.

One thing you should try not to do is allow your blood sugar to drop so far you nearly black out from it – which happened to me when I started feeling gawdawful and discovered my blood sugar was 37.  That isn’t a typo.  Thirty-bleeping-seven.  Drank two glasses of fruit juice pronto and had some toast ... and that was before I could make my way back to the bedroom where I had the glucose tablets.  I was hanging on to the countertop, trying not to let my knees buckle.  37.  Who gets readings like that?  And it wasn’t as though I was doing anything unusual when it happened; my sugars just plummeted for no good reason that I could determine.