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Well, I finally did it. I got my hairs cut. Pretty much all of them, near as I can tell. I drove down to Des Moines yesterday evening to let my mom do her thing, and I came back north a good pound lighter, despite having consumed more ice cream there than I had had the entire year prior (seriously. I don’t know how I finished it all. But I did. That’s what makes me half Stowers, I think).

It was still a traumatic experience, even though I was in comfortable surroundings, surrounded by those who I can only assume have my best interests at heart. I got my hair cut outside on the back porch, so that birds would use my hair to build their nests and a part of me would rejoin the Great Circle of Life and I would live forever. Or my mom’s basement was really messy. I’m not sure which. My mom put two rubber bands in my hair: one at the very base of my ponytail, another a few inches down. I told her I still wanted to be able to have a ponytail, and she acquiesced. About a second after her scissors touched my hair, I realized I should have specified I wanted to have a ~good~ ponytail. Live and learn. :) The one I have now sorta sticks out straight from the back of my tail like the raggedy tail of one of those little annoying dogs.

She hacked her way through my ponytail and handed me the remains. I put it in a Ziploc baggie and brought it home with me, even though I thought it was a pretty gross thing to do. My roommates seem to agree with my assessment. I measured it today: I lost 8″ - 9″ of hair with that initial snip, which was a touch more than the 4″ I was expecting.

My mom says my hair looks nice. I’m still adjusting to the change. I was expecting hair just past my shoulders. When she was done, I had hair just above my shoulders. Of course, that was with really wet hair. The problem with this is, my hair is straight while wet and rather not straight any other time. My hair is a good two inches off my shoulder dry, as you can see from the picture (and curling outwards as usual, damnit. Katie Miles called it “bouncy” today. I’m now very aware of my hair while walking). I’m consoling myself by telling myself that I’ve simply went from a 2003 Viggo Mortensen to a 2003 Johnny Depp (or at least in a month I might be able to pull it off). This morning I even shaved off my beard and went for a Depp-esque goatee in hopes that if it looks good on him, it’d look good on me. Not sure how that went, but the beard had to go regardless. I’m trying very hard to resist the urge to lighten my hair.

There are decided upsides to this hair. Today, for the first time in six months (or possibly even longer), I ate without putting my hair in a ponytail. I also didn’t wear a ponytail while brushing my teeth or shaving, and I used far less shampoo and conditioner in the shower this morning. I’m sure more positives will come to me as time goes on. Until then, I do not love or hate my new hair. I’m getting to know it.

I just realized it’s Memorial Day weekend and I have no plans. Well, no plans that are any different than any other weekend: drink with friends, or drink with roommates, or mate with friends, or possibly even some other combination of the words drink, friend, room, and mate I haven’t yet considered. *g*

I’m thinking about heading to Des Moines to get some of my hairs trimmed at some point this weekend. My hair is getting too long even for me. I tried to measure it a couple of weeks ago and got an average of 14″, I think, which seems pretty long. I have the longest hair in my house, and I’m living with two girls (and two guys) at the moment. I’m thinking 4″ off would be about right, assuming I get it trimmed every couple of months thereafter.

I know I’ve put off getting my hair cut for too long, but the last time was rather traumatic, if you recall (and if not, here’s the blog post): I had hair that was roughly a foot long, went to Great Clips to get two or three inches trimmed off, and came out missing six. It was traumatic enough that I dyed my hair blond (if I was going to have bad hair, I decided, I was going to go all out). And I’ve been afraid to get my hair cut since. In the ensuing twenty or so months, I can remember getting exactly one trim, and that was just because the back was so much longer than the front that I had to get them evened out.

So, other than the haircut, I’ve no ideas. I may have told Sarah we’d be hanging out tonight (she called too late in the evening and I had already turned off my memory), which might be fun. I think today is a bill-paying day, so that’ll eat up a few minutes, I guess. Oooh, I’ve a steak to eat, too! I’d forgotten about that. I bought a 1.5 pound flat iron steak yesterday, had Sam grill it for me, and ate half of it last night, meaning I get the other half tonight. Flat iron steaks rock, in case you haven’t had one yet. They’re super tender and cook fairly fast, because they’re usually sliced a little thinner than other cuts.

And now I’m rambling. I’m off. :)

I’ve discovered my MP3 player barely makes it eight hours on one charge. A couple of years ago I would have been amazed that anything could last eight ~whole~ hours on a single charge, but now it just seems to annoy me. Mostly because I work five hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays and three hours on Mondays and Wednesdays, meaning the battery always runs out at the end of the day, before I go home, twice a week (since I listen to it on the bus ride and so forth).

I wonder if anyone finds it odd that I sit here with headphones on all day. If so, nobody’s said anything about it. I think it’s funny because this is the first time I’ve ever tried to get away with such a thing. Granted, I’ve only had an MP3 player since Christmas, so it’s really the first time I’ve had the opportunity to get away with such things, but still. I consider it “unlike me” currently. I’m in the process of forcing myself into a new habit of having music going pretty much all the time, which includes at work, since I pretty much just sit here, ignored by all those around me, for twenty hours a week. I have the music down low enough that I can hear when people do talk to me, so it’s all good. I’m not totally ignoring the outside world… I’m just blissfully unaware of it for long stretches of time.

If I do get a Shuffle this summer (and I pretty much guarantee I do as soon as I can afford it) I think I’ll have to ante up and get the 1GB version. My current MP3 player sports 512MB, which is nice, but I’m already growing accustomed to the music on it, and that’s one pattern I’m not comfortable with. I remember how annoyed I would get last semester when I grew to immediately recognize the individual songs in my study music (which towards the end was classical music streamed over the ‘net), which would mean my mind would instantly become focused on the notes coming next instead of whatever I was supposed to be reading. I could even recognize composers after a while, which isn’t a good sign considering I can’t remember names and I’m essentially musically illiterate these days (haven’t been able to read sheet music since grade school).

Continuing in MP3 news, I spent over 3 hours last night organizing my MP3 collection. I still have manyplus MP3s not sitting in files, but they’re all named according to my schema (Artist - Song With Title Capitalized.mp3) and most all of them have appropriate ID3 tags attached. I then watched the Food Network for a couple of hours with roomy Amanda while drinking a couple Amber Bocks. I really have to figure out what to do with myself in the evenings. I keep thinking I’ll start reading fiction again soon, but I never seem to be in the mood. Sigh and alas.

When I started my job here at the Graduate College, they gave me a tour of the office. My boss was pretty proud of their digs, as they’d just moved to a new location within the last couple of weeks. They look really nice, too: they’re decorated simply, predominantly in white and shades of gray, with cyclone red as an accent. The offices have glass walls (intermittently occluded with vertical white opaque and semi-opaque strips). Etc etc pretty pretty.

She ushered me into this one room that had rows upon rows of filing cabinets along one wall. Apparently they normally have a giant machine for storing student records in a smaller space, but it wasn’t working properly, so they moved all the student records into old-school filing cabinets. Those cabinets, she said, represented the paperwork on every graduate student at ISU. I was suitably impressed. I scanned them briefly to figure out where I’d be in that mess of paperwork. I saw they were organized alphabetically (an excellent choice on their part, I’m sure) by the first three letters of the last name: A – Auh, Auk – Ber, and so on. I had almost found my name when I got distracted. A third of the way through, right at eye level, I saw the following:

Die – Fag

Now, I understand that this is a temporary solution and all, but seriously, was I the first to notice? The placards on the drawers were hand-written. How could somebody miss that? Or worse, what does it say about me that I noticed? Couldn’t they have moved one file in either direction to make it say something else? Die – Fam or Dib – Fag wouldn’t be nearly as humorous, for instance (course, I still would’ve snickered at either Did – Fag or Dic – Fag). I spent the rest of the day (and every time I walk past that office since) trying very, very hard not to burst out laughing in front of my boss. Anywhere else, such a sign would have royally pissed me off. Here, it’s so completely innocuous and out of place that it’s just plain funny. It’s still my favorite sign in the office, and I’m hoping to get a picture of it before it goes away.

Grr… my favorite t-shirt store on the face of the earth* is having another $10 sale, and I really want this beauty here, but I’m pretty broke and know I shouldn’t be spending money on clothes at the moment. I give it about three days before I break down and buy it. Or before I forget about the sale entirely. Either way, I suppose the problem is solved. [Update: Problem solved early. It's out of stock again. Should have ordered it this morning.]

I work 11-4 today, and I’ve discovered that five hours in one go is far too much time spent sitting at this desk. I start losing productivity after around three hours (probably more like 2 1/2). Luckily, I have other things computer-related to keep me busy. I’ve spent Jehovah knows how many hours searching for apartments online in the last couple of weeks.

Apartment searching isn’t going quite as smoothly as I had hoped. I think the problem is, neither Justin nor I really care where we live, which results in too broad a search to find anything specific. Worse still, Justin is in Seattle, meaning I’ve gotta make all the decisions myself. I keep talking to him online, probing for specifics, likes and dislikes, etc, and he constantly responds with a digital shrug. Hrmph. Maybe it’ll be easier once I actually start looking at the apartments in person and talking to people about them instead of just leafing through text online.

Course, that will inevitably involve calling people and talking to them on the phone, which I seem to loathe these days (just ask friends/family). Part of it’s psychological: I don’t think I’m very articulate on the phone, without the aid of gestures and whatnot. Part of it is also physical: I can’t hear well, never could, and I totally screwed myself last summer by blowing out my left eardrum. It never really healed, and my left ear is my phone ear, meaning I don’t hear well on the phone. Also, after about 10 minutes on the phone, I get nauseous. I dunno why, but it started right after the eardrum incident, so I’m assuming there’s a connection.

* I’m also a really big fan of this little consignment shop on Jupiter.