Day 12: Random musings of a scattered mind

I have been trying to write about relativity.  On a Friday afternoon.  When I need a hit of caffeine to penetrate the fog in my brain or a nap to quiet the scattered mish-mash of noise in my head.  Maybe I should not be writing a legal brief and trying to wax eloquent (or at least humorous) on rrelativity while listening to my rainy day Starbucks compilation of rainy day music when it is sunny with hurricane-force winds.  An afternoon fit for neither brief nor blog.  

Silly rabbit. Physics is for scientists, philosophy is for college students and frustrated politicians.   And I am just a daydreaming girl who wants to wax poetical and magical and whimsical.

                             Katie girls and Simple girls or why curly hair is making a comeback

Did all women under 30 decide that straight hair is required by law?  (Could Congress have actually passed a law requiring women under 30 to straighten their hair along with trying to require them to give up control over their own bodies?)  Is there some vast, straight-haired conspiracy by Chi?  Where have all the curly-haired girls gone?  The way of the walkman and pay phone?

This week marked a return to my own curly-haired roots.  Wash and go, twist my strands into ringlets, and let them air dry on the way to the liquid crack dealer.  The brisk morning air acting as both nature's hair dryer and a temporary fix for wakefulness until I could score the good stuff. One of my favourite colleagues, Lady Q, has also returned to her curly-hair roots, even though her husband prefers her hair straightened.    Curly-haired girls of the world unite!

Carrie Bradshaw, as portrayed on the the hit HBO series Sex and the City,* is a curly-haired girl, who straightened her hair for a man, for Big.   I covet Carrie's curly locks, long and flowy and Botticelli-esq.**  And her curls also symbolized a certain wildness of spirit, a quirkiness, un-mainstreamness in this world of the straight-haired girls.   Carrie realized that could not tame her hair or her spirit for Big.  They broke up.   Big gets engaged to Natasha, a straight-haired girl, and Carrie and her entourage are having cocktails to console Carrie when Carrie asks her girlfriends why Big did not choose her. 

Miranda, her smart, cynical lawyer friend, posits that it is the Hubble effect.  Robert "Hubble" Redford from the Way We Were fell in love with K-k-katie played by Barbara Streisand, who had impossibly curly hair and was not like all the barbie dolls that Hubble usually played with.  Like her wild curly hair, Katie was complicated, and Hubble, the beautiful, blonde vision of America, could not deal with the complicated.  He leaves Katie.   Years later, they meet outside a hotel years where Katie is handing out leftist communist literature.   Hubble is with his new wife--who is conventionally beautiful, a straight-haired girl who fits within his world, a round hole for his round-peg world.   Round hole waits in the car for him as Hubble says good bye to Katie.  She brushes his perfect golden lock off his forehead and says "your girl is lovely, Hubble." 

Carrie has an epiphany and realizes that there are two kinds of girls in this world--the Katie girls and the simple girls.   After cocktails, she is drawn to the scene of the crime--the Plaza and Big and Natasha's engagement  party.  Big and Natasha are leaving, and she asks Big "why not, me?"   Oh, just watch this clip for yourself.  One of the best episodes.  Ever.***  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyuCwCN78lA

As Carrie explained: "Then I had a thought: maybe I didn't break Big. Maybe the problem was he couldn't break me. Maybe some women aren't meant to be tamed. Maybe they need to run free, until they find someone just as wild to run with." 

So, complicated, curly-haired girls let your curls and spirits  flow free and wild!

                                    2.   Random, current Obsessions (in addition to curly hair)

A.  Reading glasses.  Lately,  I squint constantly when reading.  I read a lot. Ergo, I squint a lot.   Besides affecting my reading enjoyment, it makes my eyes dry and uncomfortable.  It also complicates blogging and facebooking and brief-writing and blackberry-ing.  Not to mention the fear that the squinting will cause wrinkles around my eyes, and I am not quite ready for laugh lines.  Ironically, I have not procured reading glasses because doing seems a concession to the aging process.  Yet, Borders has all manner of cool reading glasses that look more like accessories than walkers.  And the squinting is likely to cause wrinkles.   A weekend goal is to get reading glasses.  If I can find a Borders in a 25-mile radius.   May have to go the city from whence I hail. 

B.  When the Stars go blue by Ryan Adams.  I discovered it on my rainy-day compilation CD.  An impulse buy at my liquid crack dealer's den.  (Is it really fair to consumers to have impulse buys in place that pushes a legal drug that makes you more impulsive?).   The music combined his hoarse, smoky voice that manages to convey longing and desire and adoration all at once.  It makes me want to cry and slow dance and make love slowly. It's how I feel when the stars go blue.   But I am especially taken with the following lyrics:  "Laughing with your pretty mouth\ laughing with your broken eyes, laughing with your lover's tongue.  In a lullaby."


C.   My own curly hair

*This is a rare instance where I did not like the book better.  In fact, I hated the book.  It was darker and depressing.  The HBO series was criticized for being too sexual and too consumerist (the movies were both blatantly examples of consumerism gone amok).  But I adored the way the series explored sex and sexuality and it's impact on relationships.  The characters discussed sex frankly and openly.  And on topics that are not often discussed in "polite society" but in a healthy way that helped to educate women about their sexuality and encourage them to explore it.  The girls discussed all maner of taboo subjects: masturbation, um manual and with toys, (there was an entire episode devoted to "good girl" Charlotte's introduction to the Rabbit);  anal sex (where Charlotte feared becoming the "up-the-butt-girl" and notes the she went to Brown and that no one wants to marry the "up-the-butt-girl"); threesomes; golden showers (where Carrie has to decide whether she will let the Politico she is dating pee on her in the shower).    

It's hard to describe how a TV series could candidly discuss these issues without being lurid or devolving into the absurd or porn.  Charlotte did not have anal sex because she ultimately decided that it was not her ball of wax.   Similary, Carrie decided that she was not comfortable being peed on.   The series was funny, sweet, and hopeful.  The Carrie Bradshaw in the book, which is based on Candace Bushnell's columns, was not the free-spirited, romantic as portrayed by Sarah Jessica Parker in the series .
**

***The Way We Were is also required viewing for all the complicated, Katie girls. Besides starring Babs and Robert Redford at the height of their careers and Redford at his sexy best, a political backstory, and a great love story, it demonstrates with heartbreaking accuracy why a complicated Katie girl cannot convert herself into a simple girl to be with her love. Katie is a square peg who could never fit into a round-hole, cookie cutter world. Trying to do so, by straightening her hair, compromising her beliefs and ideas and herself to conform with Hubble's world nearly destroyed her very Katie-ness. And the relationship was doomed to fail the moment that she straightened her hair. Yes, at the end of the movie when they meet again, she has thrown away her straightening iron and let her curly hair reign.