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.

Back to School

We started our first day of classes by receiving free manicures from current students. This was both a pleasant surprise, and a pretty obvious way of filling time. My manicurist was an apathetic child. But she did a pretty good job, regardless. She was pleasantly unphased when I asked her to simply sharpen my stiletto nails. This service was followed by a leisurely hour long lunch break.

This afternoon we had what I would have referred to it as "syllabus day" in my past life at real school. In addition to briefly reviewing the syllabus, we spent the better part of the day inspecting our new kits (the aforementioned swag). We each collected an enormous box of gear from the peppy director-and/or-administrator-ladies, brought them into the upstairs hall, spread out, and tore into them like Christmas. We inspected the integrity of each individual makeup brush, fake eyelash set, creepy mannequin head, and so on. We plugged in all our blow dryers and irons and tested their settings. We made passwords for our new ipads. Then we used our new ipads to make a million other passwords for a million other online resource accounts. We skimmed through our only physical textbook: a thousand-pound instructional manual that is literally called Milady. (Anyone watch The League?) Then we set up our stations, did a little reading from Milady, and called it a day.

The other kids were pretty nice. I didn't have to eat lunch alone in the bathroom. The girls are mostly 18, and really sweet. My favorite 18 year old delightfully exclaimed that she had just graduated from high school and found it surreal to be "surrounded by so many adults!" I happily chose a work station between her, and the badass Alaskan girl with the knuckle tattooes. Overall I was feeling pretty good, very tired and excited as I carried my box of mannequin heads through the torrential downpour. Then I finally reached my car and found a waterlogged 80$ parking ticket.

Orientation

Yesterday I attended four hours of orientation. Myself, and about 30 other students were ushered into an upstairs classroom by the ebullient Aveda staff. Seven or eight female employees led us through a slide show explaining our curriculum and class policies. All the women have titles like "director of something" or "something administrator". They're all very pretty, endearingly plump, and have amazing hair. They spent the first part of the morning introducing themselves, explaining how they ended up at Aveda, and why they love their jobs. To me this portion felt more like a demonstration of how fun and quirky everyone thought themselves to be. Their tame and silly anecdotes were received with uproarious laughter from both their coworkers and my soon to be classmates. One director-of-something woman used the phrase "easy peasy!" like eight times (silver lining: she only finished with "lemon squeezy" once). I caught myself scanning the room a couple times to see if anyone else didn't find their antics roll-on-the floor hysterical. No dice. But despite my hesitation to share in their laughing gas, I believe their gregariousness and indisputable efforts to make us feel comfortable were genuine. Their attempts were appreciated.

My classmates are mostly young girls, as I had anticipated. A lot of them are really pretty, like really really pretty. I would like to think of myself as a wise and well-traveled 25 year old who is educated and compassionate, and isn't intimidated by a bunch of hot chicks with impeccable makeup... but maybe I'm not. I met a couple people that I thought could become my class friends. One of the very few boys in my class was nice, calm, and a few years older than me. I also liked this really badass girl who just moved from Alaska where she had been working the fishing seasons. She has "sink" and "swim" knuckle tattooes.

Overall, my classes seem interesting and fast-paced. We participate in some cool charitable events too, like Locks of Love. I'm nervous that I'm the only one who has absolutely zero base knowledge of all things hair or makeup (a lot of people have backgrounds in dance and theatre), but I'm probably not the only one who feels that way. Just have to keep my carpal tunnel in check and this should prove to be a pretty fun endeavor.

I am equal parts excited and nervous to announce that I will start hair school in exactly two weeks. Technically I'm going to cosmetology school, but seeing as I am not interested in the doing-nails or waxing-vaginas portions of the curriculum, I prefer to avoid the 'c' word in favor of the more affectionate epithet: hair school. Hopefully I will not actually live up to the title of Beauty School Dropout. These are simply my preconceived anxieties about the program. I have orientation next week, which should either feed or quell said anxieties.

Pros: I am excited to learn a trade, have an income-generating skill that I can travel with, and a job that doubles as a creative outlet. I'm excited to retire from my nocturnal bar life and become a day crawler. I am also looking forward to receiving the 2.5 thousand dollar kit that is included in my tuition. I'm pretty sure Aveda products are on the expensive side of the cosmetics scale, so I can only presume that this kit is comprised of dope yuppie swag.

Cons: I am nervous that I will be surrounded by a hoard of vapid 18 year olds that think twitter counts as "liking to read", I will not be intellectually challenged or stimulated, and will spiral into a deep cavern of regret over my wasted time and money when I could have elected to go to "real" school.