I think my mom was ahead of her time, a real ‘Granola.’ She didn’t look anything like a hippie, but she read religiously things like Prevention Magazine and  books on natural ways to have healthy children. We ate piles of vitamins and supplements. From a very young age I knew what each one was and the purposes of each. Mom even made homemade yogurt. It was quite bland. The concept of flavored yogurts had not come around yet. When I was small enough to sit up in the seat of the grocery cart, I remember I grabbed a little carton of ‘store bought’ yogurt and started eating it with my fingers. It was so much tangier. Yum. Later, when I had small ‘tuppies’ of yogurt in my school lunch along with carrot sticks, I explained many times to kids what yogurt was. The tuna sandwich was on whole wheat bread. I did not have the proper appreciation for all this. It was the era of Wonderbread, building strong bodies twelve different ways. I knew they were empty calories, but still wished I could trade lunches with the other kids once in a while.

When I was in junior high, the hairstyle to aim for was straight, shiny (see Breck ads), and rolled up  at the ends. My friend Linda always had perfect hair, a shoulder-length sheet ending in a neat hair-tube curving around the back of her neck. I had no success at this. Curlers would fall out in the night. Locks of hair would flop or go askew. Then all day I’d be conscious that I looked wrong, wrong, wrong.

For a while I had shorter hair that required me to wind the pieces in front of my ears around my finger into pincurls at night and clamp them in place with crossed bobby pins. I had puffed bangs, and at their central point I pinned a tiny velvet bow each day, a different color to go with whatever outfit I was wearing. The effect was supposed to be cute and perky, two adjectives not applicable to me. Also, the bows would lose their grip and slide sideways and down as the day went on.

Somewhat later there was the sprayed-in-place style that made your head bubble-shaped and the surface of your hair hard enough to knock on. There was also the poodle cut. Did I ever have a poodle cut? I believe I did, briefly. I prefer not to think about it.

In high school once, we had something called Grub Day, when we could wear jeans and do our hair any way we wanted to. I let my hair alone that day, and it was the only day in all those years that I really felt I looked good. I looked like myself. Luckily, a few years after high school, the Sixties arrived and my hair was finally set free.

Our crowning…glory?

What teen/young adult/ more mature adult/even more mature adult hasn’t graded a day by whether it’s a Good Hair Day or a Bad Hair Day? Said grade has a significant effect on willingness to leave the house. How many untold hours have been spent attempting to coerce the dread BHD into a GHD? Taken cumulatively, this has probably affected the nation’s GDP in no small way.

My particular battle centered on super curly/frizzy hair in super cool California in the 60s with surfer girl hair the golden icon. Beach parties were a disaster. The semester of daily swimming for PE was a disaster. Sleeping on brush rollers created a fix until about noon, when the elements took over.

Finally, in junior year, I had my shoulder length hair straightened. Oh glory – I was finally like all the other girls! Then I had it straightened again and the universe told me what it thought about my denial of my true self: half my hair broke off at the roots and fell out. When I was Sixteen. Does it get any worse? Of course there would be no trimming of the tresses to even things out a bit. I just kept the very thin long part and watched as the broken hairs grew back in as a crewcut. I must have been the only girl (or boy) in school sporting two hairdos at the same time.

The hair wars never end, but there was, eventually, a valuable lesson learned by a sixteen year old girl who was uncomfortable with, and attempted to transform, her presentation to the world.

... numbers corresponding to the days of the year were written on slips of paper and placed in plastic capsules, which were put into a deep glass jar (at the time I’d imagined a bingo cage).
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In the 70’s, we didn’t have cell phones (of any kind!).  There was no Internet.  A computer was something largely out of science fiction, or something you might use at NASA and if so, it was large, expensive, and had the processing power of your (non-Apple) digital watch today.

I remember playing a lot of video games.  It started with Pong by Atari.  Then Space Invaders, Asteroids, and Centipede.  I spent every quarter I had on a game, which was about an hour at the arcade on Saturdays.  If I paused a lot between them.  That was my introduction to geek culture.

Then, in 1982, my parents bought me an IBM PC.  It had no hard drive and two floppy drives.  I used it to write reports but also started getting into writing programs for it.  I played text-based games like Zork (which I managed to acquire for free somehow) and bought early issues of PC Magazine and drooled through the pages as if it were porn.

At my core, I was always a geek.  I wore glasses, poorly fitting pants, and was picked on in school.  I valued my schoolwork and self-taught myself a musical instrument.  Soon after getting the PC, however, I started JV sports, became more “cool”, and focused on getting into college, which required (or so I thought) a lot of extracurricular activity.  The geek was being repressed.

That repression went on until 1989 when I completed my coursework to be a Mechanical Engineer even though my school practically invented modern Unix (X11, actually, for the über-geeks among you).  However, as with other aspects of my life, I eventually came out of the closet and embraced my geekdom.  I played catch up with 10 years of computer technology and am a software professional today.

I feel like I’m home again.

I was stopped dead in my tracks one day when a young coworker said she had never worn pantyhose.
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