Regina Noctis

I’ll be leaving to head up to the Bay Area sometime tomorrow afternoon. I’m crashing a couple nights with a friend in Fremont before the con.

For anyone who wants to reach me, call my cell. The number is here. (Please note that the post is locked down so only certain people can see it. If you’re not on that list, you’ll have to try and convince someone who is to give you the number, or wait until con and talk to me then.)

The cell doesn’t get turned on until 9pm on weekdays (and all day on weekends)… when I remember to turn it on at all. I do check voicemail once a day, so you can leave a message and I’ll get it.

See folks at the con.

Back to finishing up the sewing on a costume now. Hasta la byebye.

After the last post, it occurred to me that though many who glance at this journal do know my mother, there are also many who don’t. They may not know why I would say that I wouldn’t put it past my mom to tint her grey purple and then wear red that clashes and doesn’t suit her.

There are little anecdotes that came up in discussion between my mom and me this evening. The first was from back when I was in high school. I was a sophomore, and right in the middle of that age when things like the following were mortifying.

The house here in Hellano has always attracted stray animals. They show up, look around, and decide that they’re going to live here. We’ve had a number of cats and dogs, two ducks, six rabbits, a California condor (far away from its normal habitat, I might add), someone’s escaped pet chameleon, an escaped pet finch, various small grass snakes, a rooster, and a number of frogs that set up a chorus in the back yard every summer. Those are in addition to the animals we have gone out and chosen to adopt as pets, or my cousin John’s attempts at animal-related businesses (raising rabbits as pets, and raising game chickens.)

The rooster that showed up one day and adopted us was part barnyard fowl, part game bird. He had unusually marked black and white feathers, and was quite an impressive looking bird. Also far smarter than I was accustomed to when dealing with the psycho cousin’s chickens. We named our adopted chicken Pollo Loco, because we’re just that kind of people.

One year during Pollo Loco’s molt, we gathered up some of the pretty feathers he’d left scattered on the ground, and put them in a small box. Keepsakes of our chicken.

One afternoon shortly afterward, my mom and I were sitting and talking in the dining room. In the midst of the conversation, she suddenly announced that she felt a bout of hippy coming on. She then grabbed the box of feathers and scattered them in her hair.

Fifteen minutes after that, a friend of mine came to the door. She cut me off before I could answer (and so block my friend from seeing my crazy and highly embarrassing mother.) She answered the door, and spent quite some time talking with my friend. I could see past her shoulder as my friend stared in somewhat horrified fascination at this strange woman with black and white feathers covering her hair. I stayed hidden, absolutely mortified, as any good know-it-all, conformist, easily embarrassed teenager should.

When my friend left (without even talking to me, she was so shocked by the apparition that my mother made, and just as well too considering my embarrassment) I pointed out to my mother about the feathers.

She laughed at my red face and told me that she’d forgotten they were there.

She hadn’t forgotten when my friend recollected why she’d come in the first place, and knocked at the door a few moments later. Instead, my mom gloried in being the kook with the feathers in her hair, and played up the image further to embarrass both my friend and me.

She calls it “shocking the children” and has always loved to do so.

Of course, I grew out of being the teenager who was so embarrassed by it. I got past my desperate need to fit in. These days, I’d have had half the feathers in my hair with her, and helped her shock the children.

That wasn’t the end of my mother deciding to “shock the children.” She was an executive in her company before she was laid off, and dressed accordingly. She was every inch the corporate business woman… until she pulled out her lighter in its Harley Davidson lighter case. It was subtle, but some people spotted it, and were often surprised into silence as she lit a cigarette.

She has taken particular delight in shocking the children in the direction of my friends. Particularly if she feels that they’re getting too far out into left field, or too arrogant, or too egocentric. Consequently, one friend of mine has gotten the treatment more often than any other. Well, ex-friend these days, but once my more-or-less adopted brother.

The three of us were once eating some fresh-off-the-tree oranges at our dining room table. The “brother,” Schitzo, had very long fingernails, and was complaining as he peeled his orange that he hated peeling them, because orange peel would get under his nails and it was a pain to get back out. My mother asked him why it was that he didn’t just cut the orange into quarters and suck the pulp out, which is the way that she eats oranges. Schitzo said he couldn’t do that, and would then start to give a reason why he couldn’t, but he’d only get as far as “because I…” and then get distracted by peeling the orange he was working on. After three repetitions of this, my mother decided it was time to shock a little focus into him. She finally asked him, “What’s the matter? Don’t queens suck things?”

We never did get an answer out of him after that.

Or there was the time that he decided that he was going to be vegetarian, and expected us to conform to his ideals. We didn’t have a problem with him eating vegetarian if that’s what he wanted, but we both rather resented the fact that he expected us to either eat as he did or to cook two separate meals. We explained to him that his choices were that he could cook his own food, he could go hungry, or he could go back to being an omnivore and eat with us. Since he was generally too lazy to cook his own meals, he decided that he’d eat what we ate. He still had periodic fits of deciding that meat was bad, and one afternoon when Mom was about to prepare dinner, he started shaking his finger at a package of beef and smacking it on the plastic with the tip of his finger. He said later that he was yelling at the beef in his head. Mom watched this performance, and then called out to me, “Hey, Schitzo is beating his meat in the kitchen again!” That put a halt to things very quickly.

Then there was the evening that we took Schitzo and his boyfriend out to a nice restaurant in celebration of Schitzo’s birthday. When Schitzo found out that we were going to a nice restaurant, he changed into a t-shirt that had a design on it of giant glow-in-the-dark sperm all over it. His attempt to shock or embarrass us. Unfortunately for him, it backfired. As we were eating, Schitz told us that we all had to guess which one of the sperm on the shirt was the one that made him. Mom burst out laughing, and couldn’t stop. She also wouldn’t tell us what she’d thought of that made her laugh so hard. She’d only say that, based on Schitzo’s statement that some part of the design was the sperm that made him, it was the next logical conclusion. I kept after her until she finally whispered it to me. And I promptly said it out loud. I had even less problem with being embarrassed than she did by then. She couldn’t quite bring herself to say it out loud in the middle of a restaurant.

Oh, the thought? “How does it feel to be wearing a shirt covered in your father’s cum?”

Well, it is the logical conclusion from Schitzo’s statement.

So, tinting her grey to purple? Child’s play, to her. If she thought it would shock a few children (of whatever age) she’d do it in a heartbeat.

For 24 hours, I was a blonde. The color didn’t suit me, but it was just a step on the way to something else, so I didn’t worry about that. The funniest part of the whole experience was catching sight of myself in any reflective surfaces I passed. I’d see this stranger out of the corner of my eye, and jump… and then realize that the stranger was me. My mom would be talking to me without looking at me, and then turn as she was making a point. She’d jump and yell every time, since the blond hair (and it was a very light blond) was not what she was subconsciously expecting to see. My grandmother would just shake her head every time she saw me, and sigh.

On the other hand, the most annoying part of being a blonde was that I had, for 24 hours, a demonloop of Julie Brown’s “Cause I’m a Blonde” running through my head. And so did my mom. Every time I asked her a question that she could say yes to, she sang, “Yeah, yeah, yeah” instead.

Now my hair is light purple, and having some color has made a difference. There’s not this neon thing in reflective surfaces that I catch out of the corner of my eye. People don’t jump and make soundless little shrieks of surprise when they see me here in the house. And the color works for me. Even my grandmother, who was greatly opposed to the idea of me coloring my hair purple, has decided that she likes it and that the color suits me. She has informed me every time she’s seen me today that I’m never allowed to be a blonde again, but that purple is okay.

Unfortunately, the purple didn’t take as well as we would have hoped. I’ve got a lot of hair, and the amount of dye I had wasn’t enough to fully saturate everything. So, what I have right now is very badly dyed, streaky purple hair. There are parts that have managed to achieve something more like and old-lady grey than anything resembling a purple. That will be corrected next week. Two more batches of dye are on their way via UPS 2-day service. Then I can convince the sections that didn’t want to take the dye that they’re damn well gonna.

I have never seen anyone else in Delano with hair of an unusual color. I may very well be the only one in the city. It’s making some minor splashes already. I’ve only been out in public once since the purple went in yesterday. I had to go out today to pick up the new contact lenses that were replacing the last pair I tried. The first try at contacts this time around didn’t fully correct for my astygmatism. About half the people the cheaper lenses get tried on manage to make an adjustment so they have 20-20 vision after a week’s adjustment period. I wasn’t in that half of the contact-wearing population, however. So today I got the more expensive lenses, and have now started on the latest adjustment period. Distance vision is a little blurry still, but Dr. Parks said that it’s right in line with where my vision would be expected to be on the first day, so he’s confident I’ll have 20-20 vision after a week.

This was also my first trip to the optometrist since the purple went into my hair, and I was enjoying the fact that I was the center of attention from everyone in the waiting room. They were all trying to be polite and not be obvious about staring, but stare they did. I find it offensive to be stared at when I’m not actively doing anything that should encourage it. But when there’s something that makes me stand out, I find it amusing. So, I was amused. And even more so when Dr. Parks spoke with me about the contacts. He loves the purple hair, apparently. He feels that Hellano is far too staid and conservative, and that it needs someone to come along and start shaking it up a bit. He’s appreciative of the fact that I’m doing so.

The women at the salon where I got my hair cut and stripped were excited about the fact that I planned to dye my hair purple, and want me to stop in and show it off. And so I will, as soon as I repair the streakiness.

The streakiness was something I rather expected. I chose a light shade of purple, rather than something like Manic Panic’s Ultraviolet shade. I was warned that it doesn’t take as well as the darker shades. But I will convince it that it will, if I have to get enough to fill a bucket to dunk my whole head in it and stay there for an hour.

I’m also greatly amused by my mother. To go with the dye, I have purple shampoo to help it maintain its vibrancy. On untreated hair that’s light enough, use of it results in a kind of pastel purple shade. My mother is talking about using it, so it will dye her strands of light gray to purple, mixed in the the almost-black of the rest of her hair. And if people stare at me, I can well imagine the reaction to seeing a 60-something purple-haired woman.

I suppose it would almost be like a variation on the poem “Warning.”

When I am an old lady, I shall wear purple
With a red hat that doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me

Or perhaps, dye hair purple. And then wear read clothing that doesn’t go and doesn’t suit?

I wouldn’t put it past Mom.

I’m a member of several communities, and other than a couple recipes, haven’t bothered to post or even comment in any of them.

But I finally got around to it… at least, to commenting. And of course, me being me, it’s nothing short. I’m wordy. So sue me.

had a recent post in which someone was angry at Jay Leno for a “sizist” joke. (Sizist is my term, how I refer to those people who have an automatic prejudice against someone overweight.) For once, something I felt like adding my thoughts to.

It only took two or so years (if I’m even remembering correctly when I joined, which is anybody’s guess.) I wonder if it’ll be another two years before I feel inspired again.