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.