Transition

Hi Everybody,
Thanks for bearing with my intermittent blogging. My current excuse is that I'm moving, and have been busy with related activities. I'll have to get back to you with a different excuse once I'm settled in the new place.

I promise I haven't forgotten about you all!

Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!

I got a new laptop! She's a Dell Project (RED) one, so she's a lovely deep red color -- a sleek Ferrari of a computer. Her name is Ruby Dell.

She's the second one. The first came a couple weeks ago, but it was in a bad way. The box was torn and the laptop beaten up so badly that it was bent. Bent. I couldn't have done that much damage if I'd jumped on it. Perhaps using Big Violent Gorilla Shipping Lines was a bad idea.

Dell was cool about replacing it, so now Ruby is here. I'll get it set up today. I'm not very computery, as you know, but she sure is pretty.

Sleeping Beauty

Or not.

The problem with being a grown-up is there's no where to take a nap.

We have an indoor plaza with an opaque glass ceiling and lots of tables and chairs where people from work eat lunch and hang out. I was down there just now, writing, and got sleepy. So I put my head down on my folded arms, on the table. I was quite enjoying myself when a guy wearing a suit and carrying a walkie-talkie rapped on the table to make sure I was OK. Naturally, I was composed, and was able to reassure him.

Or not. Perhaps I was a bit startled, had hair in my face and the print of my sweater on my forehead (no drool, though -- high five, Me!), and was only able to convince him I was fine because he really didn't feel like hanging around, anyway.

Either way, it was quite a nice way to spend a lunch hour.

My Chinese Haircut

You can get $20 haircuts in Chinatown! Risky, you ask? Perhaps. You're a lot of things, Holly, you may be thinking, but Chinese is not one of them.

You're right. Just about everything about the shape of my head and face is as far from Asian as you can get. But my stylist was cool, and she didn't steer me wrong. I got tons of compliments on the cut she gave me back in September. That was all I needed to be convinced it was a good idea.

I went back today, to the same woman. She said she liked my hair color. "The real color or the dyed color?" I had to ask. Answer: The real color! And here I was thinking it was mousy. I'm not sure what mousy really means, but my hair has been in this awkward transition between blonde and brown for the last several years, and mousy somehow seems to apply.

Apparently, though, lots of Asian girls try to get their hair dyed my color, and it's pretty difficult to do when the original color is very dark. They're also quite big on light skin in Asia, aren't they? My Chinese roommate once told me that pronounced (rather than flat) noses are seen as a sign of nobility. And she said that there's a disturbing trend where Asian women get creases added to their eyelids to make them appear Western.

Fair hair, pale skin, pronounced noses, Western eyes. You know what all this adds up to, right? Me! All this time, I've been a hot Asian chick and I had no idea. Why didn't I learn all this sooner? I could be on a tour of the Far East right now.