The air cools, the leaves start falling…it’s slowly creeping closer…

It’s almost time for the Creme de la Creme.

Can you believe it?

I know it seems strange to think about New Years Day in October, but the list takes a long time to prepare. I made the new icon this week and started working on the opening day post. This year, I made it so people will be entered on the list in the order with which the entry is received. I’m just giving this heads up in case you want to be towards the top of the list: you may want to start perusing your archives now for your choice or just keep the list in mind as you currently write posts. The list will open in November this year to ensure that I’m not spending part of New Year’s Eve cutting-and-pasting the blurbs into a post. Because really, New Year’s Eve is for screwing. I mean drinking. I mean screwing…and drinking.

The Barren Bitches Book Brigade fizzled a bit towards the end of summer, but it’s time to inject new life into it again. And we’re kicking it off Old School with a totally non-IF book:

Along with scoring $40 worth of toiletries for $21 yesterday, my other huge accomplishment was receiving the galleys for the book in the mail. Introducing the plain-cover-version-because-we-don’t-have-the-cover-art-finished-yet copy of Navigating the Land of If: Understanding Infertility and Exploring Your Choices.

It is pretty damn trippy to hold a copy of your book. I mean, sure, I’ve held a construction paper covered and stapled copy of the novel I wrote as a four-year-old: Miss Piggy Sings A Lot of Songs on Tuesday Morning. But I guess it’s different when it has a real binding and cool graphics and can be purchased at the local bookstore rather than “rented” from my makeshift “library bookshelf” in my bedroom. With an old address label as the “bar code.”

Obviously I knew that the book was going to be coming in bound form at some point, but I decided to bring it over to my parent’s house and surprise them. I handed it over and said, “I found this really cool book at the bookstore today.”

I know–how fucking lame can I get with announcements? Seriously, I did something equally lame for when we told them about the twins. It’s like I have announcement anemia. My announcements are so anemic that they only elicit a confused, “what?”

Here is a random page so you can see how cool it looks on the inside. While I’d love to do a side-by-side comparison with my Miss Piggy book, I believe that it is currently being housed in a drawer at my mother’s house.

This random page has a text box on what to do when you hit a blood vessel during an injection and whether the drugs still work at full potency if you reinject them (they do–you get a bruise, but you save $50 without having to throw away that shot of Gonal-F) which is something I always wondered and I’ve never seen covered in a book. And while the nurse that I asked thought the question was strange and needed to go do research herself to answer it, she agreed that it was sound information to have. The other text book is why bruising occurs at all and how to minimize it. Shazaaaaaaam!

This is what I didn’t know about galleys–they are essentially the butt-ugly, quick version of getting the book into bound-form so you can send it out for blurbs, medical vetting, and the like. Most of the time, galleys are not even produced in-house. It is only going to get better from here and I already love the layout.

So, that’s the update on the book. Galleys are in. I’ll post the cover as long as the publisher says it’s okay when I have that in hand. The bound version that I’ll use for the final edit will be sent around January. And um…that’s it. Oh–and there’s a message to all of you on page 286. That’s just me being a tease–you’ll have to wait until May to find out what it says. I sure hope they don’t change the page numbering now that I’ve said that.

Friday night, as I was unpacking the tote bag that I had carried around all day, I pulled out the bag of hair and showed it to Josh. “That,” he said, “rivals the bag of McBlood in terms of strange items in temporary residence inside our home.”

At least this one doesn’t need to be kept inside the refrigerator.

The morning that I went to donate my hair, I washed it and left it down. I should have made a t-shirt–Cut Hair Walking. I felt like my hair was on death row and it was slowly inching towards the time that it would be severed from my head. I cared for it and rubbed conditioner through it and took my time combing it out. The final meal.

When I dropped off the twins at school, everyone commented as I walked down the hall how pretty my hair looked that day. Each time I explained that I was cutting it off that afternoon and the person would do an astonished, “but why?”, I would second guess the decision entirely. I mean, no one comments on my eyes or lips or tiny ass (except for Julie). But everyone comments on my hair. Until Friday afternoon, it literally went down my entire back, serving an additional use as a curtain to block out the tan line that I didn’t take care of before wearing the backless dress for the turkey cutlet bra wedding.

The fifth person to give me the astonished “but why?” received the answer that I was donating it. If I was going to get my hair cut at all, I was going to go all the way with it. I mean, what’s the point in trimming off four inches? No one benefits from four inches. I certainly didn’t want my hair four inches shorter–I liked the length–and you can’t donate four inches. It literally would just end up on the cutting room floor.

This woman was standing with her ten-year-old daughter who sneered at her mother when she exclaimed, “my daughter wants to donate her hair too! She’s growing it out for Locks of Love. Sweetie, look at Melissa’s hair. Do you see how long that is? And she’s just donating it now. You have a long way to go.”

“My hair is just as long as hers,” the girl snarled at her mother.

“I don’t think it is. You’ll end up with short hair if you donate it now.”

“Mother,” she spat, as if her mother were this hopelessly cruel being who had just suggested that a good Saturday activity would be rubbing our thick manes in the faces of children with alopecia. “You know, some hair is still better than no hair. There are children with no hair, mother.”

The little girl stormed off and her mother sighed. “Charming, right?”

“I think it’s cool that she wants to donate it,” I said unhelpfully.

“Yeah, it’s cool until she winds up with a pixie haircut and tons of regret and cries for three days straight and I need to deal with her aftermath.”

Which sounded in that moment a lot like how I predicted I would react when I saw a ponytail of my hair hanging out of someone else’s hand.

I like having long hair.

Oh–I should have warned you at the beginning of this post–I am a complete baby about haircuts.

Look at those long, luscious locks. Even tightly curled, it still went down almost to my waist. When I pulled it straight, I could almost sit on it. Yes…um…that is me getting popcorn.

After school, I picked up the twins and we went down to meet Nazly. She works at the Bethesda Row location and does fantastic hair. Just wanted to mention that in case you are in the DC area and are looking for a salon. She was standing by the door with my mother and a ruler. I sat down in the hair and she gleefully asked if I wanted a final photo.

By fuck! Seriously–long, luscious locks!

I have to admit that I had a secondary motive for donating my hair. I have always wanted to see what I would look like with a chopped off ponytail ever since I read Harriet the Spy. I love that book so much.

She measured out ten inches and showed me and I told her to throw in one extra. Why? I’m not sure right now. But at the time, it seemed like 11 was a better number than 10. When she first started cutting, I couldn’t even feel it. There was just the sound of the scissors and the pressure of her hand holding the ponytail taut and this strange sight in the mirror of my blurry, spectacle-free face asking myself what the hell I was doing.

And then it was done.

Nazly held my hair in her hand and showed me the ponytail. She slipped it into a bag and I stared at my uneven hair in the mirror. I asked her to take another photo, but she suggested that people may not donate to Locks of Love if they saw how my hair looked in that post-donation, pre-shaping stage. It was a fantastic horror-show of a haircut. I felt like I should have brought some lipstick to smear outside the lipline and a hatchet with me to go with it.

She conditioned my hair and cut it and shaped it and twirled it back into curls. And when it was done, I stared at myself in the mirror for a long time with the thought of that woman’s snarling daughter in my head. I didn’t want to cry, but I didn’t look like myself. I liked the idea that I had something to give someone else, but I was sad that I lost the one feature that people associated with me. And most of all, I hated that I cared about something like hair. I kept reassuring Nazly that it wasn’t the cut–she had done a great job–it was simply the Cut.

I warned you that I was babyish about haircuts.

Forgive the slightly glazed expression. It had been a long day on four hours of sleep.

I have this thing about my hair–it’s not perhaps at the level of Samson, but I really do think of myself as this long-haired person. And since the cut, I’ve felt abbreviated. I’m just Melis. Missing the sa. I’m not entirely sure what was contained in the sa, but doesn’t that sound all Eastern and profound? What is wrong with the girl? She is missing her sa.

Aaaaaah, yes. Her sa.

I’ve been trying to search for silver linings. It only takes me a few minutes to wash and style it now instead of a half hour. It feels lighter. Maybe your sa is simply a heaviness. It sounds like “sigh.” The haircut lends authenticity to a multitude of costumes. I am considering going as a buxom flapper for Halloween. A flapper who didn’t get the memo about dancing and cigarette smoking over picking all of the Snickers bars out of the bag of Halloween candy.

Here is something to think about: the hair at the scalp is obviously from 2008, but down at the tip, the hair is older. Vintage hair. I’m not sure how much older, but using the calculation that hair grows about a half inch per month, my split ends were probably four years old.

One day, probably soon, there will be a little girl walking around with my hair on her head and she will be carrying with her the birth of the twins. She will be carrying with her the NICU stay and those first weeks at home before I found my groove. She’ll be carting around my four month long project to teach myself how to cook from a professional cooking school text book. She will have with her the loss of my great aunt, many library story hours, the twins’ baby naming.

What a fantastic world where she will take all of the places my hair has been to and couple it with her own trip: senior prom? learning how to drive? horseback riding lessons? Barbie games? It is bizarre to think that this thing that has been a part of me, literally attached to me, produced inside of me and worn as an identifier outside of me, will now be hers.

I hope it helps her land the guy like it did for me.

Talking with the ChickieNob about her existential crisis from two ends of the staircase

Welcome back to Show and Tell. Everyone is welcome to join, even if you have never posted before and just found out about Show and Tell for the first time today. In fact, we hope you do go back to your blog and post your own Show and Tell item and then return with the link to your post. Details on how to participate are located at the bottom of this post.

Let’s begin.

If I had enough battery power to download new photos, you would have a picture of my new sassy haircut (hint: higher than my shoulders). But until I replace the batteries this weekend, a picture from BlogHer DC will have to suffice.

It’s almost as if the Twitter gods had read my messages about wanting candy and swept into the lobby to lay out a feast while I listened to a panel on blogging basics. When I went to sit down for the keynote speakers, I was faced with a long banquet table covered with chocolate-covered fruit, gummy worms, malt balls, and several kinds of popcorn. I grabbed the first bag by myself and even went back for a second candy run. But I begged Cecily to do my hording from that point on because I was too embarrassed to go back for thirds. Thirds! No wonder I couldn’t eat at the dinner that followed the keynote. How was I to know?

All in all, BlogHer DC was fantastic. I went to two of the blogging basics panels–sort of for confirmation that I knew how to use software correctly and also to see if I had missed anything along the way (I had). I learned NOT to talk about my cervical mucous online (too late) because it may come back to bite me in the ass later on (the information; not the cervical mucous which has no teeth). I learned that I should provide an “about” page, which I do. I also spoke at my own panel on blogging for a cause.

And as a secondary Show and Tell, what do you think of the finishing touches Cali put on the header–do you like the new site bar up at the top?

What are you showing today?

Want to bring something to Show and Tell?

• If you would like to join circle time and show something to the class, simply post each Sunday (or earlier in the weekend or on Monday if you can’t do Sunday), hopefully including a picture if possible, and telling us about your item. It can be anything–a photo from a trip, a picture of the dress you bought this week, a random image from an old yearbook showing a person you miss. It doesn’t need to contain a picture if you can’t get a picture–you can simply tell a story about a single item.
• Label your post “Show and Tell” each week and then come back here and add the permalink in the comments section below (make sure you don’t just comment that you participated: add a link to your blog in your comment so people can click over). I post a new Show and Tell post every Saturday night or Sunday. I usually move people up into the body of the post every few hours.
• Oh, and then the point is that you click through all of your classmates and see what they are showing this week.
• If you want it…
  I’ve now placed a Show and Tell archive on the sidebar that will be updated each week in case you miss it. And click here for the icon code if you wish to have it for your blog. It links to
  the archives.