The Blues

Yesterday, while my son was asleep, I made my husband cut a good 2 1/2 inches off my hair. I was just sick of it. Here I am, 4 months into living in a new town and I just couldn't face going to a hairdresser to get what I REALLY wanted-- a medium-length bob. I've been talking about it for months. I've been complaining about my shoulder-length, half-assed chunky-whispy-crappy hair.

Mind you, I was at the hairdresser nary a month ago. I wanted him to transform me. To excavate me from under my hairy mop. He ended up mostly talking about himself and telling me that one of my eyes was more open than the other and then switching my part. He styled me and spritzed me to within an inch of my life and I left feeling like a very coiffed cyclops.

I've been battling the blues off and on for the past week. That's normal for most folks, but something that makes me particularly sit at attention. I have a bit of history, shall we say, with the blue bug. And somehow with me, the blues are particularly marked by a strange combo of stasis (inability to move or change) and these wild spurts of impulsiveness. It's sort of like having your fuel injectors clogged. It makes the ride jumpy and weird.

It also makes me for some reason want to cut my hair off.

Until I got married, I pretty much had pixie-short hair almost all of my life. The main prerequisites for being my hairdresser were as follows: 1) You must be a gay male 2) You must not give me little curlicues or licks or whispy things. I want it straight and clean. It helps if you have a cute accent.

I suppose I always saw my ability to wear short-short hair as a strength. I didn't have to hide behind a pelt of anything. Then, somehow, I discovered a form of patience that grew within me slowly, which allowed me to let my hair be. That patience over the past year has turned to a sort of passive armor. I'm not as skinny as I used to be, I'd reason. The flowing locks go with the flowing body.

Yet somehow, the longer my hair gets, the more attention it requires: it has a tendency to go lopsided or for the curls to wildly spring about and then take a dive. In short, it became high-maintenance.

And then yesterday it just hit me. I needn't make an appointment. Or an excuse. Or explain the way I want it to anybody. I just need a pair of scissors. I was already stripped and ready to get into the shower when I approached my husband in the living room. I said, do you want to cut it or should I? I think I freaked him out. He said what it if is uneven or lopsided? Curls, I said, are forgiving. And to be honest, I don't care if it's even. I just want it cut.

And wouldn't you know it, as soon as that thick brown hair began to fall into the sink, it was like years were being stripped away from me. While we were at it, I convinced my husband to lean over the sink and let me excavate his lovely strong face from the throngs and waves of hair that he has been too lazy to make an appointment to shear.

This haircutting thing took two hours. By the time we were both done and satisfied with the shape and length of each other's hair, my son began to stir upstairs in his crib. The bathroom floor was covered in dark brown hair.

***

My next turn may be one I've put off for a while: blue.

My hair is raven-black. It is the antithesis of color. And, in the past five years and despite the fact that I'm only 32, I have acquired a frosting of white. Actually, not so much a frosting. More like streaks. Think cruella.

My husband thinks they're bitchin'. I did, too, until they began to spread. A half a year ago I started to cover them. But what I really wanted to do (and want to do) is keep my hair color the same. And color the white blue. Not just a little blue. A lot blue. I want a blue streak.

Since my hair is predominantly black, I think I can get away with it without looking like a total misfit. I just want to look a little bitchin'.

Then I stumbled across this little blurb in the NYT sunday magazine with a wonderful drawing. It talks about what one psychology researcher calls "psychological neotony" which perhaps explains whole hosts of unfitting, rebellious or immature behavior in otherwise mature adults. (Umm, like dying your hair punk blue). He states:

...Social roles have become less fixed in modern society. We are expected to adapt to change throughout our lives, both in our personal relationships and in our careers, and immaturity, as Charlton added, is “especially helpful in making the best out of enforced job changes, the need for geographic mobility and the requirement to make new social networks.” In fact, he speculates, the ability to retain youthful qualities, now often seen as folly, may someday be recognized as a prized trait.

So perhaps if I've got the blues, I should flaunt them. Look out world, here I stutter.

Identification

This is what happens when you drink too much coffee. This morning we went over for brunch at a friend's house, and the second cup of coffee awaited (I normally only drink one). I remember when I was taking creative writing classes and we had a deadline ("one new poem a week") my writing buddies and I would drag ourselves off to a coffee shop called the Daily Grind (apropos) and try to caffeinate ourselves into inspiration. Often we could get something going, but the question is whether it would hold up at all the next day or next week in the light of full posession of our faculties.

That's the problem with coffee-- and with writing. They are fully compelling and enthralling while in the midst of them. Their ardored anticipation (laying in bed in the morning wishing someone else had already done it for you) and the dissolution of their state and effects, not so much. And more seriously speaking, it was never writing itself that I had a problem with. It was always what came in between writing, the before-and-after stuff that dragged me down.

So now it's the afternoon, the child crashed into his nap headlong and as we drove home from the brunch, the across-the-street neighbor had finally surrendered to his task: He had already plucked all but the topmost t.p. streamers from his shade tree. The whole shape of the thing had changed. It maintains its diameter only if seen from above. The concept has discintegrated.

***
I was catching up on reading and found an article in today's NYT Magazine about good old Paul Muldoon. For those of you unfamiliar, Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet who won the Pulitzer prize for poetry. He also judged the Graduate Poetry contest at U of M while I was there and chose my poems to receive the prize.

This single event was such a strange mixed blessing: It was at once a huge recognition of my poetry and at the same time drew me into the competitive crosshairs of the other grad students. The day after my prize reading, I had an anxiety attack that led to prolonged depression. I left two weeks later and never returned to complete my degree.

Before my prize reading (though after they had announced I had won it) I had the honor of introducing Paul Muldoon at the U of M. Afterwards I had volunteered to drive him to his hotel which was near Georgetown, in the D.C. area affectionately called "Foggy Bottom". For as much as I should have been able to (or wanted to) discuss with him (how often do you get to chauffeur a Pulitzer-prize winner?), I just couldn't. He seemed so tired to me. And also not quite a little concerned about being driven around by some random grad student.

It turns out that he should have been a bit weary of being in the car with me: I didn't know my way around D.C. well at all, limiting my flight patterns to a tired groove which spanned the Beltway between Bethesda and College Park. As anyone who even knows about D.C. knows, there are lots of parts of D.C. you should manage to avoid. I had picked a route that made sense on paper (though I didn't manage to bring that paper with me) and was abandoned to a mere directional sense. As evidenced by the NYT article, all's well that ends well. Paul Muldoon is still alive and kicking, despite my failure to perform.

And yet my graduate poetry award lands on my resumes, it lands on my web site. It seems like something someone should know about me, the me that's on paper. The me that is qualified, the me that's uncomplicated by failure.

As I was reading the article, I started to think: Who is it that I associate with this writing? Who is this other person who has the backstage access, who dispatches the words? She's certainly not the idea I have of myself. There would be too many expectations.

***

When I was at Trader Joe's last week, there were no balloons. That's a big deal for someone who uses the promise and posession of said balloon to partially tame an explorative toddler into shopping cart submission. I asked at the checkout why no balloons. The guy told me-- I lie not-- there's a helium shortage. I began to ponder what that might mean. Where did helium come from, anyway? Are there helium manufacturing plants with little cleansuited guys running around? The cashier boy suggested that there were Helium mines, pockets of it trapped in the earth. Hmm...

A few days later I was listening to NPR and there was a listener letter responding to a story they'd apparently done on said helium shortage. The listener admonished the reporters for inhaling helium to affect their voices, saying it could cause your lungs to overinflate and burst.

Not that I took that danger vary seriously. Nor do I think it will keep small kids from sucking helium from balloons (once they return). It did make me think, however, about how many small things we take for granted, all of which make up our ideal concept of a balloon.

There is the tensile surface of an inflated balloon which causes a light source to be reflected just so; there is the long strand of ribbon (seems far too puny as a tether for something so buoyant); and there is the weightlessness, the suspension. The top of the balloon like the perfectly-defined arch of a question mark, posed mid-air for the asking.

So many of our concepts are like that: So fragile. Often we can only start to parse them if something is awry. Then we ask: What is wrong here? What is askew? Even slight violations of form or function can catch us off guard (as a helium balloon which, losing its luft, hovers sort of halfway between up there and the ground).

Maybe we should grant even the partial things their wholeness, their own gestalt. The trees half-decked, the laundry partially folded. The writing and the people somewhere hovering in the middle.