How much of a coincidence is it that the one of the few songs I actually have on my ipod turns out to be the feature song for the pilot of Glee? Yes, I am two years behind. Regardless, I am loving the show. Tonight we had a mini-marathon of at least four episodes though in truth I lost count while I attacked a huge stack of gardening magazines, ripping and culling with abandon. The wheat will go into a binder for future reading and inspiration, the chafe to the recycle bin. It feels fantastic to let go of unnecessaries and trim down.

If only my waistline were so easy. I have been a loser at the Biggest Loser, but my hope continues to be that if I pick myself up off the floor enough times, I might actually start picking up myself up every day. In an effort to incorporate exercise sans gymtime, I went kayaking over the weekend, in a storm. It scared the crap of me and made me feel amazing and shiny. The muscle sprain from gripping my paddle so hard was shiny too. Then it met a bag of ice. Don’t stop believing!

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i loved this

small exhibit currently displayed at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto

giving you a look at the self-portraits of famous artists
and how they changed over the years.

Picasso morphs from a very respectable gentleman to a mere sketch, mostly air but still so defined.

and Rembrandt… all shadowed in darkness grew into the light, always serious with one jaunt into play.
was he trying on a mask that didn’t fit or was that face the one connected in his memory to “the good ole days”
that some of us never grow out of?

recently i’ve noticed how much i prefer photographs of myself where the waves are evident in my hair.
between last year and now, a self portrait for me would be very different in that way.
For now the difference is reflected in my Dragon Age character.

Looking in the mirror, making this snapshot of yourself, whether on canvas, in words or a journal
seems so much like a secret honeymoon with one’s self. and a puzzle for us.
I thoroughly enjoyed sitting with these men for the afternoon.

ps. i’m totally reminded of Pond and her skirts. be prepared to laugh and don’t forget to check out part 2!

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my husband came home from work and opened our pre-dinner conversation with “Did you hear about how everyone’s mad at Groupon?”

You can just about imagine the expletives that went off in my head.

“Why’s that, dear?” I ask, attempting to keep my voice steady and imbued with only modest interest so as to not belie the disaster I imagined was about to walk through the door.

I was almost happy that the anger at the company was “only”  because of insensitive Super-bowl commercials. At least my $60 haircut for only $30 was not a scam. How narrow we can be.

Last Friday I did finally get that haircut. He did the weirdest thing. I have to tell you because I still almost don’t believe it myself.

My hair is super thick and any stylist, even the walk-in sorts, inevitably thin it out to some degree. Tom, as we shall call him, had the genius idea that this caused my frizzy hair to tend towards even more frizz. His method to thin out hair like mine was to do “channeling.” He said he would cut out small, very small, sections to literally THIN my hair. I agreed or maybe I was just wooed. I hadn’t been into that fancy of a salon in a long while and you know how intoxicating it can be to have someone – anyone! – start playing with your hair.

Another of the stylists came over as he began and asked if she could watch his technique. Is this common? Because I just didn’t think it was and while it creeped me out a little, I was both flattered to have “the teacher” as my stylist and still deaf, dumb and blind from the simple act of having my hair cut. It was oh so long and thick, heavy and overdue.

He started to cut and she exclaimed “Oh my God!” RIGHT after he did so.

Now what would you think if you were in the chair?!

It really does sound worse than it was. And I’m playing it up. And I was the one there. This gal didn’t seem so bright and I really honestly truly thought she was simply amazed at the technique. Tom, as we are still calling him, joked for awhile about how her reaction was the exact wrong one to say in front of any client and continued to cut and thin and then there was this girl with a broom. She kept sweeping behind me. It’s odd how I noticed her presence, but it’s purpose there and the further ramifications didn’t fully register until I came home and felt my head.

But I’m jumping ahead of myself. Tom did a beautiful cut and style. Men always accentuate the wave in my hair. Women blow or iron it out straight. While I think all of you out there with crisp clean locks are so beautiful, it’s just not for me. I am now fully the embodiment of – what my friends in college used to call – my evil twin sister. When I’d show up at school with hair straight, I was just me. When the wavy locks came out, Adriana was born and she didn’t take crap from no one. As I get older, the two halves are merging. I like my waves but had little idea what to do with them. Tom showed me. And I walked out of there feeling great!

So you’re thinking that whatever he did can’t have been that bad, right?

Well, I dunno, maybe.

TWO days later we are sitting around the table playing a board game. I get an itch on my scalp and go to scratch it. My hair is there and, then wait, it’s not. What’s that short stuff? Thoughts tumble out one after the other. It takes half a second to go from the sensation of what I felt at my scalp to the full understanding of what Tom did to lighten my hair so very much.

He cut it off. Literally.

In layers as you go up my head from the neck, there’s a thin row of hair, then a thin row of buzz-cut short hair, then hair, then buzz, all the way up to the crown. No kidding. I have no idea what this will do to my hair in the future. What is another stylist going to say when she gets her hands on me again? But now, right now, it’s okay. I think. I just washed my hair for the first time since the cut. He said curling it in fabric like girls used to do before electricity is one of the best way to encourage my waves, so I’m off to rip some fabric, do some tying and get a few hours sleep. One night off is never enough, but I just had to ask: has anyone ever “channeled” your hair before?

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Dear Diary,

Just finished the polish on my nails. Not so sure I’m happy with them. They started out as a nude and then with the top coat became a very subtle shade of pink. Now I can’t get Julia Roberts in a bathrobe and all that hair out of the camera of my mind.

And still I am an island. Oddly enough.

Heard stephen fry say something today that totally inspired me… “the eternal adventure of trying to discover moral truth in the world” and since then virginia woolf has had me in tears. She’d been sitting there rather quietly. A pretty picture on an unnoticed bookshelf. Why have I not read “A Room of One’s Own” before today? Because I have not listened before today.

Yes, I was a good girl, obeyed my own syballus and read Dawkins and no longer believe, I think, in god or God or… you know. (I don’t even sound convincing to myself yet.)

I was even better and finished the tome on sign language. Hard slog at times, that one. And truly fascinated as I was by Broca and Wernicke, it was still a lesson, one necessary for my life to set my fingers flying.

But what truly did I want to read… to make sense of me. For this I have come to an Englishwoman who ended her own life. Poor girl. why must genius walk so closely with despair?

Still, page after page, she calls and I follow. Lights are set off and long dark mysteries revealed. And since she is so fond of them, I will say it. You have been my mirror.

“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”

And yet – how fond I am of conjuctions at the front of sentences! – with all the optimism in my heart, all the grandeur that I feel, knowing it from completely new springs, I want to shout out upon the rooftops. The wind and I shall have a contest of wills. It would be much easier to type klickty-klack on Facebook, in email or blog, but up-turned my stomach has been since I began detailing where I am. I am nervous. Will you know me? Will you still love me?

My life… my life up till now has in part been a sham. No, that is all wrong, a sham cannot be in part. For that would only been a prank or farce or some other noun of less catatrosphic conditions. A sham indeed. What am I to be? Who am I to be is someone totally unlike the person they once knew. And I find surprising my wish that they were no longer hanging on. For to disappoint breaks my heart. And it would be easier to become. I try to let go but they return. Friend requests bum me out.

What deep things do they think? Am I alone? While I’m at work or play, gaming or chopping, my mind is somewhere else. Never content to the menial. For so long I tried to be. No more.

Tonight is for quiet. There is nothing but her. Go away. Yes, even you, dear diary.

“Indeed my aunt’s legacy unveiled the sky to me, and substituted for the large and imposing figure of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration, a view of the open sky.”

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From the other side of the world, I heard her voice this morning on a podcast. It was like hearing my own.

She is Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Here is the small excerpt that wove one more thread into my mind.

Interviewer: “In your most recent book Nomad, you write that its been the work of your lifetime in a sense to put your grandmother’s ghost to rest. What do you mean by that?”

Ayaan: “On the emotional level it’s of course very hard because the loneliness that my grandmother talked about is there and was there if in my case I opted to step out of the community. And she was completely right in saying that if you do that, you will find yourself in stranger waters, you will be a stranger wherever you come, you will never have that sense of belonging that you take for granted now. She’s completely right in that.

At my lowest and deepest moments of loneliness I did have moments that I thought “I wish I hadn’t left” and I wished they were around me… I started to wish for all kinds of things that were not possible and laying that ghost to rest was to accept that yes if you as an individual seek freedom from the clan, from the collection, you are embarking on a life of loneliness but you have to then shape your destiny and create new friendships, a new network and a new family for yourself. But that is life. And so that in a way, when I say laying the ghost to rest it is the feelings of guilt and feelings of nostalgia, those are the feelings that now I am at peace with.”

I’ve put Ayaan’s books on my to-read shelf over at Goodreads. She has done amazing work to advance the cause of women’s rights around the world. Feminist theory simply won’t leave me alone. Science, caring, woman. Such themes swirl around the days of my life, and each time I recognize their voice in the wind, I wonder more deeply what answer they’ll one day demand.

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