Next I'll trash a Motel 6

Saturday night, 7:30 p.m.: I mention to Cory that I'm heading to New York in the morning. She says, "You're really living the rock-star lifestyle lately."

Fast-forward 12 hours: I'm perched on a plastic chair at the Greyhound terminal that is called Union Station, but is not really in Union Station, it's about two blocks away, and they are the longest blocks in the world when the weather is bad, which it always is when I go to New York. Bloomberg should ban me from crossing any bridge onto Manhattan. I'm soaked from head to toe from the walk in the rain. I'm eating breakfast from the restaurant in the terminal, which used to be a Hardee's but at some point became a generic Greyhound cafeteria that sells a variety of food that sounds better than it actually is, and an astonishing lineup of packaged junk food. My breakfast consists of:

1) Greasy bacon and a just-barely-edible egg on a stale, greasy biscuit.

2) Lukewarm tea, from a Styrofoam cup. The cashier accidentally gave my tea to another customer, who brought it back, and the cashier threw it in the trash, and I said the tea was supposed to be mine, and she pondered the situation for a few seconds and said, "You know what? I'm going to make you a new one." That totally should be their slogan. Greyhound Food Service: We Don't Give You Food We Fished Out Of The Trash.

So I'm eating my hey-it's-food biscuit and drinking my not-from-the-garbage tea and hoping my jeans dry very soon and I remember Cory's comment, and I laugh and laugh. Out loud.

Which, in a Greyhound terminal, looks not out of place in the slightest.

Requiem for my curls

Of all the odd things that have ever happened to me -- and there've been quite a few -- one of the strangest happened in the aftermath of an ill-advised super-short haircut. I hated it instantly, and avoided mirrors until it started growing back.

At long last it was long enough to risk a trim, and not having learned my lesson about hasty hair decisions, I went to a mall salon whose only virtue was being close to the place I was housesitting. The stylist chatted away about the great lunch she'd just had, which included two margaritas.

So when she said "You have naturally curly hair!" I thought it was just the tequila talking.
Cause I wouldn't have spent a big chunk of the '80s with spiral-perm tubes piled on my head like Medusa's snakes if I had natural curls.

But a few weeks later, I couldn't deny it: she may have been drunk, and unable to cut straight, but she was right about the curls -- and all this happened just as every third woman in the country started wearing The Rachel.

So for a decade now, I've been plagued by curls that really aren't. There's a handful of ringlets, in odd spots, but most of my tresses are just ill-defined kinks and frizz. And that was BEFORE I moved from bone-dry Colorado to humidity-drenched D.C., where I found myself with two equally unfashionable options: spend an hour flat-ironing my hair every day, only to have my efforts mostly undone as soon as I stepped outside, or look like Roseanne Roseannadanna.

I'm sure you can guess which one I chose.

And then: light at the end of the tunnel. I met my friend Rachel for dinner during a downpour. I showed up looking like a Fraggle. Rachel showed up with sleek, shiny, perfectly straight hair -- exactly the way mine looked every day. For five seconds.

Her secret? Japanese straightening.

I've had my hair straightened before, and it never really took. If possible, it looked worse. But this is different -- special chemicals, not just perm solution, and at the step in a perm where the stylist puts in rollers, in Japanese straightening, the stylist straightens the hair with a tiny ceramic iron, in tiny sections, rather than just combing the solution through.

As you might guess, this is not cheap. Was it worth it to be rid of my curls? Oh yeah, you betcha.

Four hours and a few hundred dollars later, I'm back to being a straight-haired girl. It's been a week now, and I can't say enough how much I love my hair. It's super-soft, and shiny, and looks like I spent hours in a stylist's chair on a movie set, when really all I did was wash and comb it. I've spent maybe five minutes styling it all week. And it lasts until the hair grows back in, so I'm in the clear for a year.

Whoever invented this: arigato!

Uneasy lies the head that wears the plastic crown

Like straight-leg jeans and red wine, Halloween is something I usually like more in the abstract. I love the IDEA of dressing up in a clever yet sexy costume and going to parties with spiked cider and good candy (no hard, bland peanut butter things in orange and black waxed paper), but the cleverest costume I've ever had was devil horns with a blue dress -- an idea I stole from someone else -- and the party thing depends on someone actually HAVING said party.

So I usually find myself marking All Hallow's Eve by buying way too much good candy and hoping in vain for trick or treaters.

Tuesday, Melissa brought in a handful of 40-cent plastic tiaras, so half the women in the newsroom spent the day with tiaras shoved at odd angles into our hair. I really enjoyed mine, because the added height solved the problem of people not being able to see if I'm at my desk, and who hasn't wanted to be a princess?

I went out for a walk at lunch and quickly noticed I was getting a lot of second glances. At first I thought, these boots were TOTALLY worth $150. Then I remembered I was wearing a Barbie-Corvette-pink plastic tiara.

I suppose in other cities, this would be unremarkable. In New York, it's probably the least weird thing happening on any street at any given moment. In San Francisco, they're everyday attire (for the men, anyway). But D.C. is not really a city given to whimsy.

If you ever find yourself in that situation, tell yourself this: Tiaras are not for shrinking violets. You can't wear one while looking at the sidewalk and shrinking into your coat. Throw your shoulders back, look the world in the eye and work it.

Otherwise, you'll look ridiculous.

My laugh for the day

The brilliant Fuggers at Go Fug Yourself, whose level of snarkiness I can only pray to someday attain, have outdone themselves:

http://gofugyourself.typepad.com/go_fug_yourself/2006/11/the_fug_house.html