kdiddy.org

I’ve heard from various sources that you’re supposed to get your hair trimmed every six weeks. This sounds nice and all, but I’ve always fancied it to be excessive, both in terms of maintenance and cost. Granted, I tend to let things go longer than I should, but usually get my hair cut maybe twice a year.

My most recent trim was back in September and I went to another salon on the main boulevard in my neighborhood. The one that I first went to last summer, the one that the husband feared would give me poofy bangs, was fine, but they seemed slightly put out that I was messing with the age curve.

So, in September I went to another place that served a slightly younger clientele and got a haircut that I wasn’t sure about at first, but turned out to be just fine. And it got me parting my hair slightly off-center, which, when I look back on 2009, will stand out as one of life’s big events. What Master’s degree? DID YOU SEE MY PART?!?!?

So, with my ends looking mighty unhealthy, I headed down to the same place on Saturday. I wanted to keep the little side bang, take off a few inches, and get some layers.

The haircut portion of my visit was fine and I addressed the de rigeur pitching of Redken products with aplomb.

When it came time to dry my hair, the stylist said, “Now, last time, we dried your hair straight. Could we try playing up your curl this time?” Eh, sure, go for it. I always have stylists dry it straight because it always looks so smooth and pretty, but change is good, right?

Well, 5 curl-defining products, a diffuser, and a curling iron later, I found myself staring at this:

The stylist, bless her heart, was so excited about the Bon Jovi masterpiece atop my head that when she asked me, “Do you like it?” I had to reply, “Yes, of course!” I normally wouldn’t endorse lying, but like I said, the cut was fine and this style would go away just fine. In the meantime, I just tried to stifle my laughter and wondered if I could find neon spandex pants at the thrift store.

When I walked into my house, the look on the husband’s face was one of horror mixed with whatever contortion happens when you try to stifle laughter. I couldn’t contain myself and cracked up.

It’s calmed down considerably since I washed it, but if you’re in need of a groupie for your 80s revival band, I’m available.

With the Master’s degree pretty much over and done with (or, as I told my friend Jennie the other day, “It was time to put that bitch to rest,”), I am all set to dive into holiday stuff.

I have this emotional quirk that doesn’t allow me to enjoy things if I have some stressful thing looming over my head. So, even though I started listening to Christmas music weeks ago and busted out the It’s a Wonderful Life and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation DVDs embarrassingly early, I was really holding back my excitement for this time of year until Tuesday’s presentation was firmly in the past.

As I’ve mentioned, this year I’m really into Christmas because it means lots of time to hang out with my family and the end of a year that’s been kind of shitty. And I’m sorry to brag, but my family is rad as hell. So, this weekend, I’m hoping to finish some cleaning and decorating projects and perhaps get our tree.

Our celebration of Christmas is very secular. The husband is an atheist. I’m comfortably unsure, though definitely very happy without an organized religion. And the baby…well, the one thing that we feel strongly about is that he’s too young to really ponder the enormity of things like faith and existence, so assigning him our choice of religion (or lack thereof) is inappropriate. And so we’re kind of just waiting for him to ask us questions.

Anyway, all of this is to say that our version of Christmas marches alongside the traditional version and looks much the same, but we center it around different things. And, really, I think inventing new traditions, borrowing from what came before you and shaping it into something new and good is pretty rad.

In our sporadic discussions of religion, we’ve told the baby that we (or at least I) would be happy to explore options if he were ever interested. Last night, he asked us about the possibility of celebrating Hanukkah.

I was all for it, noting that we might need to get a few things and figure out generally what one does during the Festival of Lights. “I’ll look it up on Wikipedia,” I promised, knowing that I needed to fill in the holes of what I knew…dreidel…oil…latkes…8 days.

I knew that Hanukkah was coming up but I was kind of surprised to find that the whole thing starts tonight, leaving me literally no time to obtain a menorah and whatnot.

So, there’s us. Lapsed Catholics, failed Jews. Story of my life.

I think we might still improvise the whole thing, just to get a feel for it. Then next year we’ll firm it up a bit.

*A common exchange amongst speakers of Pittsburghese. Translates to: “Did you eat yet?” “No. Did you?” Has been adapted to become the name of a local eatery.

One of my quirky pet peeves is inefficiency. Specifically, inefficient packaging. As insignificant as a concern as this may be, I think it will start to have significant consequences as people rely more on e-commerce and shipping in terms of costs, both financial and environmental.

So, for the baby’s birthday, I ordered (shh, don’t tell) this safety knife set because he always wants to help me cook and I want him to have 10 intact digits. Like I said, I’m quirky.

Today, the knife set and the other gifts that I ordered arrived and I gleefully set about opening boxes. I couldn’t quite remember what was due, so when I got to the biggest box, I wasn’t sure what was inside.

I offer my foot for scale, if that helps. I wear a size 8, 8 1/2.

Another shot of the impressive box, complete with my stained shirt. (My grandmother gave me four shirts for my birthday. I’ve worn three. I’ve also stained three. Eff my life.)

At this point, seeing the cooking.com tape, I’m figuring it’s the knife set, but I’m not yet concerned about the size because I didn’t check the dimensions when I ordered it. Maybe that makes me a bad consumer. I don’t know.

Ooh, looks enticing.

Dig, dig, dig. “Any minute now,” I say to myself, “I’m going to reach the gift. Sweet!”

Eventually, I reach China this:

I know what you’re thinking: SRSLY?

Srsly.

I estimated this to be 27 feet of Fill-Air. TWENTY-SEVEN FEET. All for this.

And, look, I get it. I ordered this around the busiest shopping time of the year. I can only imagine the fatigue that the shipping staff of cooking.com and amazon.com were experiencing and I’m sure they were experiencing packaging challenges that would make me barf. But this is really ridiculous. It’s inefficient and wasteful and frankly I expect better.

My great-uncle brought it back from Italy after World War II and gave it to my grandmother. I wore it on our wedding day.

My plans for today included laundry, eating, maybe going to the nail shop, taking a nap, and whatever the female equivalent is of laying on the couch and scratching one’s balls.

Instead, the mail came. And in the mail there was a letter from PNC Bank’s collections department.

Oh, yes they did.

I haven’t blown up like that in awhile. I was shaking. I was screaming. I confessed to wanting to do very illegal things to every PNC branch in the city. I called several different numbers (because of course they kept bouncing me around) and bitched at every single customer service rep I talked to. I don’t normally do that, because I know that most people are just doing their jobs and trying to scrape by themselves. But I now have a pretty decent amount of contempt for all bank employees, since this is some divide and conquer bullshit. Give broke people a somewhat decent job screwing over other broke people, all the while gambling away their retirement funds…it all makes me sick.

But what I found out from one poor woman who had the shitty fate of talking to me was that when I settled my account once and for all (or so I thought) about a month ago, the money that I handed over never went through and I was once again responsible for $137.74. That amount includes a $29.95 fraudulent charge that I disputed, the investigation fee (since they somehow found in favor of the merchant, which is a whole other WTF), and a couple overdraft fees thrown in for good measure.

“So I give your institution money that I can’t afford to hand over and which your institution does not deserve, all in the name of just getting you out of my life, and you guys lost that money?”

“Well, ma’am…” she said WITH ATTITUDE.

“Oh, well, that’s a real crackerjack operation you guys are running over there. Seriously. Awesome fucking work. I’ll go to the branch AGAIN and settle this AGAIN.”

When I got to the bank, I sat down with a guy (let’s call him “Skippy”) I’d dealt with at least two other times in this debacle and who had been a douche to me before. I considered the possibility that I would leave that building in handcuffs and charged with assault and like, terroristic communist threats or something.

As Skippy explained to me, when I settled my account the last time, they sent the general ledger credit slip to their collections department and that department rejected the slip for some reason. Skippy insisted that I had done nothing wrong and could consider myself free and clear.

“Oh. So you guys made a mistake.”

“Eh, no, it’s not a mistake,” Skippy replied. The collections department rejects these slips for any number of reasons, like the teller didn’t sign her name clearly enough or didn’t list all of the information on the slip.

“So you guys made a mistake.”

“No,” Skippy insisted. They had done everything correctly with my payment, just in a way that resulted in me getting a threatening letter from the collections department.

“I’m sorry, Skippy. I may be a writer and not a financial whiz like you kids here, but that sounds like you guys made a mistake.”

Skippy, ever the optimist, maintained that they had fucked up in the correct manner, and that if I received any more letters detailing their stellar operations to let him know, so that he and I could again discuss the details of the awesome way that they continue taking money from me and being idiots.

What’s really fucked up is that there is no “closing” my account with them. If PNC insists that I arranged payment to a merchant through them, they will re-open my account to “honor their agreement,” once again putting me in arrears. And considering I already had one fraudulent charge to a business that I’d never heard of and never received anything from honored by PNC, it seems reasonable for me to worry that they have the power to conjure up any number of charges that they can honor and bleed me for money for who knows how long.

All in all, trying to close my account has cost me close to $2,000, mostly in fees and trying to clear the new and exciting negative balances that they keep dreaming up. I never did get my hands on my economic stimulus. All of that went to PNC.

Do you want to know why we’re in an economic crisis right now? Because the people who run our financial institutions and businesses are shitty business people. They are stupid. They don’t understand how economics work and think that their crafty methods of screwing people over are brilliant moves. We have a generation of failures running this country.

As I just said when I shared this on Google Reader, “There’s an Ice Cube ‘It Was a Good Day,’ ‘didn’t even have to use my AK’ joke in here somewhere and I just can’t get it out.”

Why, yes, I am avoiding thinking about my Grammar mid-term that starts in an hour and a half. Why do you ask?

In somewhat stark contrast to the picture below, in which my brand-new son and I clung to each other, skin on skin, I report to you that I spent a good portion of the evening bellowing, “DO. YOUR. HOME. WORK. NOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWW.” And throwing in a, “There will be no TV ever again and if you think I’m joking, just TRY IT!” for good measure.

Gah. Today was perfectly fine until we tried to drive home and got stuck in the most horrendous traffic ever. We didn’t actually get home until 7 and I was just going to make us some grilled cheese sammiches, because what’s better after a stressful fall day than grilled cheese? But, lo, there was no cheese.

In the midst of this meal angst, the baby was just being…I don’t know…purposefully and infuriatingly obtuse about his homework. I went to help him and read the directions aloud: “Read the words in the box…Come. Good. On. That….Uh.”

Hi. I just got back from the doctor’s office and getting my breast ultrasounded. Everything is cool. I had to wait forever, but I really didn’t mind since I walked out of there relieved and I really can’t say the same for a few of the women that were also there.

I hopped on the bus back to work and after squeezing out of the crowded bus past a few Pitt students who were “from Philly” (read: King-of-Prussia, because if you’re from Philly, why do you look like you were just dropped into the middle of Baghdad when you’re only in Oakland?), I scrounged around my office for a little snack since I was starving. But since I had been at the hospital and on the bus, I didn’t want to just eat something without sanitizing my hands a little bit first.

Now, it’s no surprise to anyone that knows me that I’m a little immature and much of my humor is of the Beavis-and-Butthead variety. So, it’s really unfortunate that we use hand sanitizer that is “hand lotion formula.” What this means is that it has the same liquid consistency, but it’s a translucent white color. And it looks like…well, you tell me:

What’s really bad is that the cheap pumps on the hand sanitizer bottles tend to malfunction and squirt this substance on whatever or whoever is in its aim. Believe me. I’ve accidentally squirted this stuff on my shirt before and tried to hide both my snickering and my blushing, since I’m not sure anyone gets (or wants to get) what is so funny. This morning I got it all over the office couch which luckily has vinyl seats. It just looked rather gross when I wiped it up.

This ad is a perfect example of why it is always a good idea to have a copywriter and/or editor who is totally immature when you are working on the script for a new commercial.*

In case you missed that, Shawn Johnson actually uttered the sentence, “It makes my taco pop.” WHO DOES THAT?????

* hiring parties should contact me at kdiddy.org@gmail.com. I’ll send you my resume!

Stiff greetings to you this morning. I pulled my neck in my sleep last night and am now rocking the “I have no movable parts!” look. I rolled over around 5 a.m. and The Pain hit. I started yelping and my very sweet husband, thinking I was having a nightmare, spoke such concerned and comforting words as, “Hey! HEY! What. Is. Wrong. With. You?” Since it was 5 a.m. and I was still grappling with the searing pain, I explained, “NECK. PAIN. FUCKIN. BAD THING. OWWWW.”

And because I am the universe’s bitch, right after the neck spasm, I launched into a sneezing fit. It felt SO GOOD.

Not much else to report. Tracey visited me this weekend and Snarky Amber was in town, as well. On Saturday night we had something of a slumber party, though slightly different from the slumber parties of my youth. We were all passing out by 11:30, no one’s training bra found its way to the freezer, and I had a bit of a hangover in the morning.

Because I’m awesome, I didn’t take any pictures of our antics.

Anyway.

I bent the husband’s ear for a few minutes this morning explaining my conspiracy theories surrounding the McCain/Palin campaign.

I know I don’t delve into politics too much on here, and that’s on purpose. Mostly I just don’t have the energy to get into it with internet people but I’m also just not that compelled to write about it.

But dude. Something is UP. This whole election is such a circus, more so than usual, and the GOP’s decisions are just bizarre. It’s really starting to freak me out that they seem so willing to just throw this election. What are they up to? What do they have planned? What is with this soap opera shit? SOMEBODY TELL ME WHAT’S GOING ON.

Or don’t. Maybe I don’t really want to know. I suppose it says something about me that Joe Rogan totally gets me. But dude: