Monday, September 15, 2014

What Your Hair Color Says About Everyone Else:Blonde vs. Brunette

As  Father Time marched on, he march right over top of me and left his snowy boot print in my hair. Consequently, by age 30 I began the fight against grey. By age 40 the troops were retreating and now at age 50 the troops have gone AWOL and I am now at least 75% grey.
I take after my father's side of the family which is Spanish, Italian and Irish/British. Every grandchild looks like my grandmother's side of the family...fair skin and eyes and very dark brown hair (with the exception of one cousin who is an exotic beauty but could never embrace it when she was younger). My grandmother was certainly the matriarch of the family and she prized blonde hair.  Where she got the idea that everyone looks better blonde I have no clue, but we all, with varying amounts of success, tried to go blonde. I started in my teen and could never get lighter than a brassy, strawberry blonde. The kind you see on hookers.
Then Father Time paid me that visit and as my brown hair turned white I was able to go blonder and blonder until I achieved what the hair color industry calls "banana peel blonde" (I kid you not, it's a real term). I was ecstatic! The battle with my hair was finally over, I was going to defy age by being blonde! (whoever fed that little pearl of wisdom to us  should be shot, its not true).
I remember the first day I was truly, finally blonde, with no hint of red. I bought new makeup (because I was fighting my cool complexion by having warm toned hair) and could have sworn I lost 15 years off my face.
It's been about 3 years now that I have been blonde and I still look in the mirror and wonder who that is staring back at me. I don't look younger, I look colorless and tired. My hair has no shine or life to it. I keep it piled up in a clip on top of my head most of the time. But the worst part is that I never felt like myself. I thought the feeling would go away after a while but even after 3 years, when I blow dry my hair, it is not me staring back out of the mirror. I am the quiet bookworm with the brown hair and occasional glasses. Not this bleached blonde who is trying to look younger than she is. I felt I belonged at the mall more than the library and that really messed with my sense of self.
While I was getting used to the new color I decided to make mental notes about how people treated me, to see if blondes really do have more fun.
I discount the first couple of months because I was so happy I think my upbeat personality changed how people treated me more than my hair color. So once I got used to it I began
my study. This is what I found:
Young Men: They may as well say "MILF" and put their eyes back into their heads
Older Men: A thought bubble appears over their heads that says "trophy wife"
Younger Girls: They have no time for anything but their own reflection so they are discounted.
Older Women: The ones with fully grey hair try to convince me mine will be lovely and it will not age me. Funny but no one my age has ever said that, the ones that say it have all been 65-80 years old and yes, when I am that age I will let nature take its course but stop trying to initiate me into the Grey Hair We Don't Care club too early.
Women My Age: Either tell me to stop fussing and let nature handle it or tell me the blonde is terrible on me. The opinion had nothing to do with what they did with their hair as far as I could see.
Children: Interestingly, children were much more open to coming to me when I was a blonde. If I approached a lost child as a brunette they shied away but as a blonde they held on to me like I was Mommy. I cannot explain this unless their mothers also dyed their hair blonde.
As a brunette, my little verbal mistakes, my inability to do math, my forgetfulness and lack of directional skills was always looked at as sort of the absent minded professor syndrome. People knew I was smart and allowed for idiosyncratic behavior. As a blonde? I got NO slack. Anything I did that was not perfect or at a genius level I got called "blonde" or "Are you having a blonde moment?" Not fair, and I am sure very frustrating to all the smart, naturally blonde women out there. I felt like I was constantly trying to prove I had a brain, that I was not some dumb bimbo. Stiletto heels on a brunette are sexy, on a blonde they are trashy. (Sorry natural blondes, I am calling them as i am seeing them).
I found the stereotypes are true. I was more apt to be flirted with, ogled, and looked upon as an object when blonde. Men would convey the same interest in me as a brunette, but with more class and more respect. As a blonde it was cat calls, as a brunette is was "pretty eyes". Even clerks, regardless of gender, were more friendly to me, as were waiters/waitresses. It's almost as if blondes are seen as stupid but warm hearted and brunettes are seen as smart and cold hearted. Neither of which is acceptable! Men have a habit, no matter how "liberated" they re, of talking over women but as a blonde, you cant get word in anywhere...and they ask why I am shouting. Oh and all these observations hold true
whether I had on makeup and nice clothes or was in my grubbies without makeup.
Today I went back to being a brunette. I feel like myself. I am comfortable in my own skin again. I can only explain it as I am me and I am sure if I was born blonde and went brunette for 3 years I would feel the same.
But let me speak for the unheard minority out there. The downtrodden who do not even realize it. We are women who are smart, creative, powerful and nurturing and, like our breast size, our hair color is no indication of what goes on on the inside.


Saturday, August 30, 2014

Harry Potter and the Salvation of a Generation


EXPELLIARMUS!
INCENDIO!
EXPECTO PATRONUM!I
Using my grandmother's broom to play "Bewitched" as a child, I never thought, nearly half a century later, I would have charms and spells to disarm my opponent, start a fire with my wand, or create a patronus (look it up). But there you have it, those Latin sounding words J.K. Rowling so deftly made up can do all those things, and more, in the land of Wizards.
One of my cousins is a senior in high school this year, less than a year away from being a legal adult, yet she still reads Harry Potter books, watches the movies, reads fan fiction, goes to as many nerd-fests as she can (think COMI-CON), has a place and a life on Pottermore.com and a season ticket to all that is Potter in Orlando. She is a friendly, but at times meek girl who nevertheless fiercely defends HP, as if the franchise were a real friend to her, a living, breathing person.
She is but one of a unique generation of kids who had an entire series of books creating a magical world for them, next installments they had to look forward to, stories to discuss the minutia of, to bond with like minded people, shy, awkward kids. This is a phenomenon unique to these people, one I honestly don't think anyone else can fully appreciate. Certainly I know of no other cultural phenomenon with this much impact on an entire generation. The closest thing would be either Star Wars or Star Trek, one of which was limited to 3 superficial (but awesome)movies, the other a weekly series with good ideas and morals but nothing people could really relate to on a personal level...Star Trek dealt in social issues.
I have tried very hard to understand her feelings on this and she has tried to explain  them but I don't think her feelings can be verbalized.

She had to write a paper for school and asked me to look at it. I did and ended up crying and thinking maybe I finally understood. Here it is, edited for space....
In a barren hallway sat a bookshelf full of classic novels with curling spines and dusty pages....the book that stood out to me was Harry Potter...My preteens were a very difficult time for me, my parents never seemed to stop fighting with each other, I was struggling in school, and I felt like I was completely alone. It was when I decided to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone...that my life changed. Suddenly there was something that would always be there...Harry Potter was there for me when I needed it most. A book really is powerful enough to change a person's life. The life in a book can be so beautiful...Harry Potter was how I coped with my parent's divorce, the loss of friends, my brother leaving me with my alcoholic mother. After dad left, my mother would sit on the couch in a daze until midnight. The feeling of loneliness consumed me...The characters were my closest friends and Hogwarts was my home, also my escape...This character (Hermione) was never afraid to be who she was...helped me understand it is okay to be who you are no matter what people say...Through reading these books I understand life is fleeting so we should do everything we can while we are alive...HP introduced me to a whole other world of people like me: nerds who seem to have an intense passion for knowledge and things that are ...out of the ordinary. HP introduced me to the world I belong in and how magical reading can be...
Of course I had begun crying almost immediately when I read this. between the lines lurked the depth of her pain, loneliness, confusion, and lack of sense of self. What her parent's divorce and annamosity put her though, the profound effect of having her brother kicked out of the house had on her, and all the things she never really talks about; I saw between those lines, and it was almost like reading into a mirror.
So much of what she went through, of who she is, could be said about my life too. Yet I had no Harry Potter to console me. I had Nancy Drew, hardly more than fluff, and that was it. Nothing. And my generation sparked the beginning of the "divorce is normal" generations so there were so many out there like me. Plus I had her love of books, knowledge, and that feeling you get when you are smart and dorky, when the kids make fun of you or worse, ignore you all together.
I have not read but the first Harry Potter and I have seen all the movies. I see now, after having the memory of those feeling tear through my heart again via my lovely cousin, how this series can bind all the hurt, broken, lost children together, or even console the single child on a dark
lonely night. This series teaches morality, strength, how to honor your word and your friends, how to stand for what is good and what is right, how to have the courage of your convictions and still see the wonder of magic that is out there, and it is there, even if between the pages of a book.
I have no love lost for KJ Rowling, but I must give her credit for saving a generation of children from their parent's bad marriages, addictions, abuse, neglect, or simply bad parenting. For beginning the trend that nerd is cool, that being smart is not dorky, it is to be admired, even though the dumb kids will always jealously make fun of the smart ones.
One of the beautiful things about this series is that these children grew up with the characters, and as they grew so did the dangers the characters faced, the magnitude of the situations, and the difficulty of the moral issues they had to grapple with. They babysat our kids through the beginnings of school, through the beginnings of puberty, and all the emotion that entails, to young adulthood, all the while guiding and entertaining the lost and lonely. Giving these kids a sense of self, helping them find their sense of self, teaching them lessons and morals no one can argue with.
I seem to be switch perspectives here, from parent to child, but I see both sides of it both from my own difficulties growing up to watching my generation pass or fail at parenting.
Thank you Hogwarts and friends, for properly parenting our children when we were too self involved to do it ourselves, for keeping them company when they were alone, for giving them courage when they were afraid. Thank you for taking away the pain we inflicted and showing them there is a bright wonderful world out there, just waiting for each of their unique shining stars, something we woefully neglected to do.
Shame on us, and thank you Harry, I wish you had been there for me too.