Hair.

I'm generally not a girly kind of girl, but I do a lot of things with my hair. And when I say "a lot", I'm really not kidding: it has, at some point or another, literally been every color of the rainbow (or at least parts of it have been) except white and every length between almost 3 feet and just over 3 inches.

So, when I moved to LA, I had what was then a pretty normal, somewhere-between-chin-and-shoulders, some-color-between-red-and-blonde style going on. Then on one bright, sunny, probably near-100-degree day, I decided to go hiking in Griffith Park. If you've been reading this blog, you know that the phrase "Griffith Park" should be prefaced by the word "misadventure", and if you know me very well, you probably also know that I'm not the most coordinated person in the world. I ended up hitting my head on a tree, and of course it was a pine tree with a big bit of sticky sap on it.

I turned to Google: since pine sap apparently cannot be easily removed with shampoo, and since I'm the type of person to choose the quickest, easiest, and most importantly, simplest (see: Murphy's Law) option available to me, I decided that the best course of action would be to cut it out. The only problem was that I didn't have money for a professional hairdresser, but I had scissors, right?

I ended up cutting the sap glob out of my hair, which left an awkward chunk on the side, so I chopped the rest of it off to match. This resulted in my hair being very short, and for a few days after I cut it, looking very much like it had been blindly attacked with scissors. But, as my hair does, it managed to look cute after a couple weeks - in fact, the girl working at the $4000-sparkly-purse-store (right around the corner from the $284,000-handcrafted-from-unicorn-horn-watch-store) was the one who used the word "cute".

Since I can't leave my hair alone for more than a month, I decided to dye it red again. I went down to the drugstore to pick out a shade of red that hopefully wouldn't fade out in two weeks' time. As fate would have it, the L'Oreal Feria "Power reds" was on sale and I had a coupon! I bought it, figuring that it looked like the best candidate for "not fading out".

So I mixed up the dye and put it on. Now, I've never actually tried to dye my hair with blood before, but if I was to ever become a serial killer and decide that would be a fun idea, putting this dye on was exactly what I imagine dying my hair with blood would be like. Not only was it the right shade of dark, opaque red, but there was some sort of exothermic reaction going on that made it warm, and I was wearing some of those blue nitrile gloves that I had swiped from a lab. The only thing that was off was that of all the colors that bloodstains can be, bright pink isn't quite one of them, although salmon, grey, brown, and even a kind of greenish shade are possibilities.

If you've dyed hair before, you probably have read the part where it says to put the dye on unwashed hair. In the excitement, I had entirely forgotten that the reason my hair was unwashed was because when I tried to turn the shower on earlier, there hadn't been any hot water. So, when it was time to wash the dye out and I turned on the shower again, I suddenly realized that what I had just done was probably not a smart idea. As it turned out, there had been a maintenance person desperately trying to fix the problem all day, and with no success, but I figured if he'd been at it all day, he'd have to be close to fixing it, right? An hour later, still no hot water, and it's been in for WAY too long, so I decide to suck it up and rinse it out in the freezing cold shower. Cold water, aside from being painfully unpleasant to shower in, also happens to cause dyes and stains to set into things, whereas hot water usually makes them fade.

So, after leaving the dye in for 3x as long as I should have and rinsing it out in a way that made it brighter, what the box described as "auburn" turned out to be something on the border of "blood red" and "magenta".


(imagine this in the sunlight, so it's more intense and more magenta-ish)

Despite this incident, there was one awesome thing that happened: I was riding a bus, and sitting across me was an adorable, rather flamboyant teenager with blue hair. When the person sitting next to me got off the bus, he got up and sat down next to me. We didn't need to say anything like "nice hair" - we just looked at each other, and smiled, and went back to listening to our respective mp3 players and happily being different than everyone else on the bus.

So guess what I'm going to do over winter break, since I'll have weeks for it to fade back to a work-acceptable color?

I'M GOING TO DO IT AGAIN! Only, with warm water this time...

I'm here at last!

That's right! A couple days ago, I officially moved into my new apartment in LA. It's a bit smaller than I remembered, but the closet is a bit bigger than I remembered, so I guess it evens out?

The upsides are that I LOVE the weather, I like the neighborhood, I got a full-sized mattress for relatively cheap, and it looks like I'll survive.

One of the downsides is how EXPENSIVE it is to buy everything! It's not just that LA is an expensive city, but also that California has 9.75% sales tax. Now, I thought NYS had high tax, with it going up to about 8.5% in some places, but that's ridiculous. Someone tell me HOW this state is still so broke?!?! Also, getting new furniture-like things, cleaning supplies, food, and random household items that I couldn't pack (or didn't own) can add up pretty fast. The related problem I'm having is that I need a job.

But the craziest part? Beverly Hills. Where do I start on this topic?

I guess I should start with the fact that it's not too hard to get a bus out there (really, for everyone who whines about LA's public transportation system, it's not as bad as they make it out to be. Unless by "bad" they really meant "the buses are full of people with different skin colors than I have!") and someone mentioned to me that there was a farmer's market. Now, when I think "farmers market", I think of a bunch of farmers driving cargo vans or small trucks into a parking lot, setting up a canopy thing, and selling out of the back of the truck. That is possibly the furthest possible thing from what I found.

What I found was something that can only be compared to the interior food buildings at the NY State Fair, only it was all open-air with cloth over the walkways, and the little shops were permanent. Also, there were actual names on the shops (not like "Rolling Hills Farm, Nowhere, NY") and bars and souvenir stores and even a Starbucks. This is next to an outdoor mall, which seems to consist exclusively of designer clothing stores, fancy restaurants, and a movie theater.

This brings me to another point - well, actually another mall, which at first I got mixed up with CBS studios (another amusing story for another time). This mall was ridiculously large, where you had to go up something like five escalators just to get to the stores. Unfortunately, this mall also seemed to consist of nothing but designer clothing/jewelry/fragance/etc stores, with the exception of a food court, a Ferrari store (no kidding), and a completely incongrous Claire's.

The last, but perhaps the most fun thing, in Beverly Hills is the secondhand stores. Want a full-length leather trenchcoat? Five identical TV's? A set of brand-new glass tumblers from Ikea? Stuff with the labels still on it? It's a gold-mine of cheaply priced awesome stuff in excellent condition. I got a fully functional 20" CRT TV from there for $25 with the remote, and that's awesome because you can't even buy cheap CRT TV's from Walmart any more.

Oh, Walmart: That is my last topic for this post. Since Walmarts are as common (and sometimes as unwanted) as weeds in upstate NY, and also really cheap, I figured that would be the place to go. So, I found a super-Walmart, and went to it at 7 AM. Only, what did I find out? That this location opened at 8 AM. SERIOUSLY? I haven't seen nor heard of a Walmart that closed on a regular basis, ie, not only before Black Friday, since I was approximately 10 years old. For almost all of my life, you could just go to a Walmart at any hour of day or night, and the only thing that might be closed would be the 1-hour photo department. And, not only did this Walmart CLOSE, but it didn't open at 6 AM or any other time that would enable people to stop in before work or something like that. Ridiculous.