Hit Me

Getting your hair cut, specifically getting your hair cut short, is like doing crack. The first time is magical, seeing your long, split ends fall to the ground and an elegant cut that highlights your bone structure takes shape before you. You are addicted after one hit. You go back, again and again, but never quite experience the same nirvana--now its too short on top, too flippy at the sideburns and a bit longer on the left than the right. Maybe if you go back again, they can fix it? But now it's too short all over. You resign yourself to quit, missing your life before short hair, and start to regrow your tresses. There is nothing worse than the growing-out look, particularly growing out a bad cut, so the craving starts. You argue trying to persuade yourself to stay on the wagon:

You: I want to get my hair cut.

You: Hang in there, its only been 7 weeks, you can do this.

You: I really want to get my hair cut.

You: Remember how bad the last cut was? Don't do this to yourself. It will never be like the first time.

You: I need to get my hair cut.

You: No! You'll never get your hair back to long if you cave...

You: Hi, Shari? Can I get in today? I've got to get a haircut today or I may die...

Going Green-The Smart Way

The other day while watching a HGTV special about how to "Go Green" with home decor I was struck again with feelings bordering on disgust. What appears on the surface to be a plea to save the environment by making wise choices is in fact, nothing more than a sales pitch to buy earth friendly, but expensive and often unecessary "green" accessories for your home.

Before I am tarred and feathered for speaking out against ecologically friendly choices, consider--since granite is a nonrenewable resource is it better for the earth to rip out your granite countertops to install new ones made of renewable hemp as the programme suggests? Your existing granite countertops will last into the next eon, to be excavated by archeaologists of the future. Or, you could chuck them in the landfill and get some "green" ones made of hemp. Don't sweat the money you will spend (or the money you wasted on granite), after all hemp ones are renewable and manufactured with clean energy.

Tell me I am not the only person seeing the irony here? If you are building a new home, or refurbishing one that is beyond repair, making earth-friendly choices is smart and conservative. If you are simply remixing your home for the fun of redecorating, replacing useful and timeless accessories and fixtures is wasteful and pollutes the environment; even if you replace them with something ecologically friendly.

The woman whose home was featured on the programme was thrilled to demonstrate the chairs that were "leftover" from her previous home's design, and how they were "recycled" by replacing their covers that were manufactured detrimentally to the earth, to ones with fabrics created with little environmental impact. The chairs were clearly relatively new, sturdy pieces. It's hardly recycling to recover a chair that was built within ten years for the sake of good "green" taste.

At the end of the show, was the prompt, "For more ways to make your home green, go to..." with the implication that the responsible thing to do is to convert our homes to "green" ones. This is something advertisers can truly value, consumers being pushed to revamp their entire homes for no reason other than to make them Earth conscious. They see the money rolling in with entire homes being converted from long-wearing plastic, metal, stone and vinyl to expensive and less durable seagrasses and Brazilian drift wood. I see the landfills piling up with still useful things, replaced to jump on the trend bandwagon.

Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without. Unless of course you can immediately replace it with the more environmentally sound counterpart. Then you are doing your duty to make the world a greener place.