Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Hairy tales

I interrupt your normal blog-casting of deep, heady morose fare for....

                                             HAIR TALK WITH STACIA!

I have thick hair.  In fact, I may have the thickest hair of any girl I've met.  It bursts hair ties and shatters claw clips as a matter of course.

Typically I give some warning to my hairdressers, the students at Paul Mitchell school.  And typically the lucky student nods naively, greedy to get another haircut closer to graduating.  She gushes over how beautiful it is and how lucky I am.  All is happy-smiley.  But then she starts washing it and wonders what happened to the shampoo.  My hair swallows shampoo by the bottle.

The girl, still perky, giggles nervously and guides my dripping locks back to the cutting chair.  She pins it up.  It instantly falls with impressive weight, cascading down like the Niagara Falls with mighty aplomb.  The poor girl then tries several other clips, each one bigger than the last with stronger, sharper teeth.  As the long task ahead becomes apparent, her frustration begins to jab at my skull with copious hairpins.  I close my eyes to avoid wincing.

She cuts one layer and unwinds another.  I breathe out, calculating that at this rate, the ten tidy twists on my head will be shorn in good time.  She sniffs, grimaces, and pins back half of the hair twist.  Too much.  We share a suppressed sigh.

There is then: a long time.

In which not much happens on my end, but my valiant little haircutter chips--er, snips--away at Mt. Vesuvius.   My girl keeps casting dark glaring glances to other, happier, students with thin-haired clients.   She mouths, Look how thick!  I KNOW!  Can you BELIEVE it?  The other students quickly look away as from a bloody corpse, their minds reeling in horror.

I fleetingly consider charging money to my own freak show or perhaps supplying goods to yarn stores.    There's got to be a better use of my abounding tresses than $10-a-pop public humiliation.

An old Asian hairdresser with feverish eyes randomly flits to and fro between the shearers.  She stops abruptly at me, doubles over and starts hurriedly collecting shorn scraps of my hair.  I forget all manners and roundly stare at her.  Shouldn't I sign some waiver or consent form?  What could she possibly want with my hair?  Is this voodoo or something?
She explains in broken English that she is doing a hair color project and needs samples of red virgin hair.  Well, I do have both the red and the virgin going for me.  Take it away, strange hair lady.  Just don't take my soul.

At long last the deed is done.  Never mind the blow-drying that took the better part of an hour.  Never mind that my girl's arms are about to fall off from heavy lifting.  My hair is shining, laden with product that I will never slather on it again, and I am about just about to leave  my chair when...

The girl's supervisor sweeps by and does a final check-up on the cut.  I smile wanly and nod, Yes, yes, it's great, fabulous, I like the back, yes...  I say nothing of hairpin stabs or smarting remarks.  That kid owes me big.  All I'm thinking about is my snappy exit.
The supervisor then leans in gallantly, delicately lifting layer upon layer of pampered hair.  He is a tall, regal and strangely bald African American with a flashing wide smile.  Motioning to the mass of butchered hair lying sadly on the floor, he comments sweetly, "I'm going to take your hair and glue it on my head, and then I'll be as pretty as you."

I nervously chuckle, picturing little patches of auburn hair pasted on his dark bald head.  Was that a compliment?

As I pay up and leave, I am reminded of a roommate's comment; she and the other roommates love my hair.  She laughingly warned me that one day I might just wake up and find it shaved off, and the girls dancing around with little Stacia hair wigs.
Talk about a disturbing visual!  Although...I suppose there's more than enough to go around.


Notes:
~All of these things really have happened over multiple visits to the illustrious Paul Mitchell School.  There's actually more that I've witnessed there, including random dance parties and a marriage proposal.  I am so serious.  Men: do NOT, I repeat, do NOT propose to your girlfriend in a salon.  I don't CARE if she cuts hair.  It is beyond tacky.
~I actually love getting my hair cut because I get a head massage.
~Oh, and virgin hair really is a thing--it just means that you've never colored it.  It's rather rare these days, and every single time people are shocked that I'm still a virgin.

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Grief is glass


Happy New Year!  2013, what an awkward little assortment of numbers.  I'm still putting off writing, so here are a few poems.

The day Mom came home for hospice I went out for errands, after waiting hours at the hospital for details and the right oxygen tank.

I knew I had to get colored pencils and journals, and Mom wanted plain yogurt.  I bought a set of three slim journals, my pencils, and two enormous tubs of yogurt.

I always bought her copious amounts of food; I think it was in hope that she'd live long enough to finish it.  Anyhow, one of the journals I turned into a poetry/prose journal.  

There are not as many poems as there are deranged scribbles, but a few stanzas survived.  I don't want to always be sad, but do want to be honest.  That's why I'm posting all the sad ones (they're not all sad) now so I don't have to prolong the process. 


Grief is glass

Grief is glass
shattering shattering
pieces get hid
glimmering glimmering
stuck into toes into fingertips searching
into nostrils inhaled clogging up lungs

some of it’s noble, knighted, sainted—
colored and carved and placed in
cathedrals
most of it’s dusty dirty sneaky grenades
private heartthrobs and breath catching sighs

yearning
   waiting
for something to shift, to resolve out of
            augmented diminished tritone agony
                        but
my hope is in another world
            my heart
my treasure
            has lifted off
and flown away

what is here for me except dusty glass and empty decades?  Life lived just so 
all can be at last at last at long last
finished…          and real life can start.

come.
Jesus—
come.

7.11.12  three days before Mom’s 54th birthday


There is a soft sadness

There is a soft sadness
that sinks in-between
the everyday notches and watches of life

It curls up precisely
where it's hard to reach
and doesn't envelope until all is ripe

But when conversation's
the most ordinary
and when I would certainly rather not weep

The silky soft sadness
seeps up to my stomach
and creeps, how it leaps and it heaps.

8.5.12


And, to not end on a thoroughly heavy note, a little poem from God to me:
open your eyes

open your eyes, my love, my love

lift the lashy veils and colored muscled
     pools of soul
              to me, to me

the agony within will not cannot
            destroy me
for I am deeper still within
     the cloying hurt

8.6.12