NaBloPoMo 2015: Day 2 "Hairy"

#2: Do my hair every day for a week.

I'm typically a slap-dash woman when it comes to hair grooming. Pass the brush through hair, usually every day. Scrub some moisturizer on my face and consider makeup, but inevitably run out of time and shrug my shoulders. Pull hair up and down throughout the day, as the mood strikes. I put far more thought into my clothing than into hair or makeup or accessories.

But I'd like to be able to do my hair neatly and professionally (or close enough to it), whenever the occasion calls for it.

I watched a gajillion youtube videos, quite liked this one by Tess Christine, this one by Vivian V and this one by Luxyhair because they avoided heat and product.

I meant to take a photo each day but only managed 3:

1: Quick pin curls! I've done full-on pin curls in the past, but did a "lite" version the first day. My hair was still slightly damp from a late-night shower when I woke up, so I quickly threw it up in some pin curls. Got dressed, had breakfast, and when I pulled the pins out 30 minutes after putting them in, I had some loose wavy curls to play with. Clipped back the sides and tripped off to work.

pin curl morning

after 30 minutes

2.  The next day I did a mini-braid pull-back... Which you can't see at all in the photo.

I swear there's a hairstyle in there somewhere...

 3. For the third day, I wanted to have fun, so I went all out and slept overnight in some pin-curls. Loved this, it was so much fun to have bouncy curls for most of the day. My hair's quite heavy, so they'd mostly fallen by the afternoon, but there was still a nice wave.

DEM CURLZ 

rogue curl on the left, hubbo on the right - life is good

4. I did a braid-wrapped pony for the fourth day, and neglected to snap a pic.

5. And for my final day, I did a loose french braid, and once again, neglected to snap a pic. (At this point in the challenge, I hadn't made the decision to blog about all 30 list items, so photos weren't prioritized... REGRETTABLE.)

It was a relief to not think about my hair the next week, but I was happy to have done the full five days. Geez, that makes me sound almost lazy! It really was fun, though. In the abstract, I'd still like to be a whiz with my own hair, but for now I'm not motivated enough to make that idle dream a reality with practice.

Carpe diem,

Anna

p.s. Happy NOvember! Today is also our first day of NOvember. What is NOvember, you might ask? Didn't that start yesterday on the 1st? For Adam and I, it's going to be a month of saying "NO." No to unhealthy foods, No to desserts, No to unnecessary expenditures (like taxis), No to extracurricular activities that we don't need to commit to, etc. Basically, No to indulgence and No to overextending ourselves. Yesterday, I was too sick to think about anything but sleep, so we decided to start today on November 2nd. Here's to NO, and a healthier, happier body & wallet! I know I have a couple other friends doing NOvember - FIGHTING!! <-- as="" in="" korea="" p="" say="" we="">

WARNING: Post contains images of Obscenely Big Hair

For those of you barely holding it together for anticipation over the Pin Curl Debacle of '11, here are THE RESULTS (in photo format):

Freshly loosed from the pins

First thing: finger-comb the mane

HA HA HA HA HA - It was 6AM and I was giggling hysterically in the office at the beast I'd created after finger-combing

One side brushed out, the other NOT. Veronica Lake vs. Curly Sue

The previous images make this one look somewhat normal, but please believe me when I say my hair is still MASSIVE here - 3 times fatter and thicker than normal, at least!

Attempting to tame the giant locks with bobby pins...

I eventually gave up and threw a bandanna on, then pulled the rest back into a ponytail because I just couldn't handle ALL THE HAIR

The end result was far and away too voluminous for me to wear down - the hair mass was  overwhelming - but I ended up with a style I liked and might use for the wedding:  My bangs styled and waved across my forehead, and the rest of my enormous curls wrangled into a ponytail, showing off the soft curls, but not driving me completely bananas. (No photo of that, sorry!)

We'll just call this pin curl experiment an achievement of BIG proportions. :D

Dan the Man

This is a big autumn for my oldest bro, Daniel. Not only did both he and his girlfriend recently have birthdays, but in exactly ONE week, they're getting married! I'm so excited. Not only do I really love these two and want to see them happy/married/etc, Adam and I are also taking a week off of work (the 4th-11th) to be in Atlanta helping out with all the fixin's and trimmin's.

So: time with family, big party to celebrate Dan + Lily, no work, no stress, Wicked at the Fox Theatre, Adam's Atlanta family and cake - yay! Really, Dan's MORE than earned a wedding gift from us - this is practically a gift from them to us!

On a completely serious note, though, I couldn't be happier to be officially welcoming Lily as a Bellury sister and partying the two lovebirds into matrimony. It's gonna be realz, y'all.

And ... the fast-approaching wedding is the reason why my hair currently looks like THIS:

Call me crazy (no go ahead, call me crazy), but I got it in my head that I needed a vintage/retro hairstyle to go with my sweet little vintage bridesmaids dress. It's a '50s housewife inspired lacy thing that goes perfect with a pair of navy pinup heels.

What hairstyle would go along with this, you ask? More importantly, what LONG HAIR style could work on my thick, coarse head for this look? And the answer is: Veronica Lake's hair.

She was one of the few 1940s starlets to sport long hair, in a time when short was IN. My hair is well below my shoulders at the moment, so she was the obvious go-to for inspiration. Turns out, she used "pin curls" to get those soft, graceful waves. She, and every other woman in the 40s and 50s!

So I dragged my friend Nicki over for the afternoon, with promises of lemon bars and movies, and made her help me with the tedious process of rolling my hair into the precise pin curls that are supposed to produce such magical curls. I figured we needed to test this sucker out before choosing it for the wedding day.

However, I have my doubts that the curls in my hair will turn out MAGICAL. In this video, her pin curls are super neat and precise. My head, on the other hand, looks more like a jumble of mini bird nests. If something looking even remotely close to the woman's hair in the youtube video comes out tomorrow morning, I will be veeeerrryy surprised. :) But I had fun with Nicki, and lemon bars, popcorn and Snapple were enjoyed by all, so the evening was a success, regardless. The curls have to "set" for 8 hours, so I have to sleep on them before taking them out.

But will I look like Jayne Mansfield in the morning? Or something very scary? Neither you nor I will know until tomorrow morning, when I take the nests down and brush them out!

Check back tomorrow, and I'll post results. :D

Here I am, two-pronged clips and bobby pins stabbing my head in every direction (the price of beauty, non?), and a long night of sleeping as motionless as possible ahead of me.

Would you like pretzels, cookies or peanuts?

When I visited my friend Hyo Jeong a couple weeks ago, amidst laughter and frivolous talk and serious talk, I asked her where I could purchase a cheap set of rollers for curling my hair. She just stared at me. "For YOU?" she finally asked, eyebrows high and eyes wide.

She was surprised, because the Anna she met in New Zealand 5 years ago didn't give a fig about hair rollers, and spent her $ on really cool things, like traveling and authentic Italian pizza and theatre.

And I still like all those things! (A lot.)
But... Now I also give a fig about hair rollers. Something happened to me upon arriving in Korea. I suddenly realized that it was imperatively important to me that I dress the part of Professional Teacher. And not in a "dejected-because-I-have-to-fit-the-mold-but-don't-wanna-because-I-am-a-rebel-at-heart" way, either; no, I felt eagerness and excitement over this drive to fit the working-woman mold.

Hose and high heels! Dress pants and blazers! Neat hair and dress shirts! Bring it on!
(No make-up, though - that's a personal line I only cross for special occasions.)

What? Why is this so exciting to me? Or, to most of me. Part of me feels uneasily like a traitor - Mary G, do you still love me? - and is baffled as to why I am embracing these dress code conventions so enthusiastically.

But the answer is really simple: I've never had a job that required nice clothes before (set-building, rock climbing instructor, nanny, pre-K teacher - grubbies only), so it's a novelty, a persona I've never tried on before. I think my inner actress believes that my job is just a play and Professional Teacher is my character, and just loves wearing a costume every day.
Plus, my Husband's eyes get really wide and happy when I look fabulous (which he says is always), so I'm frequently guilty of going out of my way to dress sharp for him. And now I dress nice every day.

Some days are more miss than hit, though. Like yesterday.
I got dressed, realized I only had black and white in my outfit, and threw a scarf around my neck for color. Then I looked in the mirror.

"Adam!" I wailed, panicking because we were late and I didn't have time to change clothes. "I look like a flight attendant!"

He looked at me, smiled widely, and said, "That's not a bad thing." He really is no help sometimes.

But it was a bad thing. See photo below.


How are students supposed to take me seriously when they have to fight the impulse to request beverages and peanuts whenever they're hungry/thirsty?

And how is my inner actress supposed to take this?

I have a minimal flight attendant phobia. Despite knowing and loving some beautiful and fabulous flight attendants (yes, you, Marnell and Lily), I have never had the aforementioned 2 women as my flight attendants on any flight I've ever taken. Instead, my absolute most embarrassing moment in my whole life came about because of nasty, uncaring flight attendants. And no, I'm not telling that story in this post, so if you were getting excited and hoping to hear it, "get used to disappointment." (I just posted a photo of me posing as a flight attendant, so that's quite enough embarrassment for today.) Also, you get 10 points if you're the first person to guess correctly who said the above quote.

Anyways, I'm sure my students struggled mightily against their impulses, but the day passed without a single peanut-packet-demanding incident. And I drank the tea in that mug in the picture myself.

Adam must really have liked the outfit, though, because this is what I found on the blackboard after he finished teaching English:



:)

In retrospect, I probably could have just taken off the scarf, and I would have shed the entire flight attendant persona. But instead, I wore it all day long, because I didn't want to wear only black and white, which is what I usually do.