What About Your Friends?

This week may prove to be a real hurter. Even as I typed that I felt like shifting my thinking. Now why is that line indented? Oh well. Ok, fixed it. Anyway, let me rephrase myself and make this something worth reading instead of a gripefest (my friend Amani always calls that sort of thing a pity party.) True enough, things have really not been going my way for the last few days. We can start as far back as last issue with the great clips for hair Trojan horse which came bearing the unexpected gift of a botched and painfully obvious bad haircut. Not as dramatic as 100 armor-clad Greek soldiers bursting forth, ready for battle (and not nearly as sexy either now that I think of it…) but in a modern setting, almost equally devastating ;). On Friday, I went and tried to hook my computer up to the wireless connect at The Elysian Brewery (which I really can’t stand but seem to always end up in. Its like a barn full of fratboys.) Naturally, something was not set up right about my wireless card so I couldn’t get online. I left my debit card there, which I didn’t realize until I was buying new mascara at Sephora the next day after I woke up with my right eye swollen shut. I don’t know for sure it was the mascara, but when in doubt, throw it out! Mom taught me that about fish and mayo but it works for eye makeup too. Then I had dinner at Mom’s and went over to Frannie’s to do her hair and watch comic view. Sat I worked, then took my computer over to Tyson and Brian’s house which, while it is only 10 mins from work, took me over an hour because of football traffic. Indubitably the worst thing about living in Seattle, save the rain. Brian is a computer nerd extraordinaire and he’s fabulous. One of those rare Seattle types who do whatever it is that they’ve said they’re going to do. Anyway, he has completely hooked up this little computer of mine and he fixed whatever it was that was disabling me from getting online at Elysian. Then I had to go get my stupid debit card. It was saved behind the counter, thanks guys! My friend Sophia who works there was about to go to some new night at a club called premiere which is wack by location alone, situated right next to the new, ugly and unwanted retractable roof stadium downtown. It was terrible, the sound was terrible, the crowd was sparse and weird and in classic Seattle form they were charging $25 to get in. She had passes, dear reader, I have not lost my mind. I did see friend Derrick there, nice to chat with him and as well to hear him spin even it he did have to play some corny top 40 crap that I’m sure he closes his eyes and thinks of England on, he just has crazy skills and its nice to hear. Especially after whomever it was that went before him who apparantly felt that it was anybody’s game and just played one dancehall tune literally on top of another one. But, Sophia and I had a great time dancing and just clowning around. She’s a great dancer and, like me, doesn’t care about acting silly in public. Also I got picked up on by an Asian guy! That is a first! And since virtually two thirds of the men in Seattle are Asian… you do the math. J
Sunday I went to work and I could tell that my car was running a little funny by the time I got to the top of the garage. In a rare stroke of preemptive brilliance I decided not to take the freeway home and not stop at the beauty supply downtown even though I was supposed to do both Derrick and Frannie’s locks and left fave twisting product at school. I got to Cloverdale and 44th (a mere 2 blocks from my house, cant complain too bitterly about that) and Sizzla came to an unrelenting halt. I carried my groceries to the house and sat my go-go-go ass on the couch and thought about what in the name of all things holy I was going to do without a car for any amount of time, not to mention when I was going to get the thing in to the mechanic since it needed to be towed and it was Sunday, 7pm and I have to be at work Monday, 8 am. After a few moments of what I must say was pretty calm ponderance, I did what I always do when I don’t know what to do and picked up the phone. I sucked it up and called Mad Max, an ex with whom I hadn’t spoken in months and whose ending doesn’t bring fine mem’ry to mind. But, he happens to be a Japanese auto mechanic (he’s Senegalese, the cars are Japanese. An equation I wouldn’t care to reverse…) and he knows if the chips were down I’d drive him back to Dakar if that’s what needed doing, so I asked him who he thought would be able to come to my house and work on the car so that I didn’t have to kick off with a $200 towing bill. He thought he probably could and was there in half an hour, in the dark with a flashlight. It is about three weeks later as I now write and I got the ol’ girl back but a few days ago. He charged me no labor and sold me all the parts shop price. Still, it came to a cool $1200 parts and I shake my fist at the used car salesman with a heart o’ gold (and a janky, Spokane grill to match) who told me that, repairwise, owning a Lexus was just like owning a Toyota. Not so. And get this, Mad Max lent me his ride the last few days when he could hear in my voice that one more bus ride from Rainier Beach to the U Village might be the difference between this world and the next. Said ex’s said ride is a cobalt blue 1987 or so 8 cylinder Mustang convertible with all chrome bumpers, windshield wipers and 100 spoke rims. Good lord I was nervous driving that car. I was SURE I was going to get pulled over, and you cant even argue with the cop, its like you know you shouldn’t be driving that car, and you kind of feel you deserve the ticket. After all, nobody who isn’t up to something pushes that kind of ride. Well, Mad Max sold the accursed thing while I was driving it and of course the brother who bought it wanted it right away. A very annoying and predictably bizarre ghetto situation. So, I had to give it back immediately. Naturally, I had been using my worth-its-weight-in-gold zone four pass donated by Ariel to park the thing, since Capitol hill has two meter maids per civilian driver. Mad Max picked it up while it was parked on the hill and I was at school, the pass unfortunately remained in the car and was given with the suspicious vehicle to the proud new owner who not 12 hours later got pulled over and, as the result of driving an outrageously ostentatious car as a black man with an outstanding warrant thorough the south end at night, has been in jail ever since. My zone four pass remains in the car at an unspecified location and I have received two tickets: one for parking for too long in a zone four space and while the child-eating bastards were at it, one for not having a front plate. Any questions?
One last outrageous thing that made this whole carless for three weeks thing even more of an outrage than it would have been: I have been hustling like crazy to get all my dental work done in the right quick so’s I can leave Beelzebub’s University Village Management Office as soon as possible, since I know my future may not hold cushy health benefits for some time to come. Anyway, as luck would have it my dentist had a cancellation (getting an appointment with them is akin to getting a human on the phone calling the IRS) so I eagerly took it and skipped school, hustled downtown in a taxi and patiently lay in the chair while a dentist different than my regular one injected me with enough Novocain to keep my face numb from mandible to corrogator (eyebrow) for eight hours. When the numbness wore off, I could feel that something was NOT right. My cheek (not my tooth) was really, really sore to the touch and when I woke up the next morning, it was swollen like I had a ping pong ball stuffed in my cheek. I went back to the dentist a few days later (at my Mom and sisters constant and nagging behest, they were sure it was infected despite no signs of infection) and was told that I had a hematoma or blood clot from the anaesthetic needle. Well that’s just fine, there was, as I knew, nothing they could do about it. They did prescribe me antibiotics “just in case.” Just in case I wanted a yeast infection to take my mind off the cheek pain. We just had to wait it out. “WE” except I was the only one who had to ride the 42, transfer to the 7 downtown and walk from Broadway to school looking like Alvin the fucking chipmunk. I believe this is a perfect case of insult to injury. My face is almost back to normal, now almost a month later but you can still see the bruising and if I suck in my cheek I can feel the soreness at the needle’s point of entry (“so don’t suck in your cheek!”)
Its become a little convoluted, but the whole focus of this entry was, and is still, about how great my friends are. I had a whole bunch of other trying experiences the last two weeks that now seem too trite to retell but the gist is; I’m freaking Penelope Pitstop. I get in the most outrageous, annoying and ludicrous situations and all I ever have to do is think about the right person to call and someone, with some specific, perfectly honed and very costly expertise that I could never afford comes through every single time. In fact, I told one of my friends, who lives in LA about how much my car cost, just kvetching, and he put $200 in my bank account without saying a word. It’s staggering. There are people who never understand why I put as much energy and time into my social life and taking care of my friendships as I do. It isn’t a part of our efficiency society, outside of finishing up work and going out to drink and schmooze about work and shopping and other peoples’ personality flaws. But really loving friendships are kind of a dodo bird. Its something people I meet always say, you have such great friends. Its so true, and ive worked hard at it, we take years finding out how to be the best friends to each other, taking care, vanquishing our weaknesses and honing strengths. It is one thing that I really treasure about growing up in one place, as well as seeing the importance that my parents always placed on making time for friends, not just for fun activities but for when things went wrong or you needed outside perspective, or they did. I can’t imagine what their divorce would have been like if they were each other’s only support. That’s what that pithy cliché about things “taking a village” is about, we need each other. We cant do it alone and that should be so obvious but it isn’t. That’s why so many youth are so drawn to other cultures; its this radically new feeling of…community!!! The magic word that we seem to be unique in using and not having. Raking it in in isolation is not a success in my book.
Let see. Why is reflection so hard these days? What is reflection? Sun glinting off of a lake, your image in the mirror when you flip on the bathroom light, the tell tale square of flash in smiling snapshot irises. All those images have light in common, maybe that’s why I can’t shine anything back. It not reflecting when you have to be the light source. I haven’t truly seen the sun, been outside for more than an hour, or lately even seen it through a window for months and months. My skin is pallid and hair lank. Getting dressed is a chore and I have hat hair all the time. Who cares anyway because I wear a smock thirty hours a week and black pants. I rue the day that someone decided black pants were acceptable in any situation and should be incorporated into all dress codes. A year at Dahlia Lounge and I would look down and want to chew my legs off like wolverine in a steel trap
Jesus, I thought I said this wasn’t going to be a pity party! Shaddap already.
I did some cool hair this last few weeks. Yesterday I did another of Mom’s good friend’s hair. She wears a very clean cut and exacting bob. Unlike all these layery choppy cuts that most people have these days, which are pretty forgiving as far as fucking-up goes, the bob will tell on you. If you keep the tension that you use in the back when you cut over the ears, you’ll end up with holes in the bottom edge right under the ears, cause the hair needs to be longer to make up for the sticky-outieness of ears. If you cut one parting shorter than the one under it, or cut your guide when you cut the subsequent parting, it will look graduated and like a choppy line. Anyway, it looked pretty darn good, I must say. Especially for my first time. She liked it a lot, and that’s the important part. I felt really good about it until Ariel said it was asymmetrical. I don’t think it really is but she’ll be in Hawaii for the next month so I wont get to see. If I was in Hawaii I wouldn’t care if my hair looked like Wynonna Judd’s, I’d be so happy.
I colored this fabu drama fag from SCCC Theater dept who was Jack in the Sondheim musical Into the Woods. He had a big level 3 fro (was af am) and wanted it red, without destroying his hair. Bleach was out, so that was a challenge. 4 ozs of 6RR w/30 vol dvlpr and copper intensifier later, he was a redhead, subtle enough to avoid the dreaded clown wig look but bright enough to be perfect for the stage. I did Frannie’s locks ash blonde, a long and arduous process. A word to the wise when coloring locks; untwist them a bit, or end up with leopard print hair. I managed to salvage it but it woulda been a LOT less work had I thought of that sooner. I cut Nellie’s beautiful blonde hair from too long just above the shoulder. I’ve been hustling manicure and pedicure hours whenever I can get them, I do not want to be in fifth quarter with 200 hours left and 75 of ‘em need to be nail hours. Nightmare. Oh, I burnt my first hair during a press and curl. It wasn’t too bad, the woman had awful hair, you know how I feel about relaxers, and I would have actively tried to get her to get one as soon as possible. Feh, SO THICK so coarse and nappy. Locks or frequent relaxers, those are her two options because it honestly didn’t matter how much heat you put on it, it didn’t look right and reverted by the time you were an inch up her scalp. So, yeah, I burnt a small section of her hair about half way up in the back. Felt bad, I couldn’t believe it but I didn’t say anything to her about it! That was so unlike me. But I wanted her out of there so bad and she was so difficult anyway and I was sure that with as much hair as she had she would never miss it and most likely never notice. Plus she had the nerve to come in the salon for a shampoo press and curl with home hair dye all over her head.
This week we all had to write papers on a skin care line that we use or are interested in using. It was an amazing thing to see so clearly everybody’s academic experience laid plain. I’ve never seen anyone so stressed out over a little 5 page research paper. We had to go over each ingredient and as you might guess many products have the same ingredients. Anyway, even after hearing them read several times most people really couldn’t even sound out let alone pronounce the names of some of the ingredients (things like propylene glycol or diazolidinyl urea) and were hard pressed to write in complete sentences. I wont detail Amy’s paper as I’m really not trying to mock anyone, but you can imagine, you can just imagine. I tried to show people how to look at a really long word (di-ethyl-tri-amine or some such thing) and break down which syllables go with which but they really didn’t want to hear it, they’d rather just preface each sentence with “ok, I don’t know if I’m saying this right,” or “I cant say these big words.” It must be hard coming up with lesson plans for such a diverse group with such disparate skill levels. You can’t challenge some people in the class without dusting others, and if you teach to the LCD you…end up with a WA state public school education! But seriously folks…
Now were learning some basic A/P stuff, 10th grade bio curriculum. Cell structure, bones of the skull etc.
Our practicals are next week, we did a timed practice today. Facial, full head pincurls, full head fingerwaves and then an airform. All in under 4 hours. I felt like a train wreck by 5. Mahdis is visiting and I feel a little hookey coming on. I know I’ll regret it, but I like to leave later for later.
It’s getting late, its 30 degrees tops outside, and I have skool in 8 hours. It’s time for me to pull my hood on, tuck jammies into socks and get under the covers. Until nex’ time. xoxoV