Last night my daughter had a sleepover. It was a first time event with this particular friend, and I am pretty sure that kid thinks I am awesome because I made spaghetti. There is something so sweet about twelve year old girls. They are so interested and easy to impress. They were all aflutter about a 6th grade dance that's coming up. Katie wants to try mascara but her eyelashes are already so long we will have to go lightly so it doesn't look like stage make-up. It's weird to have a kid who wants to wear make-up already. And she also joined Facebook. I knew it was coming, she asked me about it months ago. She insisted she did not want to do it because she's not thirteen and was worried she would get in trouble. I am not sure where her deep fear of The Man came from, but she hates to break the rules. She was also worried it might be "too addictive", but by now she has friends on it, and it's a good way for her to keep in touch with her far flung family. They spent much of the night friending and tagging and tweaking privacy settings. We had to have that speech about how if you can't say it to someone's face you can't put it on the internet and how nothing online is truly private. Sometimes it feels like we went straight from Sesame Street to cramps and pimples. She is already so much more confident and grounded than I was.
I'd had a link to this blog on my own FB page, back when I had no real content or idea what I was going to do with it. And then the words got more intense, and then BAM, my daughter has a page and is commenting on all my pictures and looking very closely at everything. I don't have anything to hide, but imagining her as my "audience" here made me freak out a little, so I took the link off. She has a vague idea about some of the things I have been through, and what my own childhood was like, but I have spared her the worst of it. Now no one will find my blog. Dang.
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I decided to switch from chemical hair dye to henna, which I'd had great success with in the past, but that was a long time ago. I'm pretty much all about being a redhead. My real color is a dusty gray blonde and I was never very fond of it. I knew henna was a messy process, and I read all the directions and decided last night was the perfect time to get to it. I sat around with goop head for three hours, then spent almost an hour getting it out of my hair and just went to bed. This morning it's shiny but the color enhancement was almost too subtle to be worth all the effort, and I realized the instructions lied to me. I added olive oil, but no lemon juice and I had no idea I needed to allow the color to develop once it was mixed. I just mixed it up and put it on.
I just made another batch with lemon and will try again tomorrow. Hopefully the applied hair color will be perfect by next Thursday because that's when I get to see my sweetie and we fly out to DC for the Rally to Restore Sanity. I want gorgeous hair for that. I really really do, I don't have many indulgences in the uber girlie realm, but my hair is certainly one of them.
I told Mike once that I take my hair very seriously and he laughed his ass off, because that sounds pretty stupid. But it's true. My hair is a big deal. I just want it red and shiny. I take care of it all by myself, I can count on two hands the number of times I have ever let anyone else even cut it. I can count on two fingers the number of times another person cut my hair without making me cry once I got home and looked at it. I am really bad at letting someone else take control like that. Come at my hair with some scissors and I'll have an instant panic attack.
I am kind of funny about my nails too. I work with my hands a lot, and I have this stupid finger picking compulsion that gets really bad when I'm stressed out and the weather is cold. If I keep my nails buffed and shiny I don't pick at my nails because I don't want to ruin them. If they already look like shit I bite them and dig at the cuticles and sometimes the sides of my thumbs bleed. My thumbs are a sign for my mental state, if they are ragged and bleeding it means I'm having a pretty shitty time of it. I don't paint my fingernails often because it's not practical, but I always buff and paint my toenails. I like the nail to be very smooth and shiny and I am partial to deep bloody reds. Even in the winter I have goth toes. No one but Mike ever sees them, but it's not about that anyway. It's a girlie indulgence that makes me feel human.
I don't wear make-up as much as I used to, but because I wear glasses and they make my eyes look small, I do like mascara and eyeliner. Also eyebrow pencil so they match my hair. Other than that, I can take or leave other girlie stuff. I hardly ever wear earrings, or lipstick or perfume. But I always put moisturizer on my face when I get out of the shower. I brush my teeth with baking soda once a month to get the stains off because I like wine and coffee and blueberries and I smoke. And while I have the baking soda out I shine up all my silver jewelry. I wear the same jewelry every day, I have been wearing the same necklace for seven years. I sleep and shower in it. Why? I have no idea. I like it. I like shiny basics.
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