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Monday, 9:15 am in The Soapbox

So next weekend I’m getting my hair done; it’s way overdue.  I last had it cut just before I started working (so late January), and its grown way out since then but I just haven’t gotten around to having it cut.  I’ve got other things I can spend $200 on.

My hairdresser is one of those funny things.  I’ve been going to the same place since I was in year 9.  When I was a Wee Tyke, I always had a kind of a blonde bob haircut with a dorky 80s fringe.  I used to get haircuts at a place in the Woden Bus Interchange called L’Homme et la Femme (excuse the terrible French), and I was too young to really notice what kind of job they did.  Anyway, one merry day I went in for a trim, and they were really busy.  Like woah, major rush.  It was a unisex salon (as suggested by the name), and they hair a men’s side and a women’s side.  Anyway, they grabbed one of the women from the men’s side to come and do my hair.  To cut a long story short (har har), I walked in with a bob and out with short-back-and-sides.  Mum had gone off to do shopping or something, so wasn’t watching what was going on, and I was too unsure of myself to say anything when the daft bint started pulling out the electric sheep shearer.  I spent the next five years’ totally traumatised and not just a little bit gender-confused, with a pathological fear and loathing of hairdressers.  My hair grew out long and streaked, except I’ve always been pretty hopeless at putting my hair up in any way (it’s very sliky and thin, and I’m too much of a perfectionist; I don’t like ‘bumpy’ ponytails).  Besides, I had an idol when I was in late primary school; her name was Donna and she was the grungy, somewhat dorky sister of a guy in my class.  She had long, messy brown hair she used to streak with green and purple dye.  I totally thought Donna was the best; she used to catch the same bus as me home sometimes, and I would sit up the back with her secretly indulging in hero-worship.

Anyway, in year 9 I finally decided that the long hair had to go (I don’t remember why), and I was going to get it dyed red to boot.  One of the girls in our group at the time, Gen, had recently gone from having a blonde bob to having short, spiked Ronald McDonald coloured hair, and I think that’s the colour I wanted.  So mum booked me into the Hair Affair at the Mawson shops for my first cut and dye.

I’ve gone there ever since.

Not so long ago I did this financial management course at work.  For some reason the trainer guy started talking about the different ‘types’ of consumers stores attract.  Rats are opportunistic, cats are territorial, dogs are loyal, and sheep bring in other customers.  The guy asked whether anyone in the room had gone to the same hairdresser for more than five years, and since most of the other people were interstate transfers, I was the only one who had.  I knew I was a cat; the only real reason I’ve been going to the Hair Affair at Mawson since year 9 is that it’s close and it’s a ‘known quantity’.  The guy kept insisting that I was a sheep; I kept telling him, no, I never talk about where I get my hair cut.  It just doesn’t pop up into the conversation between, “Man, what was up with the DPS last night in MC?” and “So we put them in a cage, right, and make them fight for our love!”

It’s not that the Hair Affair at Mawson is bad, exactly.  The cutting has sometimes been patchy, but it can also really, really good (ask for Tina; the tall one).  The owner (John) is nice and knowns mum; they have long gossip sessions about me which I pretend not to hear from the next chair over.  Plus he really cares about hairdressing and looking after hair; the time I dyed my hair purple and it faded out in pink and teal stripes he stripped the Fudge out with his Special Solution which made the girl who was applying it sick for the next two days.  Oops.  I’ve been to far, far worse places (my one experiment in Wollongong with getting a haircut was a disaster).

My problem with Hair Affair is two fold.  Firstly, they don’t know how to do an a-line, but then again I’m yet to find a salon that does (I gather they’re quite hard to cut).  The second is that they’re never quite wild enough with colours.  I guess it’s because John really hates Fudge, and I guess ‘real’ hairdresser dyes don’t come in firetruck red or lapis lazuli blue.  The other thing is I just don’t think I’m very good at articulating how I want my hair done.  Or, in fact, what I want really.

Anyway.  Since I last got it stripped and re-dyed last January, I’ve told myself that I was going to use this year to allow my hair to grow out naturally a bit.  Age or dye or both has turned it a more mousey brown than it used to be, which is neither here nor there, but I think I’m finally sick of not having black hair.  I’m kind of neurotic like that; mum tells me the blonde looks ‘nice’ and I should get streaks put into it, but I don’t think she’s ever really understood that I don’t want to look ‘nice’.  I want to look like I have black hair.  Yes, I know it looks severe, and it makes me look pale (though not as pale as stripped white-blonde did).  That’s the point.  I don’t like having Jane Normal blonde hair.  I like my severe black hair with the shocks of red or green (my favourite dye-job ever is still one side black, one side red).

I feel wrong having blonde hair.

So it hasn’t been quite the year I promised, but I don’t care.  Next weekend, the blonde is going.

So I missed the raid yesterday because I was bailed up in mum’s office, with mum, all afternoon making bloody invitations for this bloody engagement party I’m supposed to be having.  They were extremely fiddly, cutting up all the card and translucent overlay paper and sticking it all together with the little black heart-shaped push-pins (approximate cost of materials: $80).  The red card I originally bought to do it with turned out to be a bit too orange, so we stole some black card from the photocopy room and used that instad.  The end result made me roughly 73% happy.  But it will have to do.

We had to do about fifty all up; why is it these supposed ‘small family and friends’ gatherings always turn into, “Oh, we should invite great-uncle Jimbo in Botswana, he’s not going to come but we should invite him anyway”.  I spent two hours sticking tiny little push-pins into bits of paper yesterday for over a hundred people who aren’t going to come.  Great.

I’m totally not having a wedding.  It’s way too much trouble.  I don’t even like parties, I resent having to put all this goddamn effort in.

Ugh.

Still no word on any houses; the one I was a little hopeful on has been marked as ‘rented’ on allhomes, too, which isn’t a good sign…  Not to mention I’m out of flextime to go see these bloody things.

It’s all way too fucking hard.

• Tags » engagement, haircut, house hunting, invitations, its hard to be me my life is full of pain, neuroses