I've been reading more of Bruno this evening; I'm only two years back, now. I tried to go to bed earlier but I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking about the things I wanted to write. I've been thinking all day about the things that I want to write. I have this essay in mind, about money and being poor, and I was thinking of things about my day I would write down. Nothing important. But as soon as I sit in front of the computer and can write, suddenly, I don't want to anymore.
I did a little writing tonight on Prophecy. I'll have to do more tomorrow. A lot more. 1800 words. Shouldn't be that hard. And then, due to the mysteries of the Master Plan(tm), no more writing for a week. I'll work on the outline or whatever next week. Be nice to have the quota thing out of the way for a while. That reminds me that I wanted to re-do a bit of the scene I finished last night. I haven't done any revising to speak of on this novel (not on the new material, anyway), the idea being to get it all written once, first, and fix it later. But I want to fix this now before I forget that it's broken. If that makes sense. Never mind.
I wasn't going to talk about any of this, though. I thought I'd talk about hair, instead.
For as long as I can remember, I've wanted long hair. My hair is waist length now, making it, by my standards, not particularly long. It doesn't want to grow any longer, unfortunately.
I wanted long hair because everyone liked the long haired girls when I was in elementary school. All the other girls wanted to brush and braid and play with their hair. I wanted hair that could be brushed and braided and done up in all those fancy styles. The longer the better.
Except that I never knew how to do any of these styles.
But now I do.
I don't know exactly when I learned. It's not like I just figured it out yesterday. For years, the only thing I could do with my hair was braid it. I couldn't even put it in a French braid; to complicated. I bought one of those hair-styling gizmos for up-dos, but using it turned out to be too tricky for me for anything more complicated than a bun. I thought all those fancy styles just required more time and effort than I was willing to put into it.
It turns out that doing a bun or a twist the old-fashioned way, without any fancy gizmos, is actually much easier and simpler, though my hair is a little too long to tuck away neatly in a twist. One of my co-workers showed me how to do it, maybe a year ago.
I've known the theory behind French braids for a long time now, but I've always thought it was too tricky to do on my own head. Well, this week I've been French-braiding my hair on the ride to work every morning. I'm too lazy to do any hairstyle that requires me standing in front of a mirror and fussing with it. But it turns out I can French braid my hair without a mirror, and it comes out fine. As long as I don't get confused and start going the wrong way halfway through. Did you know you can do a French braid inside-out? If you bring the outer locks under the middle one, instead of over it, the braid comes out looking totally different. The inside-out version is more natural for me. I don't know why; it's just the way my hands want to do it.
I can do twist braids and herringbones, too, though twist braids are trickier and herringbones take much longer.
It seems very strange to me, to be casually doing these things I always thought of as meticulous and tricky and requiring lots of time and attention and large quantities of bobby pins.
I wonder what else it like that?
