“Every Damn Time!” – Michael Bluth

I was going to write a post about my weird obsession with dream interpretation, but that will have to wait for another day because I did something marvelously stupid today and it warrants a post.

My hair is super long right now; I think longer than it’s ever been.  And let me tell you, long hair is a hassle.  It gets stuck in seatbelts and car doors, is found everywhere around the house (shower drain, carpet, ‘Geddon’s hands, ‘Geddon’s binkie, food, socks, et cetera ad nauseam), and causes me slight whiplash when I’m cuddling with The Man and go to sit up without realizing his arm is resting on top of my hair.  Plus it gets knots in it quicker than a sailor’s necktie and takes eons to style.  I had to wake up two hours early one Sunday because I wanted to curl my hair for church.  So of course, I’m ready for a change.

Now, the tense in that last paragraph was a little off; mainly so I could create some lead-up to this story.  See, I cut my hair off today.

I’ve been wanting to take off a few inches for a while now, and my bangs were much longer than I like them.  Now, my awesome sister-in-law who lives mere minutes away is a cosmetologist and has never given me a bad haircut, but she’s at a busy time in her life right now and I didn’t want to hassle her.  Plus, it always looks so easy when you read the tutorials online.  So I trucked Stormageddon off to Sally’s (a beauty supply store), bought some scissors and a mirror so I could see the back of my head, and hurried home.  I decided I would document the entire experience with pictures so I could show you all how incredible I am at following directions. 

Ready for my anti-tutorial/how-to-not instructions?

Get you some scissors, fool.  I bought two kinds – one for creating nice layers (one side is toothy) and one for straight-up cutting.  I had to use scissors to get the scissors out of their packaging, which I thought was kind of funny.  Does it work that way with office scissors too?  I threw “Geddon in the background to make this picture more interesting.

Make sure yous chilluns is entertained.  I tried a mirror, and that didn’t work.  So I put him next to me in the bathroom with his jumper and that kinda worked for a while…but mostly he was just angry with me until I threw food at him.

 Admire yo’ long hairs.  It’s going to be a while until you see them again.  Well, I guess you’ll see them in the trash can, but that’s just kind of depressing.

Bangity Bangs.  I used this tutorial to cut my bangs, but I wanted to make mine a little bit shorter than what she had, so I ignored the “cut a tiny bit at a time” rule.  Stupid, stupid me…

Cut those ends off.  I kinda followed haircut #3 from this site.  And it turned out okay, but didn’t really look like I’d done much other than butcher my bangs.  Stormageddon thought it was hilarious when I had my ponytail in front of my face.

Become a total moron and come up with your own “clever” way of getting some layers in there.  Here’s where it all really fell apart.  I thought, “hey!  I want ‘a little boost in the back’ like haircut #2 boasts, but I want to keep my length.  Maybe I should try it with just a section of my hair!”  I honestly thought this was going to turn out awesome, you guys.  I felt so smart.  I even came up with the ingenious idea of double-banding the hair so I would still know where to cut even if my fingers slipped.  It did not turn out well.  Maybe if I had used tiny amounts of hair at a time instead of half of my head…oh well.

Freak out and cut off the rest of your hair to match.  My sanity was long-gone by now.  You can see it in my “crazy eyes.”

Cry and sweep up your luscious locks from the floor.

Wash and dry your hair to see if that makes it look any better.

Hide it in a tiny ponytail.  I’ve always been curious about how I would look as a boy.  Now I know.  Insane.

And now I’ve got an appointment with my sister-in-law anyway to have her fix my hair, so I didn’t help anyone with my solution.  The funny thing is, I’ve done this before.  And EVERY SINGLE TIME it turns out bad.  I guess I got a little cocky because I’ve been buzzing The Man’s head for him the past few months and it usually looks pretty good.  I just figured wielding scissors would be exactly like buzzing a head a uniform length.  Because that’s how my brain works apparently.

Moral of the story?  Don’t cut your own hair.  Ever.  And marry someone with a sibling who graduated in cosmetology.

If I Was Pygmalion I Could Make a Friend

I have no idea how to make friends.  I make acquaintances all the time, but I seem to have lost the ability to make friends that want to hang out with me.  Luckily I’ve kept hold on several friends I made back when I had the knowledge and skills, but part of me is afraid I will never make new friends again.  The other part of me wonders if I ever had those skills or if it was just dumb luck.

During my childhood there were three different ways to make friends:

1.    My parents would make friends with people that had kids.  I made the majority of my friends this way.  If your parents want to hang out with each other, you’re kind of forced to hang out with each other and since your parents are friends and you’re usually like your parents, it just stands to reason that you will have similar interests and develop a friendship (How’s that for a run-on sentence?).

2.    School (including Sunday school).  These friendships were based on mutual experiences and me trying to make people laugh because I didn’t know how else to ingratiate myself.  Most of these friendships were great at school, but didn’t go any further.  I can probably count the number of times I invited school friends over to my house on two hands.

3.    Being neighbors.  This one overlaps a bit with the first way, but not entirely.  When you’re out riding your bike, kicking a ball, catching crawdads, or whatever you do as a child, you automatically make friends with other kids doing similar things.  It just happens.  Since you live in the same neighborhood it’s easy to hang out when you’re bored.  I made some of my best friends this way (Granted, we now only communicate via Facebook, but that’s neither here nor there.  At the time, we were best friends).

In adolescence things changed a bit.  Since I was a buthhole, when my parents wanted to hang out with other families I often ignored the new kids and only paid attention to my own siblings.  I still tried to be sardonic and witty at school and church, but never really made many friends because of it.  And though we had one neighborhood friend, our closeness barely lasted through middle school – it ended about the time it wasn’t as cool to play night games like jailbreak and sardines anymore(don’t worry, I gained back my appreciation for those in college).

It was right after middle school that I made one of my first real friends, and I went about it in the most awkward and socially unacceptable way possible.

You know how everyone you ever made eye contact with in middle school writes something along the lines of “Have a great summer!  Never change!  Keep in touch!” in your yearbook?  Well.  One fine summer day I was bored out of my mind and my mother told me to call one of my friends to hang out with.  I didn’t have any “hang out” friends, but I did have my yearbook.  And one unfortunate soul had written her phone number down.  We didn’t really know each other, we just had a mutual friend.  Mum insisted though, and I called her up and asked her to come over.  I ended up leaving the house before the time her mother had arranged to pick her up (I have no idea why) and she ended up spending most of her time at my house canning with my mother.  By some act of God that day actually marked the beginning of my longest-lasting friendship.  And by some greater miracle, she welcomed me into her friendship circle, thus blessing me with several new friends.  That was my most successful attempt at making friends.

When it came time to choose a college I decided that I wanted to reinvent myself, so I went off to a school that none of my friends were going to (stupid, I know).  I made lasting friendships with many of my roommates, but that’s mainly because we lived together and got to know each other so well out of necessity.  If we had just had classes together I’m sure we would have liked each other, but I don’t think we would have ever been so close.  The only other way I made friends in college was by inviting myself over to people’s houses.  I never hung out with the friends I made in class or at church; I had no idea how to invite them over, I guess.

And now that I’m a married adult with a child, I’m totally lost.  I know that once Stormageddon’s older I’ll probably make friends at the park or something, but for now I’m floundering.  I still make acquaintances quite often, and I’ve even invited several couples over for dinner and games, but it never seems to go anywhere.  One time The Man and I even got so desperate as to try out my tried-and-true creeper method of friendship.

We were trying to sell our contract at an apartment so we could move into our current place, and we had hit it off pretty well with a couple who came to tour.  I ended up texting them, asking if they wanted to hang out some time.  They expressed interest, but the hang-out never fell through, even after several attempts of setting one up.

Now it’s to the point where The Man and I meet a couple we like and we joke about how we need to stalk them and show up at their places of employment and tell them how much we enjoy their company and how much we’d like to be best friends with them.  You know, typing that out makes it pretty clear why we don’t have friends…

I guess we’re kinda creepy.