a question and another thing
Jan. 13th, 2011 09:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksA question: D.C. and Northern VA types, do you know whereabouts I might be able to purchase Special Effects Blue Velvet hair dye? Illness and brain-fog have destroyed my Google-fu, and my hair is decidedly fading and now very much in the purple phase, from which it will proceed to look terrible. Bonus points if the place also sells bleach, but my roots can probably go a bit longer than the rest of it. Other brands considered but very much not ideal, and that Hot Topic house brand is terrible.
An unrelated other thing, which I considered putting under friendslock and then decided not to:
so I've been direly ill with the Sinus Infection That Will Not Die since the middle of October, and it has been and is drastically awful. And one of the awful things about it has been having much less energy than usual (and I am not ordinarily a person with huge reservoirs of energy) and therefore I have not been able to do a lot of the things I usually do. My novel, for example, is lying fallow. And today I was sitting about being depressed about the lack of motion on the novel and the way I have been unable to get the chutzpah to query about the short story that is sitting at a market and has been forever and the way I can't get the brain to revise the other short story or finish the other other one and I didn't even have the energy for Yuletide and what the hell kind of writer am I anyway?
... and then, because it was not a mentally rhetorical question, the answer came back: a working writer. I have written anything between a couple of hundred and a couple of thousand words, and released them to the public, every day for the last one hundred and thirty-seven days. And I have spent anything from half an hour to eight hours in associated reading every day of that. How is that not being a working writer?
And then my brain said, it does not count, because a lot of the time it is really easy. Granted, with the sinus thing sometimes it has felt like removing the words from my brain with a putty knife, but still. Reading is not hard, book reviews take thought but they are not incredibly difficult for me usually. And then I said back to my brain, look, just because it is easy sometimes does not mean it isn't real work. Just because I do it every day and it has become a habit doesn't mean it's not real work. I care about it and I put thought into it and I worry about the quality of the results. It must be real work.
If anyone catches me claiming I'm not doing enough writing work between now and August 30th, 2011, you have my permission to give me a good swift kick in the pants. Because it is patently silly of me.
And the reason I thought I'd leave this unlocked is that I, at least, sometimes need the reminder that the things I do every day sometimes count as actual possibly-useful-to-someone work that not everybody could or would do, and so other people probably need that reminder too, on occasion. Consider yourselves reminded. It's probably real work.
An unrelated other thing, which I considered putting under friendslock and then decided not to:
so I've been direly ill with the Sinus Infection That Will Not Die since the middle of October, and it has been and is drastically awful. And one of the awful things about it has been having much less energy than usual (and I am not ordinarily a person with huge reservoirs of energy) and therefore I have not been able to do a lot of the things I usually do. My novel, for example, is lying fallow. And today I was sitting about being depressed about the lack of motion on the novel and the way I have been unable to get the chutzpah to query about the short story that is sitting at a market and has been forever and the way I can't get the brain to revise the other short story or finish the other other one and I didn't even have the energy for Yuletide and what the hell kind of writer am I anyway?
... and then, because it was not a mentally rhetorical question, the answer came back: a working writer. I have written anything between a couple of hundred and a couple of thousand words, and released them to the public, every day for the last one hundred and thirty-seven days. And I have spent anything from half an hour to eight hours in associated reading every day of that. How is that not being a working writer?
And then my brain said, it does not count, because a lot of the time it is really easy. Granted, with the sinus thing sometimes it has felt like removing the words from my brain with a putty knife, but still. Reading is not hard, book reviews take thought but they are not incredibly difficult for me usually. And then I said back to my brain, look, just because it is easy sometimes does not mean it isn't real work. Just because I do it every day and it has become a habit doesn't mean it's not real work. I care about it and I put thought into it and I worry about the quality of the results. It must be real work.
If anyone catches me claiming I'm not doing enough writing work between now and August 30th, 2011, you have my permission to give me a good swift kick in the pants. Because it is patently silly of me.
And the reason I thought I'd leave this unlocked is that I, at least, sometimes need the reminder that the things I do every day sometimes count as actual possibly-useful-to-someone work that not everybody could or would do, and so other people probably need that reminder too, on occasion. Consider yourselves reminded. It's probably real work.
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no subject
Date: 2011-01-14 03:59 am (UTC)Nine
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Date: 2011-01-14 04:02 am (UTC)Yep.
Love you.
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Date: 2011-01-14 12:42 pm (UTC)I have a tendency to treat anything that I am good at as something that "everyone can do" and therefore not worthy of much notice. This is manifestly not true, and rarely useful.
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Date: 2011-01-14 03:40 pm (UTC)This! This this this this this! I Agree With This Comment! For lo, if "real work" meant "torturous and horrible and draining," then nobody would ever be able to do it, and nothing would get done. It is real work because you create something useful and worthwhile, every day.
Wise best purr wife best wise purr!
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Date: 2011-01-14 05:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-14 06:52 pm (UTC)I think I want that embroidered and hung on my wall.
You are totally doing real work, and not something just anybody could do, either. I certainly could not.
P.
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Date: 2011-01-16 04:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-14 07:35 pm (UTC)Yeah, I need that reminder about *a lot* of my daily activities. I should write IT'S PROBABLY REAL WORK in big bold letters and put it up on the fridge.
(Also, wow, that's a long time for a sinus infection to last! I hope your body figures out how to fight it off soon!)
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Date: 2011-01-16 04:56 am (UTC)I seem to be about to start my fourth round of antibiotics; I have my fingers crossed.
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Date: 2011-01-14 09:38 pm (UTC)Most of the Sally Beauty locations I've been to around here usually have Manic Panic and Punky Colour along with a few other random brands, Ulta also carries Punky Colour, Hot Topic last time I checked had a pretty similar lineup of brands...everything but S.E. It might very well be in stock at some little independent beauty supply shop somewhere, but I haven't found one yet -- if you don't want to do a lot of traveling/calling around and trial and error, mail order may be the best bet.
One possible last option, if you just want something quick and dirty to refresh the roots while you're hunting for the good stuff -- Rite Aid drugstores carries a brand called Splat in the boxed hair dye aisle right alongside all the mass-market natural colors -- their color range is intensely limited but includes a deep blue, and the kit includes bleach. While in my experience it's not up to S.E. level quality, for a cheap drugstore dye it seemed to cling to my hair reasonably well? (I can't vouch for the quality of the included bleach as I don't actually use it, my natural hair color is light and pretty porous-textured to start with.)
Good luck!
no subject
Date: 2011-01-16 04:56 am (UTC)