End It On This

Talking to 31 yesterday. Got some light shed.


From: briana
To: 31
Sent: Mon, 26 Feb 2007 7:15 PM
Subject: Re:
31 is a ticking clock. i have forever memorialized you as 31 so we'll need to take some pics on Sunday (before you turn 32 ha ha). but just as blog briana is not me i guess 31 is not you. whatever that means. am i speaking jibberjabberish?

From: 31
To: briana
Sent: Mon, 26 Feb 2007 7:16 PM
Subject: Re:
it sounds like some sort of deep thought process you got going on there.
From: briana
To: 31
Sent: Mon, 26 Feb 2007 7:20 PM
Subject: Re:
i think i am just losing my mind. nothing deep about that. well blog briana isn't me. we got a lot in common but she isn't me. and I am sure you don't always love how I've portrayed you or own how I've on and off perceived you so you wouldn't say that 31 is all you.
From: 31
To: briana
Sent: Mon, 26 Feb 2007 7:22 PM
Subject: Re:
31 is pretty close
From: briana
To: 31
Sent: Mon, 26 Feb 2007 7:35 PM
Subject: Re:
really. that's interesting. because i've done a lot of pondering about you as you have seen. hopefully the outrageous comment i made about you being my friend all these years so you could eventually sleep with me wasn't true. but i did counter that with, "but that's just insane," alluding to the fact that I didn't think you were friends with me to sleep with me a few times and then discard me. That's one of two things that I wondered about a lot. but a lot of him being pretty close is because 31 has spoken for himself very often via text messages and emails. and I've known him for years and years and years.

From: 31
To: briana
Sent: Mon, 26 Feb 2007 7:39 PM
Subject: Re:
yeah that part wasn't true. I didn't hang around all this time as some sort of quest.
-----------------
Thank goodness we got that resolved. As my devoted readers will know, I have been racking my brain for months wondering what the fuck I did or didn't do or what flaw he has or did things just get too intense with me being sick or did me being sick freak him out or was it that he witnessed the Illinois stuff and how hard it hit me and didn't want to risk being the arbiter of more pain in my life or did he always just want to sleep with me. Good to know it wasn't the latter. Great to know it wasn't the latter. I didn't really think it was the latter but when you have absolutely nothing to go on but imagination, you mind starts to wander a little bit.

Then last night while doubling back on the Brooklyn Bridge I wondered why I told 31 that blog Briana isn't me. Of course she's me. I don't make this stuff up. I mean come on, could you make this stuff up? But at the same time, each blog is a moment in time, one side of the story, not the whole story and I am extracting a thought, feeling and making it the arc in a story with a beginning and an end. When there is another person involved I am seeing them at a moment when they gave me pleasure or pain or saved my life or destroyed it but clearly everyone is three dimensional and someone who gave me pain for that story might be giving me pleasure in another. For example the above is an ending to months of pondering about 31. But he has been portrayed many other ways all in stories that had their own endings and beginnings.

That's the thing. Life isn't neat. In reality, these moments spill over each other and overlap and there are no endings or beginnings, except birth and death or the socially constructed endings and beginnings like graduation, marriage, new job etc. But the moments I want to write about aren't, "About my summer vacation" in a capsule. If it was that simple, I'd have no need to write at all..

My sister and I always disagree about this. She can't see blog Briana as a character. I wish she could on the one hand but on the other I can't imagine what it must feel like for her and other loved ones of mine to read this stuff. When I first started writing it I was very conscious of that. Like, I don't know if I would want to know certain things if I were them. Or as interesting as it might be, it's too much information when it's your sister or your daughter or maybe even your friend. My feelings have since evolved. Partially because as the blog has developed it has become a story and Briana has become the main character and sometime narrator of the story. She isn't me. I am not my hair. I am not blog Briana. I am not sick Briana. These are all parts of me combining to form Briana. Depending on the day I may inhabit one of these sub-personas. In that way we are all schizophrenics. These are just moments that I've framed. They are all me; I am all of them combined in varying degrees at varying moments. But I can see how the power of these moments can be scary and shocking and intense when read and scary and shocking and intense when it's your sister, daughter or friend. I want them to be scary and shocking and intense but I also want those close to me to understand that I am exploiting these moments. I am distilling them and framing them and thus giving them more power and intensity. In the day to day when a million things happen all at once, those moments I write about are not so remarkable. Out of one person's life there are many stories happening simultaneously. To tell one, you have to leave out the others and let the one you chose have its own spotlight and singularity so it's given justice. So as messy and 'real' as my blogs are, the blog gives me a forum to get out one thing at a time, tell one story at a time; to give every moment its due.

I am also honored to have someone like 31 in my life who despite maybe being cowardly when I was sick or not ever truly owning what happened between us is still here and has let me rant and rave and ponder and speculate about him in every which way allowing me full artistic right over my moments that include him. It's like pictures, some you look good in and some you don't. And he's allowed me to show both the ones that flatter and the ones that don't. Other people aren't so liberal. I've had people disgree with how they've been perceived, as if by me portraying them a certain way in one blog I am setting their whole identity in stone. I have been forbidden to use their exact words, I have been asked to change someone's longstanding nickname out of fear that it was no longer protecting their identity and more. So trust me, the freedom 31's given me over his identity in this work, that's rare. And the fact that he didn't befriend me to sleep with me is good stuff too.

Brown Suga

"THE modern gentleman may prefer blondes. But new research has found that it was cavemen who were the first to be lured by flaxen locks. According to the study, north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males. Lighter hair colours, which started as rare mutations, became popular for breeding and numbers increased dramatically, according to the research, published under the aegis of the University of St Andrews. The increase in competition for males led to rapid change as women struggled to evolve the most alluring qualities. Frost believes his theory is supported by studies which show blonde hair is an indicator for high oestrogen levels in women. "
Corrected- Cave Girls Were the First Blondes to Have Fun, by Roger Dobson and Abul Taher, The Sunday Times - Britain, February 26, 2006.
"Hollywood, which knows a lot about this subject, believes that gentlemen prefer blondes. For example, as Diana Moon has pointed out, the marketing of the Oscar-winning movie Chicago treated Renee Zellweger, a blonde who's a little funny looking, and Catherine Zeta-Jones, a brunette with classic features, as if they were equals in beauty. "The bar is set higher for brunettes," Moon said.
The press typically attributes the popularity of blondeness to the evil monopoly of the WASP elite (or whatever). But that doesn't make much sense because there's little demand for blond men. Hollywood, for example, believes that ladies prefer their gentlemen tall, dark, and handsome, a phrase coined by Mae West about Cary Grant. There are dramatically more blonde actresses than actors, because audiences apparently associate darker hair with mature masculinity. In the vast majority of love scenes in movies, the man is darker in hair and skin color than the woman. Actors typically described as blond, such as Leonardo DiCaprio, generally wear their hair much darker than do blonde actresses, such as Meryl Streep or Kate Hudson. Even Conan the Barbarian was played as a brunet by Arnold Schwarzenegger. This pattern appears to be true around the world. Latin American television, for example, is full of blonde women and darker Latin lover-type men.
In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin called this kind of mechanism that makes a person more attractive to the opposite sex "sexual selection." He argued that it was the main engine of the human race's striking racial diversity. It was a brilliant insight, one that took the rest of the scientific world more than a century to start taking it seriously. Still, sexual selection can't fight too strongly against natural selection. You can't be a ladies' man if you are dead. And that may explain why blonde or red hair never became universal anywhere. First, it would lose some of its scarcity value if all women had it. But, also, while it's good for your daughters, under pre-modern conditions it was bad for your sons. It tended to hurt males at hunting and war."
Why do gentlemen prefer blondes - or at least take more notice of them? My guess is that it's largely because blonde hair is inherently more noticeable. Women like to wear gold and silver jewelry for the same reason—it makes them, to put it crudely, shinier. (In fact, as anthropologist Peter Frost has pointed out, women of all races tend to have shinier, lighter-colored skin than their menfolk—that's why they're traditionally called " the fair sex.") VDARE.com, 08/10/03, The Blonde Wars

"So ... what do you think?" "Do you like it?" I stared at myself in amazement, brown locks covering my left eye. "I don't know yet," I stammered. I'm a blonde. And I can't speak for brunettes or redheads but there is something about being blonde that is part of my identity in a way that other physical qualities or attributes of mine are not. There's the whole, 'blondes have more fun,' thing and the 'gentlemen prefer blondes' thing and how you always stand out in a crowd of brunettes because there are so few of you. There is blonde ambition, blonde moments, blonde jokes. ( http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=blonde) There's the way you get treated by men. There's the way you get treated by non-blonde women. There's the way you are perceived. There's my own mother's panicked reply when I told her I was going dark, "why would you do that, I thought you were going to keep it natural." It's like she has a blonde daughter and that is some sort of currency for her. It is currency for me too. It's one thing to be a pretty girl. It's another thing to be a pretty blonde girl.

I've been wanting to take the plunge for some time, partially sociological experiment, partially just for fun. A.J. at the Frederic Fekkai salon constantly tells me it will make my eyes 'pop.' Ok. My eyes are not one of my signature features. I couldn't imagine being brunette would change that. Even if it did, that's not a reason to go brunette. Experimenting with haircolor has been something I've done a lot of. In high school I tried everything from green to blue to purple culminating with black, which I thought would make my eyes 'pop,' but the end result was grey and I spent an hour and an entire bottle of shampoo in the shower trying to wash it out. I went red in November of 2005. It was when I was grappling for change, any change and thought if I changed on the outside maybe the inside would follow. I went to visit my grandmother in the hospital, scared she would hate it, scared she'd feel like I didn't want to look like her anymore (she is the only other blonde in the family, on both sides). She could barely speak. It was days before we decided it was time for her to go to the hospice but she noticed the red hair. And she loved it. I breathed a sigh of relief. I knew I was losing her and didn't want more distance between us than we had with her going in and out of consciousness drifting further away from me every minute, every second, every day. I wanted to cling to everything about her I could, our common hair color being one of them; but her approval was enough.

Being a redhead was interesting. I went to work the next day and someone said, "Oh you decided to go back to your natural hair color." Uh .... no. Living with AC, a natural redhead, made me feel like an imposter. Her hair was redder and she still called me a blonde. It was like she looked at me and still saw blonde. She refused to characterize me as a redhead. Oh once in a while she made Lindsay Lohan comments about my hair but that was where it ended. I did get treated differently as a redhead than I had as a blonde. I don't know if it is my stereotypes that controlled my actions hence the different treatment or whether it really was different and I was the same. As a blonde I would get asked by a male judge to approach the bench. When I did he'd say things like, "is this your first time in court, honey?" And when I wouldn't answer because my mouth was agape, he'd respond with, "don't worry, I'll be easy on you." People don't do that to redheads because redheads are tough and redheads are crazy. People definitely don't do that to brunettes. They're both smarter than blondes, they know sexual harassment when they see it. Blondes welcome the harassment. I felt like an imposter being a redhead but I felt like I was taken more seriously and I liked that.

In September of 2006 I decided to go back to my natural hair color. I realized that one day my natural hair color would be grey and I would no longer have the option to be tow-headed, flaxen haired ever again. I decided that with all of the blogging and getting back to basics and turning 30 and accepting myself for who I am I should embrace my roots. So I asked A.J. to take me back. She explained that red is the hardest color to cover and that it would take a few visits. She dulled it down with a color called 'gold' which is my exact natural hair color and added highlights to match my hair in the pictures of me I brought along for accuracy. After a few washes I was strawberry blonde. I've been strawberry blonde since with blonde or 'gold' roots. When AC saw me last she asked if I got highlights. Nope, it's just my roots coming in.

Seeing two inches of roots was very encouraging. It was the real me growing in. I expected to go to Fekkai yesterday and continue what we started in the end of September. But when A.J. walked over and asked me what I wanted I surprised myself by saying, "I am going between Sienna Miller and brunette Cameron Diaz." That's all A.J. needed to hear. She loves me because I am always open to change. She said, "Well Sienna Miller is very blonde, that will take two visits and by then, knowing you, you probably won't want to be that blonde anymore." Then she pulled out the color book and suggested colors like 'caramel' and 'ginger' and 'chocolate' and 'cinnamon.' Soon some of her colleagues came over and made suggestions of their own. They were all brunettes by the way. The colors they chose were all dark. They asked me what I liked. I picked out a color. 'Gold.' They held it up to my face as they had with the others. It was identical to my two inch roots. "Boring," they responded, "that's your natural, why would you want that?" Because I'm blonde on the inside but I haven't been blonde on the outside in over a year and I miss it. I want to be blonde again. I want as much of the real me back as I can get. A.J. finally convinced me to go dark by reminding me that the red has to actually grow out to go away but that brown would cover it. Blonde would not. I would be strawberry blonde until it grew out. She added that if I hated it she'd add highlights, she'd do whatever I wanted.

So I did it. I'm a brunette now. I fit in with my family. I'm not the token blonde with freckles. I'm just the token person with freckles now.

After parading me around the salon, "do you believe she is naturally blonde," to the other colorists who oohed and aahed with approval at A.J.'s prowess while she explained the colors she mixed and the method she used, A.J. brought me over to Antoinette, who cuts my hair. "Do you love it?!" she asked. Antoinette and I have the same natural haircolor. I said, "I don't know yet." "I need to absorb and you know how it is when you're blonde." She said, "that's why I can never go more than three months with another hair color. Blonde is part of who I am." My sentiments exactly. I will be back on the quest for 'gold,' next time I see A.J. I miss the fringe benefits. I miss looking in the mirror and seeing the attributes I was born with. But until then, I won't mind being taken seriously and being given the benefit of being smart and interesting with out having to prove it.