Convention

On Wednesday one of the director-of-something ladies asked me to participate in a career expo at the convention center. I was flattered and agreed, assuming it was some sort of aesthetics-industry expo where I could fraternize with salon owners. So I was surprised to discover that the expo was for high schoolers, and I "have" the career. Myself, and about ten of my fellow campers were there handing out flyers, giving hand massages, and generally trying to seem like an appealing collective of fun, artistic, well-adjusted young adults. I left the expo with the feeling that I had accidentally promoted Boston University more than Aveda, but the kids were curious and intelligent and I had no intention of answering any of their questions dishonestly.

A bold 18 year old boy and his less bold friend approached me while I was standing in front of the booth doling out hand massages. I asked the bold kid if he would like one, and he replied, "Actually  I want to give you a hand massage." I politely accepted, and he hilariously gave his shyer friend a knowing wink. Then he proceeded to tell me about his trip to Germany and his talent as a professional organist. Upon completing my massage, he opened his wallet and gave me his professional, though slightly aged and tattered business card. His name was Felix and he was the highlight of my day.

Clients

Yesterday a friend asked me "what kind of people get their hair cut at a school?" One of my classmates once had an especially pungent client. She had hair down to her knees that she allegedly hadn't washed in three weeks for "religious reasons". After the woman left, my idiot classmate embellished her olfactory experience repeatedly for maximum sympathy. But this particular woman is the only not-so-good client experience that comes to mind. I explained to my friend that I've been lucky with my clients. Most of them have been down to earth, youngish girls who like to travel. Finding common ground is easy and conversation flows smoothly. This group usually tips best. I've had a couple of fairly wealthy clients, lawyers, country club members, who just seem to like the energy and enthusiasm of the student body. They ask a lot of questions about the decision making process that lead to me to this point. I stand over their their supine bodies, holding their heads in my hands. I massage shampoo into their scalps and tell them "well, it was kind of a whim." I've been told I give good scalp massages.

The majority of my clients have a college education, which surprised me considering our bargain level service prices. I've had a few clients on the less-educated, lower-income end of the spectrum, but not as many as I would have expected. This group is infinitely less chatty than the aforementioned. I ask everyone the same conversation-prompting questions, and here I'm met with one word answers. "What do you do for work?" "Maintenance." Once this older man came in who hadn't had a haircut in fifteen years. He'd been buzzing his own head, he didn't look like Rapunzel. But I don't think he had ever set foot in a proper salon before. He was visibly uncomfortable with all the pleasantries and formalities: the bubbly receptionists with rainbow hair, the complementary herbal tea, the hand and shoulder massages. When he sat down at my station I immediately identified his smell as a combination of cigarettes and McDonalds. I haven't set foot in a McDonalds in years. It's incredible how scent-identification is so firmly imbedded in the human memory. I'm doing my best to make this guy feel less out of place. He's a grandfather so I ask about his grandkids, he is apparently estranged from all of his children and grandchildren, even though they all live in Portland. Family seems like a sore subject. I tentatively skirt around a few other topics before I ask "Have you ever been to The Nite Hawk?" Then I'm grateful for my five month stint as a trashy diner waitress when he lights up a little and he tells me, yes he has. After I inform him that I once worked there, he relaxes and becomes slightly more talkative. I have clearly gained entry level access to his trust. I am now borderline relatable. I silently congratulate myself for sticking with that miserable job for those five long months. Conversation is now flowing fairly smoothly, I ask if he has a dog. Then I took a few seconds to silently congratulate my mastery of the art of conversation, because (and I can personally attest to the validity of this statement) anyone who loves their dog can talk about dogs for hours.

Laundry

My affair with hair camp (it's been demoted from 'hair school') hit a rough patch this week. I'm on laundry duty right now. Which means I sit in the laundry room for three hours stints with like six other people who are also assigned to laundry duty. Every few minutes someone gets up and throws a load of something wet into a dryer. Except only two of us are ever the someone doing something, while the other semi-useless bodies huddle around an iPad streaming some shitty reality show. This is when I realize that I'm surrounded by children that are beyond uninterested in anything resembling work ethic. They spent their high school career avoiding work, ergo they're here instead of university, and I'm here voluntarily. And I'm paying for the privilege.

This girl comes into the laundry room and tells us an adorable story about how she climbed into one of these enormous dryers and her friend rolled her around like a hamster wheel. Her story makes me feel better. One thing I appreciate about my fellow hair campers is the youthful sense of playfulness that survived their teenage years.

Every few minutes the terrifying industrial sized machines make inexplicable BANG and CRACK sounds. Everything in this building needs maintenance. There is never any toilet paper in the bathrooms, all the sinks leak, half of our chairs are broken or lopsided. Where is all of our tuition money going? I think, formulating a scathing complaint letter in my head. And if one more person tries to show me what shade of purple (excuse me, violet) their hair used to be, and tells me how much they loved it and how they were so bummed out when it faded I'm going to break their iPad in half. The same goes for pictures of other people's coveted tattoos. "I don't care!" I try unsuccessfully to say with my eyes. My least favorite thing about hair camp is that by virtue of my attendance here it is assumed that I care what all of my classmates look like, used to look like, and want to look like in the future. It is also assumed that I believe in, and have some base knowledge about the properties of my star sign.

A few weeks ago a girl in my class, one who would probably not be characterized as conventionally pretty, got a makeover. Our instructor gathered everyone around to watch her transform. Well he gathered us around to demonstrate the cut, but the latter felt secondary. He gave her a beautiful, A-line short cut, then waxed her eyebrow into two. Then some of the girls did her makeup, and she looked like a different person. I've never seen a human glow with fortitude before, it was an active glow. She beamed for the next three hours until class ended, and probably for three more hours after she went home. She couldn't stop smiling. From my station I could see her reflection in her station as she finished her hair cut on her Penelope. She was just smiling and glowing and beaming and radiating uncontrollably. Word got around and all the director-of-something ladies came by to check her out and tell her how great she looked. All the other girls were freaking out and taking pictures and touching her hair. She looked up at me and said: "I feel so special today." 

And then the moral conflict set in, as it always does when I'm just starting to enjoy hair camp. "You are!" I vocalized, but my entire upbringing and my parents and my extremely expensive university education throttled me and implored me to explain to her that she was special every day and that placing such value in your appearance is secondary and narrow minded and that I secretly missed her unibrow! But I loved seeing her so happy. I want to make other people feel confident, of course. But can I do this guiltlessly? Will I ever stop thinking "what about the Syrian refugees? Access to clean water? Carbon emissions?" and is that a good or bad thing? Can I just relax and enjoy the craft of hair and makeup? Can I allow myself to value the finite skill and technique this industry requires? Can I appreciate the ephemeral pride in feeling pretty without wrenching some internal struggle out of it?

Wellness

We have a daily activity at hair school called Wellness. Wellness is when we take a mental break from whatever project is at hand to focus on something positive and unrelated to school. We take a little breather. We give ourselves a mind treat. Sometimes Wellness is a group discussion of our strengths and goals. Sometimes it's when we all share our holiday traditions. Once we took a Wellness down the street to overwhelm the nearest Starbucks. Usually Wellness is an excuse to watch Adele videos on the big computer screen. Sometimes we watch RuPaul videos. Once we watched a Richard Simmons video and it was a huge failure. The person responsible was banned from suggesting Wellness videos in the future.

At first I thought Wellness was another tiny waste of time, slowly chipping away at the larger waste of time which is everything we do when we don't actually have our shears in hand. But I've grown accustomed to the lackadaisical time management policy that seems to be the cosmetology standard. We're on west coast time all the time, it's like island time. I recently discovered the 'personal Wellness'. It's like a get out of jail free card with no limits or restrictions. You can just "take a Wellness" and scurry out into the wilds of D.P. (downtown Portland) whenever you want as long as you're back within fifteen minutes. And you don't actually have to be back in fifteen minutes as long as when you do come back you claim to have only been gone for fifteen minutes, with conviction. Yesterday I surreptitiously took an hour long fifteen minutes to get supplies for an art project (candy). Usually we use the 'personal Wellness' to go next door and get coffee at Tilt. We call this going to "objectify the Tilt boys". This is usually the only time of the day we encounter straight men, they also make decent coffee. This activity feels morally on par with watching RuPaul videos.

Branding

Today hair school ended with an optional lecture on branding and marketing oneself. I only attended because I had nothing better to do, and I thought it might be funny. It wasn't funny. It only made me feel more like a lost hippie on makeup island. The lecture was given by the most gregarious director-of-something. But she only said "easy peasy" once which was a pleasant surprise.

Actually, two funny things happened during the lecture. The whole two hours focused on customizing your facebook, instagram, and personal website to fit your "brand". Virtual platforms. So when Bubbles asked what we think of when we think of platforms and someone yelled "shoes", I was amused. But my very favorite part of the lecture was when she stuttered over the words "blog post" so it sounded almost exactly like she said "butt plug post".

The lecture covered things like, what is the best time of day to post on social media sites: (Facebook: 1pm and 3pm; Instagram: 7-9am and 5-6pm), and how to come up with a tagline for yourself. A tagline is something obnoxious like "be your best beautiful", and then you're supposed to plaster your hashtagged tagline all over the internet at 8am, 1pm, 3pm, and 5pm like a fucking lunatic. Oh and you're never supposed to swear. I slouched in my seat and prayed she didn't call on me, because the only tagline-like phrases running through my head were along the lines of: "this is not my tribe" and "I don't even know how to wear makeup". I have to keep reminding myself that like any class, or job, or group activity, I have the liberty to decide which elements of this endeavor to take with me, and which ones to simply make fun of in a butt plug post.

18

Today I really felt the age gap between my posse of 18 year olds and myself. If I'm being reductive, I can binarize the girls into two dominant personality categories. On one end of the spectrum are the loud ones with something to prove. They wear the most makeup. They've all had some shade of blue hair at one point. They like to shout-talk about all the raves they've been to, how much they love to party, how wild they used to be back in the day when they were in high school and they threw firecrackers at old people from the passenger's side of their boyfriend's car every. single. day. They take more risks with haircuts and styles. They make fast friends, and they laugh a lot, loudly. I catch occasional glimpses of my younger self in some of their antics. Just when one of them starts to really annoy me by being aggressively young and gregarious (and very vocally addicted to Adderall), she divulges some fascinating piece of personal history to melt my condescension. Much unlike myself, some of these girls have come from places of intense fear and instability: group homes, unsavory step-parents, unsavory biological parents, periods of homelessness, e.t.c. They are real life incredible. Most of them see this program, that I am so quick to dismiss as "not real school", as their key to independence. And I shamefully, silently, eat my former irritation.

On the other end of the scale are the quiet girls. They all have long, natural-colored hair. Literally all of them. They are slower to share anecdotes about their family, or to share at all. They live with their parents, of course. They seem to live at least 40 minutes outside of the Portland Metro area, and they think it's Manhattan. Once while I was getting coffee with one girl, she looks out the window and says something like: "Portland's such a crazy city I could never live here". They refer to downtown Portland as D.P. That one took me about a week to decode. Their hairstyles are classic and sweet. Last week braiding your hair into pretty holiday bows was common among this group. They are so quick to give compliments, they love compliments. They seem to watch a lot of TV.

These are not the university-bound, sharp-tongued, organic-consuming private school people that I spent my 18's around. They're much more foreign to me than I had anticipated. They're impressive, especially in their confidence. They are almost completely ignorant of current events. They all love animals and American Horror Story, so we find common ground there. They're challenging, but I am starting to really appreciate them and form attachments.

Penelope

Cosmetology school is nothing like real school. There are some technical lessons where we sit in a classroom and take notes from powerpoints about different shampoos and scalp treatments. These slides later reappear, verbatim, as questions on the world's easiest exams. Most of our lessons take place on Penelope. She is our first mannequin head (they are all named Penelope by virtue of a neck tattoo/brand name). She has real human hair, which was sold to the Penelope company by people in developing countries. While knowing this kind of makes me feel like I have "white privilege" stamped across my forehead, she functions as incredibly helpful hands-on practice. The Kafkaesque rows of suspended Penelopes at our work stations, Penelopes floating in sinks, and Penelopes popping off their stands in a flurry of tangled hair and brushes have lost their surrealism and become commonplace. Some of us have distinguished our Penelope's with piercings and facial tattoos. My Penelope has a teardrop tattoo surrounding a blue dermal, and a classic "Mom" neck tattoo. This is my girl after our first curling iron lesson:

This week we learned a few different blow-dry techniques, as well as the functions of our various brushes. Since I have been living in a state of cosmetological ignorance for the last 25 years, the results of these techniques seemed more like magic tricks. For example: if you roll up a lock of hair in a round brush and blast it with the cold setting on your dryer for a few seconds, you can achieve big-texas-beauty-pageant-prostitute curls by literally unwinding the hair in a magic wand motion. Once we'd honed our magic on the Penelopes, we got to move on to each other. This part is especially fun because we practice giving head massages during the shampoo. Working on human heads was more nerve-wracking than I had anticipated. Unlike Penelope, my classmates have the capacity to feel pain if I get a brush stuck in a tangled nest of hair. Also, I feel really guilty if I turn a lock of someone's hair into a tangled nest. One time I stabbed my partner in the eye with my fingernail while trying to move his hair out of his eyes, but he was a great sport about it. Overall, our days are pretty fun and the atmosphere is really positive. Everyone mills around looking at each other's work and making encouraging comments about specific technical aspects. The phrase "killin it!" gets thrown around often. I'm quite pleased (and frankly a little surprised) at how much I've enjoyed this first week.