Dichroic Reflections

hallways, hair, and bears, oh my

You know what I hate? I hate when you say hello to someone passing in the hallway, then say say hello to me and I realize too late that they didn't me me greet them *first* and they now think I am rude for not returning their hello. At that point, about the only way to rescue the situation is to have an actual conversation, a tactic not apt to be appreciated by someone who is on his or her way to lunch.

Grammarians of the world: Yes, I have totally given up on the issue of using "they" as a singular gender-neutral pronoun. I am far too lazy to say "his or her" every time. On the other hand, your rule about splitting infinitives is silly and is entirely based on 18th century English writers' hyper-reverence for Latin, so there.

And while I am addressing minor annoyances and oddities, I can report that it took TWO AND A HALF HOURS to cut and color my hair Friday evening. The reasons for my mind-bogglement may become clearer when I point out that all I wanted to do was to get rid of some faded blondish highlights left over from a previous experiment. (I've only ever colored my hair maybe four times, so I think of them all as experiments.) I wanted to go back to my natural very dark brown, but a maybe bit richer - the image that kept coming to mind was polished mahoghany. (The other image was of Elissa Driban, whom I sat behind in seventh-grade geography and whose hair was as dark as mine but gorgeously shiny and varied in color.) Fortunately, I was able to find a picture of Hilary Swank on one of the salon's magazine to convey what I wanted to Cool Salon Guy.

The reason it all took so long was that the previous highlights were put in when my hair was much shorter, and so are on all levels, not just the top layer. Also, neither of us wanted to just color the whole head,
since hair color is not particularly good for hair. CSG ended up painting the
highlighted parts in brown and dark red and wrapping them up in little silver foil
packets which were interspersed with uncolored strands left loose until I looked
like a peculiar high-tech witch. (The techical term is something like "two-color
weave".) And now eighty minutes and seventy dollors later, I look just as I would have if I had never colored at all, except that if you get close you can see strands of dark red enlivening the brown. A wild experimenter, I am.

Good thing I enjoy hanging out with Cool Salon Guy. Even if he did make me promise that next time I am in the local mall I will determine whether it's possible to assemble an S & M bear at the Build-A-Bear Workshop (where I regularly check in to see if they have the accessories to build a rower bear or a pilot bear). That chain is grossly underestimating the adult market, I think. Even avoiding the more *ahem* mature theme, I feel sure they could sell work accessories like businessman bears and engineer bears (I think they have doctors already) as well as the sports like climbing and rowing that adults tend to do more of. After all, who has the disposable income, anyway?