tea berry-blue

Hi, everybody.

I go to a therapist.

Once a week, I take an elevator up to my therapist’s office, and sit on her sofa, and tell her about my week, what is going on in my life, what I am pondering, what is upsetting me, what is making me happy, really all kinds of things. Sometimes the things we talk about are very serous. Sometimes they are not. Sometimes I cry, but most of the time, I laugh a lot, too.

In the past few weeks, I’ve seen or heard several of my friends talk about therapy. They have been wondering if they might benefit from therapy, or they’ve been feeling unhappy and don’t know what to do about it. Some of them have been scared to tell people they would like to try going to a therapist. Some of them tried going to a therapist once and didn’t have a positive experience. So I thought I would write about my experience with it, because I think that talking about these things, and knowing that people you know do them and do have positive experiences with it, can help a lot in trying to figure out whether it’s the right thing for you to do.

How did I start going to therapy?

I was sent to therapy as a child. It was a pretty bizarre experience and something that my elementary school strongly recommended, but my mother pulled me out of it because she didn’t like what was going on there. I can tell lots of stories about my childhood therapy experience, but that’s really a different post.

Anyway, when I was about 25 years old, I started experiencing some pretty bizarre things. I had always struggled with my emotions in ways that people might called depression or anxiety or other things, but I’d never been diagnosed with anything. Then, right after I turned 25, a few things started happening.

–I had difficulty eating and lost my appetite. My appetite became very small. I was always the kind of person who forgot to eat, but suddenly, eating outright repulsed me. When I did eat, I often vomited immediately after. This frightened me a lot, because I come from a family with a history of eating disorders. I didn’t think I had an eating disorder, because I didn’t look in the mirror and hate my body, but it worried me a lot. I dropped a lot of weight, almost fifty pounds.

–I became very emotionally closed off. I had a hard time having conversations with people about things. I would start feeling symptoms of nausea and apprehension when I had to have serious discussions.

–I started getting unreasonably upset about small things. The biggest way this manifested was as a sort of paranoia, where I was convinced that people were angry at me, didn’t like me, or were repulsed by me. I would get uncomfortable if I was on the subway and a person moved away from me. If a friend was too busy to do something, I would become convinced they hated me.

–I became discontent with my job. I had a great job, but I was having difficulty focusing and doing my work.

–A couple not-so-great things happened. The worst one was that someone I had looked up to for a long time and had become relatively close with on the internet did something pretty horrible and hurtful to me and a group of my friends. I was having difficulty finding support or help to address it and didn’t know what to do.

Anyway, I had a bit of an emotional meltdown, and finally, my mother found me a psychiatrist (the kind of doctor who can prescribe medication). He diagnosed me with depression and gave me a medication to take.

The first medication didn’t seem to do anything but make me vomit more, so he changed me to another medication.

That medication actually made me hallucinate and exacerbated the paranoid feelings I had been having. The doctor lowered my dose, but that didn’t seem to help. After a few weeks of hallucinations and emotionally (not physically) violent freakouts, he changed my medication again.

The third medication seemed to be better. It kept me from feeling as paranoid but didn’t really do anything about the other, more physical symptoms.

I went away for Thanksgiving and completely forgot to bring my medication with me. When I came home, I stopped taking it, and not only stopped taking it, but stopped going to the psychiatrist. I had been somewhat disappointed in the experience– I had thought that the doctor would talk to me more, but he really just listened to me list symptoms and prescribed medication.

About six months later, I had moved to Boston, and I was still having trouble with the same types of symptoms. I had always felt a little more “depressed” around February and March, and it was definitely that time of year. So I found a clinical psychologist who was more focused on talk therapy and started going to him once a week. Within a few minutes of talking to him, he said that he felt a depression diagnosis had been wrong, and I was pretty certainly suffering from an anxiety disorder. That experience in general was definitely better than the psychiatrist I’d gone to, but there were still problems– the doctor was an older man and would sometimes doze off while I was talking to him. He also would get our schedule confused and sometimes would fall asleep in his office between patients and not wake up when I knocked. I finally got frustrated with his lack of reliability, especially since I felt like he became even less reliable after I decided from a budgetary perspective that I needed to cut back on visits, and stopped going.

I moved back to New York about two years after I moved to Boston, with a stopover in Richmond, VA, of several months. I was living in Westchester with my parents. We had some family difficulties at the time and they were definitely getting to me. It was a pretty rough time, so I ended up seeing another clinical psychologist.

I really liked that doctor. He was around my parents’ age and much more about two-way communication, and giving me “homework” assignments, things to think about and do during the week, and that was definitely the kind of therapy relationship I thrived in. I really liked going there. But due to the circumstances at the time, it became difficult for me to go regularly, and I eventually moved back to Manhattan.

That was about six years ago, and in the meantime, I developed a lot of strategies for overcoming my anxiety. It also lessened a lot as I found myself new situations and experiences. But about a year and a half ago, I was starting to feel symptoms that seemed similar to the ones I had had several years before, and I was concerned about my mental health.

This time, I started going to a psychologist who is a woman closer to my age. I had mixed feelings about that at first because I felt like I wasn’t sure I wanted a doctor whom I would see as more of a peer. But I’ve been very pleased with that relationship and have continued going to her ever since. I go exclusively for talk therapy, which is more comfortable for me because of my bad experiences with drugs in the past.

Do you feel better now?

Yes, much! Thank you for asking!

If you’re better, why are you still going to therapy?

So, I have asthma. Sometimes I don’t have an asthma attack for many months. There have been times that I’ve gone over a year without an asthma attack. But other times, I have chronic wheezing that does not abate for many months.

If I have an asthma attack after months of not having one at all, which would be wiser: continuing to keep my rescue inhaler prescription up to date so that I have one when I need it, or not having one and having to go get a checkup with my doctor and get a new prescription? Best case scenario, it’ll take a few hours to get a prescription refilled, which isn’t usually the end of the world, but could be pretty bad. And having the rescue inhaler for the times when I get a little wheeze that isn’t a full-blown asthma attack might actually be helping me go longer between full-blown attacks.

So I feel the same way about therapy. I could stop going to therapy and only go when I feel truly awful, but going to therapy every week means that when I feel awful on Thursday, I know that I’ll get to talk to someone about it on Monday. And that probably keeps me from getting as deeply unhappy when I feel unhappy as I would if I wasn’t sure when I would get a therapist’s appointment, and had to go to the trouble of finding a therapist and scheduling one every time I was starting to feel bummed out.

You talk about how you prefer talk therapy to drugs. Do you think that’s best for everyone?

Of course not. I don’t think talk therapy is right for everyone, but it is definitely right for some people. I don’t think drugs are right for me, but they are right for some people. As with my asthma comparison, some people take maintenance steroids for asthma all the time. Those are right for some people, but not all people. Some people use natural medicines to control their asthma. Those are right for some people, but not all people.

Different people’s depression, anxiety, and other brain sicknesses are caused by different things, and therefore require different kinds of treatment. I’m not a doctor and don’t purport to know what’s best for everyone– just what’s best for me. Heck, my experience alone shows that the wrong therapist can be wrong, even when therapy is right for you, and the wrong drugs can be wrong, even if there’s a drug that is right for you.

If you feel like you might be suffering from a clinical, severe, or prolonged depression or anxiety (or something similar), I would recommend going to a doctor about it. But don’t be shy about determining that you don’t like a doctor or think a different type of treatment might work better. It might take a few tries. In fact, it will almost definitely take a few tries. Don’t be discouraged, and keep trying to find a doctor who works. It can be REALLY discouraging, when you’re feeling depressed, to feel like all the doctors you see are wrong for you, and of course, depression as a disease can convince you that nothing will help, which makes it much easier to give up looking. But if you think it’s something you might benefit from, don’t give up. When you go to a therapist you don’t feel comfortable with, try to articulate on paper for yourself what you didn’t like, so that as you continue your search, you can narrow things down more easily and better describe what you would like.

What happens in therapy?

Different therapists are different, and many therapist will tailor what goes on in therapy to what you WANT to go on there. In my therapy sessions, I talk first about the things I’ve done over the course of the past week, and how those things have made me feel. I make a point of listing any achievements in terms of personal self-improvement or things that I normally have trouble with on the social anxiety front.

Then I usually talk about anything I’ve been thinking about, whether it’s a bad thing or a good thing. Sometimes it’s the things that I’ve been unhappy about, sometimes it’s realizations about why I think the way I do about things, sometimes it’s themes I’ve seen cropping up in my life, sometimes it’s my hopes and dreams. It really varies.

My therapist offers some commentary and sometimes asks some questions, but really only when I am having trouble expressing something or am losing direction in my train of thought. She offers a supportive ear in a non-judgmental and objective way. Even when I’m really unhappy, my therapy sessions usually make me feel better.

I’m worried about overcoming the stigma of going to a therapist. What do I do about that?

My answer is a very reassuring pfft! There is stigma about going to therapy. It can be a problem in certain careers. But that’s part of why I decided to write this post. The best way in my mind to overcome stigma against something that you know SHOULDN’T be stigmatized is to normalize it.

I tell everyone that I go to therapy. I mean, I don’t drag it up in conversations where it doesn’t belong, but when I’m making plans with friends, I tell them outright that I have therapy on Monday nights, so I can’t socialize that night until after eight. I tell people about things that I thought about in therapy, or ways discussions in therapy helped me with a problem when it comes up in a discussion. I just talk about it like it’s as normal as going to work or going to my Monday night bar night (which is incidentally right after therapy).

If people see that you are not ashamed to go to therapy and that you think of it as a positive, normal experience, they will be less likely to think negatively about you going– or at very least, less likely to make negative comments to you about it. It can be embarrassing to talk about at first but remember that it is normal! We humans have a tendency to act like our problems make us weird or freakish. But most people have some kind of problem, and more often than not, when we talk about our problems like they’re normal, we find out how very normal they are.

I have another question about therapy that you haven’t answered here

Ask it!

I hope this helps! Please feel free to pass it on to anyone who might find it useful.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

So, I’ve been meaning to write about this for about two weeks, but Tea has been a busy lady!! Busy, busy!!!

Let’s start at the very beginning. You all know by now that I have a very long and tribulation-filled history with haircutters.

When I was very young, I loved going to the haircutter. I was about eight years old, and I went to a salon that was just s short walk or bike ride from my house, so my mother even let me go alone sometimes. I went to a hairstylist named Michael, and in the 1980s, he was the height of stylish, with long, beautiful curly locks that weren’t that different from mine.

But then he got sick. It wasn’t until later that I understood that he had AIDS, which he eventually died from. At the time, I assumed “sick” meant “pneumonia” or “chickenpox” or something, because at eight, in the 1980s, AIDS wasn’t really a concept I’d been introduced to. There was a middle-aged lady who worked at the salon who cut my hair instead, and she made such a botch of it– I left with my hair in a giant poufball.

I don’t think I got another haircut until I was thirteen.

I went to a great hairstylist as a teenager and college student, but she was on Long Island and isn’t at all convenient to where I live now.

So, my adult life has been a long, long slog through a parade of hairstylists who don’t know what to do with very fine, multitextured hair that is the product of a very exciting genealogical background.

Sometime in my adult life, I decided that the only thing to do was actually ante up and try out the salons that were noted for being “curly hair specialists.” I did this for the first time in 2009. The results were disastrous. I went to a salon called Ouidad, where I had people prodding me to buy their line of products the entire time, until I explained to them that I was not going to buy their products, at which point the stylist clamped her mouth shut and didn’t speak to me for the rest of my appointment. Furthermore, she explained that their “trademarked” haircutting technique involved thinning shears, something I had already had a very bad experience with. I told her I wasn’t comfortable with those being used on my hair, and she insisted they would be different.

They were different, in that my hair looked gorgeous when I left the salon, but two moths later, all the bits where my hair had been cut to different lengths began to show, and it made my entire head look ragged and frizzy. This was the most expensive haircut I’d ever had in my life.

Last year, I found out that my company, owning several fashion magazines, got a very generous discount at Bumble and Bumble. So I booked. I made it very clear on the phone that I had my hair and had them book me with a stylist whom they said was an expert at dealing with my hair type.

Yeah, that didn’t go so well. I walked in and told her I had been wanting a shorter haircut. She told me she wouldn’t cut my hair short because it was too beautiful. I told her I at least wanted it evened out and the split ends gone.

I walked out of that place with split ends still on my head, after waiting forty minutes from my appointment time before the stylist even saw me. I booked a “fix” appointment immediately. The stylist was snotty about it and barely did anything, in spite of the tons of split ends.

That was now the most expensive haircut I’ve ever had, even with the discount.

Meanwhile, I’ve been having multiple friends telling me to go to devachan for years. The women I know who go there have curly hair, but it’s much more typical of the kinds of long, tendrilly, wavy curls that don’t even seen that curly to me. Plus, I’m familiar with their products that have the kind of prices that will break ordinary people’s bank accounts (I generally don’t believe in buying hair care products that cost more than my monthly food budget). So I had always been skeptical about going there.

On top of that, it’s one of those “celebrity” type salons, not unlike Ouidad and Bumble & Bumble, and my experience there made me leery of trying another one. Plus, I’ve read lots of reviews online, and for every positive review, I’ve seen one that says that they find devachan to be a bit creepy and cultish, with customers who seem like devotees more than patrons.

Finally, this year, I decided that I might as well try it at least once. After all, it couldn’t be worse than Ouidad or Bumble & Bumble, could it? So I books an appointment with a stylist named Jackie and showed up on their doorstep a couple of weeks ago.

Jackie had the same kind of long, not-really-curly hair that I’ve come to dread from stylists, where I’m used to being told “Oh, yes, she has curly hair, she understands all about curly hair” when in reality, said stylist tends to freak out on contact with my hair. But she started by looking at my hair and asking me about my current regimen.

And that’s when everything changed. Now, I do some pretty wacky stuff with my hair– I haven’t shampooed it since 2009 (obviously I’ve been washing it with other things), and usually when I tell stylists that I wash my hair with a combination of honey and soap made from goat’s milk and shea butter, and honey, they just look at me funny. When I tell them that I use castor oil, jojoba oil, and vegetable glycerin in it, a lot of them make “ew” faces. Jackie did neither. She said she didn’t know about honey but she could see how goat’s milk was probably a good idea, and then said that oil is typically good, but given my hair type, she thought I’d get better absorption from using olive oil and coconut oil. She talked to me a little about their products, but the first time I said that their product line was out of my price range, she said that was understandable and she’d be happy to recommend some cheaper alternatives.

At devachan, they cut hair dry, which seems to make a lot of sense for curly hair– since the curl patterns are hard to make out when your hair is wet. They wash and style it after it’s cut. Jackie took a good three inches off my head, trying to even out the raggedy bits that are still left from my hideous Ouidad cut from two years ago (one of the things about having very tightly curled hair– it takes years for a hairstyle to grow out).

I had my hair washed by Brian, who was similarly very friendly and talked to me about my hair care, and read the labels on several products to see what the chief ingredients were so I could try to get the beneficial effects without shelling out a ton of money, especially since most of the ingredients were all natural. One of the spritzers he used, he even told me that it was basically a few drops of lavender oil in water, and I could just make it myself.

Then they dried my hair, and styled it. Drying was a very complex process that involved a long time under a traditional salon hair dryer, followed by more drying with less direct heat.

After that, Jackie came over and did a few corrective snips. She told me that I shouldn’t vcut my hair more than every six months, and that she didn’t think I needed a haircut more than once a year– and if I needed a little trim in between, it was fine to go somewhere else, since she knew their services were expensive. The people there were so lovely and knowledgeable that I decided to suck it up and try one of their products– especially since they had been so good about not pressuring me to buy something. So I asked Jackie, if I was going to buy one thing, which should I try, and she suggested a specific conditioner. When I checked out, I bought a bottle of it to try.

I started walking out of the salon, when I noticed white flakes falling from the sky. Snow!

I have this bad string of luck in that every time I get a new haircut, it seems to be a bad weather day. So by the time I get home, the hairstyle is wrecked and not fit for photographs. So I walked back into the salon and asked very politely if it would be possible for me to take a couple pictures of my haircut in their waiting room. The receptionist kindly waved me in, even though by now it was close to closing time, and I went to take some photos with my new camera.

A woman with magnificent strawberry blonde curls followed me in and offered to take my picture. I couldn’t tell if she worked there, or if she was a customer. I said it was all right, I just wanted to snap a couple of pictures to show my mother, and I’d do it myself. She insisted, saying that it was always better to have someone else take the pictures. She tried to figure out my camera– her phone was an older phone than mine– and after a couple tries, got a few good shots. I thanked her, and she started asking me questions about my experience there, which is when it became obvious that not only did she work there, but worked there in such a position where such things were important to her. I told her Jackie was great and I would be coming back.

Then she asked me my name, and I introduced myself. She said it was nice to meet me, but didn’t introduce herself. So I asked her her name.

And she said, “Lorraine.”

Lorraine Massey is the owner of the salon. She’s also the author of Curly Girl, which is one of the premier books about curly hair care. I said, “oh, Lorraine who wrote the book?” She said yes, and seemed delighted that I knew about her book.

So here, after having gone to two high-end salons where the stylists barely seemed to give a shit that I was there, at devachan, the owner of the salon, who is purported to have a year-long wait for appointments, and appears on TV and at major hair care events all the time, offered to take my photos for me when she didn’t have to. I thanked her very much and assured her that I’d had a great experience at her salon.

She saw my bag and seemed delighted that I’d purchased one of their products. She asked what I’d bought, and I told her. She asked if I had any of a sulfate-and-detergent-free shampoo they make. I told her no, and she said, “oh, you really should try it.” And I told her that I use honey in my hair.

Again, I didn’t get a “What?!” from her. Lorraine said to me, “well, honey is good, but it’s not quite the right ph level.” And she went on to explain something about ph levels and how she thought the optimal ph level for washing my hair was something I don’t remember now. And she actually [i]knew[/i] the ph level of honey. And then she goes up to the front counter, takes down a bottle of the shampoo she had recommended to me and gave it to me for free. We chatted for a little longer, I thanked her and went home.

I was just very charmed by the fact that Lorraine took the time to talk to me, and gave me free products rather than pressuring me to buy anything. I feel like you have to really believe that your product is better than what someone is using to do that.

So far, I’ve been pretty happy with the products, though I don’t know if I’ll continue to purchase them regularly given the high expense. But the people were all so kind and seemed to know so much about hair and actually really cared about hair and about me as a customer that it was actually worth the expense of the cut. So, if that’s what they mean by culty, I guess I’ve been converted?

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

Gosh, I have a lot of things I meant to post this week, mostly to do with ice cream and food and other exciting things, but I sort of got caught up in other stuff and now I have exciting things that eclipse all that stuff that is only exciting in my head.

I went to Twelve 28 Tattoo today for my appointment with Joy. As you may remember, I went in last week for my consultation and it was fun telling Joy all my bee-nerd stuff.

Today, I went back. But before I went back, I took THE LAST PHOTO OF MY UN-BEED SHOULDER. EVER.

When I got there, she had four simple line-drawings of bees for me to look at, and I picked three of them to transfer to my skin. I also got to see Joy’s awesome work room which has many excellent Star Wars things in it, including many many Star Wars Pez dispensers that I do not own, such as a glow-in-the-dark Palpatine. How awesome is that?

Anyway, if you’ve never had a tattoo, the procedure was pretty much like my first one to begin. We talked a little bit about placement, and then Joy transferred one of the line drawings to my shoulder. I lay down on the chair, and Joy pinned up the pictures of bees that I had given her (bee pinups!) and got out a whole bunch of inks, and went to work.

The rest of it was nothing like my first one. First off, the first tattoo I got was all black. So I didn’t realize quite how much blood was being wiped away with the ink. It’s not a ton, but it’s enough to make everything smudgey red.

(However, I will also tell you the same thing I said the last time– for those of you who have thought about getting a tattoo but are afraid of the pain, it does not hurt very much. If you have ever gone to the dentist and gotten your teeth cleaned, the best thing I can compare it to is that scrapey sensation,. Sometimes it will hurt a little bit for just a second or two, and then it goes back to feeling scrapey. If anything, my neck hurt more from getting stiff than my skin hurt from having a tiny needle in it).

Joy finished the first bee, and it looked awesome. So she asked if we should continue and I said yessirree, Bob. I did not actually say that, but I was pretty enthusiastic, I think.

These bees, they are tiny pieces of art. I can’t tell you how happy I am with them. They are like little watercolor paintings on my skin, the way all the colors mix together.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

These are mostly for beautyofgrey– photos of the dresses I bought yesterday! All from Nordstrom Rack, all under $50.

I wore this one to work today! I really like the little rosette on it.

I have been having a little love affair with dresses that I probably would never have even considered wearing a couple of years ago. The kind that look frumpy on the hanger! The kind with crazy prints that look like the Von Trapp Family’s discarded curtains. When I started working at King Features, I had to upgrade my wardrobe after a year of working out of my apartment and having to dress for comic shows. I mean, I cuted up, but my cuting up involved cute tee shirts and floofy skirts, and I needed to step it up a little.

This one is a little little-girly, but I freaking loved the fabric too much to pass it up. It’s crazy soft and floaty and reminds me of a dress I had in college, that had butterflies on it in similar colors.

The thing is that at first I was buying slacks and stuff, and that’s just not me. I mean, like I was saying to drjeff, if I had my druthers, I would still be wearing ball gowns and shit like I did in college. And I just had no idea how to dress like me but still like a grownup. It was awkward. I think I posted a bunch of posts here asking people how to dress, but I just didn’t quite get it.

It didn’t help that my body type made dressing hard. I mean, I am lucky in that I’m a normal dress size
(6-8), but my boobs pretty much mean that a lot of clothes are out. Strapless? Out. Strappy? Out. Halter? Nope. Backless? Nope. Nothing with an empire waist or any kind of decoration around the bustline, because it always falls at the wrong place.

This one isn’t my typical style, really, but I really liked the print and the sleeves! I was on a cute floral print kick, apparently! Which I like because so many colors!

And then I started watching Mad Men, and like every single person who has ever seen Mad Men, developed a huge crush on Christina Hendricks. In between fanning myself off, though, I noticed that here’s finally someone who is pretty much exactly my size. We have almost the same measurements and it was like, hello, lightbulb! I can see how all these clothes look on her and try to buy things with similar styles. And that’s what I’ve been doing since, well, the end of last summer. And I never feel like I’ve put something stupid on because I don’t know how to dress anymore!

On to drinks!

Highland Park

Ingredients
2.5 oz G’Vine gin
.5 oz limoncello
1/4 cup fresh lilac blossoms (removed from stems) plus some blossoms for garnish.
.25 oz St. Germain

Instructions
Add gin, limoncello, lilacs to pitcher or glass with ice and muddle well.
Let sit for 5 minutes
Coat 1 chilled glass with St. Germain, discard excess
Pour, garnish with remaining lilacs.

Remedy (This and variations on this is what I was drinking all last week when I was crazy sick)

Ingredients
2 oz Bulldog gin
1 oz Elisir MP Roux
1 Tb local honey

Instructions
Put all ingredients in a pitcher or glass with ice and stir. You need to stir for a while to get the honey to dissolve if you are using thick honey.
Pour into chilled glass!
That is all!

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

So, here is my hair two days after the cut:

I am liking the style, but not the split ends.

I DID call the salon back and they put me in for a redo. Nice! Just because, you know. Split ends. We’ll see how that goes. Same stylist. I think just, you know, chopping off a full inch all the way around would fix it. I’m not sure how that’ll work with the style she gave me, but hey! We’ll see.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

This is what my hair looked like at work yesterday.

I always freak out a little bit before I go to the hairdresser. I know, it’s kind of crazy, and probably if I went more than once a year, I wouldn’t freak out as much. But I was looking for curly hairstyles online and if you Google “curly hairstyles” the first things you get are:

and:

Yeah. I think not. So then karnythia pointed me toward Googling Styling Naturally Curly Hair instead, which was significantly better and I am a little ashamed that I didn’t think of putting in the “naturally” myself. Sadly, I was also rushing out the door by then so I did a quick cursory look but didn’t really get to think about any of them.

I got to the salon and waited a bit for my appointment (the hairdresser was running late but was very apologetic), and then I consulted with her for a bit. My first disappointment was that she immediately nixed short hair without even seeming to consider it when I brought up the possibility. I told her that I didn’t have something specific in mind, but that I really just wanted a hairstyle that was an actual hairstyle and not just lopping off the ends. I said I’d been thinking about cutting it very short and she did the whole “no, your hair is too beautiful, you don’t want to do that,” which always kind of pisses me off because it’s a very objectifying view of women’s hair, as far as I’m concerned. But she had some suggestions and did listen to what I did want and knew I definitely didn’t want.

I got shampooed (the only time my hair has been shampooed in two years has been when I’ve gone to salons) and then they handed me back over to the hairdresser, and I talked a little more about how I didn’t like how flat the top of my head looked with my current hair.

She lopped off maybe four inches, so it’s short…er, but it’s not short. It’s still longer than shoulder-length, and she cut it at an angle and thinned the back.

Things that impressed me: one, she and her assistant put my whole head in finger-curls. Two, when I told her that I don’t use products, she didn’t push me to buy stuff or try to convince me that my way was wrong. Usually when I go for a haircut, I tell the stylist that I don’t use any products except silicone-free conditioner, shea butter, honey, goat’s milk soap, and natural oils in my hair, and they freak out and start telling me that I NEED products. But she didn’t, she actually went to the back and got out all the bottles of all their conditioners and let me read them and told me to pick which one I wanted her to use because she wanted to make sure that what I got was closest to what I’d get at home. One of them was silicone-free. So that was awesome.

Things that didn’t impress me: Apart from the whole “it’s a crime to cut your hair” bullshit which I’m kind of sick of hearing and definitely don’t want from a hairdresser, I still have split ends this morning. Which I don’t think is acceptable from a haircut at a ridiculously expensive salon, even if I get a discount because of my job. They always say to call back if there is a problem but I never know whether to believe them or not, or if they’ll get pissed off if people do, or if that’s only something that giant douchebags do, but I’ve never left a hair salon still with split ends.

She did, however, make my hair look like it has a style, and definitely took care of my complaint about the top being so flat.

So! That is my story. I have mixed feelings, largely because of the split ends and the fact that I don’t like a hairdresser nixing one option out of hand. But I liked other parts of the experience very much.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

Happy Pi Day! I was just excited to realize that I will be most likely alive for Pi Day when it goes to five digits!

I have been splitting hairs a lot lately.

No, literally.

I haven’t had my hair cut in a little less than a year. This is normal for me, once or twice a year is about all I cut my hair. What is abnormal for me is that I have split ends.

DOZENS of them.

They are fascinating to me, these hairs that are slowly multiplying themselves, separating like some kind of amoeba, sometimes from the ends but even more fascinatingly from their centers, so they bubble up and create strange little spaces in their middles. I keep catching them and peeling them as far as I can before they split off completely, which I know is horrible for my hair, but it is just too much fun. I’m completely mesmerized by it!

Anyway, tomorrow, I am going to get my hairs cut. I discovered that my job entitles me to a discount at Bumble & Bumble (go figure!), so I booked an appointment there, and I’m very excited about it.

I’m trying to figure out whether to get a significant haircut or not. The problem with my hair is that I have never had long hair and a genuine hair style at the same time– it’s hard to find a hairdresser, even at a curly-hair salon, who actually gives curly hair a unique style instead of just lopping off the dead bits and shaping it a little. And I don’t even really know what styles would be available, since everyone I know with long, curly hair, wears it the same– unless I cut it short, but I can’t decide if I want to do that or not. My hair is starting to go grey and I keep thinking that if I cut my hair all off now, it might be the last time in my life that I have long hair in its proper color.

I don’t know! Here is my hair now, what do you think?

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

I can finally tell you all about an awesome project I’ve been working on at work the past several weeks.

Comics Go Pink!

Next Sunday, 56 of the King Features comics will be printed in pink (or mostly pink, or use pink as a significant color in the strip) in EVERY NEWSPAPER that they appear in. We are also raising money for breast cancer research, either through donations or by bidding on our auction for an original piece of artwork by Dan Piraro.

I designed the website, and today it was featured in the New York Times!

More importantly, I imagine almost everyone reading this has been affected by breast cancer in some way. I know a lot of different activities and events take place in October, and I just wanted to say that I hope that beyond any money we raise, you know that we are all behind you 100% and support you and your loved ones. Next Sunday, we’ll be posting all the comics that “went pink” for the event so that you can take a look at them all even if your local newspaper doesn’t carry them.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

Guys! So I haven’t had a chance to make a real for-real update since I spent most of my weekend busy, but Saturday morning, bright and early, was the Run For Congo Women.

Our team was made up of about 20 cartoonists, comic fans, friends, and people who lost a bet. Everyone was so nice and a lot of fun to chat with. We also ended up raising about $3500, the second-highest amount raised by any other group in the run! I personally raised about $300, and I would like to thank all of you so much for contributing.

I was very proud of myself– I ran all 5k from start to finish without stopping or walking. I ran a bit slower than a lot of people, but I met my goal of running the entire thing. It was a bit intimidating, though, when the lady pushing the double-stroller ran faster than me. That might get turned into a comic. It was a pretty hard run, harder than my usual track, but it was so gratifying to finish it.

I have decided that I want to keep running in the morning, although I am not going to run 5k every morning– that was a bit much, and I often felt a bit strained by the end. Today I ran 3k, but I made a point of making myself run harder than I did when I was running 5k, so it was still a proper workout. One thing I really like about running in the morning is that if I get up at 6:30, by the time I get to work at 9 am, I’ve already been up for two hours, and that really makes a difference in how I feel at work. I’m ready to work, and not groggy for the first hour.

There is one drawback I haven’t mentioned, and that is the effect on my boobs! My breasts are really sore when I finish a long run– on Saturday, they were pretty painful, more painful than anything else I felt. I also have been breaking out like a kid who just hit puberty in my cleavage area, with really big, painful acne. Which is ugly, too. And it’s a place I rarely got acne before I started running, so I can tell it’s directly related. I was wondering, do any of the runners who read this have either of these issues? What do you do about them? Thanks!

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

I always say that a shower is for me what a cup of coffee is to other people– it wakes me up, it gets me going. I’m never truly awake until I’ve showered, and if I can’t shower some morning, it throws off my whole day. I’m cranky, agitated; I feel dirt crawling on my skin. Never mind the fact that my hair is almost impossible if I don’t wet it down and condition it heavily every morning.

So, beginning to run marked the first time in my life probably since I hit puberty and started to have to shower every day that I got up and did things in the morning, regularly, without showering first.

I get up. I put on my running clothes. I drink a glass of water. I go to the track, I run my 5k, I come home. I eat breakfast: yogurt and granola, sometimes with honey or fruit. A glass of water or lemonade. Then, and only then do I shower.

It’s changed my routine on days when I don’t run, too. I get up, I do my yoga while still wearing my pajamas. I eat the same breakfast and dawdle over email, since I always have more time on these mornings. Then I shower.

The thing is, it changes the experience of stepping under that spigot of hot water. I no longer feel like I’m half-asleep, like I need the sensation of droplets beating against my back to wake me up: I’m already awake. Instead, I can feel just exactly how the heat and the pressure and the moisture interacts with my skin and my muscles: loosening tightness, making me feel more free. I can feel the sweat washing away; I can tell the difference in the way my body reacts to things pre- and post-shower.

Is it a little weird to wax poetic about the difference in a single mundane experience when a routine changes? Maybe. But it is such a little, common thing, that the way it has changed is astounding to me; I never imagined that it could change in quite that way.

There are a few other things I’ve noticed. Today, at my parents, I weighed myself for the first time in a few weeks. In spite of everyone saying I look skinnier, my weight has actually increased about three pounds since the last time I weighed myself. I’m also noticing more difficulty in getting pants (which I barely wear in the summer; I am much more of a skirt person and only put on pants when the weather cools and demands it) to fit around my thighs. Three pounds is hardly enough weight gain for it to be noticeable on someone completely average in size like myself, but it tells me that running is having an effect, a noticeable, quantifiable effect on my body.

I’ve run 5k six times now. The run is next Saturday and I am confident that I am prepared for it. I will be reminding you all again that you can donate money to Run for Congo Women through my team here or through me individually here, but you can go do it right now if you would like to. It lets you donate even little amounts like $2.50 so give what you can.

I’va also decided that I like the way I feel, knowing that I am fit and active and not at risk of becoming a WALL-E like sedentary blob of humanity, my bones and muscles deteriorating from all the time spent typing letters into a computer. I intend to keep running once the run is over, maybe not 5k every day but probably 3k, which is a little under 2 miles.

One thing I keep thinking about is my high school physical education experience. I think the largest contributing factor to my not working out, to my not keeping physically fit over the years was the lack of a positive phys ed experience. I don’t think it was a bad experience by any means but it was targeted largely at getting us to hit fitness milestones required by the state, and not so much at giving us a set of good fitness habits we could carry with us. Not like English, where I learned to self-edit and take criticism well, not like History, where I learned to debate with consideration for another viewpoint. Not like Science, where I learned organization and methods.

One thing we did in Phys Ed class from time to time was run a mile. I remember running that mile, the way I would be out of breath, anguished, in agony by the time the first lap was over, the way it seemed interminable and excruciating, like every step was a chore. I think about that, and compare it to my experience now, where I can, at my current pace, only having worked on this for about a month exactly, run close to twice that before I start to feel like running is hard work. I am lucky in that I have a body that works well, that does what I tell it, even when I haven’t always been a very good caretaker. I am surprised, pleasantly surprised, that my body has responded as well as it has, but it has also taught me something:

Running is not as hard as it seemed when I was a teenager.

I have no doubt that my seventeen-year-old body, if I had pushed it to be a better athlete, would have responded better than my 32-year-old body. And yet, no matter how many times I was sent out to the track and told to run a mile, it was a torturous experience. I never improved, never got better, never had the moments like the ones I have been having so often lately, where I realize that I can do this, and maybe more. And it is leaving me wondering why that is. Why, at a point in my life when I should have been able to excel at this, given the appropriate measure of commitment, could I barely manage to succeed?

I started thinking about how the mile run was handled in my Phys Ed classes, and how we were basically turned loose on the track, and told to run (after some stretching). We weren’t given advice or tips, but more importantly– and this is the place where my experience now differs the most– we were never told to go out and run a lap. We weren’t told to work up to a mile, to practice doing one lap until we were comfortable doing that much and didn’t feel like we were out of breath or in pain by the end of it. To them more to two laps. To conquer the half-mile or even the quarter-mile and have a strong sense of our own success at that before being told to run a full mile. And yes, there will always be some people who really can’t do more than a half-mile or a quarter-mile because of health or ability factors outside of their control, but for kids like me, we would have been able to lift barriers to our success at fitness that should not have existed to begin with.

I can now consistently run three miles. I can consistently run about one and three-quarters before I start feeling much of an effect on my body. If you had told me that at sixteen, that at twice my age, I would be able to run three times what I could run then, I would not have believed it. And while I’m proud of myself now, I can’t help feeling that it is a shame that I was unable to really have confidence in my ability then.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.