11:09 am | 27 October 2004 | the hair apparent

FIRST: photos referenced/semi-explained in this-here UDvCLM entry, which circularly now links back over here. So there:

antichronically, this is the end of the night, us tearing down "total eclipse of the heart" en masse.
that's Rachel and Shappy. And to your left: Gollum le Monde.


Photos taken by the lovely and inspiring Alexis, who (wisely)
focuses on the more interesting chestoral region, and not the more horrifying
facetastrophe that karaoke & extreme wastedness often present.

Now that that's out of the way, on to more important junk, like: my hair. I've been colouring this shit black, or variations thereof, for ten years (ten! years!!), and with the exception of a brief sophomore-year-of-college foray into a colour i dubbed Frosty Pumpkin*, I have always been a brunette. That's my personality, I mean. And while I feel a slight urge to veer more into that topic, it's such a minefield** that I'll fight off the urge, unlike the way I handle urges for sweet booze, and stick to the topic at head.

So I go to Fancy Salon and plop my fine ass into their vinyl chair (which the hairdresser automatically lowers to compensate for my California redwoodian height). I'm all, "Take it blonde. Really white-blonde. Just take it out. I'm sick of the entire rigamarole. It's looked the same forever. And my fucking bangs will not grow out." Stylist squints, cocks his head. "It's not going to go all the way blonde," he says. "That color is deep in there. What we can do is lighten it as much as possible and tone it to a darker blonde, and then you can come back in a month and we'll finish lifting." I'm all, Cool. So I'm sitting around with a shower cap on my head while the bleach does its thing, and then my hair is ORANGE, which is fine because bleach process takes it from black to brown to red to orange to yellow to white WHATEVER, you don't care, but long story short: he did my roots too soon, so those were a lovely baby white, and the ends were a florid manila-envelope/pumpkin-gut orange (French pronunciation, as so, oranjjgh), and he suggested an ash-blonde toner to counteract the brassy yellow.

Let's look at our colour wheel, children. 'Member the colour wheel? 'Member how we negate pigments to neutral brown by using their opposite? 'Member how the opposite of orange is blue? Yeah? Let me dance around the outcome a little bit more. I like ash when it is forming a slow cylinder on the end of a delicious cigarette. I like ash when it is all that remains of the bodies of my enemies. I like ash on my forehead one Wednesday a year and I'm totally down with Ash when it is followed by "ton Kutcher," but it is with chagrin that I turn in my Good Hair card and tie a fatty ribbon around my finger hard to remind myself why I have ALWAYS done my own hair, because, dear readers, your author now has grey-green hair.

Yes, like a septuagenarian lap-swimmer, my hair is now a shimmery greyish-green, the kind that a haircolour box would probably floridly and suib-poetically designate one of the following name choices:
1.Spanish Moss
2. Old Computer Casing
3. We Think This is The Colour a Brontosaurus Might Have Been
4. I Coughed Up Something This Colour Once

Sad, sad, sad. And THEN, when I said, timidly, "Do you think it looks kind of...green?," Stylist assured me that it didn't, that it was just a true ash, and then capped that off with "It gives your personality a whole different vibe...When you walked in, I thought you were mean or something." Waves of despair threatened to engulf my tiny black soul as my inner child screamed But I am mean! My phone is being stupid so I can't show you in veritas, but hearken below: on the right, what I wanted; and on the left, what I got, only greener, way motherfucking greener:

I can fix it in a month, before Christmas for sure, and this is sure to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of cheap pickup lines, but let's just say, as I whined to Jer last night after forking over $85 to become a living Chia Head, "Of course I'm in a bad mood! I neither look nor feel good! PAY ATTENTION TO ME!" Boys, of course, understand nothing of the heartbreak of a stupid hairstyle, so his sympathy was insufficient. Also it was raining. And then a wet palm frond slapped me in the face. Then I got too sleepy and missed going out. And when I woke up my hair was still green. Suffice it to say that my mood is not getting filed under "good." It's getting filed under "it's a good thing I have Master of Puppets on this computer." BRING ON THE LOCUST PLAGUES!! clm.

. . . . .

* Explanation for which: I went to get a haircut. I was for some reason wearing glasses that day (glasses-in-public has happened exactly six times since 1995) and I had to take them off during much of the process. I requested a choppy bob, and I walked away with hair one inch in length over the totality of my head, a look that the 'stylist' promised would be 'fly' but was in fact so very dyked out that i stopped at the Goodwill, bought a flannel shirt, and ripped the sleeves off then and there. No, no i didn't. But i ended up bleaching it (thinking frantically "lighter colours will give the illusion of more hair!," thanks, art school) and it turned orange and I looked totally shitass for the next year and half, since my hair grows reeeaaallly slowly.

** Quickly: my mom has short dark hair. My stepmother: long blonde. I had long (waist-length) dark-blondish hair until I was about 14 and then I cut it all off and started dyeing it dark, something that I think was viewed my my dad/stepmom as a 'choosing of sides' between the Two Houses of Le Monde, and also then Marilyn vs. Jackie, and also David Lynch (c.f. Laura Palmer vs Maddy in Twin Peaks, or Rita/Camilla in Mulholland Drive, or Lost Highway, you name it), blah blah. I started writing an essay on it but there was too much to deal with and: like so many other things, I quit!