Here is some good information about dealing with workplace bullies. Follow the links. This is the serious and truly useful part of this post. Now we move on to true frivolity, for hair has been flatironed. Yes, flatironed.
I always thought it was a genetic characteristic of some Louisiana women to have this very straight hair which, when they tossed their heads, rotated like a paddle wheel and then fell upon their shoulders – the way the voladores, Precolumbian dancers in Mexico, fall around the the pole from which they are suspended, circling slowly as they descend. Now I also have this hair, because I had my hair cut and the hair cutter decided to flatiron it. I look like the students now, I declared in amazement. It is not a genetic characteristic, it is a flatiron!
Flatironed hair exists worldwide, and I did not know it! For best results, I am told, one should buy a ceramic flatiron costing $170. This seems a little steep but my very fashionable honorary nieces in Orange County, who look fantastic, have one such. I found a ceramic flatiron for $20. Is there a difference?
In other notes on vanity I had dinner with a friend who is older than I am. I had not seen her in over a month and I thought she had had a chemical peel, her face looked so fresh and youthful. She said it was the results of using Oil of Olay, the face wash! I see that I will also have to try this. “People do not realize it, but Oil of Olay does work,” she said.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I looked at the pictures and thought…
“Who would DO that?” upon seeing most of them.
I mean…yeah, all those people reviewing it would do it. 😉 They just did. Duh!
But…wow. There’s only 1 head of hair I saw on page 1 that I liked better on the face or body it came with straight than I liked it “natural.”
That 1 head of hair…okay, yeah, that woman might’ve needed a short haircut to make her hair look like anything considered “neat” in, well, any culture I’ve seen pictures of.
But the rest seemed to have found ways to make medium-longish hair look not only “neat,” but, in my opinion, great.
Of course, some flat-out said, “Yeah, I’ve found ways to make my natural hair look great, but this is for variety.”
But some of the others who didn’t, I just went, “Bu..buh…bwuh…bwuuuuuh?”
Oh well.
Interesting, though, your discovery that what you’d thought was genetics was a flatiron.
(P.S. All the work I go to to try to get my hair to curl MORE, and as I start to get some success…what does it result in?
A woman who probably beat her hair into straight submission (based on the bit of curve it had) touching it the other day and saying, “Is that real?”
(I think she meant the curl, not the hair……..))
(Comment #2 meant to point out that it illustrated how non-mainstream curly hair still is. Even as a white woman, what do I get when my hair sets curly? The same old touching and comments as people who have it that way every day!)
Yeah, well I had a certain neediness that went along with my sincere genuineness and openness. So it was that whot undid me. It was like: “I’m a migrant! Please, kind sirs accept me, so that I might then accept myself!” (I’m in a Jane Austen mood, from seeing some last night — although I can’t quite convey it in this mode of language….) So that was a real problem in my need to be needed.
Actually I think its normal and human to want to be needed — ie. to be part of a society, a community. Yet narcissists do not like that which is human, and we live in a narcissitic society, that will exploit need as weakness. It’s a little harder for them to exploit simple sincerity as weakness, but given prime opportunity and an urge to feed, they can do that too.
Straight is desirable, it seems. My hair is wavy, with body, so it has the best of all worlds in that sense … no limp hanging, and no frizz. But it seems that curly hair causes a lot of work, you have to keep it from bunching up and frizzing. The flatiron, it seems, keeps hair in place – if one cares about that – and is faster than various alternatives.
I set my hair by washing it at night. Then I sleep on it wet and wake up with curly hair. This saves on blow drying, curlers, etc. – let alone flatirons! 😉
But many people here have hair like mine, and consider it a bad thing, so they flatiron it. Sometimes they come out without flatironing and are slightly embarrassed, but I think they look nice.