superborb

1. I had been reading my DW on a comfortable once a week schedule, which has been thrown into disarray by the introduction of my JE friends back onto DW, via a 30 day music meme. Will people actually do all 30 days of the meme? Who knows, but day 3 x a half dozen folks is an extra ?skip=20 already ahaha.

2. I was going back and reading my diary from college (which I apparently kept up until the beginning of grad school! I kind of thought I'd stopped midway through college...); it's not very interesting as it mostly contains who I talked to every day. At the end of college though, I already knew I'd miss the casual chats in dining halls and hallways and never be able to replicate that again; the diary really reinforced that. Even if I include fannish discord chats as casual chats, it's really... not the same... But it did bring to mind a few people I want to reach out to, which was nice! 

3. Awh, I looked over my twitter list and DID lose complete contact with a few people who left before I got a forwarding address / didn't bother with a forwarding address. Though I think most are still in my extended someone-on-DW-still-talks-to-them circle. (But at the same time, how much good does a discord 1:1 PM do in terms of keeping in contact? Not much. I'm generally terrible at keeping 1:1 messages going. Maybe I should make more concerted effort to form group chats...)

4. I think my Tumblr foray is probably a failure. Useful for occasionally checking in on people, but even filtering out the 'so many gifs', it's difficult to sort between 'things interesting to me personally' and 'discourse, not expanding my knowledge' without way too much effort expended ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(I have a Bluesky now, but unless there's vastly more uptake, my primary fannish socmed will remain Mastodon.)

5. Have been losing steam on the DCU fic reading, but now I feel completionist about an arbitrary level of surveying, which seems counterproductive. It's arbitrary to begin with! It'd never have been anywhere near a full survey! Self, this is silly. 

Dealing with not being able to go home by cooking too much! But that's practically required anyway, for proper auspiciousness!

( Two food pics under the cut )

Today I got a haircut (pics on twitter), and the shampooing / head massage part of things always reminds me of China. 

For reasons unexplained or immediately forgotten, we weren't to wash our hair in the apartment. Instead, we'd go to the hair salon a short walk away from the group of apartment buildings. As it was inevitably the summer when we were in China, I'd want to go a lot, despite having to go through the sticky heat to get there. Anyway, at 10 yuan, which at the time was only a little over 1 USD, for a nice shampoo and a mini massage, it was totally worth it. Unlike the US, the massage was longer and more forceful and they did your arms too. Honestly one of the things I most miss about China (mostly joking). 

While I was thinking about haircuts, I also remembered that as a child, we'd go into Chinatown for my mom to get her haircuts. This is a weird memory for two reasons. First, as I reminisced about previously, Chinatowns were not a major player in my childhood memories, and second, my mom is Shanghainese enough that she spends a lot of effort on her hair. (This is a Shanghainese stereotype, as relayed to me by my mom. Mostly when I am lazy about getting my hair cut.) So either she mostly got it cut elsewhere and just took the opportunity when we visited the city to get it done there (but why? Aren't most people really loyal to their hairdresser if they get it done frequently? She is very hairdresser loyal now?), OR I was too small and only thought it was chinatown, when in reality it was just a place that was a long way away and had a lot of Chinese businesses in close proximity? *thinking face*

I think that as a small child, my mom must have mostly cut my hair; I only remember this because I once cried for hours over being given bangs (...). By the time I have more fully formed memories (reaching the level of standard Helena-has-a-bad-memory recollections), I just went to the hairdresser my mom went to. After I became an adult, I would still get haircuts at Chinatown, because everyone always said that only people familiar with Chinese hair could cut it properly etc etc. 

But as my years between haircuts attests, I don't really care enough about my haircuts that I can tell the difference between a Chinese salon and anywhere else. I DID notice when I went to supercuts (for the non-USians, it's a super cheap hair salon chain), and they didn't cut in a straight line parallel to the ground, but other than that... is there really a difference? Okay, my bf was able to cut in a straight line, so going to the salon for layers is indeed a noticeable and needed difference, but non-supercuts salons will all do layers, so... What I can tell is the non-Chinese salons don't style my hair as well afterwards, but the differences in the cuts, I'm just completely oblivious to. 

This is kind of a weird post, huh. Do you have any haircut memories?