dream hair

It took me a long time to find all of the cords for the various camera/cell phones/whatever but here is my hair post.  In real life, my hair's pretty fade-y now... kind of My Little Pony purples... these are from last week:

As I mentioned in a previous post, I came up with the color scheme in a dream.  Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, two of the colors ended up being exactly the same so there are 4 instead of 5 colors.



It was really hard to get good pics like I wanted.  I asked Joe to take pictures of it outside in day light but we just couldn't get our schedules together to make it happen.  Oh well.

Joe totally helped me with the rinsing tho, thank god.  It wasn't easy to keep stuff separated.


Sadly, in subsequent showers, some of the pink/purple got into the platinum blonde and turned some of it a light pink.  It's not bad looking but it's not my dream hair.



No lesson today.

No pics, no post.

I did dye my hair, as in the dream, sort of, but I have yet to take my glamor shots, so it's still a private matter as of right now.

I have no pictures to share otherwise, but if you'd like to see me in a hilarious plastic sweat suit, you can check out my weight loss blog: shittydiet.blogspot.com

If you want to read something that is poetic, well written, and hilarious to your brain, check out my friend's blog, CrosbyStillsNashYoungNicksNashYoungandStillsandNash.

haul-y shit: haul + economics lesson

I had a dream about dying my hair and decided to follow that dream (because I'm not too old for dreams yet).

My dream hair had four (or was it five...?) different colors.   Horizontally sectioned from the top, lavender/white, fuchsia, violet, dark purple, navy blue/purple (it was five).  I think it's a merger between the rainbow hair I've been seeing on Fuck Yeah Fantasy Hair and when, in Howl's Moving Castle, Howl tells Sophie that her hair "looks like starlight".  Plus, I'm hoping to do something rad enough to warrant a submission to FYFH.

So anyway, I already have a dece collection of dye but it's been about 10 years since I've dyed my entire head so I knew that I would need MOAR DIE.  Because my dream colors are mostly very similar, it is unnecessary for me to procure one dye for each color since they can be mixed.  (That wasn't the economics lesson: YOU ARE NOT OFF THE HOOK.)

dece/semi dece hair dye collection, should you require proof

So I set out, into the sunset (actually away from the sunset- the mall and Sally are east of here), to Worth, IL to visit SALLY BEAUTY STORE/SOMETHING.

Is this worthy of a haul post?  Probably not.  I bought more Manic Panic in Hot Hot Pink, some blue mixer/toner/compliments (they discontinued the violet one, WHY?!), some blades for this razor I bought that I'll probably never use, and some clips.  I don't even remember what it all came out to.




Then, I thought "maybe Hot Topic has some dye on clearance..." so I hauled ass to the Chicago Ridge Mall, returned something to Bed Bath and Beyond, and walked across the stupid mall all the way to Hot Topic.

It was steamy in there.  I mean, really just unbearably hot.  I was sweating up a storm.  There were so many people in there too.  God, it sucked.

So they had that horrible shopping incentive where clearance items were buy-one-get-one-fifty-percent off (if I ever use that phrase again, I'm going to say BOGO50).  So I felt like I had to buy four things, in similarly priced pairs.

Here's what I got: an Invader Zim tank top, some Raw dye, a shitty eyeshadow that I didn't know was shitty til I got home but I kinda had a clue, and some socks for my bff.

The total on the receipt: $28.34

BUT... is that truly the total cost?

Nope.  In economics, the total cost is the explicit costs + the implicit costs.

Let's break it down.  I am a business, Rora LLC, and what we do here at Rora LLC is make me happy.  We make purchases of raw resources (generally in the form of make up and clothes) in order to produce said happiness.

The exchange of $28.34 for the resources (input) for my hair dye project and general happiness was an explicit cost, as was the gas I had to put in my car to get there, mileage deductions etc etc.

$28.34 isn't too bad for what I got, but there were very high implicit costs.  There was the cost of my well being, since I had to listen to the absolute worst music while I shopped.  There was the cost of my time (there's another economics lesson there, but let's not get into that now).  Implicit costs are the costs that don't usually end up on balance sheets: the owner's labor and time (but not salary, that's explicit), resources that are already owned, etc  and implicit costs can be (but aren't always) hard to put into monetary terms.  But I would estimate that I just spent a million dollars on four items from Hot Topic.

bienvenue!

Welcome to my personal style blog.

My mission statement for Stupid + Boring:

I aim to:

• blog about myself and what I like as though others care
• teach those who do decide to read a lesson of some kind (in a good way... probz)
• fill the internet with pictures of myself

This is the third incarnation of Stupid + Boring.  The first (barely) chronicled my journey through two semesters of math class.  The second was a twice updated weepy blog about bad shit that happened to me and friends and family who died in the summer of '11.  I decided to move away from that because 1) I'm not sad all of the time and 2) I don't want to be sad all of the time.

So here it is.  I'll start you off with a haul post and a little bit of economics.

June recap. part 2. say it. RIP Mike Olivieri.

The first day of the summer semester was a Tuesday (for me).  I was meeting with a claims adjuster in the morning so I switched to the evening class for c++.

It was like any first day.  Can you sign on the schools website?  Can you get into your email?  Can you see your grades?

As instructed, I signed into my email, then I signed into Moraine Valley Connect which is the site we use to sign up for classes, check our grades, gets messages about construction on campus, etc.  On the main page was a little note that said the flag would be at half mast in honor of soldier Michael C Olivieri.  I gasped.  I actually gasped.  I didn't think people really gasped reflexively but I did.  I started panicking... I was already in denial thinking maybe it was some other Michael Olivieri or maybe he had done something awesome and they were honoring him in that way.  Just typing his name into google didn't bring up a news story immediately (it does now) but then I found it.  I started crying, right in the middle of class.  Not sobbing.  Only the two people next to me saw.  They didn't ask.  First day so for all they knew I'm nuts and for all I know they're right.


I haven't talked to Mike in years.  He was my best friend right when I needed one.  And a good best friend.  We met at Comcast on March something (I used to know this by heart) 2008.  We were in the same training class.  We ate lunch together every day and took all of our breaks together.  We used to play trivia on his phone.  I remember his voice so clearly and the way it would rise when something was unfair.  Not unfair to him, but to me.  He was so protective of me, this pregnant weirdo who cried all the time.

I was so sad when he quit, right as we were about to make it through training.  I'm not surprised that he quit because he hated it (so did I, but I lasted nearly 2 years) but he didn't quit because he hated it.  The day he quit, he was supposed to go see his uncle about working with him but the night before his aunt and uncle were both killed in a car accident so he quit Comcast anyway to help take care of his cousins.

My biggest regret is that I never told him how much he meant to me for being there.  After he left Comcast we kept in touch for a little while but eventually, it just fell away.  He loaned me the movie Once and I never watched it, I sent him a text asking if he knew of any jobs (partially an excuse just to talk to him again) but he never responded.  And that was that.  He wished me happy birthday on Facebook this January.

And I just hope he didn't die thinking that I was too cool to hang out with him after he left Comcast, or that he wasn't important to me, or that I didn't care.  Because I did and I do.

this is not as I knew him but he looks good.

I don't like most people and I don't spend much time (any) trying to make friends.  Mike's death is a reminder to me that I have to stay close to people who I love, whatever the effort.  I just wish I could have learned it before Mike died so I could tell him thank you, thank you, thank you.

I wanted so badly to attend his wake but I didn't have any shoes because of the flood.  I was on my way to Walmart to buy the first black size 8 shoes I saw when my mom called to tell me she had locked herself and Oli out and I had her spare keys because I was borrowing her car.  I had to tail it to the city and that was that, missed the wake.  I went the next day to the funeral procession.  Stood outside in jeans and tennis shoes and watched the cars go.  It was really cloudy that morning but the sun came out right when the first car left.  The rest of that day was all good news.  I don't remember all of the great things that happened that day but I remember we got lots of good news from two of our three insurance companies after days of bad news.

June recap. part 1. a fish is not aware of water.

I don't blog as often as I should... especially for someone who's registered so many blog names.  I wish I would have documented this summer better, but I didn't, whaddyagonnado?  I'll do my best to do it now.  It will be boring.

I think this summer probably started out the same as any others... I finished my spring classes (easy except for macro economics, which gave me a scare), signed up for my summer classes, bullshitted, whatever.


I can't remember the date (8th or 9th of June) but whenever it was, the evening of the flood, I slept great.  I opened the window and listened to the storm and drifted off into perfect sleep.  I woke up around 7AM, took a piss, and decided to go back to sleep because it was so. fucking. wonderful.  When I woke up again, the water sounded a little too close.  From the bed, I looked out into the kitchen and saw water pouring in through the air conditioner.  Minutes later, the bed was floating.  This was about 9AM.  By about 920, the water was up to our waists and the electricity was still on.  I had to stay up on the second floor landing with Oli (my nearly 3 year old) so I couldn't really save much of anything.  Not that it would have been safe to try, with the electricity on.  Eventually the water receded, and we started throwing shit out.

kitchen after water receded

only pic taken as water was rising

The next week, Oli stayed with the grandmas and we stayed at shady motels.  You know, the kind that let you stay 4 hours.. except we stayed there over night.  They're cheap.  For our relationship, staying at motels and having a vacation from parenting was pretty awesome.  Kept us strong mentally for the next two weeks of throwing out things we loved.

Eventually the money started to run dry- our renter's insurance did not cover floods, though our car and motorcycle insurance did, thank god.  We ended up staying for about a month in the basement of our landlord's son's family.  It wasn't bad but Oli acted up really late at night and we were paranoid about them waking up from him screaming.  He also refused to poop there and ended up being VERY constipated (we went to the ER once).

At the end of July we moved back in.  They had to rip out and replace half the walls and all of the flooring.  They also replaced our oven.  Our landlords gave us a mattress, so luckily we didn't have to replace that, but all other furniture had to be bought again, save for two tables, a folding chair, and a kitchen chair.  So far we've been able to do that pretty inexpensively.  We raised a fairly decent amount of money (about $1000) on facebook.  A really nice woman named Marina, who I have never met and only knows my mom from message boards, shipped me four boxes of clothes and supplies and donated money.  Strangers can be kind.

The flood was the definition of disaster but was not the worst part of June, unbelievably... but that's all I can stand to write, right now.  My house is still a mess and not unpacked, nor has everything been replaced or cleaned but for the most part, the flood and its damages are off my mind.