Mood Swings and Tiger Stripes

In the last couple of days, I've been pretty moody. Considering the past five months have been the most existential and imbalanced of my whole life, that's saying something. In terms of notable events, it all started with a sudden resurgence of interest in taking advantage of my location due to the fact that it both became financially feasible for me to pay for a ticket home, and the ever-growing threat (partially because I am deliberately provoking it, in small steps) of being fired once again. With the surety that as soon as next week (relatively speaking from about a week ago), I could be fired and have to head home. While this thought made me quite happy, it also reminded me that for most of the time I have lived here in Xuchang, I haven't really acquired the stories that I expected from myself. Sure, crazy shit happens all the time because this is rural china, but that doesn't count. That's daily life! That doesn't make for good stories, I needed to get out and start really doing some shit. This trend in extremely impatient adventurism resulted in an impromptu trip to Luoyang and the famous Shaolin Temple, which I will go into detail on at some other point. Suffice it to say for now that the famous Shaolin Temple is currently a modern Chinese Disneyland, full of ten foot plasma screens, blaring music, and extended go-carts to ferry about the fat Chinese tourists that can't handle the slightly inclined half-mile complex. It was worth going, because now I've been to the Shaolin Temple.
Anyways, I told you that story so I could tell you this story: I've never had long hair, which I define as past my eyes. Thanks to my total lack of trust in chinese competency in general, and observable disgust with every chinese hairstyle that I see parading around a foot underneath my own, I hadn't gotten around to getting a haircut for around four months. My hair was in danger of becoming actually long, with my vision being constantly obscured and irritated by dangling locks. Possessed with my new gung-ho drive to make whatever time I had left in China as memorable as possible, I decided that something would finally be done about these no doubt gorgeous and luxuriant but highly aggravating and inconvenient curls. I got a great suggestion from Julie that I simply dye it all some insane color, which suited my mood perfectly. I was in China, everyone already looked at me like I was a freak, and I might as well do something interesting since I wasn't in danger of alienating anyone I cared about. Once arriving at the hair 'salon', I ended up changing my mind about that a bit, since it occurred to me that my employers might very well fire me for one last step over that boundary of professionalism that I have ridden roughshod every day since my first week. Having learned from Kelly that the dying of hair usually involves bleaching the hair thoroughly first, I decided to just do that part first, and then come back later for the color once I had gauged my ability to get away with it. Also in consideration was the maintenance of my escape fund, which somewhat limited how extravagant I could make this project. This is how I looked when I arrived:



Note unruly, unkempt, beast-like hair.This is how I was looking after the first treatment, which involved much painful combing:



I kept this for about two days, and then my moodiness kicked in again and I swung the opposite direction from optimism. I got pretty upset, for reasons only vaguely relating to the hair, and decided that by God, if I couldn't solve my problems then at least I could make drastic changes to something in order to feel better. As the bleaching (predictably) did horrible things to my hair, making it all clingy and spiderweb-y, in addition to still being unmanageably long, I decided that I was going to get rid of it all. I had kind of wanted to anyways.

And so here I am, with the longest hair I've ever had, and a horrible, horrible bleach job.

It was not without it's zaniness, but I couldn't take having that shit fall into my eyes any more.


So, after borrowing Indy's shaver, change was done upon the world, and I felt better. I kept all the hair, in a garbage bag, and something amusing is going to befall somebody I know with it. No specific ideas yet, but there was too much gold-yellow hair sitting on my bathroom floor to let go to waste.

The end result will be with me for a while since I'm not going to actually shave it. I am quite excited for the prospect of my hair growing back out with weird little tips of orange-gold!

You can see the mottled, tiger-stripey quality of the bleaching, but I think it looks cool. Also, I had just taken a shower and it's decided to be hot in Henan lately. Also, it was like 1 am, after an intense period of time, when this all went down, which is why the weird stare and state of immoderate undress.


So, that's how my experiment with long, bleached hair went. And you know, I really did feel much better afterwards.