Where did you go (my lovely)?

If I were a Peanuts character, I would undoubtedly be Frieda. It's not because I'm a “chatter box” or play baseball or because I get thirty valentines each year. None of these things are true of me. But I do have naturally curly hair, or at least I used to.

Normally, the mop of brown hair on my head, varying from shoulder to shoulder blade length, is composed of tight, corkscrew curls. My friends (and even people I don't know that well) take great joy in “boinging” my curls. I, too, from time to time, have enjoyed stretching them out to their full length before letting go and watching them spring back to their length somewhere between my shoulder and shoulder blade.

Every now and then, I like to straighten it, just for the heck of it. This will usually happen in the winter when there's less of a chance of humidity ruining the hour and a half of work that goes into straightening my hair. In general, it freaks people out when they see me with straight hair and they're not expecting it. My favorite reaction to my non-curly hair happened earlier this week when a friend of mine, after greeting hello contorted her face in confusion before uttering, disgusted, “What the hell?” As she explained, the space around my face didn't match.

Normally, once my hair gets wet, any suggestion of straightness disappears and my hair reverts to its natural state. This time, however, my curls haven't returned. This past week I used a new flat iron that I had never used before. I washed my hair a day later and it stayed straight. I've been washing my hair for the past four days and still nothing. I'm starting to get anxious. Where have my curls gone? I want them back.

Like many latin women, my hair has always been a contentious issue; it manages to encompass all issues of race and gender dynamics within our culture. I hated my hair as a child. Neither I nor my parents quite knew how to manage it as it was an odd combination of my mother's thick wavy hair and my father's fine straight hair. Many a weekend was dedicated to hot blow dryers and giant painful rollers like so many others of my ilk. My grandmother always said I looked “greñado”, i.e. “a complete mess” in puertorrican. Only once I was in the final stages of high school did I really figure out how to manage it and realize that I actually loved it. It's become a huge part of my look, my image, my ideology of self. And it's gone. Well, on vacation. I hope. Right now it feels like I'm wearing someone else's hair on my head, like there's some random guest staying with me and I'm waiting for the usual tenant to come back.

Wherever you are, if you can hear me, Curls, come back to me.

Good Advice

A couple of days ago a friend of mine remarked how funny she found it that guest speakers always try to dispense what they consider useful life advice when giving lectures on college campuses. They seem to really take to heart the possibility that what they have to say may have a profound affect on our futures. It seems like an enjoyable task: to mold us. I can understand the appeal; it's pretty satisfying when you're able to save someone from making the same mistakes you've made, teach others how to avoid the pitfalls you may have encountered and to prevent the frustration you've had to endure. I do, indeed, enjoy giving advice.

I've got to say, I also love receiving advice. Even bad advice. That's not to say that I heed all of the advice I receive, I simply enjoy learning how people see the world and what others find worth sharing. One of my favorite pieces of advice came from The Odd Couple t.v. show in the jury duty episode in we are shown just how “assume” makes “an 'ass' out of 'u' and 'me'.” Genius. As cliché as it sounds, I actually have gotten a lot of good advice in college, though none of it gat in lectures. For instance, one of my favorite pieces of advice comes from the same friend who made the aforementioned comment.

After all is said and done, you can't go pleasing everyone, so screw it.

It's actually a John Lennon quote, so I guess it's advice from him, but my friend is the person I heard it from, so technically it's advice from her.
The second best piece of advice I received was from a professor. I know, I was shocked, too. But it wasn't given in an class, nor was it truly very helpful, I just liked the analogy he used.

Think of your life post graduation the same way the Communists thought of Russia; have a Five Year Plan.

My final favorite piece of advice comes from a place of many pearls of wisdom: a bathroom stall.

Lovers may not be perfect but love can be.

I'll be sure to keep all this in mind on my way to the top.

Oops!

The best plans are often times the ones that go wrong. Take penicillin, for example. Or even better, cheese. Had it not been for some careless oversight, two of the greatest contributions to humanity would never exist.

This evening followed the schedule of one such failed plan.

The plan was simple. Shower, do some reading, straighten my hair while I watched Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. Simple.

How wrong I was.

I did get to shower. Thank goodness. Not a moment passed that I returned to my room that one of my friends knocked on my door. I answered and found her practically glowing with satisfaction at the new coat she had bought and was now wearing. I invited her in to share the tale of her shopping quest.

Over the next three hours we were joined by two other friends and had amazing conversations. They ranged from the most inane and hilarious of topic to the most serious and down right heavy. I still ended up straightening my hair but I nixed the readings for class. I can do those tomorrow.

The point is, the evening couldn't have been better or more fulfilling if I had planned it to be so.

Thank you Chance and Mishap. You two sure know what you're doing.

Follow Your Nose

It's true what they say; smell is the strongest sense of memory. I can't count how often I will be somewhere, smell something and be taken back to a specific, long ago moment in time and space. There are a few particular scents that I come across more often than others.

One smell that often comes back to me is this soapy, eucalyptus scent that matches the smell of a bubble bath I used as a child. As soon as my nose registers it, I'm immediately placed in the bathtub at my grandparents' apartment. I'm four. It's after school, before dinner and I've just finished watching Power Rangers. This was my daily ritual until I was about eight years old. I still watch Power Rangers, though. On occasion.

The next smell I encounter less often but it's all the more wonderful when I come across it. I last smelled it this summer while in the elevator at the 92nd street YMCA as I was headed to the gym. I entered the elevator and behind me entered a man who appeared to be a few years older than me. He had the distinct smell of my preschool. It was that unique combination of dish soap, water based paint and sand box. I'm not sure if it was his deodorant, his detergent or if he actually worked with small children, but he was coated in this wonderful smell. I had to restrain myself from pressing my nose into his shirt. That would have been awkward.

This last smell pops up fairly often. It's the smell of books, specifically my paperback copy of The Lord of the Rings. Strangely enough, last week something in the bathroom on my floor smelled distinctly of the pages of Tolkin's volumes. I was instantly brought back to the first time I read it in 7th grade, over winter break by the afternoon light that streamed into my parents' bedroom.

I wish I could bottle these and create my own perfume line. I'd call it Memory. I'd make millions. But then again, memories like those are priceless.

It's been a while

Let me begin with an apology. I went away without hardly a word and have been gone for so long. I allowed myself to get bogged down in the hellish academia that a place like this will envelope you in. I told myself I had no time to write for a blog when I barely had time to write the dozens of papers that are due in a given month or to read the hundreds of pages due in a given week. This was a lie. I waste enough time doing nothing. Some of this is constructive mind cruising with the windows rolled down, (as brain with traffic like mine tends to do), but a lot of it is time consumed by worrying about how much work I have to do or how tired I am. There's no point to this.
My original reason's for writing this blog had to do with practice in writing for an audience. That objective has changed as a) I'm back in school and simply practice by doing, and b) it's really more relaxing writing for myself on a daily basis than it is to sit around being exhausted. I find myself being particularly exhausted today due to the amount of physical activity I undertook. Recently, as an off-shot of the dance troupe I'm a member of, I've started playing capoeira. In case your not familiar with it, capoeira is a Brazilian martial art form that's fairly acrobatic and fluid. (Read: it kicks your ass into shape with a hammer). While my body is feeling much of the strain from my two hours of playing today, the sport is fairly addictive. I can't quite explaining but once your realize that your body is capable of things you never imagined you gain the drive to push it as far as it can go.
As a child I was treated like glass; I never had a real cultivated sense of adventure or risk. I find I'm discovering my inner Lara Croft now that I'm coming into my own as a person. I realize that if I fall on my face or my ass, I'm not going to break. I mean this figuratively as well as literally. In capoeira you fall on your ass and your face often when you begin. It hurts but the blisters hurt more. Kind of like running, though, you see the progress you make and the results in your body fairly quickly. I have more upper body strength than I've ever had before. I can do cartwheels in both directions!
I'd like to believe that I'll keep up with capoiera after this dance is over and once I graduate. I can't be sure of that but I am sure that I'll be making a more concentrated effort to keep up with this blog. Not just for you few who actually read it and have asked me to continue writing, but for myself as well. Because while I'm learning lot's of neat new stuff, it's good to hold on to the old.