Wet Feet

Multimedia message

That's the back of a boombox circa 1985. And that's an Ipod hooked up to it. And up top there is the foot of a hipster who has gone too far.

Multimedia message

has figured out how to blog from her phone. Stay tuned...

-- ================================================================== This mobile text message is brought to you by AT&T

Multimedia message

three in a hammock. i am the luckiest :)

Multimedia message

Lunch on the deck

Multimedia message

Testing mobile blogging capabilities because it appears that i will never again have a computer that works.

All in a day's work

Today, as followers of Cecily's blog already know, I did her color. I will now walk you through what happened on my end. refer to her post for pictures because she took much better ones than I did.

She's an ideal client, especially for a student. "Hey, do whatever. It's impossible to fuck up my hair!"

So, okay. Let me try this layering method I just read about and thought would be fun. 3 r/v on the bottom, 6 r/r on the top.  In laymans terms, that's a dark red violet layered with a medum true red. A few foils in front to break it up. Let's go!

Oh, wait. Except there's one formula for the roots and another for the colored hair. Don't forget the gray, and the developer it requires.  And those zig-zag partings? that's a great idea, it surely will make the color blend nicely, and they make a special brush for that. You don't have it? well then paint like Michelangelo, and make sure you don't overlap the formulas!

Perfectionist, IGNITE!!

Four formulas, four applications. Cecily was serious when she said this took HOURS.

The biggest difference between student salons and regular salons is that everything takes twice as long, at least. We are slower and we require frequent checks to make sure that some horrible oversight hasn't been made.

When I am doing something new, as I was doing with Cecily, I will ask for instuctor assisitance as often as I can get away with. One reason is that I don't want to fuck up Cecily's hair. The other reason is that I have tremendous respect for my instructor and I know that whenever she comes over to check on my work I will learn something new. It helps that she also has respect for what I do. I can tell she likes instructing me.

"whenever I see you you're getting color" says the blond 17 year old jersey girl classmate in the dispensary.

I tell her about the idea, the existing color, the gray.

She blanches. "Good luck!" , rolls her eyes and saunters away.

Later, another classmate joins me. 20 year old PA suburbanite. "Your client FREAKS ME OUT. what's up with HER EYES? she looks ANGRY!"

I laugh. I tell her Cecily is a writer friend of mine, and she's one of the most awesome, powerful women I've ever had the pleasure to meet. Intense, yes. Angry? No, not really.

"oh my god you KNOW her?" and I can tell she's thinking she put her foot in her mouth. Who cares? Not me. Not Cecily.

The color comes out exactly as I planned. But the highlights are still ahead.

I place seven foils, all face framing, all chunky slices. Foils are harder than you'd think. You have to get them close to the scalp but not so close that the lightener bleeds out as it processes. Heavy enough to have a strong effect, fine enough to not scream "skunk!".

Because we are trying to lift out fresh pure tone color as well as exisiting color, my instructor recommends a high volume develper with the bleach. 30 volume. If left to my own devices  I would have gone all the way to 40 volume but I go with what my teacher tells me. I apply it and wait. and check and wait. I put on a cap and a towel to heat it up and wait some more. And try to keep myself from checking. It's becoming a compulsion. I show Cecily the results and pray she says it's light enough. Thank god she does because by now it's 3 PM and we've been at this since 9:30.

Jesus, this is taking forEVER.

Finally, I take the foils out, shampoo, condition deeply, and blow dry. My blow outs have been on the bad side of mediocre lately and I'm glad this one goes well. I am careful, I take my time. Because I have been substandard with the blow dryer lately I know they are watching me.

In the end, even though the lightening pattern wasn't at all uniform, it turned out cool and funky. I loved it. And Cecily liked it too.

After she was gone and I was cleaning my [tornado mess of a] station several of my classmates complimented me on my day's work. Nobody in my class has had a chance to really explore the creative side of color and they were all watching, from a distance, to see how this one turned out.

There are things I would have done differently. I would have section her hair so that more would have been the darkest color, especially in the back. But all in all, a good color service and an excellent learning experience. Thanks, Cecily. Please come back soon!

"No, I'm not mad at you, I'm just overwhelmed"

This is one of those times when all the shit seems to have hit the fan at the same time, specifically in the form of freak illnesses and dental emergencies and an enormous change in my lifestyle.

I had a computer of my own for a blessed 24 hours before it started acting up again. Now it works but I can't open up a browser. Phooey.

My brother is currently in the hospital being treated for some horrible strain of pneumonia. If you are the praying type, please pray for him today because he's having a procedure to drain his lungs of the sadistic fluid that's making him so miserable. He'll be under anesthesia for the procedure and in ICU afterwards. Mortality, I bid you a reluctant hello.

Both my girls have bad, bad teeth in need of immediate attention. Naomi had an abscess and had a baby molar pulled last week. The only upside is that with that experience as a teaching tool, it is no trouble to get her to brush her teeth anymore. And I don't even want to tell you how bad Miriam's teeth are. Jesus gay, it's amazing she can eat at all.

On top of all that, my boyfriend Damon is moving in this week. His lease ended suddenly and it seemed the most obvious, logical thing to do. So as of May 1 I will officially be living with another adult. I just pray I won't ruin it by being, well, me.

All of this on top of the normal stresses, it has made me depressed. I want to turn off my phone and pull my blanket over my head. And I know people are tested far beyond all this but I've had enough. I want life to stop so I can catch my breath. If there are any of you left reading, could you please leave me stories about the shit hitting the fan and how you made it through? I don't care how trivial or how deep, just give me something to read, something to connect to, or even just a reason to check my email.

OK, Adoption

Adoption has not been in the front of my mind lately, partly because my mental waiting room is spilling over with other things needing my attention and partly because I've aired so many of my feelings through this blog. but then Jo linked to this post at Shakesville and as I read it I felt the need to respond line by line, because some of the things she said really can't be reiterated enough. The italicized text is hers, not mine.

1. "I have given a baby up for adoption, and I have had an abortion, and while anecdotes are not evidence, I can assert that abortions may or may not cause depression - it certainly did not in me, apart from briefly mourning the path not taken - but adoption? That is an entirely different matter. I don't doubt that there are women who were fine after adoption, and there is emphatically nothing wrong with that or with them; but I want to point out that if we're going to have a seemingly neverending discussion about the sorrow and remorse caused by abortion, then it is about goddamn time that we hear from birth mothers too.

Believe me when I say that of the two choices, it was adoption that nearly destroyed me - and it never ends. The only comparison I have is the death of a loved one. The pain retreats, maybe fades, but it comes right back if I poke at it...There is no such thing as "over" with this.

Also having experienced an abortion and an adoption, I can echo this point. It drives me crazy that the people who trumpet the emotional consequences of having an abortion are often the same people who tout adoption as the answer to the "problem"* of crisis pregnancy.

I had an abortion after a gray-rape kind of experience when I was 16. (And I am now apologizing to the members of my family who may read this from my facebook page and didn't know it already). While it was certainly harrowing, it was finite. I'm sorry it had to happen, but I have no qualms over the decision I made. It was the right one. End of story.

Adoption, as I've written and as she states on Shakesville, is more of a chronic condition than a trauma that heals eventually. I am fortunate that I am in a period where this monster is sleeping. But when E surfaces again the pain will be just as intense as it has ever been. The body doesn't forget, and she was part of my body. And there is the other issue of her reaction to my decision, and the lifelong consequences she will experience. This is a loss that keeps on losing.

*"Problem" being a relative condition relating more to the structure of our society than the universal unfitness of women who get pregnant without the requisite cultural rubber stamps. Teenagers can be good mothers too. Some 40 years olds have no business making babies. You really can't generalize.

2. "Birth mothers are a demographic seldom heard from, and then generally only in the context of how soon they want to "replace" their lost child. This is a huge WTF to me. I went into a self-destructive tailspin for over a decade, and never once thought that maybe a new doll would do the trick...I'd spend so long hovering on the edge of suicide, desperately trying to find some way to deal with an all-consuming pain I had no idea even existed. I had never needed help so badly, and I doubt I ever will again. I've known a lot of birth mothers, and I consider myself lucky; I'm less broken than many of them, somehow. Maybe it's because I never did get any kind of therapy. I couldn't find any that didn't make me feel inhuman"

Count me among those who had the urge to replace what was lost, or to restore the ruptured motherhood.

Back when I was first exploring the online world of birthparent support on various message boards, I saw that a pattern seemed to develop. Birthmothers either had many children right away, or never had another child. While there were those in the middle ground (where I would eventually land, having two children several years post-placement) the majority seemed to fall on the extremes.

I think what made the difference for me, why I felt the urge to have more children, is because I had always seen myself as becoming a mother one day, and by placing E for adoption I was only delaying babies in favor of things that I thought were more important at the time, like travel (FAIL!) and education (EPIC FAIL!).

Many women have no desire for motherhood, and placing a child ultimately doesn't change that.

It is important to see that in this passage she tells us that even when motherhood is not desired at all, the emotional consequences can be just as severe. Birthmothers suffer a debilitating wound with chronic consequences, which no one, even therapists, can understand. We are stranded, and we must find sense and healing on our own.

Which leads nicely into:

3. "I've googled over the years about the psychological aftereffects of giving up a baby, and what little I found is astonishing. Depression and suicide rates ridiculously high, comparable to PTSD - and beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is no way you can cook any post-abortion trauma study to come anywhere near post-adoption trauma levels. Strange how peer-reviewed studies on this are damn near non-existent; strange how nobody mentions any of this when it's not just your mind on the line, but also that of your kid or kids (more on that later)."

It's a huge problem that the only information about the consequences of placing a child for adoption are mostly anecdotal. Not only does it make supprt hard to find and help hard to justify, it an easy device for those who would like to minimize our experiences. If it was important, it would have been studied, right?

I have a hunch that if it were studied, it would be an undeniable truth that far, far more women are crippled by placing than who skate through like Juno, and women like me would cease to be seen as the embittered anomaly. It would cause a paradigm shift in our cultural view of adoption ("how wonderful! the best thing for everyone!") and adoption industry practices that are now accepted as normal would be seen for what they truly are: manipulative and abusive. Ouch!

Also, for myself and on the behalf of the other women who've been doggedly blogging this topic for years now, I am annoyed that the title of this post on Shakesville includes the phrase "Breaking the Silence". We've broken the silence repeatedly. When will people start to listen??

That's enough for now. As always, I welcome any discussion on this topic.

Six Bullets

1. I'm still here, I swear.

2. Applying dry heat to a coating of wet hairspray on a finished updo causes it to dry like shellack, enabling you to take all the visible pins out and get yet another A in hair school. Just in case you need to know, in case you need a formal hairstyle that will withstand any amount of abuse.

3. Age 3 is the worst. age. EVER. Although 19 year olds are nearly as bad, especially when they won't shut up about the AMAZING PARTY they went to last night, as if they're the first people in the whole wide world to party. I think I'd rather go prematurely gray and wrinkle like a prune than be 19 again. But 3? With all the testing of the VOLUME and the BOUNDARIES...and the only wearing pink clothes with hearts and kitties? Jesus gay I'm fucking tired.

4. Age 6 might be the best age ever. My girl Naomi gets more awesome every day. She's so smart and insightful and funny... and she's growing up so fast.

5. Now that we are spending so much time apart, I am falling in love with my little creatures all over again. Wazzle and Dazzle, I call them. (Naomi said she's going to change her name to Dazzle.) They are both so very talented at art, in such completely different ways (Naomi is all about emotions and faces, Miriam is all about colors and forms. Both brilliant. Wow!). I find myself bragging to strangers about how awesome they are. I've shown crappy cell phone pictures of their art to random clients at school.

6. Speaking of clients, I have now entered the level of hair school where I am working in the student salon four days a week. Now I know I'm doing the right thing because the rush I get from connecting with a client and making them look good is just like the rush I get when I write something that resonates with people. I love it. I truly, truly love it. And I feel so damn lucky.

If you are in the Philly area, call and make an appointment with me 215.386.0404 (ask for Kateri). I really want to do your hair. I want to do everyone's hair. I can't help myself. And If you need a perm or a relaxer, I really, really need you to come in during the next few months. I'm being graded on those.