Deborah Lipp

Seems like everyone in the U.S. took a Wednesday holiday as good reason to take the whole week off. I’m leaving the last Tuesday trivia question up a while longer to give vacationers time to get back and take a look.

I married young the first time. Yesterday would have been my ::mumble mumble:: wedding anniversary. More than twenty-five. Holy shit, twenty-seven years. No offense if you’re reading this, Vere, but MY GODS I’m glad I didn’t spend twenty-seven years married to you. Seriously, one was plenty.

So yes, we’d say “We were married on the 4th of July. They had a parade in our honor. There were fireworks.” Blah blah. Funny, right?

I dreamt that George Clooney was cloned, twice, and me and several other women were test-driving all three men to see if we could pick out the real one.

I’ve been learning new ways of doing my hair, and it’s brought up all sorts of stuff. Stuff about ethnicity and whiteness and childhood. This isn’t the first time I’ve found politics in the small things of daily life and it probably won’t be the last. At least this time, we’re not showering.

I hit upon this hairdresser who gave me different advise than I normally get, and so I tried new things, and that opened the door to try more new things, and in short order I developed expertise in styling my very curly hair. I made the frizz go away. I made the handfuls of hair stop falling out daily. And I started changing my look.

I did big bouncy Shirley Temple curls. Small flirty Betty Boop curls. Center part with curls framing my face. Side part with wisps of curls over one eye. Combed straight back with a cascade of curls down my shoulders.

My Curly Girl sisters noticed and complimented me, which encouraged me to do more. And sometimes I’d get a compliment from a co-worker or a friend. But mostly, this was fun I was having with my mirror.

Until I tried blowing it straight.

I didn’t like what blowing it straight looked like. I never use a blow dryer, and letting hair dry naturally lends it a lot more shine and softness with no extra effort. So my hair looked straight, but also a little dry, a little hard.

But everyone flipped out. I mean flipped. “You look glamourous.” “You look like a movie star.” “It’s so 1940s.” And lots and lots, not just of compliments, but of noticing; “What did you do with your hair?” all day long. Which had never happened before.

Now Roberta, who is the one who taught me how to straighten it, told me people would respond to it. “When you have curly hair, they think you have great hair. When you have straight hair, they think you’re pretty.” Which totally I believed, but I was genuinely unprepared for the wave of accolades that accompanied a little blow-drying. Roberta said one more thing; “It’s an ethnic thing.”

She was right. The accolades I got; what I felt, was that I looked…white.

I am white. Grew up in white neighborhoods. Stared at the one table of black kids in the lunch room. But I also grew up very conscious of the difference between white white people and ethnic white people. Not just because of anti-Semitism. Not just because there was only one other Jewish kid in my grade. But because I wasn’t one of Them.

And I don’t actually know how to describe it without talking about hair. I don’t go through what black women go through, the burning and torture. Yet I know the mockery, and I know what it’s like to never see anyone like me in a magazine or shampoo commercial or TV show (except for comic relief).

I remember the women from the comics I read as a kid: Jean Grey, Sue Storm, Karen Page, Gwen Stacy, Mary Jane Watson: All blondes or redheads, all with straight or slightly wavy hair. I latched onto Wanda Maximoff with a passion; the ethnic background and the hair. She was the only one, and I loved her (and a witch too!).

Movies would have it be a class thing. Like Mystic Pizza, with working class, ethnic, curly-haired Julia Roberts and Lili Taylor, gazing towards the whiter, richer, more straightened other side of the tracks. But I grew up in about the mid-range economically and socially of the towns where I lived, and went to school with kids whose parents had about the same amount of money, and wore the same color collars, as my parents. But the curly-haired divide still existed.

You can walk through life, being as white as me, and never notice that you’re not white enough. Until one day, thanks to a blow dryer and waking up extra early, it comes to your attention.

your longing may now be fulfilled.

I got tagged by ahab, and I dunno, I guess I’m being nice.

First, the rules:

1. I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.
2. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write to their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. (You’re not the boss of me!)
5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Random Deborahisms:

1. I think my new tattoo might be infected. I have eleven tattoos. Which means I’ve been tattooed more than 20 times, because you go back for touch-ups and so on. And this artist uses impeccable sterility techniques. I blame myself. I’m using topical antibiotics. Oy.

2. Right now, at this very moment, I am writing the index for my new book. What kind of crazy masochist volunteers to write an index? I have no idea. Not me. I am compelled to do this by my persuasive editor. I hate it. I hate it so much it is possible that the sheer force of my hatred infected my tattoo.

3. I have a sister, three half-sisters, two step-sisters, and two sisters-in-law. Please never tell me “you’re like a sister to me;” you may get lost in the crowd! (A loveable crowd, to be sure.)

4. A couple of months ago, the nail on my left index finger became ridged vertically down the center. I have to trim it down the the very edge or else it splits and cracks. The ridge grows below the nail bed so I don’t anticipate it going away anytime soon.

5. I want to marry John Goodman. But I want to have sex with Antonio Banderas on the side.

6. My great-aunt was engaged to Mel Brooks. They broke up.

7. I am a little obsessive about what chair I sit in when I’m home. I have to sit in a particular chair in the kitchen. Arthur refers to it as “my spot.” As in, “Where did you put the note from your teacher I have to sign?” “At your spot.” Sometimes we have guests and one will sit in my spot and being polite I won’t say anything. But I will fidget. If you knew how haphazard and laid back and even sloppy I am, this whole spot thing would blow your mind.

8. From the time I could read until my mid-twenties, I collected Marvel comic books. I cut my teeth on Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and Daredevil, which my brother and I referred to as “the big four.” These were soon joined by the Hulk, the X-Men, Captain America, and more. In my teens, I favored the more artistic stuff, and was a huge fan of Captain Marvel, the next incarnation of the X-Men (and then the next after that), and Killraven. My GODS did I love Killraven.

If you are reading this and have a blog, consider yourself tagged. That means you, Roberta.

The Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World

This site is awesome. The maps posted there range from the thought–provoking to the crackpot to the historical to the fanciful to the just plain fun, but what they have in common is that they make you look at the world just a little bit differently.

…so here’s a picture. Velvet Stickseed (Hackelia velutina), Kibbie Ridge, Yosemite National Park.

So if you don’t blog, let me tell you about comment spam. A year ago, most of it was just a paragraph of links. Some of it was smarter. It would be a fake blog post with a neutral phrase like “Hi” or “I agree with you” or “Great blog” and then the spam link would be in the signature. Some of those are actually pretty clever and you have to read closely to determine they’re spam.

I assume, from the point of view of the spammer, that having to read closely is desireable.

But then these other spammers started appearing. They send you thousands of links in a single spam. Seriously. Thousands. When I open my spam filter, one spam comment will fill two or three screens. Or more.

What this does is allow me to scroll through all my spam very, very fast. And the other spam, the stuff I’d have to read closely, gets scrolled past just as fast. Because it’s all too much.

So you’d think that one of the groups that would be interested in stopping the crazy screen-stuffing spam would be the normal spammers. You’d think they’d step in or something.

But you’d be wrong.