kdiddy.org

Last year, when I went to BlogHer, I didn’t feel like I had really taken in the conference. This was mostly my fault, as I cut too loose the first night that I was there and spent the first day of the conference recovering. The rest of the time, I mostly focused on soaking up as much time as possible with people that I had been friends with online. It was fun, of course, but not really the best use of the hundreds of dollars that I had spent to go there.

This year, I was determined to get my money’s worth. See, I had bought my ticket back when we thought the husband was about to start a job, so I nearly burned a hole in my MasterCard, reasoning that we would be paying it off within a few weeks. Then the job evaporated and I agonized over whether or not I should move forward with this trip that we definitely could not afford. But, obviously, I decided to go, resolving to squeeze every last drop, knowing that I probably wouldn’t be back.

But my experiences of every day that I was there can be summarized into one of a few categories: Struggles that I Overcame, Parties that I Attended; Sessions that I Attended; Injuries Sustained; People on Whom I Mouth-Breathed; Pictures that I Took.

Let’s start with Thursday.

Struggles that I Overcame:

I screwed up planning my flights and landed at JFK at 4:30. I nearly fell off the airplane because they let us off right onto the tarmac and I didn’t know you could do that unless you were the Beatles or on a private jet. Amber swooped by in a taxi and then I got to experience rush hour in New York City. My jaw is clenching just thinking about it. About two hours and countless brushes with death later, we burst into the hotel looking for our fellow MamaPop writers, who were in the lobby bar last we’d heard. And Amber was all, “I HAVE TO PEE!” and I was all, “NOBODY’S HERE AND THEY’RE NOT ANSWERING THEIR PHONES!” Eventually I got a hold of Danielle, who told me they were at the SocialLuxe party. I apologized to Amber as I ditched her around the taxi line because I really wanted to go to a party that I’d been invited to at the Martha Stewart offices.

Parties that I Attended:

The aforementioned Martha Stewart thing, which was…well…I don’t want to say it was bad. It wasn’t. But it took forever to get there and then we stood in line so that we could stand in another line so that we could shuffle through the hallway and then squish into a tiny room with an admittedly amazing view. And I’m not complaining about that, really, I was just worn out at that point and gripped a glass of Prosecco and kept an eye out for the male model that was dispensing refills. At one point, we called him over and his eyes widened in alarm. Whatever, dude, just stand there and look pretty with a heavy hand while I veer into baby-cougar territory. Kelli then asked him if he watched Party Down and he got all irritated. But maybe he just doesn’t have cable.

When I told my mom and grandmother that I was going to this thing, their eyes rolled back in their heads and they clutched their pearls and asked what I was going to wear. (The correct answer to that, by the way, is a black shirt and white and black skirt and thirty buckets of sweat and angst.) But rumor was that Martha was in and out promptly at 6 leaving us to mingle with the staffers who were good sports but who were obviously thinking, “I’m so glad I could stay at work until 8 on a Friday so that this chick from Pittsburgh could stare at me.”

On our way out, I noticed the test kitchen and pressed my nose up against the window. And then I tried the door and the security guard made a move toward me. It was locked, but I guess he was concerned that I was going to try to take a refrigerator with me.

I was glad that I got to see the offices, but my first private party left me with the impression that they aren’t really worth the strife that they seem to cause. They’re just parties, man.

Sessions that I Attended:

Nothing official was happening that day but we did have an impromptu panel in our hotel room. I don’t remember what we talked about.

Injuries Sustained:

Four insect bites of unknown origin that are still red and angry looking nearly a week later.

People on Whom I Mouth-Breathed:

At Martha, I met the Bitchin’ Wife, KBestOliver, Tall Tara, Always Home and Uncool,
Cagey and two of her lovely friends (we shared a cab over there and I’m so sorry that I didn’t get their names), and got in Miss Grace’s faces who had the stunning Califmom with her. I also met Charlie for the first time, who gave me the fiercest hug ever.

After our hotel room session, we ventured about two blocks away from the hotel to find food and managed to find the one diner in New York City that closes at like 10:30. Part of the closing process includes glaring at the table full of bloggers who are shoveling food into their faces and having a cook pointedly punch a pile of meat. I don’t know, man.

Pictures that I took:

Just these two, with my phone.

Vintage Heimlich instructions in 10 point typeface posted in a corner of the room that will surely be of great use should someone start choking.

Tracey is not falling asleep at the table but taking pictures of our dinner mates from an artsy angle.

I know multi-part BlogHer posts are obnoxious but that’s too bad for you. More tomorrow

I’ve been limping around the internet as kdiddy since mid-2001. The husband, who was then the boyfriend, was helping me to come up with a new moniker as I began the slow, painful process of cutting my ties with my AOL address. At the time, Puff Daddy had recently christened himself Pdiddy, which was the most hilarious example of celebrity self-aggrandizing at the time. Obviously, this was before the Hiltons and all of their dingleberry knockoffs started making headlines on CNN, the “people” from Jersey Shore, and the Palins. Now, the Pdiddy debacle seems almost quaint and humble, a mere re-branding. No biggie (ohh, see what I did there?).

The boyfriend suggested kdiddy and after laughing heartily about how clever and pop-culture-savvy we were, I adopted kdiddy for my first non-AOL email. Well, first non-AOL email aside from my Pitt email, which was nothing too special. And I barely used it because up until my senior year, I had to access it using Pine and since I’ve already established that I was then a dedicated AOL user, you can imagine my bafflement at something like Pine. I vaguely remember never mastering some very basic task, like replying, maybe. It was some contorted keyboard command and I don’t have Rachmaninoff hands.

Since then, I’ve encountered other kdiddys (kdiddies?) and while I usually get a twinge of indignation, I’m fine with not being the most original person on the internet. What I hadn’t anticipated was Pdiddy dubbing his proteges with names that are variations of his.

My Twitter handle, @kdiddy (duh), is very close to that of Pdiddy protege Kalenna, which is @KDIDDYBOP.

I remember a couple of months ago seeing a reply to me pop up on Twitter that didn’t make much sense, but I dismissed it as spam. But these misfires now happen at least twice a month, and though they seem to be corrected and/or deleted after a short time, I always delight in seeing my “name” mistakenly mentioned in a tweet that is usually in all caps and contains excessive punctuation and use of “LOL.”

Case in point:

“My brother @kdiddy Okewa booked the Monica TOUR!!!! oh lay do it!!!! L O V E! God is @ workkkkk. Let’s Goooooo!!!!”

Apparently, I’m going on tour with Monica. If it were 1995 right now, I’m be PUMPED. Just one of dem days.

“Leo’s RT @KDIDDYBOP: RT @DRockStar2010: RT @DawnRichard: OBAmA’S bRTHDAY IS TODAY …. mIne is tomorrow ….@kdiddy”

My birthday isn’t actually until October 31st, but I am perfectly happy to celebrate with this fine group of people. I mentioned I’m going to be in New York this weekend, right? Diddy, can you hear me?

I have not yet worked up the nerve to reply to any of these tweets, but if I do, I fully intend to bluff my way into some kind of super-group through the cunning use of Twitter. Then you can say you knew me when.

I am about two hours away from a three-day weekend so today I’m doing pre-mini-vacation stuff like working for no more than three minutes (or as long as my attention span allows) and then doing stuff like taking pictures of myself in the ladies’ room mirror.

Something that I’m hoping my running and other exercises will help me with is my posture. When I was a ballet dancer, I of course had pristine posture. But over the years my shoulders have steadily slumped down and forward. Quitting ballet made me less aware of my body, I gained weight (both the normal amount that comes when you begin consuming food after a 10-year hiatus and the extra stuff that I packed on because, well, “It comes deep-fried? Can you put some wine on it, too?!?! EXCELLENT!”), got a desk job where I spend a lot of time furiously typing, and also the regular beatings that the universe rains down on me.

I was sorting through clothes the other day to get some stuff together to give to the Vets and found a dress that I bought two years ago. I remember wearing it to see Eddie Izzard and the husband took a picture of me in it and I couldn’t believe how decrepit I looked, just because of my posture.

I’m wearing it again today and it reminded me of my efforts to stand up straight. Allow me to illustrate.

Standing up straight.

Slumping, though you can’t tell the difference too much. So let’s go for the dreaded side view.

Standing up straight.

Slumping. Also, hey when’s the baby due?

That second side view is from a slightly different location because someone walked into the bathroom right before I was going to take it, so I had to scramble and act like I was just pacing around the bathroom looking at my phone…because that’s far more normal. It also resulted in this picture:

Anyway, I assure that I’m not exaggerating my posture in any of those pictures. If I relax to the point where my typical posture is, that’s what it looks like.

Maybe I’ll start walking around with a book on my head, old school style.

You know that site People of Wal-Mart? I’ve never really liked it because it seemed really mean-spirited and I am, as I’ve mentioned, sensitive about the fact that we shop at Wal-Mart a lot.* But I don’t think I can really decry the meanness of it since I generally laugh at stuff like latfh.com and antiduckface.com. So, as long as I’m not a potential target of mockery, I’m cool. At least I’m honest about my hypocrisy.

Anyway, last weekend we stopped at the store and I was wearing this sundress that had a drawstring-type embellishment at the collar. I had tossed some tomatoes into a produce bag and because I never bother with twist ties, I quickly whipped the top of the bag into a knot. When I went to put the bag into the cart, I was surprised to find the top half of my body dipping into the cart, as well. In my haste, I had somehow managed to entwine the drawstring into the knot of the produce bag.

I picked at the knot but couldn’t seem to find where it began. So, I did what any normal person would do and let the bag of tomatoes hang off of the front of me while I went looking for the husband to help.

His facial expression changed from confusion to amused horror as he saw me approaching, plastic bag of produce swinging from my neck. “Could you help me, please? I tied these to me and I can’t get them off,” I said. “Whaaa…Why….Wha…” he stammered, before giving up and picking at the knot. He eventually had to rip the bag off, leaving me with some remnants that were slightly easier to remove.

I survived the rest of that shopping trip unscathed, though certain I would find myself on the aforementioned site.

* Mostly big grocery shopping trips because the average cost is lower and I have no interest in taking on the equivalent of a part-time job clipping coupons, though more power to all of the frugality bloggers who rock that approach.

There are times, usually when I’m doing something domestic, like cooking or baking, or lamenting my perpetually messy and dusty house, when I get a twinge of wanting to devote myself to wifey things. This gets even more perverted when I think about how much I would like to micro-manage our food; have a garden, do all of our baking, try to do everything that I can to make sure that what we eat is the best that it can be for us and the earth. /hippie

But these are things that, when I’m honest with myself, I just don’t have the time or, more importantly, the energy to take on. I can’t just pack every second that I’m not at work with housework. I need to relax and sit sometimes.

Anyway, I told my friend Angela the other day that I was having a Diane-Keaton-in-Baby-Boom moment because I had some down time at work and found myself searching real estate websites for farms for sale.

Farms.

Turns out Angela sometimes has the same urges for a more scaled-down and self-sustaining existence, one in which we don’t rely on companies to do the right thing but instead grow our own food and whatnot, go to bed when it gets dark, wake up with the sun, work, retire to the porch, send the baby outside to play all day or do his chores.

One thing that I like about living in a city is that you are always coming face-to-face with the fact that being part of a society means relying on each other. From macro things like paying taxes so everyone can have roads and sidewalks and schools and fire departments, to more micro things like the bus driver coming on time so that I can get to work and help the people that I work with everyday.

But at the same time, I find myself longing to be away, quiet, and having some semblance of control over my environment. Plus, Pennsylvania has some really beautiful country.

However.

I realize that this is highly idealized vision of such a life, that it’s incredibly hard, physical work that I’m just not used to. And I know that, realistically, I would get so sick of living in the middle of nowhere after a short time.

There’s also the not insignificant matter that I’m somewhat terrified of the country, having seen too many horror movies where psychotic, mutant axe murders lurk in the trees, waiting to chop me into bits and bake me in a casserole to be served to their inbred, mutant family.

I told my mom about my farming idea the other day and she immediately reminded me of the time we went to a family friend’s farm outside of Conneaut Lake and I got thoroughly freaked out by a group of kids who went to play in the corn field. At night. And there was some flood light or something that bounced their shadows along the barn and it looked so creepy that I remarked to someone, “Ten children went in, but only five will come out.” I sought refuge in the farmhouse, the walls of which were covered in deer heads. I’m not in any way opposed to hunting, but when you’re trying to calm down, decapitated deer aren’t the most soothing sight.

Another obstacle to my rural fantasies is my incredibly sensitive skin, which achieved some kind of notoriety this past weekend by getting horrifically burnt while I was firmly in the shade of a wooden structure. It took a few hours to really develop, but on Saturday night, the husband came in late from a bachelor party (which did not include strippers but instead consisted of poker, cigars, domestic beer, firing guns, and watching Ultimate Fighting, aka The Most Dude Agenda Ever) to find me half naked in bed, an alarming shade of red, covered in damp rags and making some kind of, “Ehhhhhhhh,” sound. He couldn’t wrap his head around my ability to get burned under those circumstances and has since teased me at every opportunity. Last night, for example, on our way to the movies, he asked me if I had sunblock on. “That projector gets pretty bright, man.”

(Aside: the weekend before last I managed to get extremely drunk from three beers. I feel like all of my defenses are failing me.)

The final big obstacle to my farm-to-be is that the husband has absolutely no interest in moving out of the city. We either split up and I forge ahead on my own or I drag him out there and just let the axe murders behind my house know when he’s whining about the lack of sidewalks and public transit.

One of the ongoing sources of conflict between my mom and my husband and me is the amount of junk that the baby comes home with when he spends time with her.

Full disclosure: my child is spoiled. His toys and belongings have at least some presence in nearly every room in our house. We buy stuff for him (rarely, because a) we’re broke and b) he really doesn’t need more crap), and then he has two grandmothers, two grandfathers, an aunt, two great-grandmothers, a great-grandfather, and a slew of extended relatives who think he is so swell that he deserves another Bionicle. The husband and I have had to be stern/mean to our well-meaning families explaining to them that all of the plastic junk that they buy him is, in fact, junk, that he has a lot of trouble distinguishing between wants and needs (and, yes, we know he’s only 8 but it really feels like we’re fighting an unwinnable war here), that the rate at which new toys come in is way too fast, and that we simply do not have the time nor the desire to constantly find places for new toys or to sort through and get rid of old toys.

Our house is big, over 4,000 square feet, and there’s no reason that we should have a hard time finding room for stuff.

Many of the assorted grandparents have listened and curtailed their gift-giving. My mom continues to buy him trinkets and whatnot when they go out, despite me sometimes tearfully telling her not to. She sees my house. She knows it’s always messy and it stresses me out. And, really, I thought the problem sort of ended there.

The baby spent the night at her house on Saturday and Sunday he arrived home bearing two toys from Kawaii, a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, a big bottle of Sprite, and…lord help me…a can of Axe Body Spray.

Her justification: “Well, he wanted this $50 bottle of cologne at Sephora so we got this instead.”

Why is everyone just apparently drunk all the time? How did I miss this nonsensical party that everyone lives in now?

Anyway, the combination of the Cheetos, Sprite, and Axe gave me a glimpse of the future. Really, I thought I had a few years before my kid staunchly eats nothing but junk food and smells of the signature fragrance of sexual and emotional immaturity and the desperation that only horny teens can emit.

Much like skunks and mustard gas, Axe performs a hostile takeover of each and every molecule every time it is released. About two hours after the substance had entered our house, the baby had squirted himself several times and was starting to ensure that his toys smelled pimp musk by giving them the treatment.

The Axe was then confiscated and is now residing on top of our fridge (right next to his DS, which was confiscated last week and MY GOD has it been a trying time in the kdiddy household), probably making everything up there smell weird. The next step is to gain entry into my mom’s house and set up some kind of Axe bomb.

Sigh. Anyhah. Sad Little known fact about me: some times if the husband is out and I’m by myself on a weekend night, I drink beers and watch music videos and talk shit on them. I remember when the video for Ciara’s “One Two Step” was in heavy rotation and around 2 and 1/2 minutes into the video, a guy douses himself and the air around him with Axe. It makes me choke every time I see it.

This morning, I admitted something to myself: I’m neurotic about lunch.

And, like any good mother, I blame my son for this.

He’s a picky eater, though much MUCH better than he used to be. But at any given time, the list of things that he will eat for lunch is pretty short. So, I’m always trying to find some balance of actual calorie input and health for him. Currently, he will eat half of a sandwich, consisting of bread (wheat or rye) and lunch meat (we’re on a chicken breast kick right now), a cup of applesauce (no sugar added or high fructose corn syrup), sometimes a cheese stick (I go totally mainstream here and give him Kraft), sometimes a few baby carrots and/or some other fruit or veggie.

His old lunch box was one of those canvassy, zipper joints that was kind of small and useless. A few times, I let him use my Laptop Lunch and recently that company came out with some new bento lunch systems.
When our tax return came, I took a few bucks and ordered him one, along with some extra containers. Today was his second day using it. He had a sandwich, some carrots, some graham crackers, and some strawberries. He seemed a little indifferent about it yesterday. I hope he gets more enthusiastic about it.

I had a Laptop Lunch because I have been on a quest for the perfect lunch vessel for some years. I liked the Laptop Lunch, but I felt that it was just too small for me. I like to bring a pretty big salad, a “main” dish, dressing and croutons on the side, a snack, and my breakfast. And if I don’t have what I consider a good lunch, I get all anxious about it. I was explaining this to someone the other day as they eyed my tote bag of containers of various sizes. I needed a change.

Around the same time that I bought the baby his Laptop Lunch, I bought a tiffin from Happy Tiffin. I heard about tiffins last summer in my business class when we watched a movie about dabbawalas.

My tiffin arrived yesterday and I was so excited to pack it up today.

Here we have my salad and my bagel for breakfast…

This is my wrap sandwich that contains a layer of fresh spinach and a helping of my tweaked version this Curried Tofu Salad. (I need to take a little more time preparing that salad the next time that I make it. It’s too watery this time from the veggies and tofu. But very tasty.) The other container holds my croutons and dressing, plus a snack of sunflower seeds and dried cranberries in one of those silicone cupcake baking cups, which is a trick that I learned from watching blogs about bento-style lunches.

And here it is, all stacked up, latched, and ready to go. The only problem that I’ve had so far is finding a fork that will fit. Also, obviously, this isn’t microwave-safe, so I’m not sure what I’ll do if I ever want to bring leftovers to heat up. And if I were to bring something that was already warm, I would need to keep it away from things like my salad.

Like I said, I’m neurotic about lunch.

But so far, I’m pretty happy with it.

Speaking of food, I’m going to have some pretty big posts on the matter coming up in the next few days, so be sure to check back, especially if you’re in the Pittsburgh area.

I shouldn’t call it punishment, but sometimes it feels like it. I’m doing Couch to 5k.

I finished my third week on Saturday and I’m honestly kind of surprised that I’ve made it this far. The first few days I thought for sure that I would die, but I can actually feel myself getting stronger bit by bit. And I’ve been really pushing myself to finish the jogging intervals no matter what.

I’ve never jogged as regular activity. When I was a ballet dancer, it was generally discouraged because of the risk of shin splints and the different muscle use (read: your thighs might get too big). So, learning to jog is very humbling. And I think it’s really making me recognize that, while I’m not old, I’m definitely not as young as I used to be. I feel pretty certain that if I had decided to take up jogging, say, five years ago, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. Now, my knees hurt and my breathing sucks. The 30ish pounds that I’ve put on since I started grad school and my main physical activity became typing and freaking the hell out* dance gloriously around my mid-section as I start to resemble Fred Sanford during one of his claims of The Big One.

The game has changed for me. I was very in shape from ballet when I was younger and retained a lot of that through a good portion of my 20s. Picking up a physical activity wasn’t A Thing. Now it is.

I had actually been toying with the idea of doing the Couch to 5k for a number of years after a friend on LiveJournal mentioned it. And I made an attempt last year which resulted in me deciding that I don’t like treadmills for much the same reason that I was terrified of escalators when I was little. I mean, I don’t REALLY believe that the treadmill is going to eat me, unlike that automatic foot-eating monster in Gimbel’s that forced my mom to go the long way to find a safe and non-hungry-for-tiny-toes elevator. But the speed that I had to go to run was just slightly too fast and remember one time thinking, “I really should have put that emergency clip thing on my shirt. This could end poorly.” Plus, the first few weeks of C25K have a lot of switching back and forth between running and walking, and that made for a lot of button pressing while hyperventilating, running, and trying not to fly off the treadmill and into the bench weights.

I’m not doing much in the way of calorie restriction or anything. Just eating healthy foods when I’m hungry and trying not to snack too much. A few people have told me I’m looking good and I’m just going with that for now. My scale has dust on it.

I’ll start week four hopefully tomorrow. I was going to start it today but we went roller skating on Saturday and I have a monster blister on the bottom of my foot. Sexy.

*By the way, my school was just ranked the 8th most stressful school in the country by the Daily Beast, which isn’t exactly The Source on such matters, but whatever, it’s documentation that I slayed that particular dragon and/or am certifiable for attempting such a thing.

I’m pretty sure that every spring around this time, my brain goes to work blocking my memories of how stressed I get. This is always an incredibly busy time for me at work and yesterday I was thinking about how the three springs prior to this one, I was taking two graduate classes (and getting As). I really can’t even begin to imagine, nor do I want to, how completely freaked out I must have been. And I really don’t know how I didn’t a) flunk out of grad school b) get fired or c) permanently alienate my family and anyone who had the misfortune of coming into contact with me.

I voiced this concern last night. “You were annoying, that’s for sure,” replied the husband. Gee, thanks.

That saying that God will never give you more than you can handle might have some truth to it, provided that God or some universal force does, in fact, exist and determines exactly what pile of shit we’ll fall into and God or this universal force has either a drinking problem or is just sadistic and prickish (because, really, WTF?). My evidence for this is that the baby has been pretty well-behaved up until this year.

He’s not up to anything really delinquent. All of the flies in our vicinity still have wings and he has not seen the inside of a juvenile detention center. But something in him realized that some bad behavior would no longer send his mother completely off the edge so he decided to try some out.

A few weeks ago, I received a phone call at work from his teacher, who sounded so completely DONE that I very nearly offered to buy her a drink. The baby had incrementally raised his level of douchiness over the preceding week or so. At first it was mostly small, isolated incidents of not listening, but by the time I received the call, he was nearing Lord of the Flies levels.

I listened quietly as his teacher, who I know is a reasonable person with as much patience as one should have in a second-grade teaching position, listed the increasingly assy things he had done. I wasn’t entirely surprised. A lot of it was stuff that we struggled with at home, just amplified by the presence of other 8-year-olds.

I apologized and immediately set up a parent-teacher conference, screamed via email to the MamaPop writers that I was sending him to Dutch country, and then the husband and I started crafting the crack-down.

We drew up a contract that outlined the behaviors that had to improve considerably over the period of two weeks and the privileges that would be removed during that time. No DS. No Wii. No Cartoon Network. Earlier bedtime (which will remain in place because I think he might have been a little sleep-deprived, contributing to his behavior). No arguing. No whining. Doing what he’s asked to do the first time. We would evaluate his performance in two weeks. If he had improved, he would start to get some of his privileges back. If he hadn’t, we would take away more stuff: no TV, no iPod, even earlier bedtime, no excursions with grandparents. No fun or joy, basically.

All three of us signed it and posted it on the fridge. We explained to him that it’s bad enough that he wasn’t behaving well for us, but we were disappointed/PISSED that he wasn’t behaving at school.

He got it. He cried, mostly because he was going to miss his DS, but partly because he felt pretty rotten about screwing up. A couple of times I’ve explained to him exactly how and why I get stressed and upset and how his behavior affects that (ie, I’m just trying to make a nice life for us and it’s hard and you being a jerk makes me feel like crap) and while still over his head, I think it twinges his empathy. So that’s good.

By the time we went for our parent-teacher conference, his teacher informed us that he had done a 180. So, I think I’ll go ahead and put a W in our column.

I don’t know. It felt kind of severe, but we really wanted him to understand how not cool it is to behave like a jackass. It’s an important life lesson, you know?

Of course, it might not be entirely his fault. Last night, while looking through the baby’s iPod, the husband said to me, “Did you put The Chronic on here?”

“Um…maybe?”

It appears I was not paying close attention when adding music to the baby’s iPod and added an album that, while undoubtedly a classic and one that I hope will be part of his regular rotation in the future, is not entirely appropriate for an 8-year-old and his spongy brain. Tonight’s project: re-evaluate iPod contents.

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.