Thursday, July 31, 2008

Does this mean summer is over??

Sigh. The pink highlights are gone. They had faded to blond mostly a couple of weeks ago, so I had started getting my hair wet in the pool which sped up the process. When I noticed on Tuesday that the pink was finally gone from my bangs, I knew that I had to dye my hair back. Paul says me reverting back to my natural color signifies that summer is really over. I think he's right.


Yesterday I bought some "soft black" hair color at Walmart. Today LaRae helped me to dye my hair back to its natural shade. I'm not sure it even looks natural. To tell you the truth, I'm not sure what natural looks like on my hair right now. I think the perm then the relaxer and then the summer sun had lightened my hair a little. Not helping matters, when I first got the pink, the girl bleached in too many highlights and covered some with brown. Yes, you read that right -- brown, not soft black -- thus creating hot pink and brown lighter than my natural hair color highlighted chunks. It wasn't too noticeable, and so I loved it! Anyways, my hair obviously looked a LOT lighter after the highlights. Now since I've had the blond highlights (chunks) for a couple of weeks, my hair has looked really light, so going back to black is really weird. What do you think?
In a sense, I look in the mirror now, and I think, "ah, there you are! It's good to see Joanna again." Already though (less than 12 hours since the dye job), I am missing the girl with the hot pink highlights. I am missing the looks I would get walking through a store. I still giggle thinking about when I flew into GA right after I got the pink highlights. I was walking through the airport with Sprinkles (in his awesome Ed Hardy-esque dog carrier) in his bag on my shoulder and listening to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on my iPod when I noticed people kept looking at me. Perhaps it was my cool grace, my confident stride, my amazing bag they all envied (after all I was "the girl with the amazing petflys dog carrier), my sweet puppy sticking his nose against the grates on his bag, or even my sweet little pink iPod shuffle that caught their attention. I didn't figure out why people were staring until my mom's eyes immediately zeroed in on my hair when I walked up! I was so used to it already that I was clueless. I can't believe it, but I miss the attention. I miss feeling like I was daring enough to finally do something totally out of the norm for most people -- something that would prompt people to say things like, "that totally rocks my face off" or "I've always wanted to do that but I'm not cool enough to pull it off" or "wow that's awesome!", etc. Always good reviews. (On a side note: I'm not cool enough to really pull it off, I just have always wanted to do it and went for it!) It was nice. Black hair doesn't exactly turn heads though, does it?
That expression doesn't quite have the same fun effect that it did in the picture of me with the pink highlights a few blog entries lower than this one now does it? Oh well, I'm embracing weird faces for the camera though -- here's another:
I'll get used to being normal again. I honestly really do like the black shade that my hair turned out. There's a bit in my bangs that still has a hint of red tones if you look closely, and in the back underneath there are a couple of blondish patches that don't show unless you dig for them. The cover up job was a success! Thank you, LaRae! The giggles that ensued from coloring my hair built a fun memory that made it so much easier to say goodbye to crazy fun hair color (even though it had already faded out). I love you! Thanks!
Finally, for those skeptics out there who don't believe that the color in these pictures is my natural hair color, I'm going to put up one more picture. This one is me student teaching my last semester at HU. (I was 22.) Ignore the horrid bags and shadows around my eyes. I was soooo busy, sleep deprived, and stressed at that point. I'd recently had surgery on both hands and was still teaching after only a week of recovery, so it was a bit crazy there for a while. :-)
Now I feel like I'm ready to go back to teaching. I'm ready to dive into putting my classroom back together and to delve into Geometry (which I'm teaching this year -- hurray!). Well, let's take baby steps actually -- I'm ready to start getting ready to go back to work. Give me another week to be ready for kids. :-)
On a quick side note - the assistant principal in charge of dress code is using a lot of my pics of my pink highlights for the slide show about what is NOT ok to wear. :-) She said she'd try to work in who it is in the pictures to give me some advance "street cred" with my kiddos. LOL. I'll also have the pictures up in my screen saver that ends up coming up during class, and I know they'll be in the staff slide show of our summer fun at in-service, so at least more people will get to see that I actually went through with it and was daring!
I'm signing off for now. Hopefully I can keep my blog up to date a little better. I've been spending a lot of my time lately learning PhotoShop and making designs for t-shirts for the DISboards. I know it's a silly excuse to not update, but it's been really fun! The link to my photobucket with my designs is in the last blog entry -- I've added a lot, so go check it out!

2 comments:

  1. If you want to do something a little bit crazy, but still dress-code acceptable, I suggest coloring your hair a "deep, burgundy black (or brown)." Clairol has one called Egyptian Plum, and another that is blackberry something or other. They are so much fun b/c they look like a "normal" dark-colored hair until the light hits just right, and then you see the crazy red and purple undertones that hide the rest of the time. I have been Egyptian Plum for a couple years, now, and just love it! And I love the comments I get from it :-D My boss' 16 y/o daughter even told her mom she thinks I'm "cool" and if a 30 y/o being called "cool" by a 16 y/o isn't impressive, I don't know what is :-P

    ReplyDelete
  2. I loved your pink hair!!! :o) Totally you. I think you should do it again in October. ;o) Hope you had a good first day!

    ReplyDelete