I recently was in New York to visit some of my best friends and I decided to go to Chinatown to get a thermal/digital perm at Cutting Edge Salon.

So what’s a Thermal/Digital perm?

Basically they roll your hair onto these special curlers and then they roll over a contraption that looks a lot like a heart monitor with a ton of different cords that plug into your curlers.  You end up looking like Medusa bot.

My friend looked at the machine and saw that it was set at 69 degrees.  I think they adjust it depending on what your hair texture is like and how curly you want it.

So the whole time I was really nervous because I’ve never had a perm before.  Well, unless you count the time when my sister and I begged my mom to perm our hair and she used the leftover chemicals from her own home perm to perm only our bangs.  Haha, this is easily one of my favorite childhood stories.  I have ridiculous straight hair so needless to say, I looked pretty goofy in second grade.  It was like a reverse mullet.  Party in the front, business in the back.

Anyway, the perm turned out great!  If I want it curlier, I just put in my curl enhancer after I shower and if I want it less curly and just wavy, I don’t put in much curl enhancer at all.

Here’s an after photo:

(Thanks to the random lady on the street that took this photo for us on my iPhone.  She looked pretty trustworthy… as in, I didn’t think she’d run off with my phone.)

I also purchased my first hair dryer and was surprised to see how complicated these things have gotten over the years.  I went with the Infiniti Cord-Keeper™ by Conair™ Tourmaline Ceramic Ionic Hair Styler from Target.

I like it so far and it came with the diffuser which is important for perms.

The thing I like most about the perm is that it’s low maintenance but looks like I put more effort into my hair than before (which was close to zero).

I can see why this is taking off in Asia.  Let’s bring back the perm to the US, ladies!

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I just noticed I don’t have a beauty category for my blog posts.  Haha.

Do you know what G.I. stands for? The internets give several answers: government issue, general infantry, and galvanized iron.

Wiki also chimes in saying:
“The term is now used as an initialism of “Government Issue” (or sometimes incorrectly as “General Infantry”)[1], but originally referred to galvanized iron. The letters “G.I.” were used to denote equipment made from galvanized iron, such as metal trash cans, in U.S. Army inventories and supply records.[2][1] During World War I, U.S. soldiers sardonically referred to incoming German artillery shells as “GI cans.” In that same war, “G.I.” started being interpreted as “Government Issue” and said as an adjective of anything having to do with the Army.”

Anyway, the husband and I went to watch G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra last night. What a fun summer treat!

When I was in elementary school, I copied my older cousins in their love for GI Joe action figures and I watched the GI Joe cartoons regularly but I don’t remember the stories AT ALL. I made up the backstories for the action figures I played with and I only owned one action figure, a red headed man with a white tshirt, camo pants and a flashlight (this is what my memory tells me anyway). My cousins all had this character (but our action figures were all in varying conditions of quality) and we enjoyed acting out elaborate war scenes where this character would progressively get more worn and lose more limbs. All this to say, I can’t speak to the accuracy of the movie to the comics.

The movie is pure fluff. Impossible action sequences, shallow emotional investment, cheesy dialogue, and the liberating feeling that no matter how bad things get, the good guys are going to work it out in the end. Truly wonderful fluff.

The CG was surprisingly bad, it seemed like it was from a decade ago — hard to believe this kind of CG still exists when movies like Star Trek have taken it to another level this year.

I’m a firm believer that you judge a movie by it’s intended purpose and not on individual expectation. I think GI Joe has completely fulfilled its purpose: fun summer blockbuster that is a launchpad for future blockbuster sequels.

If you are good at suspending your disbelief and still have a childlike heart somewhere inside of you, go catch it in the theater!

(This post was written on the WordPress iPhone app. Not sure how it’s going to look.)

EDIT:  Special thanks to Brian for reminding me that they’re called action figures and not figurines.  It’s been awhile since I’ve played with one.

(En route from Houston to Austin on Highway 290 on a beautiful summer night)

So come with me to a place that we don’t know
If you need some inspiration before we go, just know
It’s the way I have fallen in with you
Come with me, I just wanna say hello
It’s the way I have fallen in with you

– “Bandstand in the Sky” from the album Nightcrawler, Pete Yorn

It was the summer of 2006 and the husband and I had faithfully been listening to Pete’s first two CDs, Musicforthemorningafter and Day I Forgot for four straight years together.  We even bought Pete’s Live from New Jersey– never mind that it only had a couple of new songs.  I guess that’s what happens when you really become a fan of somebody.  I wouldn’t know, I’m not a very good music fan.  I rarely remember song lyrics, I often don’t recognize artists when I put my iTunes on shuffle, and I generally dislike going to concerts.

But this was different.  This was Pete Yorn and he was playing a show in Austin as part of his “You and Me” acoustic tour to promote the release of his third CD, Nightcrawler.  The only other artist that even comes close to how much I like Pete Yorn is Elliott Smith and I definitely don’t know all of his songs (granted, Elliott has a ton more songs than Pete).

So yeah, the concert was on a Wednesday night, but who cares, because we were going to leave right after work on Wednesday, watch the show, and drive straight into work on Thursday morning.  This is one of the things I love the most about the husband.  In the face of logistical difficulty, his stance is always, “If we really want to do this, let’s just do it.  We shouldn’t let things like driving or less sleep stop us.  C’mon, it’ll be worth it.”

I know this sounds silly but the night felt magical.  I think working in a cubicle day-in and day-out had really robbed me of my wonder.  As we drove to Austin I remarked at how pretty the drive was and how much I missed it.  And then we did something we never do on our drives to Austin.  We pulled over to the side of the road, got out of the car, took photos and just enjoyed the peacefulness of a Texas summer.  (That’s when I took the picture that’s posted above.)

By the time we arrived in Austin the sun was already making it’s final goodbyes over the DKR Texas Memorial Stadium.  We found parking pretty easily downtown since it was a Wednesday night and we excitedly hurried upstairs to The Parish, one of my favorite venues in Austin.  The place was still fairly empty, we were super early.  I’m really glad we were early though because the place eventually got pretty packed and because we were early we had a good spot near the front that let me take the following photos:

I took these photos in RAW format because I knew I wanted as much room to process as possible.  But the crazy thing is I never had the software to even look at RAW format photos until I got this MacBookPro this past year.  So two days ago I just came across this old CD-R in an old spindle of CDs that had “PETE YORN PHOTOS” written in large block letters in yellow sharpie (what a stupid color for a sharpie, I think it came in a set).  It was such a delight to open these pictures up in Aperture, see these photos for the first time, and relive the night all over again.

It was a great concert.  Probably the best concert of my life.  The crowd was great, everyone was singing along.  The setting was relatively intimate, the Parish room isn’t all that big.  So many moments during the concert, the husband and I would look at each other with beaming smiles and just wordlessly relish in the fact that this was an amazing concert and wasn’t it so great to hear Pete live and acoustic and wasn’t it so great to be here together.

We left the concert glowing.  Thanks to Judy for letting us crash at your place that night.

So fast forward three years to 2009.  Pete’s coming to Houston on July 14 at the Meridian and we already have tickets for it.  Will it be as memorable as our first?  Probably not.  But will it be a great concert?  I sure hope so.

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In other news, I got the following email from Facebook last night:

Subject: Alexander Rodriguez added you as a friend on Facebook

Alexander added you as a friend on Facebook.  We need to confirm that you know Alexander in order for you to be friends on Facebook.

A-Rod?!  Wait until I tell Lawrence!!

Unfortunately, when I went home and opened my Facebook Friend Requests page, I found this fellow looking at me.

Wrong Alexander Rodriguez.  I’ll refrain from any Super Mario jokes.  Beyond that one.

Beck’s new album, Modern Guilt, has been on heavy rotation for the past two days and have had some time to marinate.  I’ve always liked Beck, not all of his songs, but on each album I can usually find a few songs that I really like.  But I really like this album in its entirety.  It’s the first of his albums that I’m not skipping tracks.  I know this isn’t supposed to be his best work (according to the music critics), but I like it the best.  I think his collaboration with Danger Mouse worked out well.  This album makes me want to throw a party with good friends or go on a long road trip.

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Whenever I walk around the grocery store, I always take a strange delight in seeing misplaced products.  A box of Cocoa Puffs abandoned next to the Bounty paper towels, a box of Betty Crocker brownie mix left next to the jars of Ragu.  It’s interesting.  I wonder what happened in the aisle that triggered the abandonment.  I think it’s pretty inconsiderate of people because then the stockers have to put everything back in place but I have been guilty of this on a few occasions.  The only time it is really horrible is if it is a perishable item that needs to be refrigerated or frozen.  I’ve seen packages of cheese, cups of yogurt, and a bag of defrosting peas abandoned before.  That’s just plain wrong.

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On the flight back from Mexico, the husband was completing his first-ever Sudoku puzzle in the back of the in-flight magazine (after doing his customary giggling while flipping through the SkyMall magazine).  Puzzles like that don’t really appeal to me.  Neither do word searches and crossword puzzles.  I used to really love logic puzzles with the matrix where you put x’s and o’s in the box as you solve the problem.  That was probably the only puzzle I liked.  I was thinking about why I disliked puzzles and it reminded me of this one Sunday School teacher I had.  I can’t even remember what grade I was in but he would basically tell us a bible story for 30 minutes and then hand out these crossword puzzles with no clues.  That’s right, no clues.  Just an empty grid of boxes.  He would tell us to fill them out using real words and whoever was first to finish the puzzle would win.  And he only had ballpoint pens for us to use!  So there was no erasing.  The puzzles were impossible, but we kept quiet for the rest of the time because we were so busy trying to figure it out.  I think a few kids actually “won” but he never checked their answers because it was usually time to go and I suspect they didn’t use real words.  Maybe that’s why I don’t like puzzles.

Here’s a rare glimpse into my childhood.

I post these basketball trader cards not for self-proclaimed cute factor but because I recently realized that I cannot comprehend a time when I was less than five feet tall and only eighty pounds.  I don’t remember being that small.  I was terrible at basketball but enjoyed every second of every game I ever played in.  I begged my parents to let me quit piano lessons and use the money towards registering me for a summer basketball league.  I loved it when I got an accidental rebound and the coaches rewarded me with a play they drew up especially for me.  I loved getting rebounds.

When I think back about my childhood, I feel like my mind has always been the same.  I’ve always been thinking the same kind of thoughts and it’s been a pretty fluid transition from childhood to adulthood as far as my minds goes.  I don’t know if that makes sense.  I don’t have the mind of an eleven year old, but the thoughts I had at eleven years of age still make sense to me today.  My body, on the other hand, has always just grown and developed– seemingly independent from everything else.  Often against my will.

So many things have changed since age eleven.  And then so many things are the same.  I still love basketball, even though I do more watching than playing these days.  I still stay up late at night reading fiction– except now my reading is accompanied by the rhythmic breathing of the husband sound asleep next to me.  I still like to write, but now it’s typed on a blog instead of by hand in my bound journals.

I like holiday weekends because of the extended leisure time but I also really like holiday weekends because you get to skip the groggy Monday part and get right to the “oh, tomorrow’s hump day already!” part.

I remember in 2nd grade, whenever it was someone’s birthday, we would all take a half sheet of construction paper and write one sentence on what we liked about the person. The model sentence went like this:

I like <insert birthday person’s name> because <he/she> is _______________.

Then we decorated the paper with drawings, usually somewhat related to our concocted sentence.

Each student’s paper would be collected and bound together with a plastic spiral binding and the cover laminated so that by the end of the year, everyone had a book full of reasons why they were liked.

Pretty great idea, right?

The only downside is that inevitably, some students said that they couldn’t think of anything they liked about some of the students. So Mrs. Chafin, my second-grade teacher explained that we could write “because he/she is UNIQUE” which meant that they were different.  Which no one could really protest against.

So you could basically leaf through your booklet and find out which kids didn’t like you or didn’t have anything nice to say about you. Kind of a downer.

To this day, whenever I hear someone say, “That’s really unique” or “She’s really unique” I can’t help but think it’s just code for “I have nothing nice to say about that” or “I don’t like her.” Even if that’s not what they mean.

It’s terrible. Elementary school teachers, be careful what you teach!

I do want to write a disclaimer in that they might not be accurate memories. I think over the years, memories have an odd way of morphing in your mind. Especially if you’ve told the memory and it’s changed a bit, the altered memory tends to stick.

Here’s an example:

I remember when I was really young my sister and I would love to watch 3-2-1 Contact.

This was when educational shows were still cool to kids.

In one particular episode, a group of kids had a jug of milk that they were taking turns shaking. Eventually, the milk turned into cheese. (This sounds a bit far-fetched to me, I haven’t researched the plausibility of this– but be a good sport. This is like a mini-memoir. Anything can happen!)

One of the girls opened the jug and spread the cheese/cream on a cracker. She then proceeded to shove the entire cracker into her mouth. While she was chewing, someone asked her, “How does it taste?” Her mouth was so full, she couldn’t respond. And when she tried to, it was disgusting to watch. You could see cheese and soggy cracker coming out.

My dad (oh yeah, he was there too) saw this incident and jumped on the opportunity to teach us. “See? This is why when you’re tasting something, make sure you don’t take too big of a bite so that you can still talk.”

I’m pretty good at interviewing. I think this is because I started receiving interviewing tips at a young age.

I didn’t know what we were supposed to do as best friends. But Becky knew. She said that we should exchange notes to each other every day at recess. She also said we should exchange pictures of each other with a message written on the back. She was very knowledgeable about these sorts of things.

Most of my childhood was like that. Not knowing what I was supposed to do but having very knowledgeable children around me to teach me.

I remember cheering on one of my best guy friends, Paul Porfirio (sp?) to ask this girl out in fifth grade. When he told me he did I was ecstatic and asked, “So where are you guys going?”

I still remember the confused look on his face. “Nowhere. But we’re going out now.”

Puzzled, I asked him, “You didn’t ask her out on a date?”

“No, I just asked her out.”

Yeaaaaaah, fifth grade was a confusing time for me.

So best friends in second grade definitely mean something different than best friends in college. I imagine it’ll change again when I reevaluate at 40. But memories like this make me really tempted to sign up for Friendster and see how childhood friends are doing.

And then sometimes I just want my memories left alone.