I got my hair cut yesterday & I don't like it. It's cut exactly the opposite of how I wanted it; I know it's the exact opposite because the only way to get it to look ok is to part it on the exact opposite side. She barely took any off so I know I'm being overly dramatic but all the same I feel schoolteacherish & stupid in it. Last nite, immediately post-haircut, I was coming out of the train when I ran into a cute boy I know. We went on a few dates ages ago but he is even better looking these days. He had a very substantial layer of snow on his hair & wool coat. The whole effect was very charming. He was being flirty, grabbing my arm & smiling, & then kind of standing there waiting for me to flirt back but I had forgotten how. I felt the wrongness of my hair & the wrongness of me & I gestured stupidly down at the subway station with my book. "You better go if you want to beat the snow," I said, inanely. I mean he was practically covered in it already.
"OK, yeah," he said. "Well, nice to see you."
& so with that I trudged home, cursing myself along the way. I knew that when you look & feel your worst you are as good as destined to run into someone you'd rather impress, but knowing that didn't make me feel any better.
I felt sort of sad about a whole host of other things too, not just my hair, & it didn't help that before I went to bed I read a few more pages of The Magus. The characters in the book were having a huge screaming awful fight at their hotel in Greece, which reminded me that once upon a time I also had a huge screaming awful fight at a hotel in Greece. I was with a girlfriend of mine, & we'd been traveling together just a bit too long, & for one reason or another when we got home from the bar we started going at it really bad. It was probably 2 or 3 or 4 in the morning & we disturbed the entire hotel. I think we were in Paros, or maybe it was Antiparos, but anyway it was one of the quieter islands. We made so much noise that the next morning the English girls across the hall slipped a note under our door psychoanalyzing our personalities & offering "helpful" (read: vicious) ideas on what we could do to fix ourselves. I can't quite remember exactly what the note said, but it was something like my friend should go to AA & lose 20 pounds, while I needed anti-depressants & a boob job. (The girls never saw us, but somehow my friend's weight & my boobs figured into the fight). Whatever it was it actually banded us together, against the English girls, so really they did resolve the whole thing.
I guess now that is a funny memory, rather than a sad one. Also, this post is all over the place, sorry.
