Hair, Teeth, and Words on the Page

I decided to jump in the shower before picking up my pen this morning. Sometimes the shower is the only way to tame down the bed head. My hair is getting long, too long for the kind of cut I have but I don’t know what to do about it. I swore I wouldn’t go back t my hairdresser after my last haircut there but if I want to maintain a cut I have to go in every 3 or 4 weeks at the most. She charges $28 for this, at the most, 10 minute job which has been nothing to write home about lately.

When I was in Mexico I got a haircut for $8 and a much better one then the hairdresser I go see here. I need to find another one to go to that can cut hair with natural curls and that’s as difficult and as much of a crap-shoot, as finding the winning lottery ticket numbers. If they don’t know what they’re doing with finger waves like I have, I can be walking around looking like I’ve got my finger permanently stuck in a light socket or worse yet a cattle prod up my …… Well you get the idea.

The sad thing is what a person has to pay for a hair cut around here and then some, up to twice as much in some places. Here’s my other beef about that. I walk into her shop having come straight out of the shower with my hair already shampooed and crème rinsed so all she has to do is to whip out her scissors and start cutting and 5 or 10 later, she’s done. She uses absolutely none of her products. None!

While I’m writing about cost and I’ve already mentioned Mexico, here’s another thing to take note of. While we were out there for a week my partner and I decided to go see a dentist. I know, not the most fun, touristy kind of thing to do on a holiday but we knew Andree needed some work done. Approaching a dentist almost requires a person’s life savings, if we even had any to speak of, which we don’t, so off we went 3 mornings in a row to visit a dentist.

Andree had an extraction and four fillings done, plus both of us had our teeth cleaned. I can’t even imagine what that would have cost us here but if I were to wager a guess I would say somewhere around $1500 and that’s probably a low ball figure. It cost us 1,800 pesos which is equivalent to $150 Canadian. Worth it? I’d say so.

As I’m writing this I’m noticing something happening here. It’s something I’ve noticed since I started my new journal, a large one, a gift from a friend. I feel much more at ease to write here on these beautiful big blank pages compared to the smaller journals I’ve been using lately. Although the smaller ones are ideal to pack around with me, I find they cut me off mid-sentence like I so often was before. That’s the way I feel when I write in them, like my words are being interrupted, like I’m being shut down - old wounds that still get in the way every now and then, feeling cut off, like I wasn’t listened to, like my words were not important. Ran deep like looking down into the Grand Canyon.

That kind of stuff is not something you can erase like a white board. Some fifty years later traces still linger like oil slicks in the ocean waters from our tampering with the sea. It’s a big clean up job. Within these big blank pages I feel I can write so much more freely. There’s lots of room to express myself before I run off the edge of the page or have to flip the page over to the next one. What can I say, I’m slow that way. I need time and space to express myself and I need to feel heard. These pages give me that, “take your time, I’m listening,” feeling.

So, I get to the page and I pick up my pen and I go. I just follow it. Maybe I don’t say anything hugely important or say it in the most eloquent way but it doesn’t matter. Here I don’t feel I have to choose my words, how I’m going to say them, how long it will take or if I’m allowed that much time to say them in. I don’t think about any of that. I just listen and I write. I don’t judge. I just listen and I write. I don’t turn away. I just listen and I write down the words I hear.

Like Julia Cameron says; “……writing seems to alter the chemical balance and equilibrium when we are out of sorts, bringing clarity, a sense of right action, a feeling of purpose to a rudderless day.” Yes, that’s what writing does for me.