Homework, the fun kind

Good (Enough) Woman assigned me something entertaining over at her place: seven things I haven't mentioned before on my blog. Just the thing that might get me out of a writing rut, GEW! So thanks, and here we go ...


1. I used to have curly hair because my mother thought I might look nice with a perm. Not long after my tenth birthday, she took me and my stick-straight Asian tresses to her hairdresser. I was nervous -- no one had ever cut my hair except Troubadour Mom (nor, for that matter, had anyone ever processed it). But I had visions. Oh, such visions -- of sleek, thick, raven-black waves rippling down my back like braids freshly undone at the end of a school day. Only the effect would be permanent! How, I ask you, could I have resisted?

I put myself in the hands of the hairdresser, let her wrap my scalp in curling rods and douse me in chemicals that smelled like rotten eggs. I remember her explaining to me that one solution would break the bonds in my hair while the other would re-fuse them so each strand would conform to the shape of the rods. Rods, braids; same idea, right? I trusted her completely.

After nearly three hours in the hairdresser's chair, I got my first look at the result. It was frizzy. Cloud-like. A wiry, raven-black mass that could hardly move, much less cascade. I went home and told my mother I liked it, even though as soon as I saw my little sisters' still-unsullied locks, I wanted to cry.


2. If you've ever permed your hair, you know how awful it is when the perm is half grown-out. Because I looked so bad during that in-between stage, I continued to get perms for the next thirteen years. I had to finish college before I got up the guts to let nature put my hair back the way it was supposed to be. It took almost two years.


3. Continuing the bad-hair theme: I have watched every episode of MacGyver ever filmed. Including the two made-for-TV movies that followed a few years after the series ended. While Richard Dean Anderson's mullet did little to inspire me to get out of the vicious perm cycle, watching the man escape from various tight spots did turn out to have educational value one summer when my sisters and I got trapped in an elevator with our grandfather, who started to panic and have chest pain. Remembering what MacGyver had demonstrated many times, I wedged my fingers into the crack at one end of the elevator's single door and rolled it open. (The car was already right at our floor, so there was no need to do anything really wild like climbing up the shaft, thank the gods.) Once Grandpa got some nitroglycerin in him, all was well again.


4. I age people. Not by getting them trapped in elevators -- I mean that, when I've got nothing to do in a public location (say, while waiting for the bus), I look at people, particularly children, and imagine what their faces will look like when they're older. I don't know how long I've been doing this, but I'm guessing it's been going on since I was a kid. I say this because when I was a sophomore in college, I recognized a girl whom I randomly bumped into at a start-up meeting for a creative writing group. I hadn't seen her or kept in touch with her since I moved away from our home state at the end of third grade, but I was 99.9 percent sure of her identity when I saw her from across the room -- something familiar about the shape of her slightly turned-up nose, the position of her eyes in relation to it, still squinty whenever she smiled. "Christina?" I said. "It's CT."

Her jaw dropped. "I totally didn't recognize you!" she said. "Wow, your hair's curly now ..."


5. I took my first bath last month. Wait, before you run away from any imagined stench, let me explain! On an ordinary day, I'm a shower girl -- have been since the day I could stand in the stall without slipping. (It was easier for my mother to get three girls clean using a removable shower head rather than bending over the edge of the tub to scrub us while kneeling.) On occasion, she would let my sisters and me play in the tub with about three inches of water in it, but definitely no filling it all the way. We lived very frugally.

So the house we bought last spring has an enormous soaking tub in the master bathroom. The weekend before D and I were to leave for all our holiday visits, I decided to treat myself to a proper luxury bath. I lit candles, put on soft music, ran the water till the tub was full. I added the bath salts we'd received as a favor from somebody's wedding and body wash for some bubbles. Sank in, melted. Bliss.


6. I do my best thinking in the shower. Sometimes this leads to fairly comical moments of near-indecency -- if I come up with an idea I'm afraid I'll forget (which is a strong possibility, the forgetting), I'll jump right out from under the spray to go write my thoughts down. Most of the time, I'll grab a towel, but I'm sure that many years ago, when my sisters and I were sharing a bathroom, I streaked past them at least once. You'd think I would have learned by now to put a piece of paper and something to write with by the sink, but sadly, I have yet to do that. And if you're wondering, no, baths aren't the same. In fact, they cause the opposite effect: total mind vacation.


7. I would not have reclaimed my girl-ness without my sisters. Even though they are younger than I am (or perhaps because of that), they were the ones who taught me, among other things, how to put on makeup, how to use a razor, how to treat myself to pretty underwear. These were things my parents didn't want to encourage, and they had good reasons (probably influenced to a degree by the disastrous perm but more likely born of the culture in which they grew up). By the time my sisters were old enough to handle eyeliner, though, the parents Troubadour had relaxed somewhat.

Thank goodness. My sisters were and continue to be the best teachers I've ever had.

Photo courtesy of Almost Dr. Sis

I'm passing this homework assignment along to these seven people (in no particular order), whose blogs I love reading:

• hypoglycemiagirl at hgg
• Medieval Woman at Purring Prophecy
• French Fancy at her blog of the same name
• Amanda at A Lady Scientist
• Mrs. Whatsit at I Love Science, Really
• Jade Park at Writing Under a Pseudonym
• Teresa at On Three Kids

No rush, though! And if I didn't name you, it's very likely that it's because you've already been tagged with this very recently and I didn't want to make you redo it. (I have a fairly small blog circle, but it does grow, even if it's a very gradual process ...)