Make-over? Or Do-over?

I got a new haircut last weekend. Nothing too dramatic: A few inches off the bottom, a little extra 'fringe' around my face. A subtle change. When I came home from the salon, Fresh said, "I like it. It's spunky." (Note: Fresh did not comment on my new 'do unprompted. Oh no. He's a good husband, but not that good. I had to say, "I got a haircut. [Shaking my hair like a Pantene ad] What do you think?" But at least he said the right thing.)

So, spunky, huh? I'll take it. Molly, my stylist, and I were discussing how to give me an age-appropriate-yet-stylish look. We thought this new look worked. In any case, I got to thinking: If this one says spunky (and professional, and stylish, and cute--all part of what Molly and I were going for), what have my other 'dos said about me? Because, in my memory at least, I have been the master of transformative hair-dos. So I went back hunting through some photos, all ready to re-discover my Barbie stage (when my hair was blond), my alterna-punk days (when V. would test out her latest Manic Panic purchase on my unsuspecting locks), my edgy days (when my hair was pixie short, orange, and spiky), and my studious days (long, long, long, in a bun, with or without bangs). I had a whole post ready in my head on my multiple personalities expressed through my hair. But as I went hunting through my photos to capture these metamorphosised Melissas--horror of horrors--I discovered that I was all wrong. There have been no great transformations. In fact, for my whole life, I have basically had the same five haircuts. Check it out:

The Short Bob With Bangs (ages 2, 7, 8, 11, and 23)





The Short-ish, Curled Under Look (ages 3/4, 13, and 21)




The Long Hair With Bangs (ages 5, 17, 18, and 28)





The Long And Straggly, Usually (But Not Always) Pulled Back In A Pony Or Bun (ages 10, 11, and 27)

















Even this latest look is nothing new--Shoulder-Length With Bangs has always been a part of my repertoire (and is my mom's favorite, I think). I guess there's only so much you can do with straight, fine hair. (ages 6, 15, 31)

















There are, of course, a few looks that have been unparelleled, including The Bangs (age 13)...

...and The Ugly (ages 20-21).

Although, even this last one looks a lot like My Original Look (age -1).















So while my 'new' do might be spunky, it actually isn't anything new. What a disappointment. I just hope these recycled hair-dos don't mean that I'm bound to repeat my mistakes. Please--never let me wear The Ugly again.

Ode to Joy

I have an incredibly talented and thoughtful group of friends. Many of them write regularly on their blogs (there's a whole list of them in the column to the right). Really, my friends--especially those far afield--are responsible for my renewed writing binge here.

Case in point: My friend S. recently moved back to Alaska. To keep abreast of the shenanigans of she and her lively three kids, I've been reading her blog regularly (because, like I said the other day, I'm a bit of a stalker). Around Christmas time, she wrote an incredibly beautiful post about how she has fallen in love with every church and faith community to which she belonged. She talked about the candle service at the church where she grew up, the banjo sermons at a small-town Alaska church, the generosity and sense of community she felt in every single one. And most importantly, she described the somewhat ramshackle volunteer choir in her current church. Now, maybe I was particularly hormonal or emotional that day, but I found her musings moving and beautiful. And it made me think how often hollow our academic/urban/atheist/modern/ambitious/[insert your own adjective here] worlds and existences can feel. I'm not saying anything new here; my reaction to her post was actually rather predictable. In fact, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes it far more eloquently in his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, than I ever could:

"...sooner or later we wake up alone, sensing that there is no way this affluent, scientific, and sophisticated world is going to provide us with happiness....after each success, it becomes clearer that money, power, status, and possessions do not, by themselves, necessarily add one iota to the quality of life."

Csikszentmihalyi may have said it better, but I was still moved to write S. this response:

December 18, 2008

So I have added all of my friends' blogs to a blog feed, yours included, and I just had to write you after reading your "Volunteer Choir" post.

I don't go to church. Except for Christmas services at a multi-denominational Christian church in the U.P., an occasional Catholic wedding or funeral, but otherwise, not really. Sometimes I feel guilty when I see the Lutheran church across the street emptying from Sunday services around the time I'm just coming to from my third cup of coffee. And sometimes I think about how if I have children, the community of a church would be nice. But otherwise, I don't think about it too much.

Let me also say that my not going to church isn't due to a particular stand on religion or anti-religion. I neither believe nor dis-believe in god. I know how comforted I feel going through the rituals of a Catholic funeral when I am grieving; I know how moved I am by the parables and tales of the Bible, especially the Old Testament (and how much it is my moral compass); and I also know how frustrated I am by the use and mis-use of religion in contemporary society to do and preach some pretty horrible things. But that's not why I don't go to church. I just don't go.

And let me also say that I grew up, for the first chunk of my childhood, at least, in a very religious, very Christian household. Services twice a week kind of thing. Our only friends were congregation friends. It is a particular brand of Christianity that I now disavow completely. So maybe I don't go to church because, well, where would I go?

Finally, let me say that for the past few years I have been on this mission to find a choir to join. I was a choir singer my whole life, but stopped in college when being part of a choir became competitive. That was not why I sang. I sang for the sheer joy of it: For belting out when you wanted to, for the goosebumps you get when a good harmony emerges, for smiling and animating a stage while you sing. I never wanted to be a soloist, and it was never about recognition or glory. Singing and music have always been, for me, about the sheer head-to-toe joy that fills me when I'm in a choir. While formal once-a-season performances are fun, it was actually choir practice that I looked forward to the most. And unfortunately, what I've found is that most of the adult choirs out there are competitive, performative, perfectionist. That's fine, but I want joy. I even tried to join a choir here in Madison, but it was too instructional. We spent all our timing learning how to read music. And, well, I spent 12+ years doing that, thank you very much. I wanted something different now.

So when I read your blog post on the volunteer choir, it made me cry. The same kind of cry I get at the end of a musical when the cast is performing the show-stopping, all-out, every-voice-counts finale. The same cry I get when I hear a perfect harmony that is a goose-bumppely fusion of voices. The same cry I get when I sing my favorite songs, in my car with the windows down, when nobody else is there, and I can just belt out my delight or my pain or my love. It's a cry of sheer joy. Thinking about that choir, mismatched clothes, an off-key note here or there, the inevitable older woman who thinks she is an opera singer dragging out every vibrato note, the man with the surprising falsetto, the clarity of a child's voice hitting every perfect C in the melody. Joy.

And it just made me think: Some people feel that kind of joy all the time. Every week. Every Sunday, in fact. And some people feel moved to give and to care for their neighbors and communities (which I am always frustrated by and lamenting...how selfish so many of us are, how uncaring, how unwilling we are to share our privileges and our wealth, myself indicted as well), and to do it every week, all the time. And some people can look at their neighbor, whomever he or she is, and see the good in them (which is something I'm always talking to my student teachers about, about being able to see the "better angels" in our children instead of all the ways we've been taught to pathologize and denigrate them, to sort and to stratify them. To learn to love them, in all their little bundles of complexity, and to see them as the powerful, brilliant, charismatic adults they all can become if only we let them). And some people even find a way to be silly, every week, as they celebrate and cultivate community (something that is so rare in our academic life here in Madison).

And it just made me think...Maybe I oughta give church a second chance.

Rethinking India

Ross and I met in India. The monsoons arrived with us when our plane landed in Delhi, and for six weeks, we schlepped through muddy street floods, humid and bug-filled days, and torrential outbursts of rain. Whenever I tell stories about that trip, I always get a cock-eyed look from my listeners, a look that says, "And you went there because...?"

The thing is, I loved India. Monsoons and all. But it's hard to explain how or why to someone who hasn't been there (I tried, at the time, but I don't know how successful I was). It was the chaos, the colors, the food, the head waggle, the throngs of communities, the beaches, the flowers, the temples. But even that doesn't capture it. I tried to explain to our friend A., who recently moved to India, how much I loved it and why I thought he would, too. Unfortunately, in his first few days up in Northern India, in the foothills of the Himalaya, he was (1) bit by a mouse, (2) cohabitating with scorpions, (3) shitting on neighbors' doorsteps, and (4) obsessively watching the MLB post-season. I was a little worried about him and his new life on the subcontinent. Had we led him astray? Were we really crazy to love a country that, on the surface at least, is so hard to love?

We emailed A a few days ago, putting out feelers for a trip to visit him in the next year or so. As is A's usual way, he hemmed and hawed a bit: Maybe he was moving home, maybe he was moving to Delhi, maybe maybe. Did he even like India?! But after spending a few weeks traveling through Kerala and Tamil Nadu, he did mention in passing, "The south makes me realize why you and Melissa love this country." So maybe we hadn't led him completely astray... and I felt somewhat vindicated knowing that someone else could see what I saw in that place. I've been waiting a long time for someone to get it--instead of looking it me like I'm crazy--when I talk about India.

India has clearly been on our brains of late, and our friends have been mocking us for missing out on one of the year's best films, so Friday night we finally went to see Slumdog Millionaire. It was as captivating as everyone had said. But that's not the only reason why I loved it.

You see, it's the first film I've seen that actually captures what it's like to be in India, as painful and overwhelming as that is: The throngs of traffic; the side-by-side living of abject poverty and opulence; the mannerisms of the street children motioning for chapathi; the thumping music that is always everywhere at once; the rain that doesn't stop; the train car 'windows' through which passerby reach in their hands to either sell you chai or surreptitiously grab something; that head waggle-bobble that is sometimes yes, sometimes no, sometimes don't bother me; the police officers who uphold the law in name only; the rushing rivers of sewage water; the flurries of brightly colored fabric; the Taj, both Disneyfied and magnificent at once; the incessant energy of the cities; the rickshaws that wiggle through lanes of traffic while you hold on for dear life; and the Bollywood dance routines that are everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. (Noticeably missing, however, was the traffic moving every which way at once...Can Mumbai traffic actually be organized?)

As we drove home, Ross and I rehashed the film, the images, our memories--we both particularly shuddered to think about the real street children we met, missing limbs and eyes, following us and begging imploringly, "Chapathi. Chapathi." We're not sure we'll get to visit A. next year, but for a few hours, we were transported to that place we met almost six years ago.

And as we rehashed and reminisced, I realized that, all these years, maybe I've been describing my time in India wrong. How could I love it? That's such an over-simplified emotion and reaction to a place that is so utterly complex--what you see in Slumdog Millionaire is, at least in our experience, pretty close to the 'real' India. How, then, do I describe how much I didn't want to leave at the end of six weeks? How much I learned? How stimulated I was from every sensory input? How much fun I had? How that trip pushed and extended me and my world in ways I didn't even know possible? (And, you know, I did get Ross out of the deal!)

Or maybe saying I loved India is exactly right.

Obsession

I may have become a stalker.

It's not my fault, though, I swear. See, it all started with a phone number switch.

Back when we first moved to Madison almost three years ago, Ross made the (arguably terrible) decision to change phone numbers, to give up his 312 for a 608. (I, of course, resisted. I still cling to my 773 as one last badge of Chicago-ness. Because, I know, my love for cheese curds and badgers could have fooled you.) In any case, Ross became a 608er with little thought thereafter. Until he went on one of his googling sprees. You see, every now and then, Fresh likes to google himself--to see if his Zoob escapades still grace the 'net, to see whether or not his daily letter to the editor has gotten published, and to see if his doppelganger Ross Freshwater (Scottish hostel owner, stingray expert, "Shower of Bastards" front man) has out-googled him.

Well, on this particular googling expedition two years ago, Fresh found a hilarious blog post about himself...by the guy who inherited his 312 digits. Turns out, all of Fresh's friends had been harrassing this poor guy--also a Ross--for months. At all hours of the night, Ross #2 had been getting calls for Ross #1, and he had exasperatedly wasted hours trying to explain that he was Ross but not that Ross. Poor guy. But Ross #1, our own Mr. Fresh, made it even worse: He went and sent this blog post to all of his friends, along with yet another phone number update. So now, not only did Ross #2 get endless phone calls from Ross #1's friends, but his blog was inundated with cryptic, sarcastic, intrusive comments. You can see the whole bloggersation here.

For a few days, we were a flurry of activity. Emails back and forth, phone calls to friends in Denver to say this was for real, google research to find out who Ross #2 really was. We even dreamed up our own "This American Life" adventure, where we could meta-narrate a Chicago meeting of the two Ross's and make intellectually witty comments about our crossed wires.

But it got old after a while. And we forgot about Ross #2.

Fast forward a year. For some reason, I was reminded of this episode and went hunting for the blog and comments documenting the insanity of our jumbled identities. I found it, alright, and before you knew it, I was a stalker.

You see, Ross and his wife KT write a pretty funny blog about pretty mundane stuff. As I read it, I thought, If these people lived near me, we'd totally be friends. And what's more, they update their blog everyday. So before I knew it, a one-time reminiscence became a daily obsession--What would Ross and Kitty be writing about today? Would she knit more ugly socks for her nieces? Would they finally sell their Chicago loft? Would she cut her hair so that she didn't look like a polygamist? Would Ross finally get his Chewbacca backpack for Christmas? And then I even started reading the comments, and I got a little jealous: Their friends were pretty funny, too. And they read Ross and KT's blog everyday. And they all kept blogs. And, well, now the Carlklef Chronicles are in my blog feed. And this post, unfortunately, is probably going to turn their blog private. Which really would be okay by me because then I wouldn't have the occassion to act like a stalker. I mean, really, do they want some total stranger to know that they take the bus to BYU everyday and are desperately trying to buy a house so that they don't have to live with their parents? Really?

So I'm a stalker. I've got to accept that.

But then I got thinking: If you write a blog, aren't you inviting stalkers? Isn't that the whole point? And that got me thinking some more: How come everybody else blogs, and I don't? How come they get to write about their bad hair days and I don't? And do you really have to wait until you have a baby before you can start blogging? And does anyone really want to read about your kids that much? Which got me thinking even more: Isn't our blogging craze a little egotistical? Does anyone really want to read our random ramblings?

Now, the jury's still out on a lot of these, but I think the answer to the last one is loud and clear. My stalkerdom is a testament to that. (Well, and the baby one, too: I totally read all of my friends' baby blogs, cooing over every cute little picture. Although maybe that's less about the inherent interest of kid blogs and more about the fact that I'm 30+ with no children.)

So I've made a one-month delayed New Year's resolution: To start writing again. Here. I like to write, a lot (and academic papers don't count, although I'm trying to make those a little more user friendly on my professional blog). It used to be that all those authorly juices got flowing when we traveled, as evinced by my blog archives, but we've recently been bitten by the responsibility bug. So we're not going anywhere anytime soon. Where does that leave me? Writing-less? No way. (Plus, Lauren keeps reminding me to blog about some of the crazy stories I've been telling her.)

So I guess I have Ross and KT and that damn 312 phone number to thank. Maybe I'll keep stalking just a little longer.