October 23, 2001 — The ice cold vise that grips my head

I woke up during the morning today. Barely. But it was three hours earlier than yesterday, which puts me well on my way to a proper existence.

Unfortunately, it was raining out. I'm sure that people with normal schedules don't let rain stop them from getting on with their plans for the day, but I've found it hard to force myself out into the rain when it's perfectly warm and dry inside, and when there's nothing really stopping me from waiting until the next day to leave the house.

And so I still have a couple more loads of laundry to do, and the five letters and packages that I was supposed to mail today are still on my desk.

I didn't waste the day, though. Or at least I don't think so. (Admittedly, they're all wasted days in the long-term. But in the context of my life at the moment, and in comparison to many of the days from the last week or two, it wasn't a wasted a day. Work with me here.) I managed to cut my hair all by myself, and I continued my Internet boycott, and I finished reading the Harry Potter book that my mother brought for me at Thanksgiving.

In retrospect, the day's sounding sort of wasted. But if I'm happy with it, then I figure you probably ought to be, too. Besides, it's only 10:30 pm -- who knows what adventures I'll have before I go to sleep tonight?

In other news, I've brought back the Slogan Submission System, albeit in a more subtle form. So you're invited to return to abusing that at your earliest convenience. Much better than that dry little blurb about site news. As if I'm optimistic enough to think you'd even care.

Oh, and the message board that I want to use for the site still hasn't been released. I'm hearing talk of Wednesday being the day, but again, I'm not holding my breath. I'd love for it to be online this month, though...

It's strange how little time I've spent in front of the computer over the last four days as compared to my daily average since as far back as I can remember. It feels good to not have staring at a screen seem like a completely natural thing. I've found myself fiddling with the location of the keyboard and with the height of my chair and with the angle of my monitor -- nothing seems quite right anymore. For the first day of this, my arms actually hurt a lot more than they ever do when I'm typing, but since then they haven't bothered me much at all (except when I try to put any of my weight onto my left wrist, which is a rather painful experience).

So even if this boycott doesn't end up lasting all that long, it's been nice to have a bit of a break.

It occurs to me that I didn't really say much about the joys of cutting my own hair, and we all know that if there's anything that will keep the readers coming back, it's the image of me sitting half-naked on the kitchen floor between two mirrors trying to trim the hair on the back of my own head.

But before getting to that point, I had to convince myself that the risk of butchering my hair is worth ten dollars. It took several days, but I ended up deciding that I would be bitter, irritable, and single for a long while yet regardless of whether or not I had chunks of hair missing from my head. And through some faulty math, I managed to convince myself that by not paying to get my hair cut, I would be able to justify the cost of buying another CD that I couldn't really afford otherwise. I was soon rushing to Andrew's closet to borrow his hair trimming device.

For the record, it's definitely not as easy as it looked when the experienced hair trimmer operators cut my hair to 0.25" in length all over. It took about five passes for me to get it looking anywhere near even, and when you include all the breaks I took to giggle at how silly I look with the hair on the left side of my head almost an inch longer than the hair on the right side of my head, it ended up taking quite awhile before I even started on the back.

I had to drag a mirror in from the bathroom and set it up on a 45-degree angle with the other mirror before I could even see the back. It was awkward, but I eventually managed to learn how to coordinate myself to the point of being able to run the hair trimmers over my head properly. I'm sure there are parts on the back that are a little bit longer than they ought to be, but all in all I think it was pretty good for my first outing in the zany and dangerous world of haircutting technologies. And who knows what other zany and dangerous worlds await. (I'll have to consult the ol' journal archive, but I'm reasonably sure that that's the worst pair of adjectives I've used to date. Feel free to prove me wrong, though.)

Anyway. Hopefully it won't rain tomorrow and I'll be able to drag myself out of the house. I could probably check what the forecast is for tomorrow, but I'd prefer that it be a surprise. Life has few enough surprises as it is without meteorologists stealing one more from me.