Hair and Virgins
A color photograph to show off my bleached and dyed hair. You can see my roots starting to show. I enlarged the portion of bleached hair before I left for the Philippines upon someone's suggestion (I've forgotten). It was a good one and I like the effect of masses of light hair tumbling down my neck, straining for shoulder length. I talked to Mike about my hair length the other day. He loves my hair long and I decided to grow it out for a while. Atleast, until this summer when I'll get so annoyed at how hot it is that I'll cut it tomboy short. He always indicated that he prefers it "shoulder length". Shoulder length means reaching the ends of one's shoulders, the tips beginning to curl down the length of my arms. Not to him.
Now that it's long, it's terribly unruly. I was thankful that my hair decided to stretch the needed lengths just before I left for the Philippines for me to put all of it in a ponytail without stray ends getting pulled away at the slightest touch. Had my hair not been of adequate length, the stray ends would have caused me a great deal of grief. Now, it was long enough for me to pull the ponytail tight and give me a very stern and professional appearance.
I was combing my wet hair with a brush, pulling my brush away from me so I could easily inspect the ends. Not too many split ends. I noted the length was almost shoulder length, so I turned to Mike. "Almost there."
He looked up at me with a confused look, unable to apply my two words to anything specific and asked, "Almost where?"
I pointed to my head. "Shoulder length. My hair is almost shoulder length."
He twisted his face in a slight smirk. "That's longer than shoulder length."
It was my turn to give him a confused look. "No it's not. Atleast not yet. I'm growing it out to shoulder length," I indicated the end of my shoulders with my hands, "since you said that's the length you like it."
"Your hair, actually, is a little too long for me as it is now."
I smirked. "Then you don't like it shoulder length. How long do you like it then?" I put a flattened hand to the side of my head, raising it up and down slightly. "Longer? Shorter?"
He paused. "Oh, I suppose you call it neck length then. Base of the neck."
"Ah."
"I like chin length too."
"Ah." I made a mental note to cut it to chin length when I got tired of its current length. Perhaps really short in back with a severe angle towards the front. It makes me look a bit like an anime character. Mike has indicated on several occasions that he really likes that haircut, although always stresses that it's my hair and I should do what I like with it. Right now, as long as I can bleach it and I don't find it too hot, I don't really care, as long as I don't look like too much of a slob.
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I've started reading The Virgin Suicides. I read the first two paragraphs and I was hooked. It looks like a delicious read. I've been tearing through it, but I only started late this evening. I wish I started reading it earlier. The writing style is easy and uncomplicated and the narrator pulls us easily into the world.
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide -- it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese -- the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the as oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope. They got out of the EMS truck, as usual moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one said under his breath, "This ain't TV, folks, this is how fast we go." He was carrying the heavy respirator and cardiac unit past the bushes that had grown monstrous and over the erupting lawn, tame and immaculate thirteen months earlier when the trouble began.
Cecilia, the youngest, only thirteen, had gone first, slitting her wrists like a Stoic while taking a bath, and when they found her, afloat in her pink pool, with the yellow eyes of someone possessed and her small body giving off the odor of a mature woman, the paramedics had been so frightened by her tranquility that they had stood mesmerised. But then Mrs. Lisbon lunged in, screaming, and the reality of the room reasserted itself: blood on the bath mat; Mr. Lisbon's razor sunk in the toilet bowl, marbling the water. The paramedics fetched Cecilia out of the warm water because it quickened the bleeding, and put a tourniquet on her arm. Her wet hair hung down her back and already her extremities were blue. She didn't say a word, but when they parted her hands they found the laminated picture of the Virgin Mary she held against her budding chest.
I checked Amazon.com for other books by Jeffrey Eugenides, eager to order them. Unfortunately, it looks like he has nothing else in print.
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Speaking of Amazon.com, I've ordered several things from there today. I got the initiative to order two Avengers 1964 sets (four DVDs featuring the Dr. Cathy Gale episodes, Honor Blackman (better known later as Pussy Galore) playing Patrick Macnee's partner instead of Diana Rigg's Emma Peel), the Eyes Wide Shut DVD and a book called A World of Ideas: A Dictionary of Important Theories, Concepts, Beliefs, and Thinkers. I've been looking for this book ever since I heard about it on NPR. The book consists various concepts that the author believes are essential for everyone to understand, like communism and relativity and gravity and logic and capitalism. The author was being interviewed on the radio and listed his top ten "ideas that you should know" and his list (of items discussed in the book) was so fascinating that I decided I should get this book. After a long stretch of web searching, I found informtion on this book and decided to order it.
I've spent way too much money on books and the like in the past month. I think I do this every year: go through a period of purchasing a lot of things online. Then, I seem to forget this convenience or long for the hours of walking between bookshelves that I go to more traditional shopping methods.
I guess it's that time of the year.
