Grace off the schedule

Well, it's been a while.

I don't have any particular excuse, except maybe the snow. As I age, I'm becoming more and more reliant on a very scheduled day to maintain my sanity, a quirk I'm sure I'll get over within then next five years or so. So the snow cancels plans, it screws up my daily whiteboard schedule and forces me to lie on the couch and do nothing all day. And by nothing I mean wipe out Isabella and Genghis Khan before 10 AD, build ten different wonders, accidentally build my Palace in some random little ex-Spanish tundra city I forgot to raze, curse Sid Meier to the high heavens, and then get overrun by Mehmed and his 1000000000 cavalry units and die a horrible death. Oh, and then my final score enshrines me in the annals of history right smack dab next to Dan Quayle. Stupid Civilization. Stupid Dan Quayle.

But I have obviously digressed. Basically, if I get off the schedule, all hell breaks loose, although I've been dealing with it a little better recently. I get anxious and grouchy when things do not go according to plan, which is often. Which is also why I don't travel well, because there's no schedule and things like traffic.

And what's one of the ways Grace copes with anxiety? Hint: it's not with alcohol or hott yoga.

Well, one time, when I was in college, I was in the library one day and got cramps. Very bad cramps. VERY bad. And my preferred medications were not working.

I dragged myself over to the health center, literally crying the entire way there. I told the staff nurse that I had very bad cramps and they were not going away. She gave me some meds that wouldn't interfere with what I had already ingested and sent me on my way.

The meds worked, and I was terrified of feeling things like pain, so I just kept popping those pills all day long and all night long. I don't remember how many I took, I just remember that I didn't hurt for the rest of the day, and that was totally awesome. I went to bed as happy as a clam.

I woke up around three in the morning with my heart racing and sweat pouring down my face. Something was obviously quite wrong. I'm strangely very calm in emergency situations, it's just the whole I-have-to-go-to-the-bathroom-and-there's-a-line type that sends me over the edge. Thankfully, I did have (crappy) college health insurance at the time, so I called the ambulance on myself. I read a lot of medical encyclopedias growing up (this was in the 90s and pre-MedlinePlus), so I was not taking any chances with a possible heart attack.

So after they carted me off to the hospital and I was stuck in bed doing nothing but thinking about cardiac arrests, my anxiety started going through the roof. What was the matter with me? Would I die? Would this be my last night on earth? Could I get someone to bring in my homework for my 7:55 AM class pre-coma?

I was trembling, I was sweating, I was a nervous wreck. I had to do something, and I had to do it quick.

"Excuse me," I asked the nice young tech dude, who probably had no idea what he was getting into. "Could I ask you something?"

"Of course. What would you like to know?"

"Do you mind if I tell you why the practice of feudalism took hold in Europe before the Medieval Period?"

"Uh.... OK, sure!" Poor nice young tech dude.

And for the next twenty minutes I discussed the historical development of feudalism. I had to think pretty dang hard about it to come up with a fairly cohesive monologue, and all that thinking effectively drowned out all the thinking about possible death. I chilled out significantly.

So that little episode showed me one way to deal with anxiety. I just have to think harder about something else, which is why I wiped out Isabella ten different ways over a three-week period. Civilization is the cure for all evil. All of it.





Oh, and what exactly was wrong with me?

The health center meds contained added caffeine equivalent to six cups of coffee. I didn't start to drink coffee until after I graduated college. No, I was not dying, I had simply overdosed on caffeine. I didn't even know it was possible to overdose on caffeine. Live and learn, live and learn.

Grace gets hott hair

Sometimes, when Dan comes home from work after an abnormally warm day, he'll have a question for me.

"Grace, why is it that whenever it goes above 70, all the Lehigh girls hang out outside the library all day doing homework in their bikinis?"

"I have no idea, Dan," is my canned answer. "You'll have to ask a girl that question."

I'm an odd bird, and I know it. I also flaunt it, possibly because I have a inferiority complex and an innate, desperate need for attention and affirmation, but possibly because I'm comfortably out of the finding-yourself stage and have chosen to obnoxiously trumpet my awesomeness. Normal People are a dime a dozen, but I can truly boast that there aren't many other people out there like me who welcome the sunlight on a regular basis. Who else is gonna be your friendly neighborhood font of dairy industry trends, anyway?

One of the (many) things that make me unique is that I am a very, very late bloomer. Imagine, ladies, that you didn't discover your feminine qualities until you were 26. That's me. Before I was 26 and was ushered into womanhood through the combination of the life-changing experience of teaching incarcerated middle school kids and the daily consumption of Concerta, I was a person of quarters. One quarter tomboy, one quarter Vulcan, one quarter reclusive Aspergers-lite, and one quarter female (then dormant). The Aspergers-lite quarter didn't understand how to be feminine, the tomboy quarter felt that femininity was for girls, the Vulcan quarter said that femininity was illogical, and the dormant female quarter was dormant. I think the Vulcan quarter had something to do with the dormancy, but I don't actually have the facts to prove it.

Lots of very enlightening things occurred when I was 26, only one of which is going to get today's write-up.

I was sitting in my bedroom, gazing at my frizz-bomb, unmanageable hair in the mirror, mourning my total lack of genetically hott, smooth, non-frizzy hair, and feeling generally sorry for myself, when I suddenly had a Feminine Revelation.

Wait a second!

Hott girls have hott hair. Even many non-hott girls have hott hair. Lots of girls spend lots of unnecessary money on hott hair products. Those hair products can't just be sitting around doing nothing but emanating hott!

So in order to have hott hair, you have to use hott hair products to make your hair look hott!

My Vulcan quarter, although scoffing at the illogicality of my thoughts about hair, also scoffed at my inability to make a logical connection between hott hair and actually, you know, doing your hott hair to look hott. I have no clue how I missed this. What did I think, were those bottles and bottles and bottles of hair whatever on my sisters' dresser just for show?

So then I tried to do my hair.

I identified four things about my hair that I felt were weird/ugly/not hott.

1. My hair is frizzy. Really frizzy.
2. My hair has a natural part. In the shape of a Y. What did I do to deserve this?
3. My hair looks flat half the time, and the other half of the time it looks like I was just electrocuted.
4. I have an Elizabethan hairline, which is the 16th century way of saying I have a high, slightly receding hairline. Kind of like this just not as 16th century.

I wanted my hair to do four things.

1. I wanted limited frizz. Frizz in the summer was OK, frizz in the dry air of January was not.
2. I wanted my hair to have a nice part in the shape of a lowercase l. Preferably in the area of my head that I wanted.
3. I wanted my hair to have a good amount of fluff. I did not want my hair to look like I was losing my hair.
4. I wanted my hairline to move about 450 years into the future.

And I was also willing to do pretty much whatever it took to get to happy hott hair, as long as it took under twenty minutes to do.

My first plan of action was to hit up a stylist. I walked on in and asked what I should do with my hair.

"Oh, you could take some mousse and some smoothing oil and use a diffuser and a round brush and some extra-hold hairspray and you'd be fine," she said.

"OK," I responded, uncertainly. "What's mousse?"

The poor hairstylist didn't even know how to respond. What was I, nine? I think she just assumed I was joking. Who didn't know what mousse was when they were... 26?

So that didn't help.

Next, I asked my sister.

"Oh, you could take some mousse and some smoothing oil and use a diffuser and a round brush and some extra-hold hairspray and you'd be fine," she said.

"OK," I responded, even more uncertainly. "What's mousse?"

She didn't know how to respond, either. I have a master's degree and can discuss the intricacies of the development of the social order of the South and how it lead to the social stratification in the North. Didn't Southern belles use mousse? Or something kinda like mousse? Maybe made from, like, dead squirrels or something? What was I, nine?

No answers there, either.

So I finally turned to YouTube. YouTube told me that if nothing else, I needed a hairdryer. Yes, me, the girl who never dried her hair, ever, and as a result would routinely walk into the early class in college with frozen hair (literally). But this was the year my hair was going to be hott. I bit the bullet and bought a random hairdryer at Target.

For a couple of weeks, I dried my hair with the hairdryer, but I had no clue how to dry it, so I would end up with bits of hair sticking out all over my head. When I tried to smooth my hair down, it would just pop up again.

Back to YouTube. The hott British video hairstylist said I needed a diffuser attachment.

Ah! I knew I had one of those! It came with the hairdryer!

So I dried my hairdryer with the diffuser. Success! Now my hair was curly and less messy, but it still was frizzy and kind of fell flat two hours into the day.

Lots of experimentation later, I've stumbled onto a general hair routine.

1. I wash my hair. With humectant shampoo. I spent more than a dollar. Go buy your lottery tickets now, because luck this obvious might never happen again.
2. I condition my hair with some kind of moisturizing conditioner. It smells funny. I don't even really know.
3. I get some gross-smelling mousse. I hold in the vomit reflex and put it in my hair. (I have always been very grossed out by shaving cream and other products with similar consistency.)
4. I push my hair around with reckless abandon. This is supposed to make my hair wavier. It usually just makes me look stupid.
5. I flip my hair upside down and dry it with the diffuser attachment. Much more success with this step after YouTube told me I was actually supposed to put my hair in the diffuser for maximum awesome.
6. I flip my hair upside up. I arrange my hair so I look less electrocuted and/or close to death. I dry the hair on the side of my head flat against my head, so it's not all sticking out.
7. I take my glasses off and lose them on the floor.
8. I spray my hair with hairspray, invariably hitting myself in the eye. Hence the glasses on the floor.
9. I pat around on the floor until I find my glasses, praying that I don't squash them in the process.
10. I look at my hair in the mirror and ask myself if I would look terribly out of place at Loft or Starbucks. If I think I'd kinda fit in, I'm good to go.

More Adventures of a Socially Awkward Amateur Academic coming up soon!