the lovely hair salon

My friend from High School, Justin Kelly, owns this salon, Studio 3. It's this fabulous high-ceilinged space over near the Target Plaza in Carlisle. He's got his own line of products and tons of Ikea furniture.

He says he's living the American Dream. He has a house and two dogs and a partner and a Volvo and his own highly successful business. If I wanted him to do my hair, I'd have to book 2 years in advance.

And I LOVE giving him and his stylist Jeannean my money. And I LOVE the whole grown up hair salon experience. I had a cut and highlight, and it cost $80, which is probably more than I've spent on ALL the haircuts I've had in the past 10 years, but I swear--I got my head shampooed and conditioned not once but TWICE with this awesome Studio 3 Mint shampoo, and the most excellent moments of utter self-indulgence and femaleness and estrogen-laden energy.

I'm finding that indulging all of this womanhood, or maybe not womanhood because I am a woman every day and I'm mostly comfortable with that. Maybe I mean that I'm experiencing a new kind of comfort with my own femininity, my own interest in prettiness, in nice hairdos, in nice creams, lotions and skin treatments. I have started moisturizing my face and getting excited about eyeshadow, mascara, moisturizing conditioners. I'm finding all of this to be both an extension of my newly realized militant feminism and in reaction to the fact that my job puts me in the presence of almost exclusively men on an hour-to-hour basis. And the whole thing kind of freaks me out. I'm not comfortable in this comfort or in my level of involvement in the comfort.

I have to admit that it's also a bit about Pearl. How am I going to be a mom to a very feminine little girl who will eventually have very feminine little friends who will pressure her to get her eyebrows waxed? How will I negotiate? How will I navigate unless I learn myself?

I don't want Pearl to be 20 before she learns that people actually do wax their eyebrows. I also don't want her to be shocked. Perhaps I should like it if she found the whole thing to be an horribly barbaric expression of cultural vanity, but I'm not holding my breath. I think she might possess her father's disinterest in a critical inner life which is another thing I shall have to learn to negotiate.

Mazel Tov.

Being a Grown Up Sucks

Because it means that my life constantly exists on two planes: excellent and nose bleed.

These are the excellent things: I threw my first body shop party solo this evening. I did well, with cards. I am not a script-follower generally. I got a solid, positive, promising lead on some consistent freelance work today. I had two decent prospects at work today. I entered the body shop order in record time, and figured out how to order some stuff I didn't know how to order before. My sisters' friends' mom, Cathy, is a very, very cool woman, and I chatted a bit with her this evening. She is inspirational because she gets paid to do art. My dearest friends in the world, Noelle and Feike, will be visiting next weekend. I have been holding myself to New Year's resolutions and being proactive in doing things that will make me happier.

These are the things that cause nose bleeds: I am broke. Poorer than I've been since moving home. Patience, I keep telling myself, Patience! I need to buy new underwear. My cat, Oolong, is [in heat, retarded, sick???] and she keeps peeing on things. She has been living in the basement for 3 days. I want to take her to the vet, but i can't afford it. She needs to be fixed. I haven't had the time to write e-mail or update this thing in 5 to 7 days. All words for numbers ten and under should be spelled out, and I have screwed that up at least 5 times today, once in the e-mail to the promising-freelancing-work-guy. I am terribly sexually frustrated. The laundry is piling up, and I have more food in the fridge than I can consume before it spoils. If only unspoiled food could be traded for cash.

Often, when I am seeing the hardest edges of my adulthood, both planes are going breakneck.

I have no philosophical mental spew to soften these edges. I have no real idea of what to do except for to keep doing.

I get that Beatle's song, "Help!" for the first time, ever.

New Job for 2008

Despite my absurd ignorance about all things involving feminine-self-care that involves creams, make up, or other things commonly called "products," I have become a Body Shop At Home consultant. I have a website. Via The Body Shop At Home. You can go there and buy stuff that I'll get paid a commission on. It will be delivered directly to your house, just like any other online shopping.

http://www.thebodyshopathome.com/web/aline

That's the URL. Go there.

I guess since I'm not getting any younger, and as much as I wish it weren't so, people in the professional real world do often give a ?$*# what I look like, and since The Body Shop has really good company "core values" and are about the business of empowering people and women worldwide using fairly traded ingredients, recycled materials for their packaging wherever possible, etc. It's a good company. Nice to the world like Starbucks is. It is one of those companies I'm proud to be affiliated with, even though (like Starbucks) the potential to become an empire.

Stay Tuned for more stuff on the novel, and I think a poetry project I'm going to attempt to revitalize that I started a few years ago.

Yay!