Helen, The Destroyer of Hair

I have been walking around with the longest of hair for two weeks now. I used to love having long hair when I was younger, and my hair was a walking homage to Farah Fawcett. I would have to continuously flip my hair to keep my vision clear, and even after my hair was gone, I kept the habit. More recently, I have decided that I would much rather not have as much hair, so keeping it short has been fine with me. In Utah, I had a fabulous hairdresser whom I never had to decide what I wanted; she would just go to work and send me on my way with some awesome hair and a smack on the bottom. 

Since moving from Utah, I have yet to get a good haircut. The first being done by a place in Hemet called, “Tangles.” At Tangles, I was helped by a woman who spoke very little English and the other stylists were busy clipping a dog’s hair in the chair next to mine. I walked out with a decent haircut that I made look better through copious amounts of hair product.

Since then, I have moved to Rancho Santa Margarita, and while I have fifteen people in the YSA ward who are licensed cosmetologists and I planned on going to one of them, until I couldn’t wait any longer to be rid of the mop on top of my head. So I walked about town to see if I could find a posh spot that would give me a good haircut, which fortunately enough was right across the street from me.

I went in the next day to see if I could do a walk-in, and they were happy to oblige. I spotted the woman I wanted to cut my hair, but she went to the back and got two Eastern European women to come out, who then proceeded to fight over who would get to cut my hair. The fatter of the two women won, and dragged me to the sink. At this point, I started to think, “Well at least she doesn’t have a dog in the chair next to me,” and decided to just go through with the cut.

When she sat me in the chair, she asked what I did and I told her that I was a water chemist. She didn’t really know what a water chemist was, but knew that I worked with water somehow and thought that I was somewhat like the Sparkletts’ water man. After clarifying that I don’t deliver water, but test water, the fog began to lift from her eyes. Right before she made the first cut, she asked, “So is safe to drink water from home? I don’t think it safe, so I buy water. It from Jay-Pan. A machine make.” I knew at this moment that this woman should not be cutting my hair, and before I could weasel my way out of the chair, she had made the first cut.

Her scissors were dull, which was the second problem I had with this woman cutting my hair because every cut would pluck out fifteen hairs along with it. My first problem was that this woman was dumber than the sack of potatoes that I had purchased earlier in the day, and in hindsight, I would have been better off getting my hair cut by the sack of potatoes. But she had started her work, and I just let her go along with it; I’ve had mediocre haircuts before, and I am confident in my ability to style over incompetence.

Her scissors started to take a magical toll on my hair, and my hair began to frizz more than it had ever done before in my life. By the end of the haircut, I had an afro to be jealous of, and she then received a phone call and left me in my seat for ten minutes. I contemplated how I was going to be able to cope with having an afro and how I desperately needed to go home and shower before I could be seen in public with this monstrosity of a doo. After her phone call, Helen went back to work and cut my hair again, this time shorter and more frizzed.

She finished my hair and started up again two more times before I said, “Thank you, it’s perfect.” I was ready to get out of the chair, even if I had to lie, cheat, or steal. She finished up by taking a glob of gel and casually sliding it halfway through my hair which made me then look like Cameron Diaz in, “There’s Something About Mary.” I looked in the mirror and realized, there is no fixing this haircut. No way in hell.  

 I got up to pay the woman with my card and the woman stared at me blankly. “Oh. I no take card. I take cash.” I looked at her dumbfounded and showed her the inside of my wallet, which contained a receipt from the grocery store and a coupon for a pint of ice cream at Baskin Robins. “You have check in car?” I tried to keep my thoughts inside my mind, but instead, they splayed across my face, and they read, “Are you seriously this dumb?”

“You go get cash from bank next door?” I shook my head no. “Well go get money and come back, I hold your iPod for you until you come back.” She fingered the cord to my headphones and pulled my iPod out of my pocket, and along with it, took my ID badge from work. I rushed out to my truck, upset that I had to go to the ATM in the middle of Target with the most hideous haircut of my life for all the world to see, and then had to go back to see Helen, the destroyer of hair.

I went back with money and gave her a twenty for her work. She looked up at me and said, “No tip?” I looked down at her and considered shaving the side of her head for my tip, but instead just smiled, turned around, and headed for the door. The woman asked again, “No tip?” which then put me at wits end. At the door, I looked at her, smiled, and said “Don’t sleep with gum in your mouth, enjoy that tip.” I came home and hacked away at my hair with the kitchen scissors until my hair looked a smidge bit better, but I have to keep in mind that, “. . . the difference between a good haircut and a bad one is two weeks.” I might have set a calendar date on my iPod for two weeks from now.

Life Alone

Life alone is very different for me. Being that I am a social creature, coming home to nobody, and not knowing any of my neighbors, has started to take its toll on me. Mostly, I have become increasingly stir crazy as the days go on. 

Most of my days involve watching DVDs to the point that I have watched practically every movie that I own. Worst of all is that I have watched every movie that I practically own in Spanish. This being because my brother lent me his DVD player which has automatic setting for each disc to play in Spanish. I, once being able to speak Spanish to some level, can understand most of the movies, but sometimes I get very lost in the dialogue and then lose all sight of the plot in total. This has given every DVD a whole new storyline where I have no clue what will happen next, which then frustrates me even more, so I turn off the movie half way through. On a side note, I have discovered how to change the settings on my DVD player so that I can watch in English, but sometimes I am too lazy to change it and just watch in a foreign language anyway.

All of my friends claim that living by your lonesome is the best because you can just hang around the house naked. I, never being naked outside of the confines of my bedroom before, decided to take it for a spin. After securing each window and shutting the blinds tight, I took off my clothes and tried to go about normal life. Normal life never really happened, and I ended up standing naked in my kitchen for fifteen minutes, waiting for the awesomeness to set in. After standing awkwardly nude in the kitchen, with my hands by my side, standing as tall as I could, I decided that nakedness isn’t all that fun. Then it hit me. “I should eat something naked. Yeah!” I reached into my cupboard and pulled out one of the numerous Fiber One products that I must have on hand at all times and started to peel away the wrapper. Unfortunately, eating naked made me feel increasingly more pathetic and after one bite, I slid the Fiber One bar back into its package for some other time.

I’ve only somewhat met my neighbors, which means I have seen them around once or twice and never really said much to them. My immediate neighbor’s name is Vern, and he likes to smoke at six in the morning. I wouldn’t mind so much if I didn’t have all the windows in my house open and then having to wake up in a cloud of smoke, but he seems rather pleasant and fat. Next to him is another neighbor who likes to smoke early in the morning, but he likes to throw his cigarette butts off of the ledge and into the courtyard. I would mind more if I used the courtyard, but it smells of dog poop because dog owners have become increasingly apathetic to where their dogs do their business.

My downstairs neighbor is a hoarder, which I discovered when I accidently dropped my phone off of my balcony and onto his patio. I considered just walking behind the building and grabbing my phone quickly, but didn’t want to cause a ruckus with a new neighbor. So I went down, knocked on his door (which he locks heavily at all times), and explained my plight to him. He has no name, but is Asian and has a beard like Brigham Young himself. After I asked him to get my phone, he closed his door, locked all of the locks on it, and then went and got the phone for me. This was the only time that he opened the door wide enough for me to see anything inside, and it was dark and packed with boxes that probably contained dead bodies or something.

Besides my neighbors, the only other inhabitants of Rancho Santa Margarita that I interact with are the numerous spiders that live here. I, moving in with heavy arachnophobia, have become almost completely unphased when I look out my window and see a five-inch long spider spin a five foot across web. Each day, I see more spiders than I saw in the movie “Arachnophobia” or “Eight-Legged Freaks” and each day I care less that they are here, that is if they keep their distance. One spider lives in the eucalyptus tree of my backyard and moves closer to my apartment with each day. The spider crossed the line when he decided to spin its web over the patio chair on my balcony, which I promptly stood up into. After screaming bloody murder and having all of the neighbors from the next courtyard look out their windows, I decided to sweep up all of the webs he had spun and then smashed the spider several times until I knew that he would be dead for a good long time. Although, I hear that if you kill one spider, five more will come in its place.

Because I have just barely moved into my apartment, I still lack a few essentials. So I decided to walk across the street to the Target and get what I had forgotten: cotton swabs, non-stick spray, more bottled water, and anything else that could be useful for my apartment. But due to my short-term attention span, the moment I walked into Target, I forgot everything that I needed. I walked around the aisles trying to recall what I needed, and ended up in the Paula Dean Cookery section. There I became increasingly upset at my previous roommates for destroying all of the pots and pans that I owned, so then I was mad at Paula Dean for having so many great pots and pans. I left her aisle with a vendetta against my favorite southern woman, besides my southern friend, Bonnie Ross.

I came across some bottled water and threw it into my cart and ended up going towards the checkout, where I found a rogue box of cotton swabs. After paying for my merchandise, I walked outside and remembered that I had forgotten the non-stick spray. “Damn it Francis! I forgot PAM!” This, while therapeutic for me, probably caused confusion for all the other patrons of Target. Where was this Francis that this man was yelling at? Is she with Pam? Of course, right when I cursed to Francis, a flood of mothers with their children decided to walk by.

Determined not to walk back into the store to get non-stick spray, I just started walking off towards my apartment with my pack of water on my shoulder. Crossing the widest street in RSM with a heavy package of waters on your shoulder is not recommended, especially if you are self conscious of people gawking at you whilst you shuffle across the street awkwardly, trying to make it before the light turns green, but traipsing across the widest street in RSM is especially frowned upon (but I did anyway).

After making my way back to my apartment, I decided to collapse on my futon and put in my favorite movie. But because I was too lazy to find the remote, I had to watch “Señor Zorro Fantástico” instead.

Commuting and Lunch

My drive to work has turned out to be the most draining experience of my life; I can commute five hours a day, and have to pay five dollars in tolls to get home during bad traffic days. My day starts at four in the morning when I get up, shower, eat a quick bite, and then run off to beat the morning traffic going into Orange County. Most days go smoothly enough, and the morning ride can be somewhat decent, not causing me to rip out my hair. Lately, it has been a little bit rougher because of heavy traffic, making my mornings almost as miserable as my afternoons.

The worst of mornings came when I was driving to get to the freeway and I might have run over a possum in the dark. I never ran over a mammal before, and the shock of it all put me into a horrible depression over the poor (possibly smashed) possum. In my despair, I reached for my lunch pail to drown my sorrow in food; obviously, I must be an emotional eater if after killing a possum, I needed to reach for my lunch. When I started reaching over to find my pail, I grabbed nothing but air. I looked over to see that I forgot my lunch at home. My day was then ruined and my thoughts never strayed too far away from my hunger afterwards.

When my lunch break finally came, I tried to ignore my grumbling stomach, but that lasted all of two minutes of my break. I thought that I would cave and buy something at the vending machines, but when I tried to put in my cash, the machine did nothing but twirl and flaunt its selection of lunch items. I tried several times, and then decided that it must be a broken cash slot, so I went out into my truck to grab some quarters from coin stash. Along with my quarters, I grabbed a random piece of paper from my truck and pulled out my cell phone, chatting wildly to nobody, so that it would seem like I had to go out to get some paperwork from my truck.

After coming back to the vending machines, I tried to get my selection from the machine with the coins, but the machine just continued to twirl, laughing at my attempts. Whenever a coworker of mine would walk over by the machines, I would walk away from the machines so that it didn’t look like I was having issues; I would hate to be the new guy who can’t even operate a vending machine. After skulking back and forth past the vending machine, I realized that I should just give up on getting some type of real meal for lunch.

I remembered that I had eaten a pop tart the week previous, but didn’t finish the whole thing, so I left it in my truck under the mountain of empty water bottles on floor. My hunger had made me desperate, and so I went back outside to go find it. Obviously, I broke out my phone and had a fake phone conversation with an apartment manager who needed my license plate number so that I could have an excuse to go back out to my truck (I don’t know why I am so paranoid to think that all of my coworkers are standing at the receiving bay, laughing at my repetitive trips to my truck, but I am).

The tart was smooshed, stale, and a bit dusty, but it was my only form of sustenance that I could muster up, and after eating the chalky tart, my appetite grew. Now I was completely out of food, so I went back to my cubical to drink copious amounts of water, hoping that the pop tart would swell in response, making me feel fuller. After I had gone through three bottles of water, I was still feeling hungry, and now had to pee like a race horse. I had a few minutes left before I had to go back into the lab, so I chewed and swallowed five pieces of gum, my last possible chance of making it through my day without undergoing ketosis. And even if I did develop ketosis, the gum would hopefully cover the acetone breath of starvation.  The large bolus of gum in my stomach somehow made it so I didn’t die.

After work, I race out to my truck and try to make it onto the freeway so that I can experience heavy traffic. If I stay at work for more than five minutes, heavy traffic bumps up to morbidly obese traffic, and I may as well read a book while parked on the 91. I find that I can get through traffic much quicker if I can find an obnoxiously colored mustang and follow it through traffic as it bobs and weaves though the parking lot of cars. I always try to then pass the obnoxiously colored mustang and beat them to my exit. When behind the car, I always imagine the owner to be a bodaciously voluptuous woman, but whenever I catch up to them, the driver usually ends up to be an overweight woman with horrible bangs, or a man with long hair, whose manboobs looks amazingly similar to actual boobs from a tailing angle.

After I get home, I usually lapse comatose on the couch, and then end up in bed for a few hours, only to repeat the whole process again the next day. I guess that is the life of a commuter. And as much as I love sitting in traffic for a fifth of the day, staring mindlessly at racist bumper stickers and listening to random podcasts, I have realized that I am not meant to be a commuter. So I made an impulse buy and signed a lease for an apartment by a lake, and when I move in, I can start being independent again. Unfortunately, I will be poorer than dirt, but thankfully, being poorer than dirt makes the best of stories.  

When You Are Engulfed in Asians

After living in a desolate wasteland of all white, Mormon Utahans, being in any sort of diverse environment has become somewhat alien to me. So when I started my job at the Irvine Water District, I was surprised at the incredulous amount of Asians that I worked with: Dave, Dave, Tammy, Dave, Alex, Tang, Katrina, and Dave. While they are all very nice individuals, I did feel a little bit out of place, being one of two white people in the lab.

I came in at 6:20 and was given the tour of the lab when I met Dave. Dave, being one of the senior Asians in the lab, has worked there since he was 18, but is now much older than 18 (although I cannot ask how old he is without breaking the law). Dave found me in the lab because he heard somebody who was a little too chipper for six in the morning. He introduced himself and assumed that I had helped myself to the gratis coffee in the break room, but when I told him I don’t drink coffee, he was more than surprised. “I can’t be drinking coffee. I don’t want to stunt my growth.” This statement becomes somewhat ironic while towering over the Asian man.

The rest of the crew filed in after about an hour, somewhat shocked that I commute two hours in and two hours back for work. After we gathered for a group meeting, I noticed something was different about Dave. Whenever he was in front of our boss, he developed an Asian way of speaking. Ls interchanged with Rs, and I just stared over at him in complete stupor. The lab manager couldn’t care less if he had an Asian accent, so why did he put on this front during the group meeting? Obviously I was out of the loop.

My next coworker I came to know was Katrina. She was a temp like me a year before and was hired on for a permanent position in the company, so I knew that if she trained me, I would probably end up on the more likely side of a permanent job. As she taught me, I noticed that she would lunge across the room to every lab station. I can understand the purpose of exercise, being fat before, but this woman was in desperate need of putting on weight, so why would she be lunging everywhere? I asked her why she was lunging and apparently, she is mocked for having the tiniest butt of all her friends, so she lunges to gain a larger backside. “Well, to be completely honest, I don’t have a butt either, but I have butt pads that I wear when I need to fill in my pants a little more. Like when I interviewed for the job here, I wore my fake butt.” On a side note, I feel that my butt boosters pushed me one step above my competition; therefore, getting me my job.

My job is a very simple one. I sit in a chair and wait for water samples to come into the lab. From there, I take the water and run three tests on them: pH, turbidity, and electric conductivity. This seems like it could be rather enjoyable, but the difficulty comes in with the sample types. The water I test mostly comes from the water reclaim, and half of the samples are ground up sewage. One of my coworkers was mixing a batch of raw sewage, splashed some in his eye, and now has an infected eye. How he was able to do that with goggles on, nobody knows, but I assume it is because the sewage is alive and has devious plans for the chemists.

None of my operating procedures require gloves while doing the tests, but every time I grabbed for a water sample, Katrina would scold, “GLOVES!” (Sometimes she says, “GROVES!” but that is neither here nor there).  I had no clue why she was so concerned about me wearing gloves if I made sure that I washed my hands after touching bottles, but she was adamant that I always wear gloves. I soon found out why she was so paranoid about me wearing gloves when she tested the water for suspended solids. In the suspended solids test, water is filtered through paper, and then the filter paper is dried in the oven and then weighed to see how much solid there is in solution. This particular day, she found two white fish in her water samples. I was confused to how a white fish would make it into the water and wanted to know if it was alive and cute, but instead, I learned that white fish is how the Asians classify a used condom. How a used condom was able to make it through the grinders that all of the water goes through before sampling is past all of our comprehension, but somehow, this white fish had managed to make its way through. I thought I was disgusted enough until we had a shout out about finding another white fish. “Two in one day? So clazy!”

Besides that rest of the Daves, I met Tammy half way through the day. She is the most Asian of the entire lab, and works across the lab station from me. I have never seen more than her eyes because I have to peer through shelves of folders to just see her, but she is a nice woman. Actually, she is very similar to the neighbor in Home Improvement; I see nothing but her eyes and she gives me very nice advice about life. Even when I leave the station to go find water samples, I only see the back of her head, which is covered in the straightest, black, Asian hair I have ever seen. It may have only been my first day on the job, but I assume that I will probably only ever see her eyes and the back of her head.

After eight hours of taking water, putting a probe in it, putting a different probe in it, putting another different probe in it, and then going for another water sample, I think that I am rather prepared for this job. Although, most of the time, I just sit, waiting for more water samples to come in. And then I look confused for about an hour, wandering around the lab, trying to find where the other chemists have placed the water samples, and then I go back to trying to probing sewer water. And that is my job: sitting around sewage; waiting for sewage; testing flushed, toiler water and sewage; and sitting around Asians. This is what I call my career.

Yogi's Option: Broken Bones or Dislocated Joints

When I was fat, I used to think that I would get some sort of daily work out by waking up at four in the morning and watching television yoga. Never would I actually participate, but watching made me feel like I was taking a step in a healthy direction. This was my yoga exposure for the longest time, until I actually did P90X yoga and possibly fainted after the two hour video.  On a tangent, I lasted two days on P90X, that is until I did AbRipperX, which caused me to believe that I had a hernia.

My mother started doing yoga in town during my last months up at school. I told my mother that I would come home and do yoga with her, but when I came home, I never really went. Either class was too early, or class was too expensive, I always found a way out of going (which meant just not getting up for class). I managed to dodge the class until my mother offered to pay for three classes for me, which I said yes to immediately due to my extreme ennui.

I was nervous to meet my mother’s instructor because yogis have a reputation of being a little bit insane. From what I had seen on television, yogis are as flexible as rubber, which of course is a sign of insanity. If your foot can stretch behind you and touch your nose, you must have made a pact with Satan, and therefore, you are trying to recruit me to become a Satanist.  But the instructor, Jamie, did not seem like she had made a pact with Satan, so I was put at ease.

Class started off slow, with a lot of downward dog. I am quite capable at downward dog. This of course was so that if I told anyone I can do yoga, I would quickly get into downward dog and then balance on one foot, which convinces most people that you have been doing yoga for the span of time. From downward dog, we did plank, which was also easy enough for me to do. I mean, who can’t just hold themselves stiff as a board? After the first five minutes of going from one pose to the next, I was already tired, and my palms had begun to sweat enough to make my hands slip on the mat.

Downward dog continued every other pose for the next twenty minutes, which would have been ok if I didn’t feel like I needed to pass gas worse than I have ever done before in my life. Each time I would go into downward dog, I would clench my butt cheeks together as hard as I could to keep myself from farting. If we were in a larger studio, I couldn’t care less if I farted, because I could probably lay the blame on someone else. But this studio only had room for one row of yogis, and the square footage of the studio would not allow for proper diffusion of any type of gas, let alone the worst fart I have ever conjured up in my life.

The gas subsided and we started doing strength and balance poses, which I actually did well at. First we did handstands, which I have tried my entire life to be able to do. We start against a wall and kick up to get into a handstand, resting against the wall. I was able to do this after two kicks, but kicked up with such force that I might have possibly kicked a hole in the wall. After a few tries with the wall, I managed to get a full handstand for about five seconds, which then made me whisper, “MA! LOOOOOK! I’M DOOOING IT.” Unfortunately, I lose my ability to whisper when doing yoga and the yoga instructor heard me. Now that I think of it, I never really had the ability to whisper, but my lack of ability worsens when I do yoga.

We balanced on our heads, on our hands, on our knees, on our feet, and I was able to maintain composure through the majority of the class. The worst of it came during the cool down, where we had to enter into happy baby. Happy baby has you on your back, with your feet up in the air, and your hands clasped around your feet. I thought that I was doing the pose beautifully, but it turns out I must have been doing it distractingly wrong. The instructor came over and pushed my knees closer to my chest and then pulled my legs apart. Using every muscle I could muster to keep my pose, my eyes began to cross and my face became crunched up and mangled. “Jacob, find some joy in the pose.” I forced a smile on my face, and took a breath, which made it seem like I was at least trying to find joy in the pose, but really, I found the devil. The class ended with a massage with some aromatic lotion, which made my hour and half suffering worthwhile, and the rest of the class, we laid on the ground with a buckwheat pillow over our eyes.

The next class was early in the morning the day after, which after waking up and not being able to move, seemed rather daunting, but I went anyway because as painful as it was, it was still a work out and I have put on some weight since coming home. When we stepped into the studio, the first thing the instructor asked was if I was sore. I knew that she was asking so that she would focus more on those areas that I was sore. So I smiled and said, “No. Not one bit.”

We went back through our sun salutations and then went into some hip opening exercises. Now, I have done ok in life with closed hips, and they seem to want to stay that way. I couldn’t even do the easiest of poses, and I found my mind wandering. The worst of my distraction came from a poster on one of the walls that went through ever pose imaginable, and I was entranced with the man in the poster. I was relieved that he was wearing dark spandex, because if he was not, I am positive he would have had crotch sweat, which is the worst of all sweats.

One pose I was doing obviously wasn’t on par as to what the instructor thought I could accomplish, so she decided to come and push me into the pose. As she nearly snapped my back from bending me backwards, I started to feel like I was going to lose balance and crush the yogi under the bulk of my being. But when I started to fall she just pushed back, and then pulled my arm out of its socket to accomplish the pose, which I pray was perfect or else my pain was in vain.

During the poses that the entire class seems to accomplish with great ease, the instructor loves to give out a, “Yogi’s Option.” This usually entitles contorting into a crazy position, while using your big toe to lift your leg over your head. If it was really this yogi’s option, I would option to go next door to the fish fry and eat fried seafood and tartar sauce until I can no longer move. It’s probably a better choice to follow the instructor’s option instead of my own.

The class is actually really great, but yoga is turning out to not be the form of exercise that really entertains me. This is probably because I prefer loud, Latin pop music to songs of the forest blue jays, or maybe because I like constant dancing motion, but all in all, it is a good class. I think also that the yoga mindset just doesn’t sit well with me. This is because the moment you say that, “this removes toxins,” I give you as much credibility as a Kinoki footpad.