Update, Re: Hope

My optimism has waned considerably after three tries and vaguely-red-and-not-even-the-right-red hair. Why is it so easy to shake up my world views? I think all anthropologists are like this. If we weren't, there's no way we could use Warcraft to write on the creation of identity and the nature of human interaction. And certainly no one would give you tenure for it*.

If anything, the cognitive dissonance and guilt related to having to tell your perky stylist they messed up is just further proof that I am never going to change. And, more importantly, if I think dying my hair will make me change, I am dumb but probably also a fantastic ethnographer. Because in medical anthropology EVERYTHING MEANS EVERYTHING and no extrapolation is too generous. Take the last article I read, for example: People sharing food with each other in Fiji means that your body is communally owned and you are not your own individual person, nor do you have control over your own physicality.

So my excitement over the tattoo is combined now with a deep-seated fear of permanent disfigurement and a compulsion do just freaking do it anyway because like, come on. Really.

Though I guess it's not fair to say I'll never change, since I haven't turned in my last two weekly assignments in Ethnobotany and I don't even really care. Normally this would cause me to panic but these things are like, what, half a percent of the whole semester? And when I have a paper, presentation, project, or midterm nearly every day for three solid weeks, watching videos and giving trite summaries is just gonna have to go on the back burner. The fact that I'm okay with that is pretty interesting.



*If this does NOT make you want to quit your job and become an anthropologist, you better be a professional chocolates-massages-and-wine-at-the-same-time critic because I cannot imagine anything sweeter than getting paid to screw around in Warcraft and then tell people how to think about it.

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?

How Blossom got her groove back

Today, after a full week of hiking, shoveling, sifting, and sweating, it finally felt good.

Since I started working here, I've been lethargic and unmotivated for no reason. Getting plenty of rest, eating well, and staying hydrated did nothing to help. Hiking to the sites and doing the heavy work wasn't fun for me like it used to be. I jumped away from ants, gasped at spiders, tried to stay out of the dirt, and gingerly dabbed sweat off my face with a gym towel. I asked others to lift the heavy buckets into the sifter for me and half-assed shoveling the dirt underneath it. Work that used muscles wasn't fun, so it wasn't really fun at all.

I realized it earlier today when I had to admit that I actually couldn't lift the full buckets at all. Something about that admission felt terrible. They were just buckets of dirt, max 20lbs, and I couldn't lift them? My backpack in high school weighed that much. It dawned on me then that I have become a freaking GIRL.

Apparently, realizing this pissed me off so much, I got my mojo back. Suddenly the shovels felt lighter, the dirt felt thinner, and the pit seemed a lot more shallow. I leveled the whole thing, bringing the 4 square meter pit down by 5cm so quickly I had to stop and wait for the sifters because I had filled ALL the buckets on site. The girls in the other pit got mad. One of the women got mad because lifting the full buckets is difficult, and I had filled them completely. She told me I should start lifting them into the sifter if I was gonna to do that, SO I DID.

I felt so great about it. I know it was coming from anger- anger at being the littlest always, anger at having people always taking things and helping me when I don't need it, anger at knowing I'm not as tough as I want to be, or as I used to be. But I got my passion for work back, the excitement of being outside and straining yourself for no good god damn reason. The satisfaction of finally laying down in bed afterwards. Most importantly, I didn't feel TIRED anymore.

This evening I went to the reef in Pago Bay. I sat still in the water so the fish moved around me. I collected hermit crabs in empty oyster shells and watched them crawl in the sand.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone because I am a consumer whore.

First day on site

We got to see the sites we're working on today, and of course I got assigned to the one that's in the sun all day. Dr. B said I could switch to a different one (since I'm burned already) that's all shaded, which I think I will take him up on. All three sites are about 100 feet away from some of the most beautiful beach I've ever seen, so lunch time at any site still means I'll end up in the sun for at least a little while.

On the plus side, I will come back bronze. I think I'm going to actually have to try to not come back from Guam looking like a boot.



Anyway, if I go to the other site (the first latte site) I'll be working on the shallowest excavation. The other one, Casa Real, is the deepest, and also the least interesting in my opinion. It's a Spanish colonial-era building was standing as of the 1970's when the military bulldozed it, so it's a lot less exciting than the other sites. At the two latte sites there are tools and potsherds just laying on the ground out in plain site, which is amazing. And then of course there are the latte stones, some of which are still standing, albeit without the capstones on top.

Ours aren't as big as the ones in that photo I linked; they pillars are about waist-high and the capstones are less than three feet wide. They get much larger. That's from the quarry on Rota, apparently the latte stones around where we are in Ritidian are normally a lot smaller.

Tomorrow we start excavating for real, and at night we're going to get Chamorro food which is exciting because I have no idea what that actually consists of.

I am a consumer whore

My quest for Korean and Japanese cosmetics may be dashed. One of the girls asked the TAs if there was a touristy section of the island, which is exactly where I wanted to go to find that stuff. The overwhelming majority of tourists to Guam are Japanese, so much so that many of the hotels and shopping centers' websites are only in Japanese. Because of this, I've heard that you can find Asia-exclusive products and brands in Guam. The TAs told her that there is, but it's lame and boring so they wouldn't want to take us there. D'aww :( Dior did an Asia-only re-release of the Iridescent Leather quint* and I might not get my hands on it. I am a sad panda.

So today we went and saw all the sites we'll be working on and, despite layering on a bunch of physical-blocking sunscreen, my arms and shoulders are burned to a crisp. I guess reapplied SPF60 isn't good enough, so I'm going to go get some 85 as soon as possible even though it'll have to be a chemical block in that case. I've never seen a physical one over SPF65.

But since I'm already burned, I'll also need some aloe and antioxidant products (both of which I own but didn't bring) and some long-sleeved shirts which I also didn't bring with me. Why do the solutions to all my problems always involve buying things?

* Christian Dior is famous for their eyeshadow quints, a small palette with five sparkly shadows in it. They're probably one of the most popular cosmetic products in the world. For the holidays a few years ago they sold a quint called Iridescent Leather, which was full of cool brown neutrals-- a set of shades that are surprisingly hard to find in high-end makeup. It was a smash hit and sold out everywhere. Now it's one of the most sought-after and hard to find items for makeup enthusiasts like myself. Though the quints usually retail for $50, this one can be sold on Ebay for... Well, let's just say substantially more. If you put an IL quint up for swap (a deal through Makeup Alley where users trade makeup/skincare products they don't want, probably the best way to get discontinued/hard to find products) you could probably get whatever you wanted for it.

Nature sucks big eggs

We're going to the dig site tomorrow for the first time, so I'll know what I'm really up against then. I should be used to the humidity by Tuesday, so hopefully being outside will get easier soon. Right now it feels like walking into a wall as soon as I go out of the air conditioning. Now I know what people are talking about when they describe the heat/humidity in Austin. I grew up in that level of crap weather, so Texas & Hawaii feel normal to me. But Guam's humidity is even higher, believe it or not (I didn't believe it until I got here) so even though it's not actually that hot it feels horrible. It's just sticky and wet outside, like the inside of a greenhouse.

There's a beach right next to campus as it turns out, but it's all rocks and reef so I'm too afraid to go in. Reefs scare the crap out of me, since they're full of poisonous things pretending to be harmless. The thing that really killed my desire to go into the water there is the aquariums. Each dorm building here has an aquarium in the common area that is full of fish people caught at that reef. Apparently they catch them, have them in there for a while, let them go, and catch different ones. The tank in my dorm is full of lion fish. Oh hells no. I thought, okay, well they're bright and obvious so maybe I can deal with that. Then someone took me over to the other dorm and showed me the stone fish.

Imagine, if you will, a rock. A lava rock covered in algae that sits on the bottom of the ocean, with a dusting of sand. Then add poison that will cause you to lose your foot. That is a stone fish. When they pointed it out to me in the aquarium I almost said, where, behind that rock? I thought they were playing a joke on me for a good ten minutes before I saw another fish poke it in the eye and it winced.

So anyway, I'm never going in the ocean again.

I guess that's the trade off you get in the Pacific. Sure, you can go hiking and camping without having to worry about venomous snakes, rabies, skunks, big cats, coyotes, bears, etc. But god help you if you want to go swimming. Not only are there poisonous animals, there are plants around Hawaii that you can't even SEE that will get in your suit and give you a painful rash all over. There are also rip currents that will sweep you away, and caves that will suck you in if you get too close. Oh, and there are giant centipedes that sting. Never before did I think a rattlesnake would look appealing... At least you KNOW when one of those is around.