napoleon the funky

my husband is gone for the night. it's work related and only for a day, but i woke up this morning and thought, "i'm going to be a slob and not take a shower today because my man isn't here to notice."

i've felt like i was being rather slovenly, but then i remembered something i read a while ago. supposedly, when napoleon was off at war, he sent his lady josephine a message telling her not to bathe for two weeks prior to his return. thinking about that today led me to do a little internet research and there's speculation if he actually said two weeks or three days, but most sources i found said two weeks.

this troubles me. i had to talk myself into NOT showering for one day and i will certainly be clean and pristine before i see my fella tomorrow, even if there's no hanky panky on our agenda.

i'm assuming that napoleon was coming home from his warring, feeling powerful and frisky. and maybe powerfully frisky, depending on how long he'd been gone and how many whores he'd visited while he was away. i can't imagine wanting to get up close and personal to anyone when i was dirty and.... ripe. because i don't care who you are, you will be smelling all kinds of funky by the time 2 weeks of non-bathing has gone past.

we recently read in a book on american history that people used to think that bathing was dangerous and avoided it most of the time. they typically took only a couple baths a year. did you catch that? two a YEAR, people! can you imagine how bad they smelled? they didn't have air conditioning or sanitary toileting facilities either, so their rears had to have been smellable from across the room. or the field for that matter!

and these people often slept several to a room. they didn't have the space or money to have large, spread out houses, so oftentimes, kids slept in their parents' bedroom. and it wasn't unusual for a family to have ten kids.

it makes my eyes bug out a little bit to think about going for 6 months without a bath and sleeping in a bed with a man who's been working the fields day in and day out and who's also been many months without getting intimate with a bar of soap.

now imagine that you are part of that couple, that dirty, odoriferous couple. it's summer and you're lying in bed after a long day of sewing garments by hand for your 9 kids. you've cooked several meals over a big open pot on a fire and you've killed and plucked a couple chickens. you've been inside a house with no electricity or water or even a door or screens to keep the bugs out all day.

you've been nursing infants for nearly 12 years straight. your boobs no longer resemble the breasts that we currently think of in america, but more closely mimic the ones we see in national geographic where they hang straight down with the long, uninspiring nipple distended and pointing at your feet when you stand up. when you lie down, your teets slide off into your sticky, hairy armpits. there's a pungent scent of old yeast and sour milk wafting up from the breasty region.

you're lying in your bed of grass. it's been covered with a sheet that you air out every week or so, but it's filled none-the-less with old hay. if you lay your ear directly on the mattress, you can hear the bugs crawling around under your bodies inside the hay. you can hear your children breathing in various locations around the room. one's in your dresser drawer bedded down on your grandma's old shawl. two are on a blanket on the floor beside you within arm's reach.

neither of you owns a tooth brush. you pick and scrape at your teeth from time to time with a stick that you've widdled to a point, but toothpaste isn't something you even know about.

can you picture the scene? are you with me?

okay, now close your eyes and tell me how you feel..... is the answer HORNY? i know that scientifically there would be a large build up of pheromones that are supposedly a turn on, but i suspect the other factors would counter the alleged attraction. i'm positive that the very last thing in the world that i can think of when i'm putting myself mentally in that situation is wanting to bump uglies when both myself and my husband are both big sweating stench bags. there would have to be a line of demarcation down the center of that buggy grass bed until such time as a bath could be procured for the both of us.

it's amazing to me that families were so large at that time. clearly, current american standards for cleanliness have affected my mindset on this matter, but it seems that even if that weren't present, surely my nose would protest close contact on a hot summer's night.

much like my appreciation of toilet paper from a couple posts ago, i am now voicing my appreciation of soap. and running water. and razors to scrape off all that armpit and leg hair. thank you, Jesus that i live in the year 2012 in the current conditions and standards for bathing.

sheri-licious

my good buddy Karen over at Ow, My Angst did a fun post a few days ago where she gave herself a makeover, jersey-style to show her love of the tv show Jerseylicious. it's a show about some jersey girls who do hair and makeup ~ and when i say they do them, i mean they do it all excessively. tons of makeup crammed onto their faces and big, big hair.

i thought it would be fun to do one of these myself, so i asked her to make it into a meme in order to make it seem like i wasn't just being a lame copycat, even though i am. you'll see her linky and note at the bottom of this post if you want to participate too. men, that includes you. please, feel free to indulge your inner diva and take pics to show us your creative process.

that means i'm the first to jump onto the karenlicious bandwagon with a makeover of my own.

with no further adieu . . .

i filled my bathroom counter filled with various and sundry hair and makeup items.

then I started with a blank canvas. scary, I know.

then i painted my face with waaayy too much concealer, foundation and powder.

next comes the choice of what color to put on my eyes. those are always the most fun to create.

 this was done with brow liner, 6 different eyeshadow colors, plus black liquid eyeliner out the wazoo.

i guess it's time to do something with my stupid hair. hmmm.... i don't have a bump it to lift it up. or any extensions. or a flat iron. dang it, i'm just stuck with my hair dryer and standard curling iron. well, it's not big enough to look like a proper jersey girl, but it's bigger than usual. let's just overlook it, shall we? look at my lipliner instead, okay? niiiccee!

smile pretty for the camera!

okay, i'm starting to feel weird about taking my picture all alone in my bathroom with a face caked in goop. maybe if i make some faces, that'll help.

i've got some great stink-face going on here.

it's feeling less and less like jerseylicious and more and more like glamor shots gone horribly wrong. in my bathroom.

 okay, that was fun. now it's time to go cook dinner and toss in another load of laundry. i'm so glamorous i make those licious girls jealous.

brooke decided to let me make up her face and floof up her hair today too and she wrote about it and included pictures on her own blog. to see and read about it, check out hers here. it's funny.

if you want to join in the face painting fun, here's karen's blurb and info.

The "Karenlicious Meme"

Make yourself delicious!  

Karen is a blah, boringly natural housewife and mom most of the time.  But she made herself DELICIOUS. 

 

Here's what you do:  throw a shovel-full of makeup onto your grill.  Take as many before and after photos as you want of your transformation. Post these insane photos for all the world to see, with the "karen-licious" banner.

Invite your friends to pass it on and be ridiculous too! 

Then go wash your face.  You're fine just the way you are.  But not today!  Today you are

KARENLICIOUS!

hair bonanza - the final chapter x2

i met my future husband when my hair was growing out of the buzz stage & into something infinitely less attractive. my hair was approximately 1 inch long all over with no shape & going nearly straight up into the air. i have no idea why he asked me out, but i'm very glad he did & sure enough, i managed to grow my hair back and look like a normal girl before our wedding.

i changed the color of it on a regular basis in order to get my hair fix without the drastic cutting. i had about every shade of blond, brown & red imaginable & then one day i decided to make the leap to a deep, dark brown. the shade was called "midnight ruby."

if you'll notice, my natural coloring is extremely similar to the woman in this picture, so the color was destined to look awesome on me. after a little while of that, i decided to go all the way to black. i wanted to look like an asian woman right down to my roots, so i bought a box of blue/black & became a whole new woman. actually, chris decided to join me on my black hair endeavor, so we shared a bottle & both went black (can't say we never went back though). chris looked kind of like the devil when his facial hair all freshly dyed black too.

here's a picture of me with my sister sarah where, for only a brief period of time, my hair was darker than hers. i kind of liked it being black for the sake of variety, but it was hard to maintain because my roots were dreadful when they started growing in. and unlike some people, i don't use sharpie along my root line to keep it looking fresh (ahem... sarah.. cough, cough). i also looked pretty corpsey if i didn't wear a bunch of makeup to cover the pastiness & freckles.

one night while i was lying in bed with my black head, i had the overwhelming urge to purge the black & go platinum. i wanted it to be lighter than it had ever been before & i could hardly wait til morning so i could go buy some bleach. i was just sure that it was going to be great, but alas, reality threw me for a loop. it turned a hideous shade of orange that even I couldn't live with. i cut most of it off in my bathroom that day & then bought more bleach. i believe i bleached & dyed it a total of 5 times in rapid succession over the course of a week. during that week i drove with my honey to new york for his virgin voyage north of washington d.c. we stayed with my aunt & uncle & a couple cousins. my cousin drew decided to get in on the bleaching fun, so he & i would color each others' hair at night while laughing at how it kept getting progressively worse.

then i decided that since it was bordering on intolerably horrid, i'd go to sally beauty supply & pick up a bottle of blue hair dye. i had never gone way off the natural color wheel like that & i was picturing something deep & drastic, in the royal blue family for some good shock value. alas, what i got was something more closely resembling baby bird feathers. lots of it had fallen out in the process of all the bleaching & dying and for some reason, the blue didn't come out at all as i'd envisioned it. it was like i had a sad, 4-yr-old-styled "my little pony" on my head & it had crossed way over the line to intolerable. it was time for drastic measures - i would have to shave it... again. so my cousin steve & my husband both had a go at my hair with the clippers (properly charged this time) and had a bit of fun while they were at it. here's a picture of steve giving me a sneak peek at a possible future of male pattern balding. lovely, isn't it? i believe there was also a rat tail.

this time around, my shaving experience was a bit different than the first time. this time my scalp was wounded & weeping from all the chemical abuse it had suffered in the previous week. it more closely resembled a world globe than a head, complete with oozing mountainous peaks of lava & some patches of blue for the oceans. there were some darker places where the bleach hadn't fully penetrated that looked kind of like land & some nearly white patches of fuzz that from a couple feet away could have been mistaken for cloud cover from the air.

i was visiting with lots of friends & family, some of whom i hadn't seen in years & i'm guessing that it was probably a bit of a shock for them when this bald, scabby headed woman showed up at their doors with a wink & a smile. here's a shot of me visiting with my friend cristi. surprisingly she was willing to be seen with me outside of her apartment.

it wasn't more than a month or two later that my grandfather died & i drove north again to attend his funeral. my mom asked that i please wear one of my wigs in order to not give any of the old folks heart attacks. here's the best wig that i owned during my bald periods.

it came in pretty handy when i didn't feel like standing out so severely. i was working at a retail store for kids clothes at the time & i often wore my wig to work so as not to startle the small children. i would have strangers compliment me on my great cut & expertly placed highlights. there were numerous times when a customer would ask me for the name of my hair dresser & with a gleam in my eye, i'd tell them i was my own hair dresser. then my co-workers would start giving me the look, just begging me with their eyes not to do it again, but i could never resist. i would always reach up & yank that wig off my head & expose my hideous scalp to the horror of everyone around.

ahhh, fun times...

it grew back out, slowly but surely & i managed to keep it trimmed up into something more fashionable this time around. dying it a lovely shade of strawberry blond helped take the edge off too.

eventually i learned to leave it alone. for the most part anyway. it was after the second shaving that i decided to calm the heck down & let my head be normal rather than being a gross lumpy globe. so now i just play with highlights & varying lengths. but i'll always be glad for the hair adventures that i've taken in my life. it helps me remember when memorable things happened in my past... oh yeah! the last time i saw you was when my hair was about an inch long after the first time i shaved it. gosh, that's been 14 years!

hair bonanaza - the bald years x2

i don't know if you tuned in yesterday for the maiden episode of hair bonanza, but if you didn't, you might like to go there first to see how the ground work was set for today's edition where the hair seems to spiral out of control. and unfortunately, i don't mean that in a curly, voluminous sort of way.

when we left off, i was in a dorm bathroom with julie, sporting a juicy mohawk. julie and i spent a lot of time together & after college, we even managed to both get live-in nanny jobs nearby each other so that we could spend our days tanning by the country club pool & taking kids to the mall. our nights were spent in a variety of ... other pursuits. here's a shot of me, probably at the tannest i've ever been & certainly at the thinnest i'd ever been up to that point. i was attempting to show my serious & yet sexy side.

oh collar bones, how i miss you!

i wore my hair like that for a year or so & then i got a stupid hair cut that required too much effort. i hated it because while i enjoy hair games, the reality of actually fixing hair for more than 5 minutes in any given day is out of the question for me. that same day of the yuck hair cut, i watched oprah. that changed my life. demi moore was on the show that day & she had just shaved her head to play g.i. jane & on the show she barely had any hair at all, just a bit of a buzz & damn but she was looking sexy! she had great makeup & long dangly earrings & some little voice in my head said, "you can look like her too. you just have to shave off your hair! and just think, then you won't have to fix it at all!"

so i got julie & out we went to walmart to buy some clippers. we got back to julie's nanny room & i sat down on the toilet lid in her bathroom & she grabbed up chunks of my hair & started hacking it off, right down to my scalp. while we were laughing hysterically and chopping off my locks, the clippers were charging close at hand. we didn't wait quite long enough for them to finish charging because we were in a hurry to get the job done, so as julie would run them through my hair, after only a few swipes, the battery would run out & they would start to yank rather than cut the scraps of hair that remained on my head. over & over we had to put them back on the base to charge, all the while we laughed & laughed & laughed in nearly feverish hysteria. it took so long for the job to be done that i started wondering if i'd made a horrible mistake. maybe being 21 & bald wasn't such a hot idea after all. but it was too late. i might get fired from my cushy nanny job for becoming a freak. i might never find another man. i might get really cold since it was november & i wasn't a fan of stocking caps.

eventually, the job was done. i went home & spent a prickly night in bed, waking up repeatedly, wondering if it was all a dream. no such luck; my pillow case sticking to the 1/8 inch long spikes covering my head was a clear indication that it was entirely too real. i wore a baseball hat the next morning to face my boss. she wasn't happy & clearly hadn't ever dealt with such a scenario with any of her former nannies. there's apparently no rule about what to say or do when the caretaker of your children goes from a normalish person to a bald-headed freak overnight. to her credit, she didn't fire me, just asked me to please not shave it again.

a couple of days later, the weekend arrived. julie & i generally went to this one club on the weekends where we knew a lot of people & could get in for free. it was our spot. our stomping grounds. the scene of our crimes. so we got decked out in our sexy little mini dresses, did our makeup & nails & she did her hair. we drove over there like we always did & suddenly, when we were just about to arrive, my heart started pounding really hard. i felt like i couldn't breathe. i thought i'd throw up. how could i possibly go into this place where i'd always felt so cool & let everyone see me with a bald head? i nearly turned the car around & took my panicked self home, but julie helped me up & out into the night for my first public display of insanity. everyone stared. people pointed. mouths dropped open and it was pretty clear they weren't staring because i was looking super fly.

a few drinks later, i overcame my panic & started having fun with it. i had a few strangers ask me if i was going through chemo. they told me to be strong & fight the good fight. i had some men whisper in my ear that it was surprisingly sexy. one dude rubbed my head & told me he wanted to put his toes in it because it felt like a carpet.

it wasn't long before i realized the benefits of being bald - no need for shampoo. no need for hair products of any kind, for that matter. i didn't waste time blowing or fixing it. i never had a bad hair day. but the downside was that i felt like i always had to keep a full face of makeup painted on if i was leaving the house. i couldn't forget my earrings & i always had to have my acrylic nails fresh & fabulous in order to keep myself looking healthy & not sickly. no cancer patient action for this girl. i also went to a modeling agency & started taking some classes & had a portfolio made. here are some of the pictures that i still have from those days of traipsing about a gorgeous set with a photographer in tow.

i had to face my family eventually & my darling sister sarah, who was 10 at the time, told me that my head felt like a little animal. my mom didn't want to look at me and they weren't exactly rushing to take pictures of me to send to their friends. i did dig up a couple pics taken by my mom as it started growing back out a smidge.

you'll notice in this one, the doilied monstrosity made another appearance. i believe we were headed out to the nutcracker that sarah was dancing in & it was the only non-flowery dress i owned that would be appropriate for wearing in classy company. i love the contradictions here where i'm in this old, tacky dress with a buzz cut & smiling like it was the most normal thing in the world. and snuggled up tight beside me is my sister erica who doesn't exactly look like a relative & she's wearing a bead factory on her body. this picture makes me smile every time i see it.

here's another gem of a picture, this one taken with julie while i was bald. i'm not sure where we were since i've got on going out eye makeup, but she's wearing a flannel & i'm wearing a corduroy shirt, so clearly we weren't headed out on the town. it's like a mystery from my past.

i think there will need to be a third edition in this series since i've still got a bunch more pics to share & no time left for blogging today. ahh, more hair fun to which you can look forward.

hair bonanza x2

i'm resurrecting one of my favorite posts since things in my brain have been too hectic to present new material. i posted it about a year ago, but i had about 150 fewer followers than i do now. i figure most of you haven't read it, so please read on & have a laugh at my expense. or be inspired to take your own trip down hair memory lane. i'd love to read yours!

ever since i was in second grade and my best friend amy got her hair cut to shoulder length & feathered, i've had a thing for hair. before that i remember having very few thoughts about hair other than that my mom pulled too hard when she was brushing & parting it to make me presentable. but ever since then, hair has been something i've been fairly creative with. i finally convinced my mom to let me get a hair cut to match amy's after months of begging. i went from this

to this.

a few years later, when i was 10, i got it cut really short in the back & got the top permed - because, well, because it was the 80's & my fabulous aunt joan had hers like that and i strove to be like her. i can't find any pictures that really showed the awesomeness of the style at the moment, but i did find one from that time period where i had some friends over & we decided to go all out punk, complete with hair, makeup & clothes. i think we were 11 here & we were channelling madonna and cindy lauper. i'm the one w/ the mirrored sunglasses & hearty socks.

along the line there were lots & lots of perms done in my grandma's kitchen because i wasn't cool enough to get the spiral perms of beauty shop lore.

i also went through many bottles of sun-in & lemon juice with peroxide applied to fried hair with a hair dryer. my parents were pretty conservative & didn't seem to understand my need to constantly cook, cut, dye, perm, and shave off my hair. they let me do some things, but had to draw the line somewhere & i guess sun-in was okay because orange & stalky was acceptable, but miss clairol was somehow over the line.

i did my time with the poofy bangs. my hair is really small & flat, but i was dedicated with the hair spray bottle and curling irons. here you see me, at 12, attempting to give the best sexy face i could manage.

i once went to camp for a week when i was 13 or 14 & came home with the back, bottom half of my head shaved totally bald. as if my hair wasn't small enough already, i had to go & decrease my volume by half. good plan there, sher! i actually found the clump of my hair a couple weeks ago when i was digging through boxes of relics in my parents attic. the guys who hacked off my hair for me were thoughtful enough to hold the end of my now-removed pony tail into some melted candle wax so i could save it as a summer memento. it also serves as a reminder of when i first went rogue w/ my hair. i'd decided i didn't need parental permission anymore for anything i wanted to do to my own head.

here's another shot of me trying to do big hair when i was about 16. it never lasted long, but the first half hour was generally ok before the flop kicked in. there wasn't enough rave hairspray in the world to keep this flat stuff in the air.

finally, straight hair came back into fashion & for a while there, i was in luck. i could stop perming it & just put some gentle curling iron coercion onto my bangs to prevent them from sticking to my greasy forehead & things went fairly well for a spell. here i was, my senior year of high school wearing a lovely ruffled denim shirt & having a pretty good hair day. that's my brother w/ the icky mustache in the back. i almost cropped him out, but i feel like it adds character to the picture. some gritty flavor, if you will.

and while we're at it, i need to add this picture of me in my golden corral uniform too. that hanky they made me wear on my head made me feel smokin hot. i liked working there because the sweet outfit helped me pick up guys. my claw-like hand, dirty keds and transparent apron look foxy here too.

then, right around the time of my 18th birthday, i had a break up that started a trend where i felt like i needed to make some physical change to myself when a relationship ended. this time, it was a big hair cut where i got my hair chopped into a very "mature" style. in other words, i had the hair of a 40 yr old woman. a couple months later, i was just about to head off to college & wasn't loving the hair, so i got a bright idea of how to fix it .... i permed it! and the next thing i knew, i was no longer a 40 yr old woman, i had become an octogenarian. i had the fluffy, short hair of my grandmother & i was only 18.

are you digging my huge, manly wool sweater? i think it offsets the granny hair. (btw, this is the same amy from my early childhood. we're still together after all these decades.)

whadaya know, the granny hair didn't prevent me from finding a boyfriend... even if he was shorter than me.

i got it trimmed a few months later to try to get rid of the granny that was lurking around my head, and i think that was probably a good thing, but as you can clearly see in this picture, my duck smile and velvet, poofy-sleeved, doilie collared monstrosity of a dress left something to be desired.

eventually that grew out. here's me in college dying it into a lovely faux-hawk w/ my newly met bestie, julie in the background. she became a regular partner in the hair crimes i committed against myself even if she wasn't going to make the same foolish hair mistakes on herself that i did.

this was when i developed the concept of "hair is intended for amusement purposes - if it's looking good, it amuses me; if it's looking bad, it amuses others." i believe that the scales don't tip in my favor by this standard.

there's a whole slew of other exciting hair follies, but this has gotten too long already. so tune in next time for the second installment of hair bonanza - the bald years.

uh-oh. new hair style

i've noticed in the past couple years that i've been growing some really weird hairs in random locations on my scalp. i have a habit of running my fingertips along my scalp sometimes when i'm watching tv or reading a book & from time to time i'll discover these really thick, kinky almost crispy feeling hairs growing & i can't help but to pull them out so that i can examine them more closely. not only do they feel strange, they also don't hold color properly, so they've got an odd assortment of colors streaked across their lengths. i even pulled out another strand of my hair once to compare the two to confirm to myself that my hair really doesn't look like that. because, to be completely honest here, they look like giant pubes.

they're the length of the rest of my hair, but that's where the resemblance ends. i've probably pulled 7 or 8 of them out over the course of 2 years, but i'm starting to wonder if, over time, they'll replace my normal hair. i've noticed some thinning, but what if that's just nature's way of making room for the pubey hair that's on its way to replace them? if i keep pulling them out, will i end up bald? will i be one of those old ladies whose scalp shows pinkly through her little bits of hair that she's got teased up in an attempt to cover the bald? will i wear a clear rain hat to avoid any possible chance of my 18 hairs getting rained on & matted to my head, leaving the world to see that underneath it all, i really look like gollum?

i've decided to do some research about what i've got to look forward to, should this head of pubic hair be my fate. i want to know what my options are so i can be prepared.

you can see here that it's a bit wispy & thin, but i think i could get by. with some good styling products i could make it work, people.

here's an option that i could go for if i wanted to just keep it really short & easy to maintain. if you've read my hair chronicles, you know i'm not too scared to go this short, so this is looking like a pretty viable option. easy peezey, lemon squeezy.

if it grew in really thick & luxurious (as opposed to what it's been so far in my life) i could see this one as a good possibility. i'd have to dye it to get that nice chocolately color, but this girl (and by this girl, i mean me, not nick jonas) is not scared of a box of hair dye!

and lastly, i've found that one that somehow seems the most likely to be my fate. i mean, if i'm unlucky enough to have my head hair replaced by pubes, what are the chances that it'll be pretty? this is what i fear.