Hello World, redux

“Hello world!”

… after months of neglect, i’ll be writing in here again. there is a season to everything, and for a while it was time to lie fallow, to fall asleep, to hide. And as anybody who has had trouble waking up in the morning knows, getting up is tougher than falling into bed. It’s much easier to hit the snooze button and go right back asleep. But nobody can sleep forever… (apologies to readers who have been asking about what’s up with me – a case of ‘blog hypersomnia’!)

So, a little bit of action beats no action at all, and this post is a reminder/declaration that:

I want to say hello to the world! I’ll write something here again! I want to write about figuring out what to do with my life! Hopefully it’ll be meaningful, literary, wise, interesting! (but i’ll also settle for simple narrative and refrain from detailing my daily lunches and/or toothbrushing) Feel free to comment and chatter!

Hello world!

Hair!

So today we cut off my hair, and it has become a community project

(apologies for sideways presentation… i couldn’t figure it out and it’s 3am!)

this is the before picture

Julie with the first cut

Claire is definitely enjoying this…

Anne gives it a go too!

all shorn but not yet bald!

yeah, photoshoot! (i’ll look like this in maybe a month)

I can taste the freedom! no more heavy tangled hair!

Bald! Adam finishes off what the girls started

profile view…

mysterious 3/4 perspective view

The Last Gasp of Vanity

It’s hitting me.

Today I realized that I have two, possibly three days, before I shave my head, forsake most of my worldly possessions and all the surface gloss of living in civilization, and plunge into the wilderness.

Few of the events of the past month (crazy packing, leaving people, bumming around in Boston, going to Montreal to get a tourist visa, tying up miscellaneous loose ends) have heralded the upcoming start of my Appalachian Trail section hike as much as much as the notion of cutting off all my hair. Of course, I have reasons for that drastic act, mostly hygiene ones – my head itches unbearably after a few days without washing. So it makes a lot of sense to just do without hair, especially in the warmth of the summer. Also, this is best time to do it if I ever want a shaved head – in the mountains, away from curious stares wondering if I’m a dyke, punk, or cancer patient.

I have my vanity. I think my head is somewhat oddly shaped, and probably not too pretty bare of all adornment. It is largish and oval from the front, but with very little curvature in profile. I have a flat back to my head. Maybe I was left lying in my cradle a lot as an infant and the whole skull just flattened out a little bit. Let’s just say I would never go around as a two-dimensional baldy in normal social circumstances. Ah vanity! After years of growing up with short bobs and bangs, I let my hair grow out in college, and have gotten used to the feel of it being shoulder-length or longer, a significant weight that can be dressed up or down, a banner floating in the wind, a veil to hide my face behind, a symbol of femininity. Enough people have told me that I look better with long hair than short hair that it has become a crutch to my ego. It also provides the occasional boost of superiority about low-maintenance natural beauty when other girls bemoan their hair products and hours of styling and brushing and all I do is wash it, and maybe quite infrequently comb it. Too many little things that prop up self and image, to be simply labeled as ‘vanity’!

But bareness is also attractive and meaningful in a different, non-aesthetic way. A change in haircut sometimes functions as a physical marker of transition, and though this is my secondary reason for taking it all off, it’s probably no less significant. Going hiking along the trail is quite similar to the Shikoku pilgrimage for me, and a pilgrimage of any sort has always been characterized by a time of preparation, of meditation, detachment, or some other paring down to reveal a pilgrim’s essence. Now clearly I have been quite frantic and attached (see the previous post on adding to my material goods) so perhaps the haircut, properly ritualized, becomes a last minute attempt at reaching spiritual calm.

I envision being centered and serene, glowing with that sort of calm that monks and nuns have…. but so far all I can see is an unattractive bald head, where the bones of my face look too broad. I wonder if I am trading certain sensuality for uncertain (and unwanted?) ’spirituality’. Perhaps the haircut is just the first step, and if I’ve learnt anything from Shikoku, it’s that good intentions aside, change happens along the path, after you get dirty, tired, rained on, bitten, and splattered in mud and come through it all smiling. Perhaps there’s no forcing anything, and what happens happens, with the hair being only an external indicator.

So we will see what happens! The hair comes off with Julie wielding the razor (I can’t think of a more appropriate person). But in the mean time, I’m going to wear dresses and skirts and take pains with my appearance and let the hair down and today Nozomi and I are going shopping to satisfy my last gasp of vanity before I go the route of Jean-Luc (he has a nice-shaped head!) Picard!

Before and after pictures will be forthcoming!

Simplify, simplify, simplify

Life is a funny thing.

As I prepare to leave Florida for Boston to start hiking the AT, I’ve had to face the notion of getting rid of all my ’stuff’, accumulated junk and mementos from five years of living away from home. So I have the spent the past few months holed up in an imaginery stock-taking room, assiduously calculating the sentimental and/or monetary value of every item I own, pulled this way and that in a tug-of-war over whether a particular thing makes the cut into my two suitcases and one carry-on and one box to ship, or whether it gets consigned to friends or the thriftstore.

The minimalist creed (I have too many clothes for that) is not only practical, it makes sense as a sort of spiritual withdrawing, or paring down to essentials, or just mental preparation for when I go vagabonding about with only a backpack to my name. To cultivate that lovely transcendant mindset of doing without the unneccessary and non-utilitarian, I picked up a copy of Thoreau’s Walden at the library, vowing to read it and gain some packing wisdom from the sage who said, ‘Simplify, simplify, simplify!’

So I’m mostly through the first chapter ‘Economy’ and its lessons that possessions do not make the man, and feel myself arming with resolve for an attack on my clothes, books, papers and other accumulated debris, a merciless weeding out of everything that is not absolutely essential. (Well…. essential to a certain extent. I am a girl after all)

Until! I discover a shipping agent that will send my excess stuff home as freight, evaluating the shipment by volume and not weight. And to utilize their services, I’ll have to purchase a minimum volume of 35 cubic feet, which works out to something along the lines of …. 6-8 boxes. Big boxes. And this is still cheaper than sending one as-light-as-possible box by good old postal air mail! So yes, even thought I have a current maximum of about two boxes, I sign up for the deal.

And find myself in yet another tug-of-war, this time between clashing ideologies – the minimalist creed and the oh-so-Singaporean ‘let’s fill up the space, we can’t afford to lose out!’ kiasu mentality. After all, having been the victim of many a packing-induced nervous breakdown (thanks, Carleton), the prospect of sending home ALL I have without anxiety at the airline counter is quite close to chocolate-overload euphoria. So the next thing I know, I’m caught in the contradictory situation of browsing online for cheap backpacking gear sales ( I can always use more gear, right?), checking out internet bookstores, poking around my designated “Give to Thriftstore” bags for stuff I want to take back; all the while perusing a bit of Thoreau on the side.

This is the way this rather paradoxical situation works. I am seriously thinking of buying a djembe from my drum teacher, a purchase I’ve never made in expectation of difficulties moving the heavy drum back home. Now I can. (not too healthy for my bank account, but yes i can!) I am also rubbing my hands in glee at the thought of yet another thriftstore hunt for second-hand but fashionable goodies (Singapore has no thriftstores worth talking about, so I better get my bargain shopping kicks in). So right now, I am considering a compromise position of getting rid of low-quality/no sentimental value stuff in return for good things that I assure myself I will treasure and love and use, pointedly ignoring the idea that this replacement is going to take some $. And I am attempting to salve any consumerism guilt by buying cheap and/or old, and recycling unwanted stuff to the thriftstore. After all, the logic goes like this: The thriftstores are like a library you pay a small fee for using. For only a few dollars, one takes in one or two bags of old icky boring clothes in return for another one or two bags of lovely exciting quirky possibilities!

So, where to go, what to do? I might do just that. Exchange a bag of the old for the new. And if I decide if the old is okay too, then well, at least I have the space for it

Off work in 15 minutes, heading out to shop!