Chay Chay Chaynge

I was sitting at my desk with two senior citizens sitting in front of me and I was puzzling over a sticky piece of foreclosure business that had to be attended to. Doom was looming on the horizon and I was wracking my brains trying to figure out how to slow down the train in order to mitigate the damage from the inevitable trainwreck that was coming.

As we're sitting there in silence -- me thinking and them doing whatever it was they were doing, Mrs. T looks over and says, "You've changed your hair, haven't you." I glance up to see her looking at me out of the corner of her eye.

"Um..." I tried to switch gears and think back to what I looked like the last time she saw me and couldn't remember. So, I did the easy thing and agreed. "Yeah. Yeah, I thought it was just time for a change."

Previously I had quite long strawberry blonde hair that was very unkempt and ragged at the ends. In my younger days it was a really nice coppery red that everyone complimented me on. Over time I'm finding that it's fading to a very lovely shade of red-gold that is pretty, but that I hate immensely. So, now instead down to the middle of my back, it's just a little bit past my shoulders and is chemically enhanced to something a little closer to my original color.

Hanging out there in the air reverbating against the oldbodies were those words "just thought it was time for a change..."

Mr. T squints at me as I'm getting back to my Very Important Paperwork and says, "I bet you're not having any more fun than you were though."

"Well... no, I guess I'm not."

He thought that was really funny and obviously doesn't understand women despite having lived with one for what I approximated to be 150 years.

I was probably going somewhere with all this, but don't really know where now because I was struck by the absurd reality of the fact that I'm typing this on a laptop propped up on my bathroom sink and my child is sitting in the bathtub drinking a tupperware container full of bathwater that has Sponge Bob bubble bath in it. A product, by the way, that smells like rotting fruit.

I feel compelled by a strong urge to stop him, but as I have stopped him on repeated occassions in the past and he seems to have a leaky memory (or to have inherited my stubborness and cavalier attitude about rules, that "rules apply to me only on a case by case basis") it makes me think I am fighting a losing battle.

My mother keeps telling me, "Pick your battles." That's all well and good but so far nobody has given me any guidelines about how to pick them or which ones are the important ones. To me they all seem very important or I wouldn't bother.

No, cutting my hair hasn't done a damn thing for me. But what the heck.