sheer potentiality

I ran out of Aussie shampoo and conditioner so I went to get more. Well, instead of the “medium” or “mild” or other conditioner/shampoo Aussie used to make, they now only have “moist” and a variety of blends that are supposed to, I dunno, be especially nice. The only ones they had at the store were “volume”, “sun-kissed shine” and “soft”. Well, my hair’s soft enough already, and volume could have been a disaster, so I tried sun-kissed shine.

It’s quite shiny.

But now on the internet it looks like they have a “catch the wave” shampoo and conditioner that not only defines waves and curls, it even “helps eliminate frizz”. AAAAAAA!

Ooh, but they make a “calm that frizz creme”!

(No pictures because my camera is in Pullman.)

I shouldn’t have gone to work out today.

I left to work out a few hours ago. When I came back, most of the people I wanted to talk to were offline, and I was too tired to do anything else. I might go to bed shortly after writing this post. I might stay up and play Knights of the Old Republic instead, although if I start I’ll feel compelled to record my actions and write a fanfic out of it, and I don’t have the energy to do that.

Two nights ago I decided to shave. I’m pretty happy with my appearance overall. When I take care of it, my hair is smooth and shiny and healthy, my body doesn’t look too bad when I have clothes on (and would probably look great if I took better care of it), and my face is alright. The only thing I don’t like is my facial hair. Sometimes I want so badly to have a thicker beard that’s worth anything instead of this patchy-ass curly shit. I got sick of it today and shaved it all off. It’s really quite frustrating to find that there’s something I don’t like about myself that I can do absolutely nothing about. It makes me feel incredibly powerless.

Something else that makes me feel incredibly powerless is when I see a young woman or girl crying. Unless I know beforehand that it’s her own damn fault, seeing a woman crying makes me feel sympathetic, tender, but completely powerless. I mean, I can’t just approach a complete stranger who’s crying and try to comfort her, can I? (Actually, I tried it once. I don’t know if it helped.)

Sometimes my friends joke that I’m too much like a woman. Maybe so. For instance, I do have mysterious mood swings for no apparent reason. Tonight I’m actually pretty depressed. I didn’t really feel like working out even though I did, and now I’m sad that I didn’t get to talk to anyone. It might strike some of you as strange that talking to people online is so important to me, but to be honest, most of the people who are worth my time and attention don’t live in Pullman, and if they do, I haven’t gotten around to meeting them. Sometimes I think that when I graduate, I’m going to leave this place, never come back, and never care about it again. Sort of like the way I feel about Port Angeles, except there’s a few people in and from Port Angeles that I do care about—more than I’ve met in Pullman, to be sure.

I should have picked a harder major. It’s hard to feel superior to others when you’re a business major, even if it’s MIS. And majoring in philosophy only helps slightly. I don’t know—as much as I hated high school and wanted to get out, it was better in some ways. I had more friends, friends who were just plain better people than the friends I have here. I had a lonely existence in high school and never really spent much, if any, spare time socializing, but it seems that even that was better than now. Inevitably, everyone who was as smart as me went to a better college than I’m going to. And the thing is, I’m too far out of money to transfer or change majors. All I can hope to do now is graduate and get ahead in the real world.

Or maybe I’ll screw that up too and live a dull, meaningless life.

So here I am, sitting in my professional/technical writing class. Usually I’m acutely aware of being a vast minority for two reasons: one, I am usually the only person with a laptop (at least out of a sample size this small), and two, I am almost always the only longhaired man in the class.

Not only are there two other laptops in here as I speak, there are also two other longhaired men. Although, to be perfectly fair, both of them have their hair back in ponytails instead of loose like mine, but I always wonder what the point of long hair is if you just tie it back.

But man. In this class, the longhairs and laptop jockeys outnumber the iPods. I’m in an alternate reality, I swear.