from the ashes...a walrus

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD Morning Vietnam! Been a WHILE! I have not felt the need, been able to force myself, guilt trip myself about discipline, or wanted to write for a long time! And im not so sure I want to now! I dont know what has changed, it used to be that writing was like a pressure valve and if i didnt get it out there Id get a slow leak and eventually blow, potentially killing hundreds and injuring god knows how many. Plus I didnt want to miss getting anything down, and didnt want you to miss anything! And thats still true, i hate how many hilarious things have passed me by. Ive made a million mental notes to write about things and forgotten them immediately.

I think there are a couple of reasons. Firstly, my job is pretty normal. All that hard work at lovella and at SVI school of cosmetology has paid off. I work at a darling brooklyn salon with a pretty corny name which as per confidentiality i wont reveal here, but I will say its punny and I avoid telling people the name of where I work. But beyond that theres not much funny about the place. I work with one of my old coworkers from Lovella, one other stylist who is affectionatelly named after her home state which she shares with GW and JR. Shes a sweetheart, does great color and tells the same totally uneventful stories to every client in her chair. Mainly having to do with the sideshow carny classes she took this winter in coney island which led to her being able to "eat fahr" and "stick a nayl in muh nose." The owner of the salon was John Sahag's personal assistant and does only cutting, dry cutting even, and is a doll. The most bizarre person there was the receptionist who was a Upper East Side Jewish woman who moved to park slope but still organized tennis functions, contemplated a career in PR, bemoaned never finishing her art history dissertation and alternated between binge drinking/pill popping and obsessive Pilates intensives. She wore only DVF (if you dont know, count yourself among the blessed) wrap dresses which were far far too short (she's tremendously tall with long muscly legs a la tennis) with clogs, no matter the weather. She was very bitter and constantly bitched about the owner of the salon who is the nicest person ive ever worked for. She loved me immediately, trusted me implicitly and I have rarely felt so uncomfortable around anyone. But, she got fired. The till never balanced and the chick that recommended her called and said she thought maybe she had a drug problem (duh.) So now we have two sweet girls at the front who are too young and cute to be interesting subjects, one sweet assistant who seems a lot younger than she is and is about to get a leg tattoo which involves scissors and blowdriers (I couldnt mask my disapproval) and a pretty darn good atmosphere.
Im busy there pretty much every day that Im there, especially on the weekends and even though Im a Jr stylist so far I get a lot of new clients and Im starting to get a lot of return requests! Thats really exciting . Its also affordable enought that I can have my clients that used to come see me at home come there. Yay. No more hairkitchen. My work is getting WAY better too, which is very cool to see. Ive dubbed myself the bobbinator cause Ive been giving these killer vidal sassoon style stacked bobs. I dont do that much color yet but its building up slowly. And I can walk to work, No more two train hours a day, so that angst is gone. The other reason I think, is ben. Its so much easier to go through these things when you have a partner, someone to vent to, to help with some of the stupid stuff you dont want to do alone, and just to generally be the pressure valve. I know why so many artists throughout history have been either chronically single or in terrible dysfunctional relationships; It kinda kills the ennui and creative drive to be in a happy couple! Aint that a bitch??

I FINALLY got my license, the test was a FARCE. See, i cant believe I didnt write about that test. It was amazing. I was in LA until three days before. Of course they scheduled it for while I was in Senegal and I had to reschedule. So i got home from cali and spent the next 72 hours in intensive prep. I got all the paperwork from one of the new assistants at Lovella who is in school, I ordered the prep book online, I bought a manniquin head, gel, cholesterol, tape for labeling, tiny containers for the gel and cholesterol which i labeled relaxer, base, perm solution, tint and lightener. I bought perm rods, sanitizer; hand and surface, a box of latex gloves fresh blades for my razor.I borrowed twenty towels, seven tint brushs, fifiteen perm rods and a bunch of rollers from Lovella. I bought gallon ziplocs and organized each excercise into its own bag. I practiced the state board set three times, a combination of rollers, pincurls and fingerwaves that results in hair like Loretta Lynn in 1983. I made sure i was able to complete each excercise in the exact time that the board alloted. I packed everything into my rollerbag, dried my mannquin head in state board formation (which you have to comb out then reset during the test, to make sure you didnt have anyone do it for you im sure) and got on the train an hour and a half early. I was ready. It took the whole hour and a half to get from my house to 34th street. So much stopping in the tunnel it was amazing. It was held at the Manhattan campus of LIBS thats Long Island Beauty School, the biggest cos program in NY. When i got there, I encountered terrible disorganization. There was zero signage, just two registration tables across the hall from each other that you couldnt tell if they were doing the same thing or if you had to go to both. So i went to the closest one, the lady said sign here and go talk to the other table. So I did that. When I got to the other table the rotund brown woman behind the table bellowed at me "See all those people on line 'dere? They awl waiting the same way you needuh." Alrighty then. I proceeded to wait in the line, which wrapped all the way around the whole floor of the bldg for an hour. The test was supposed to start at four. By the time we had gotten signed in (after a lot more bellowing from the big bird bitch at the front) and settled, then resettleled in three seperate rooms, it was after five. Of course my procter was the big bellowing behemoth from the registration table. There were about thirty students per room and two proctors. We were six on one folding table, all trying to make sure we had our stuff set out exactly as all the paperwork specified.

I could already see that this was not going to go the way i had thought. In seattle there was a small booth for each person, and a space for storage beneath the booth, you had a shelf for all your things and there were about two students to each proctor, all of whom were dressed in white lab coats with clipboard and did not so much as crack a smile. Most of the NYC test consisted of the proctors trying to tell the students who didnt speak any English what they were supposed to be doing. Things like "Good god, ok, ok does anyone here know how to say blunt cut in spanish?? Ay Caramba people!" They would tell you things you were doing wrong and wait for you to correct them, then say good job! Half way through we were runing out of time cause the building closed at seven, so they just had us start an excercise, theyd see (though they could tell nothing from one parting of a relaxer done with cholesterol) if we knew how to do it, and tell us to start the next excercise. Then they were like ' dont sanitize anything, dont sweep up, just keep going!! We gotta get outta this room." Mind you the whole point of the test was to make sure everyone knows saftey and sanitation procedure. The little man who was the other proctor was wandering around muttering "Whadda disgrace, whadda sham dis test is. Yous all gonna leave and tell yer frens what kinda test this was. Whatta disgrace.Dis is some kinda joke." Before I heard that I was a litttle concerned that beacuse they didnt look at anything i was doing they wouldnt know if I was cool or not, but after he said that I realized they were gonna pass everyone. Except the Dominican lady across from me who was doing the haircut when she was supposed to be doing a perm. She said yes to everything the proctor asked her, including "Do you understan' a ting Im sayin?" to which the answer clearly should have been no.
I left feeling glad that I was done, glad that I passed, but a little disappointed that I wasnt able to do everything I practiced and a little pissed that I had spent so much money on stuff I didnt even have to use. But, Im done. Two years later Im licensed in NY and Wa and Im not moving till Ive been licensed for five years and can transfer automatically. Amen,

Ill write about Senegal soon i promise, but i just recently got back from alaska and seattle and i think ill give that a litte airtime first.

First of all, you all need to go to Alaska before its gone. Its amazing. Truly. We landed in Anchorage, which is not very amazing, a rather flat and suburban looking city. Like Spokane Wa, you can sense the methlabs bubbling just below the surface. We stayed in a LOVELY bed and breakfast called the Alaska House of Jade run by this lovely Alaskan woman and her sephardic israeli husband. Go figure. It was great, and its for sale, for only 900 thousand. A steal. Seriously. Anyone wanna go in on it and move to alaska? she said it makes 100 grand a year!! Anyway, we were there with Bens folks, who are divorced but still take family vacations togehter, similarly to my family. So we had dinner with his Mom's cousins who, as jews living in Alaska, refer to themselves as the frozen chosen, which you may remember from that wacky client of Judah's who went on an alskan cruise and saw real live natives. Then we went to Seward and went on a boat trip out into the Fjords. It was breathtaking. The mountains rise directly out of the water, with glaciers lapping at the waves. We saw Orcas, porpoises, Humpback whales, tons of seabirds like cormorants, puffins (tufted and horned) myrres (which are like penguins,) bald eagles (which were so common ben began to refer to them as Alaskan Pidgeons.) Once we got about four hours out into the water we stopped in front of a huge glacier face, killed the engine and listened to it calve. Huge peices of the ice groaned and splashed into the water, all around us icebergs floated and turned. It was terribly terribly quiet and still, the ice absorbs the whole light spectrum, only blue can get through, so the face looks translucent and bluish. We were a quarter mile away from the glacier but the scale is so rediculously huge it seemed like only about thirty or forty feet. Then we set back towards the islands where we saw hoards of stellar sea lions barking and roaring. Theyre so cool. Apparantly their population has declined 80% recently so researchers are hard at work trying to figure out why. They've set up a seal cam on one particularly poplular breeding island and have a dedicated sea lion channel for observation purposes. Maybe that has something to do with the decline...I wouldnt want to mate and breed if i knew it was going to be broadcasted and shown at the museum! We also saw harbor seals, which are so adorable. No walruses. That was too bad. Ive become a little obsessed with walruses. Google walrus skull and check out the images, unbelieveable. The size of the maxilla where the tusks insert blows my mind.

We stayed in Seward one night, Barbara and I spent the day at the sealife museum and Ben, Steve and his brother Sam went hiking until pure bear fear brought them back down the mountain. We did see a brown bear, from the car, and a lot of moose, which are HUGE. Then we took off (in the minivan mind you) for Homer. Its a lovely drive and since it doesnt ever get dark there you can drive around at all hours and still be able to see the sights. We took a nice hike on the way there. Homer is the most beautiful place Ive ever seen. Its on a spit that sticks out in to the ocean five miles. we stayed in a hotel at the end of the spit, which is basically like being in the middle of the water surrounded by a ring of snow capped mountains. They have a hottub outside which you can sit in in broad daylight at midnight and watch the waves and the colors change on the glaciers and snow. Dope. If you go to AK, dont short shrift homer, you will want to be there more than one night. Lots of local arts there too, and its the Halbut fishing capitol of the world, fantastic seafood. I was on total fish burnout by the time we left. We went back to anchorage to spend one more night at the Jade house then fly to seattle.

Seattle was a good time had by all. It was so much fun to see all the parents visiting and getting along so well. It was uncanny how it felt like we had all known each otehr for years. We did some touristy pike placey stuff, ate at the best ethiopian joint, went for the marsh walk along foster island and the arboretum and generally continued our eating tour of the west coast. I hadnt been home in a year, so i stayed longer than the Hersons and spent some good time with Mom, and lots of old friends, did a bunch of haircuts, went dancing and scoped the thurs night dancehall scene, surveyed the old peeps and new faces. Got a massage and a colonic, and just chilled out. Drove a lot of course, and met a few new babies. everyone I know is poppin them out like its going out of style. Which is fun for me, lots of cute new additions to the fam, lots of crying and pooping.

Now Im back. And hopefully this will be the first of many. Sometimes you gotta burn the whole thing down for something new to grow. Im hoping for a pinnneped.