Duchess Jane

On Thursday, I had my weekly lunch date with Bombadee, and somehow – I swear I’m not the self-absorbed hair maniac who brought it up this time – we ended up talking about hair. She said something that I’ve been thinking about since I left the restaurant. She said, “You stick with the hairstyle you had when you were getting laid the most.”

People whose glory days contained a mullet or teased perm or a feathered layered thing tend to hang onto that hairstyle long past the time that everyone else has let go. Just think of what those poor poor Emo kids will look like a couple of years from now. We expanded the conversation outside of hair to include behavior in general. Especially in small towns. Those who got laid the most in high school are the people who can’t seem to let go of high school and all of the drama contained therein. Those who didn’t bloom until college are still rockin’ those college habits, and those whose best years happened in adulthood seem to have a more firm grasp on reality.

But the hairstyle comment stuck with me, because I haven’t cut my hair in a very long time. Almost a year. The anniversary is approaching in July. I’ve only been thinking about scheduling an appointment for the last few weeks or so, but I can’t bring myself to do it because I’m basically terrified. I have a tendency to schedule myself for a simple trim and then sit down in the chair and say “Oh, what the hell, let’s try something different.” I’m also scared because of my layers, because I love them so much, they are so perfect and I know that every girl with long hair is thinking “Psh, how special can long layers be?” but trust me: These are special beyond your wildest imagination. My last cut was so perfect that I even talked about it here.

Girls with long hair are also probably thinking that I have at least an inch of split ends happening, and I swear I don’t. I really have only been thinking I need a hair cut for a few weeks. I don’t know if I give my hair so much attention that it doesn’t dare defy me, but it’s cooperated really well with this No Cutting Plan so far.

Back to Bombadee’s comment and the refusal to let go of a hairstyle: Are these my glory days?

The last time my hair was this long, I was maybe 10 or 11 years old. Since then, I’ve had hair that ranged in length from super super short to shoulder-length, always always changing. I used to color my hair and change the style so often that I have trouble putting photos of myself in chronological order. I quit coloring it in October of 2004. Now that it’s this long, the thought of a scissors anywhere near my head just makes me want to cry. I’m a logical person. I understand the concept of a trim, I know that I will probably lose so little hair that only I will notice, but I’m still terrified. I love my long hair. I worship my long hair. Even at my points of lowest self-esteem, I think “Well, at least I have my hair.”

Just writing this out has made me relax a little, and I’m almost ready to reach for the phone and schedule an appointment. For a trim only. Because obviously these are the best days of my life, right?

Thank god it wasn't that summer I dyed my hair orange.

Film Strip Friday has been kind of dull lately, and for that I'm very sorry. As often as I'm in the company of drunk people, you would think that I have the world's largest collection of stupid people doing stupid things on film. But sadly, I'm often not paying attention enough to grab the camera at the right moment. Today was one of my luckier days.

Schlorty and Schlong are available for wedding receptions, divorce receptions, birthday parties and of course, Friday lunches at Hooters where none of us bother going back to work.

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Sometimes I look at my dog and I think about his greatest traits and I am just astounded that such a creature exists.

I mean, really, there is no other living breathing creature in the world that is as loyal to me, as trusting of me, or loves me more than Wrecks does.

I came home tonight with a chunk of a furnace door and announced that it was art. Duke was about as pleased as that one time, remember, way back when, that time that I announced I was going to put a stolen semi-decapitated giraffe in our lawn?

I'm not as crazy as you are thinking right now. The furnace was a 1970s Rheem model that one of my crews took out of a house earlier this week. The entire furnace was bright blue, with a panel in the door area that was stamped with a quilted geometric pattern. I said, as I'm prone to say, "I want that!" and the response was, again typical, "No." Bald Mike told me that I clearly didn't understand the horrendous pain that the furnace represented, as he had to haul it out of basement. His partner Not Bald Mike (partner at work, not Committed Life Partner, although that would be wicked hot) said "I don't think that piece comes apart, sorry."

Fate intervened and the forklift driver wasn't around that day and the furnace remained on the back of the truck for another day before meeting its eventual fate in a scrap metal dumpster. I spent that extra day pouting and whining. This morning, Not Bald Mike relented and disassembled the furnace and cut out the panel that I wanted and hemmed the edges so that I wouldn't bleed to death while hanging my art. It almost made up for that time, remember, way back when, that time that he didn't steal the giraffe for me?

So I brought the door home and I think Duke is unimpressed. I have a plan. (That's also probably the #1 sentence that strikes fear into his heart.) I'm going to do this whole fancy photo arrangement around it on one of the walls of the spare bedroom (which will be my bedroom after the remodel is complete). Those of you who have visited recently will remember this as the bedroom that only has three walls right now. So it's more of a courtyard than a bedroom, but we have big plans for it. But I think that my scrap metal photography installation will be a hit, just trust me on this one.

I feel like I need to juxtapose this story with a tale about Duke from the same evening. I had a rough night tonight and I spent the majority of my evening crying like a little baby and Duke took me on a motorcycle ride to either cheer me up or to surround himself with engine noise so that he couldn't hear me. We rode to the little town that he used to live in and drove up and down a few alleys, looking for somebody standing in their garage drinking beer. This is the kind of town where that sort of thing isn't tough to find.

On the way home, we were coming up Cherry Valley Road when we passed a couple of detour signs. Duke proceeded. Then we saw the Road Closed barricades. Duke drove around. "How can it possibly be closed completely? We can go around." I said "Gee, I don't know, maybe there's no bridge." Guess who was right? No bridge! So we turned around again and followed the detour, and I laughed almost the entire way home at his attempt to thwart the road construction in our way.

There are times when his stubbornness makes me want to tear my own hair out, and I would have to list driving towards a bridge that doesn't exist and hoping it will materialize as a rather stubborn sort of thing to do. But then there are times that I recognize myself in him, when I see my own German bullheadedness. It's these times that I see what a delicate balance we have going here - how lucky he is to have a woman willing to sit on the back of the motorcycle and laugh while we are driving towards the cliff and how lucky I am to have a man who will merely shake his head while helping me bolt a piece of garbage to the wall. He probably has the raw end of this deal, because the stubborn insane things that he does are merely actions that live on through stories and occasionally film. My stubborn moments tend to be a more permanent part of our lives.

Now, about that thing you were just about to throw away . . . I was thinking it would look great in my living room.