Please note that all blog posts before 8 April 2007 were automatically imported from LiveJournal. To see the comments and any LiveJournal-specific extras such as polls and user icons, please find the source posting at http://brianenigma.livejournal.com/2002/05/I sit here, drinking coffee, waiting the mandatory 30 minutes for the hair dye to set. I think everyone knows this already, but I do not have naturally black hair. It is more of a light brownish-blondish, which is weird because my eyebrows and other facial hair, if I were to grow a beard or mustache, are all dark brown and nearly black.
One of the things I miss about working at a small-ish dot-com company is the ability to look and dress in just about any radical way imaginable. For a long time, I would color my hair black, but bleach a long white strand in front of each ear (which is hard to describe in words, but looked kind of elvish, although I am sure plenty thought it was pretty gay looking). Occasionally, when my hair grew out, I would dye the roots purple (my favorite) or red or blue or whatever (I was never really into green, though). Of course the wacky colors never lasted much longer than a few days, regardless of the quality of the dye. (Manic Panic was a joke, but Fudge seemed to work decently.)
I also miss the comfort of “jeans and a t-shirt” (or in my case, cargo pants and a t-shirt). I miss wearing big shit-kicking boots. Sure, I am wearing some pretty decent boots to my present job: Grinders, which pretty much are the cool nifty boots in the post Doc Martin Sellout age. (It really cheesed me off when Docs made the spaces between the eyelets closer together so that 20-holed boots were shorter and used less leather and just became generally lame.) I am wearing the Grinders, of course, after establishing a reputation for being smart and “good at computers” there, after wearing formal wingtip dress shoes for many, many months (hey, I love my job, I just sometimes with I could dress a little more relaxed). I miss going to Metapa every morning wearing knee-high boots so tall you had to tuck your pants into them. Boots with an inch or two of sole, encrusted in cybernetic-looking metal craziness. Wacky Kiss boots with big metal springs visible through cylinders cut through the the soles that added about 8 inches to my height. I have about 6 pairs of boots (and one pair of dress shots and some flip-flops) that range from the simple ones I wear to work to the crazy tall ones, and I rarely get to wear them anymore. I hate to think of the shloads of money I shelled out on Melrose to get the boots I never really get the chance to wear anymore. Oh, well, it was fun while it lasted, and I’ll probably just wear them out to the local coffee shops and bars more now. Of course, I might feel slightly overdressed and/or out of place in them, but that’s cool, I can deal with that. The sterile bubble of Irvine and Newport Beach need a healthy dose of freak every once in awhile.
The thought has also occurred to me that even though I have a fear of doctors and hospitals and needles that borders on neurotic (okay, well, maybe it crosses that border), I am perfectly comfortable with tattoos, piercings, and tattoo/piercing shops. Hospitals have the reputation for being sterile, humane and painless, while the stereotypical image people have of tattoo shops is nearly opposite. Of course, this is all based on generalities and stereotypes that I think are completely off-base (most tattoo places are as sterile and clean, if not more-so, than doctor’s offices). It is just a random thought that crossed my mind while sitting here, waiting for the hair dye to do its thing, staring at the machine and The Magician. Time’s up. Time to rinse…
