How Dying My Hair Brown Made Me Fear The Future, Part II

My god. What if the tattoo ends up like the hair? Good looking to everyone but me? Just far enough from what I wanted that every time someone points it out, I get even more disappointed? If I can't even pick who to color my hair and cope with five days of off color, how could I possibly pick a tattoo artist? What would I do if THAT didn't come out right? If the wrong hair color makes me feel like I'm looking at a different person in the mirror, A) how much of a sissy am I and B) what the hell kind of reaction would I have to the wrong tattoo?

Suddenly the insecurities came back. Maybe these are superficial changes and aren't really enough to make them go away. Even if I get the right red, even if I get the right tattoo, even if I didn't need grad school-- am I really going to feel different? I had imagined embodying the kind of person I wanted to be would make me that person. In all likelihood, I will not change. And when I imagine me in that body, it suddenly doesn't seem to appealing. Maybe I won't be vibrant and self-assured. Maybe I will still be worried and difficult, just with red hair and a tattoo and a lower education level.

While on the one hand I feel like I should know that getting body mods and new hair styles doesn't make a person change. But in my work to change thoughts and behavior, I felt like I needed to look different to really be regarded as different-- even just to myself. I remembered back when I wore whatever I wanted and had ridiculous hair, when I had friends and people thought I was tough. I was more obviously an individual, and because of that I feel now that the expectations of me were very different.

If I obviously looked how I wanted without much regard for how stupid that was, it sent three messages: 1) That I was stupid, 2) that I wasn't about to change anything I did for you, and 3) that I was stupid and wasn't about to change anything I did for you. Somehow, those three not entirely desirable judgments made me a more likable person. Back then no one ever told me "You know what your problem is?" or "You ALWAYS do this!" Back then anything I did to rub my friends the wrong way was met with a shrug and a write off-- well, that's Blossom. That's why we like her, she's kind of a jerk. It's funny.

Maybe I thought that if I started looking how I imagined would be awesome without concern for how weird it was, I could get that pass again. The imperfections would turn back into quirks. The quirks would build character, not a character flaw. In some ways, I would rather be the ranga with freckles and temper than anyone else.

So I'm going tomorrow to get the red, and ten days after that I'm getting that tattoo. I'm still not going to grad school and I don't plan on taking the GRE "just in case." I'll keep going to my unpaid internship, crossing my fingers that something I learn or someone I meet will prevent me from having to move back in with my parents next year. I will make that Rocky Horror joke in my medical anthropology lecture when we discuss the formation of the transsexual identity through surgical practice. I guess because hope springs eternal and even though the future is just as scary as ever, I'm not going to let that stop me from going there anymore.

How Dying My Hair Brown Made Me Fear The Future, Part I

Apparently some people were actually reading this and were disappointed when I stopped updating. Traveling this summer and moving back into the dorms, coupled with an internship and a full 18 credit semester, has left me with little time to bitch and pontificate. Time passed and shit happened. More on this later. For now, I would like to explain how dying my hair brown last Saturday made me extremely fearful of the future.

I've wanted to be a redhead since I was a kid. I always talked about coloring my hair but never did it because I used to grow out & donate my hair to nonprofits that make wigs out of them. Don't judge my hobbies-- it beats model trains and fantasy football. Some sick kids out there now have 12-17 inches of my flexible head growths. Anyway, I finally decided to just cave and color my hair. Originally I was gonna do it in a salon, then I got talked into doing it at home, then I got talked into doing it in a salon again. Last Saturday I came with the photos I've been pining over for the last few years (my tastes in shades of red have changed since the teenygoth days of yesteryear) and went to the lady who usually makes my hair look so damn good.

I left with brown hair.

Not intentionally-- and, mind, it was a different shade of brown. Somewhere a wire had been crossed that turned copper red to a not at all red kind of brown. The roots were reddish and, only seeing that, I left without realizing that all the hair behind my head was only about one shade off. It wasn't until I got home and inspected it in the mirror and normal, non-trendy salon lighting that I realized it was not at all red on 90% of my head.

People complimented it every day since, since it's still a nice shade of brown, but it's not red. It's not RED so it's not what I wanted, and no amount of being a nice shade of brown has yet been able to quell my disappointment. It's like finally getting the courage to jump out of the plane with your parachute to find you're only ten feet off the ground. You land on your feet and everyone claps a little, but it is just not the same damn thing as terminal velocity.

I rescheduled for tomorrow to have it re-done, but now I'm plagued by insecurities. This red was one of the first steps in my transition from a stressed student to someone who I was determined would be more relaxed, more accepting of her situation. I was going to stop fearing the what-ifs, stop sweating the extra efforts, and start doing the things that made me feel good. I started eating better, packing lunches and snacks so I didn't go hungry all day during class (a bad habit I've had since middle school). I stopped impulse shopping. I threw out much of my lazy clothes. I decided not to go to grad school right now, not to take the GREs. I convinced myself not to panic when I ran out of time and couldn't complete an assignment. I made the appointments to dye my hair red and get that tattoo.

The most immediate of these things has gone wrong. And not horribly wrong, because it's fixable, but many of these others are not. If dying my hair was a mistake, what else was a mistake? What about all the things I threw away? What about grad school? What about a freaking tattoo?

Things-o-rama

I finally turned in my Guam application yesterday and he said he would get back to me today or tomorrow. I haven't heard back yet so I'm nervous. I imagine him sifting through all the work I turned in last semester, shaking his head and tsk-ing quietly to himself as he decides not to let me in.

By the way I'm still spending most of my time hunched over a computer writing about domestic abuse. I have a short paper due this weekend that involves critiquing and attempting to create a feminist ethic for interpreting and responding to sexual abuse, then next Wednesday (YES RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF MY SPRING BREAK) I have a 3000 word research project on the use of the idea of mental health as a form of gendered control. So if in the next week you find yourself thinking "hot crackers, I sure am having a shitty time!" I want you to picture the eleven books about systemic abuse I have sitting on my desk, and I want you to picture me reading each one of them and stuffing them with post-it notes instead of relaxing over the only break I will get for the rest of the semester during the only chance I'll have to see my dad in almost a year. Then I want you to think "WELL GOD DAMN I guess my time is not as shitty as it could be!" Because gals and pals this is SHIT-O-RAMA right here, yes it is.

In somewhat related news, pick a monkey and then try to find its family, subfamily, superfamily, suborder, & binomial nomenclature in less than fifteen minutes. YOU CAN'T DO IT, I TRIED. Now do this for every primate at the Honolulu Zoo one after the other. Have fun, kids.

Mercy Corps

As many of you may or may not know, I am a huge fan of Mercy Corps. They are a wonderful organization and are a large part of the reason why I want to get into global health-- one day I hope to be a part of one of their programs.

In the meantime I'm encouraging people to support their development and relief efforts all over the world, and of course right now the big issue is the earthquake in Haiti. Since you're all probably getting pressure from everywhere to donate to this and that, I'd just like to throw out two things: 1) 89% of Mercy Corps resources go directly to their programs and 2) all donations are tax deductible. Unlike other organizations, Mercy Corps stays in areas affected by natural disasters for as long as it takes to re-stabilize. That might not sound like much, but they still have programs in Indonesia helping rebuild economy and infrastructure after the tsunami in 2004.

Anyway, I can't donate as much as I could back then so I made a fundraising page to help encourage people I know to donate. So go here to donate if you want to donate to Mercy Corps and it will tell me how much the people I know have raised. I don't get anything for this so if you have another charity in mind go ahead and give to them instead. As long as the groups involved get the funding they need I don't really care who gives to what.

Apologies for the solicitation.

Public health: Keeping you alive since forever

I am very gradually making peace with the knowledge that, even when presented with every fact about a situation, the majority of people still will not give a rat's ass about what is happening to other people and will actually go to every extreme to prove why it is a non-issue and how I shouldn't care either. This attitude it starting to be okay with me-- that should not be okay. That kind of BS should be met with public ridicule, not acceptance. What the hell, people? I'm increasingly beginning to worry that my career is largely going to be a long, uphill battle with the apathy of the average person.

Oh sorry. Today, I guess I am Dromiceiomimus. I'm still mad about thatjob I missed out on, too. I lost out on the position at the doctor's office I'm sure because I want to work for a nonprofit doing global epidemiology. I sent my resume/cover letter and got an enthusiastic response asking about my career goals and when I sent that back suddenly they stopped contacting me. I don't know why wanting to prevent people from dying of cholera offends people so much. Shit.

In less crappy news I found out the public health school has one class offered to undergraduates that's like a survey of public health issues for people interested in going on to get an MPH. Since the two anthropology electives I wanted filled up (because the d-bag registrar put me in the VERY LAST registration period for Sophomores instead of the first one for Juniors like they should have, then refused to change it because they were just SURE that any profs would add me to a class I wanted even if the class filled, and then the class filled and the two profs refused to add me as an extra student. For the record someone with my class standing should have registered on Thursday, they put me on Monday afternoon, meaning all the classes I wanted filled up four days before I could even try to get in) I replaced them with that class and Japanese. Weee. Hopefully when I apply to MPH programs they'll notice that and it will add points in my favor.

You know what cheers me up, though? This T-Rex Squishable that they just started making. If no one gets it for me for Christmas I WILL BUY MYSELF TEN and pretend that everyone got me one. Then I will pile them all on my bed and they will be my new friends.

Women hold up half the sky

I've been reading Half the Sky for a couple of days now and it's hard to put down. I'm actually going to be pretty mad when I finish it.

The piece I like to use to summarize the subject of the book is this: 107 million females are missing.

"[In] normal circumstances women live longer than men, and so there are more females than males in much of the world. Even poor regions like most of Latin America and much of Africa have more females than males. Yet in places where girls have a deeply unequal status, they vanish. ... This has nothing to do with biology ... Every year, at least another 2 million girls worldwide disappear because of gender discrimination. In the wealthy countries of the West, discrimination is usually a matter of unequal pay or underfunded sports teams or unwanted touching from a boss. In contrast, in much of the world discrimination is lethal."

What I love about this book is that it's not preachy. It's not a sermon, it's not trying to tell you what you should do or tell you what the solutions are. It acknowledges that this is a multifaceted issue and that there is no obvious fix. Kristof and WuDunn (New York Times reporters who famously witnessed and reported on the Tienanmen Square massacre) are not interested in making us feel guilt or sympathy, nor do they attempt to fabricate some kind of idyllic future that's only a bit of volunteer work or a small donation away. They give you the stories objectively, explaining proposed courses of action and weighing the pros and cons of each. Ultimately the fact that weighs on you is not the atrocities suffered by the women they interview but the knowledge that, even with everything done right, this will continue for a long while before it can even possibly be resolved.

The stories are not usually tragedies. Despite the kinds of horrors some of these women have been through, they are not ruined. For the most part they do not break and they are not afraid. They are constantly fighting back and, sometimes, they triumph against those who would force them to suffer in silence. I don't finish a chapter feeling upset or angry but rather hopeful and inspired. If Mukhtar Mai can outlast the government that tried to lock her away, if Usha Narayane and the women in her town can take down a brutal gangster when their government would not, if Meena Hasina can lead a raid on a gangster's home to get her children back, these are not tragedies. They are a window of the kind of justice that will continue to develop if we support it.

The key is not just humanitarian aid; It is also political pressure. No society will change of its own volition without pressure, both internal and external. With increasing internal support for women from aid organizations the remaining piece is for us in the West to demand certain changes. Action will only be taken if we insist on results, not just legislation. Policy change is largely irrelevant because there is little influence of the law in the rural areas in which most of the brutality takes place. No government wants to be shamed on a global scale.

I guess the important thing is that change is already happening, and hopefully with the support of people like you and I it can continue to happen. There are girls out there right now that are fierce and resilient but they can't do it alone. Not all issues will be resolved, of course, but for every small step there is at least one more woman who will be safe. And if that seems insignificant, remember-- you are just one person, too.

An open letter to locals

Not all locals. A very particular handful of locals that one of my friends has the misfortune of having to work with.

If someone moves to your hometown and brings a different culture with them and you get an attitude with them because they're too different and haven't already seamlessly assimilated into the Borg local scene, they're not the racist/xenophobic one. That title can fall squarely on your sheltered (and yet somehow still perfectly tanned) behind.

Furthermore, if you know someone here who moved from another country entirely and they say "wow things in America sure are different from back home," you have no right to get offended. I'm still not sure why you got offended, but somewhere between "YOU'RE PREJUDICED AGAINST OTHER CULTURES" and "AMERICAN CULTURE SUCKS HOW DARE YOU COMPARE US TO THEM" we surmised that this was projection of your own problems onto us.

So basically, you're racist and xenophobic. You hate my friend because she's different from you and you honestly believe that your inability to deal with her due to her being different makes her racist and xenophobic. You've never been to the mainland but you're entirely positive that the locals here are absolutely nothing like Americans on the mainland and should not be grouped in with them. At the same time you don't recognize me as being from the mainland because the culture I grew up in on the mainland is so similar to the one out here. You only recognize my friend as being different because she's actually from a different country altogether and isn't familiar with American culture or laws.

In summary: sit down and shut up, you clearly have no effing idea what you're talking about.

Where's my freaking medal

I want to get a BA in anthropology, an MPH with a focus on preventative medicine, and then I want to get hired by a nonprofit. I want them to ship me out to the Middle Of Freaking Nowhere, Asia-Pacific, where I want to work on sanitation and public health programs that will help prevent people from contracting diseases like hepatitis A and keep children from dying of preventable conditions like diarrhea. I want to make infant mortality and malnutrition drop off, and I want to be rid of illnesses like tuberculosis. I want to help make childbirth safe and sanitary so that no babies or mothers have to die because they didn't have access to clean facilities. I want to do this in areas that are hours away from hospitals, where political instability can prevent people from traveling for help. I don't care if the nonprofit I work for to have a freaking sign that says "NO VIOLENT INCIDENTS IN _________ WEEKS."

What I also want is to know why everyone seems to think this is a stupid idea. Everyone that's heard about this so far has tried to talk me out of it, not just because of the danger I may be in personally but because many of them seem to think that this is somehow unimportant. At least they've convinced me of one thing-- I can't do anything that could kill me because no one would take my place doing that kind of work if I died.

I want my pat on the back damn it :| Are there really so few people who think health is important? I can get botulism injected into my face to prevent wrinkles any day I feel like it but there are still places in the world where leprosy is a common problem-- Am I really the only one who finds that to be more than a little messed up?

In summary: Wah wah no one will tell me how awesome I am, I want a hamburger and french fries and a milkshake.

(If this was snarked on sf_drama the title of the post would be "Would someone give Blossom her freaking pony already?")

But then some days I'm stamping my nails and I suddenly realize, holy crap, I could go to beauty school and do nails for a living. Every day I could be going to work and painting nails and drilling acrylics and gluing on rhinestones. And it would be awesome. No really, how sweet would that be? Herp derp I'm going to work, gotta go paint some nails with pretty designs for six hours. You're essentially getting paid to doodle on people, and you get to sit the whole time. Sure you gotta touch some gnarly feet every once and a while, but that's not bad at all.

I guess there's no demand for professional nail technicians in impoverished rural areas, but maybe I could start my own nonprofit using my Konad kit. Save the Nails? Stamps for Subalterns? Poverty Pedicures? Hey leprosy survivors! You've only got seven fingers left, you better make the best of it! Your family's not going to take you back with dry cuticles!

Wait. That's not funny.