standing under the eaves in the rain, smoking
sitting inside watching the snow fall and drift into piles
walking down the middle of the street in the dark

What you want is not what you get. What you get is what you get. You
can feel as good or bad about it as you want to feel, but it will most
likely not change what you get.

You can embrace what you have,
what you got, what you will get. You can shout from rooftops or perhaps
websites about your lucky draw and your happy hands and your pretty,
pretty life.

Or you can alternately mourn what you do not have, have not
gotten, will never. Keen and wail over it or suffer semi-stoically,
baby martyr. Did dur baby have its feewings hurted. Whoa is you indeed.

The thing about martyrs is that they’re only impressive to the
people who believe what they believe. To everybody else they are
terrorists, windmill tilters, demanding nonsensical whiners. In no case
are they people who appreciated what they had. In no case are they people
who get what they want. And the longing and the whining and the
violence, the glass thrown across the room the plate smashed hair from
the roots white gasp and the seam of blood dissolving in tears or
flames temper temper takes from what you have, and what you have is
consumed in the yearning for what you did not get.

Want what you get. For starters, it’s easier.

I’m not talking about the haircuts where you think that when you get
your hair cut like Brad Pitt you’re going to come out of it looking
like Brad Pitt. I’m talking about the haircuts where your total
inability to articulate what you want and/or the hairdresser’s total
inability to understand you ends up with you crying.
And how in the first case (Brad Pitt’s hair) you are just being really
silly, but in the second case the problem rests in the disconnect between
what you want and your ability to express it so that other people will
do it, and that disconnect is what makes you cry as much as the bad hair.

People
have been trying to give me long fringey bangs and cute little side
fringey things ever since I came into my face. It’s a big face, like
I’m coming at you through a peephole, and some softness around the
edges would probably make it less whoa, but the thing is I hate having
stuff touching my face and ears, and I’m the one who lives with it. So
lots of "soft little fringe" experiences in high school wound up with
me coming home making cat splutters and (because i could never cut a
straight line) eventually doing something with my mother’s pinking
shears. Sorry about that, Mom.
But if people had just done what I said, instead of what they thought would be best for me, tips would have flowed instead of tears.

Once I wanted my hair like a cross between Alannah Currie and
the Heat Miser, bald on the sides and dramatic chunks standing up on
the top; it was long and there was a perm growing out on the top,
perfect, and I cut the sides up very short myself but was perplexed by
the back. I went to a proper hairdresser who "shaped" it, oh my heavens
no. My boyfriend at the time came home to me crying hysterically
because there was nothing I could do to fix it. He took me to a barber
and the barber shaved it all off,  and vacuumed up all the stray hairs
with a wall mounted vacuum, which was a hundred kinds of awesome and cost about a tenth of the proper hairdresser.  Still, I didn’t get what I wanted and  I was so close, and I know that haircut would have been so embarrassing to look back at now, and I mourn it.

In Japan I went with my terribly well groomed and fluent
friend to get a haircut- I’d been cutting my own hair there, because
it’s superfine hair and my Japanese was atrocious and I was scared of what might happen, but I was getting
seriously tired of sweeping hair out of the tatami and ready to take a
risk. "She wants it exactly the same, but about 2 cm shorter" he told
them. They cut it 2 cm shorter than his. I even got
a nice shave for my gaijin sideburns. Yay.

All
things considered, my trip to the hairdresser today was not the worst
thing that has happened to my hair, but man. I came home today looking
like a mushroom. A mushroom that cries. I told her "cut it jagged"
which every hairdresser here has understood, and she gave me some
ass-symmetrical emo thing. We are not emo, although I was beside myself
with unhappiness for a full 20 minutes over a
haircut which is the stupidest thing ever. I tried to explain
it to her again, but she was all huffity "I don’t know what you want" and I
thought I might take her stupid straight scissors and poke her in the
eye so bah, I left and cried a bit on the way home and then did it
myself. I got out the clippers and stuck my fingers in and sort of
jabbed at all the bits that stuck up, only grazing my knuckles a few
times. I look fine. Mainly it’s not around my eyes or my ears or
touching the back of my neck anymore.

The thing that comes to me this time is that it’s not just the haircut.
It ties in to my hesitation to ask for things from others that I can do
for myself, and my utter fury when it doesn’t go well, because I feel
like partly it goes wrong because the other person screwed up, but
partly it goes wrong because I explained it badly and shouldn’t have
delegated and paid for what I’m perfectly capable of doing anyway. It’s
a whole life lesson or something. I’ll work on it once I’m done
sweeping up all the hair bits.

There were dozens of things I was going to do, crazy things and
sensible things. I was going to be a mover, driving people across the
country to start new lives, meeting people and bonding and then moving
on like a 70s television hero. Or I was going to own a small home near
the woods where I could touch the opposite walls with my fingertips and
be a mad hermit poet. Or I was going to be a ballet dancer, since what
else can you really do with perfect turnout.

Everything seemed probable. And everything still sort of
does; I could pick up at any minute and we would be sleeping in the
back of our moving van, or we more simply could move and live at the
cottage. The ballet dream is pretty much done. But I still could mostly do
what I had wanted to, except I think I don’t want it anymore.

The difference is that the life I have is also a life I
wanted, one of the possible trajectories from who I was then. I don’t
feel in any way like I betrayed my truck driving self by becoming an
editor, because I had an equal number of feature fantasies in which I
had a green visor and sleeve protectors. The costume changed, but the
dream I wanted was the same.

To
me, there is a web of lines emerging from every choice, and each choice
makes others possible. I don’t see it as having a choice, and that
choosing one thing is endlessly cutting off the other, because lines
can loop back; I don’t see Billy Pilgrim’s centipedes exactly either,
where everything past is linked to an inevitable now, but I also don’t
see a series of captured moments, unlinked. To me, you get to where you
are from where you were, and the lines can be traced no matter how
entangled, no matter if some snapped as you ran across.

And so I have trouble sometimes reconciling the person you’ve
become with the person I thought you were. I can’t see how you got to where you are from where you were back then. Perhaps my choice to stop
willfully charming people makes me as different from who I once was as
you seem now different to me. Or perhaps I’ve made smaller choices
slowly along the way, not even noticeable individually but cumulatively
changing me and it’s me who’s different and you’re moving on a consistent path.
I don’t know. I do know that it’s strange to look across a table and
see the eyes I once knew looking at things I don’t really understand;
the mouth I once knew forming words I never thought I’d hear, not while
sitting with you.