Serendipity

There are many things that I love about my short, sassy haircut. It’s easy - I can go from “hag who frightens children” to “fabulous” (or at least “hag who doesn’t frighten children”) in about 10 – 15 minutes, whereas with long hair, it can take considerably more time to be presentable. It’s entertaining – sometimes I wake up with the most awesome bed head. Sticking out at alarming angles, defying gravity, and looking as though it could provide inspiration for a medieval torture device. And this morning, it proved itself to be very creative. I sat up and looked at myself in the mirror, squinted a little, and my reflection slowly came into focus in the dim morning light.

My hair looked awesome. A little re-arranging of a couple errant pieces, and it was done.

Seriously – if I had tried to make it look this cool, I would have failed miserably. It’s funky, but not scary, it’s still somewhat smooth from having been straightened yesterday, but it’s got some wave to it. It just…oh, it looks so cool.

The sad part is that I can’t imagine I’ll be able to really re-create this on my own. I’m hopelessly unskilled. I felt a little weird about coming to work without having invested a little more time in my appearance, and I asked Special K to do a sanity check and tell me if it looked like bed head. Now, I tend to take his opinion of my appearance with a grain of salt, since he’s often too generous. And statements like “you would look hot in ____” (describing some absurdly tiny outfit) or “you could totally go braless in that” only serve to underscore my belief that we differ drastically on what is considered to be acceptable in terms of my appearance, much as I love him. But he, vaguely resembling a koala since he himself had just woken up, was the only game in town this morning, and he assured me that it looked good.

So for today, I am proudly rockin’ the world’s coolest bed head.

On The Road

Every so often, as I’m sitting in some variety of hated traffic, I think back to my life in Long Island. Where I lived two miles from my job (well – my office job, my job at Crate and Barrel was a considerably longer drive, about 15 miles), and I lived in the middle of a town and could walk to anything from movie theaters to the grocery store to about 50 restaurants and bars to my hair salon. My drive to work took less than 10 minutes, and that’s if I hit all the red lights and had to wait for the cars heading into the daycare/nursery school I used to refer to as SUV Heaven, since it was on the road to my job. My apartment building was kind of like a DMZ, but I didn’t care because at the age of 22, I had my own place, a great car that ran beautifully (despite a couple of accidents in its early life), and a real job that didn’t involve wearing any kind of a uniform. (Although it did need to be supplemented with retail work for which an apron was required.)

*sigh*

I would roll into work at about 9:20 on most days because I was most likely out at some bar or club with friends the night before and hadn’t gotten to sleep until 2 am, on a good night. If I left any earlier than 1, no matter what night of the week, I was on the receiving end of a liberal dose of crap because I was leaving “soooo early”. That was back in the days when I didn’t leave the house to go out before 10:30 pm. When I thought that body glitter was “fun” and would draw focus to key areas. When my biggest concern about accidentally dyeing my hair Circus Freak Burgundy had nothing to do with looking unprofessional. Now, by the time 10:30 rolls around, I’m often as not sacked out on the couch, on the verge of falling asleep, if not already in deep REM stages. I think my last tube of body glitter bit the dust when I hit 25. And fortunately I haven’t turned up anywhere with burgundy hair in many, many years.

Now, I actually like getting to work early. And if I do happen to roll up at 9:20, it’s because of traffic or a delay on Metro or something like that. I feel so….grown up sometimes, it’s weird.

About 99% of the time, or even 99.9%, it’s really fine. I’m glad that I did my crazy club/bar time in my early 20s, I am glad that I don’t feel like I ever missed out on anything, and every so often I have a vague nostalgia for it and would like to go out to dance with my girls at a club where the music is too loud and the drinks are too expensive. Although, I don’t think many of my girls (if I can even really use that term anymore) feel that same nostalgia, and I know it’s definitely not K’s scene, so it is very rarely indulged. I’m glad that I took the better part of a year to travel around the world on my own, which was scary and hard and one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself. When I look back over my almost-32 years on this planet, there’s not much I would change. I think my life has gotten better as I’ve gotten older, and I try to really embrace whatever stage of life I happen to find myself in – even if I don’t succeed all the time.

But dammit, I really wish I could have that commute again.

Peace

It was another fantastic weekend out at the farm, with good food, good wine, and a lot of much-anticipated relaxation. Unfortunately, the whole gang wasn’t quite there as S’s business is keeping him very busy, and P didn’t feel right leaving him at home alone while she came to live it up with the rest of us. So…next time, yes? And all things considered, I’m really happy for him that the business is going so well, even when it does interfere with fun plans.

Some sad news at the farm was that one of their goats had to be put down on Friday, and it was a really rough experience for all involved, so they were definitely in need of some laughter and company – which Special K and I endeavored to provide. I think that’s got to be one of the hardest things about having a farm – as K said, living off the land is setting yourself up for one heartbreak after another, whether it’s saying goodbye to beloved animals or watching some disease hit your crops. Now, I still could easily see Special K and I having a small property like that one day, where we grew as much of our own food as we could and had some animals, like chickens to produce eggs and such, but it’s a lot of hard work, and a lot of commitment. I’m torn between whether or not I’d like to raise kids out in a rural area – on one hand, I think they’d develop an appreciation for the earth, for knowing that our food comes from it, and knowing how important it is to really care for it, since we’re not going to get another one. On the other hand, I’d like them to have a greater diversity of after-school activities and rites of passage than mailbox baseball and cow-tipping.

So, it’s a quandary.

I think my knee-jerk definition of what I’d like to own when we’re ready and able (and who knows when that will be), is actually quite similar to what we have, but a lot closer to our jobs and with a bigger back yard. I’d even be fine with keeping the size yard we have, really, but the proximity to our jobs is just bothering me tremendously. I’m having a really hard time sitting in a car for so long; I just can’t get over the financial and environmental implications of it. I love older, inner suburbs that are more accessible, where you’re not forced to rely on a car for everything. I like houses that don’t all look the same. I like old trees and sidewalks, and I think there are still a number of years of city girl left in me, when I really sit down and think about it.

We don’t want to move any time soon, so we hope that our landlords don’t want us to move any time soon, either. But we’ll have to look pretty carefully at both sides of the river once we do decide that we’re ready to buy.

But back to our weekend. Well, there really wasn’t all that much more to it – which was the best part in a lot of ways. I managed to fall asleep at almost every opportunity (I do this a lot lately. My body is getting greedy about sleep, methinks. And yet, I still feel tired all the time. And I’m not pregnant. So I really don’t know what that’s about.), but we still all had a great time together. Dinner was fantastic, as it always is, and we spent the evening sitting out on their porch, listening to music, and talking about life – which is actually about the time I dozed off, although I do remember being woken up for pie.

Mmmm….pie.

Brunch the next morning was delicious, and then since it was raining really hard, our walking plans were scrapped in favor of sitting around and doing nothing, which felt like quite the luxury for all of us. First, we watched Galaxy Quest, and underrated gem of a movie, and then we watched a good chunk of the HBO miniseries John Adams, which Special K and I want to Netflix (funny how that’s now a verb…sort of) as soon as it’s available since we had to leave before it was over.

(And I fell asleep again.)

Overall, it was a renewing weekend, and one that lived up to all the anticipation, as they always do.