I got all of them cut!

So, for about ten years now (maybe six or seven), I’ve been wanting to cut my hair short.

How short? Really short.

But there were a few things holding me back. First off, there was my fifth grade haircut. Second off, there was my college haircut. Both were short-short cuts that continue to haunt me, even to this day. In fifth grade, people constantly called me a boy. I vividly remember being at the grocery store in a SKIRT (well, okay, one of those skirt-and-bicycle-pants combos) and an old guy calling me “son.”

In college, I had that very 90s look–clipped in the back, longer in the front, ridiculous all around. I have a photo of myself from a formal event, and my hair is all puffed up like a gigantic helmet. So weird. So, so weird.

So for years, I’ve been just doing “stuff” with my hair–cutting it, growing it, blonding it, re-brunetting it, ponytailing every single day, layering it, cutting bangs, wearing it tidy, wearing it messy, ponytailing it even when it was really too short to ponytail…

So finally, as my last cut started to grow out and it became obvious that something would have to be done, I decided to go for it. Apparently this cut is sort of “in” right now, thanks to people like Katie Holmes and Posh Spice (Lord help me!), and that probably seeped into my subconscious and made me braver. But whatever the reason, Tuesday afternoon, I went for it!

And I’m very happy. Everybody claims to like it, even the husb (who, it turns out, did not like the old haircut and was happy with any change at all… which proved to me I can do whatever I want and he won’t complain. Good man!).

The weirdest thing is that without hair hanging down away from my head, it feels like I have an updo (that would be some kind of hairdo where all of your hair is piled onto your head, as in a bun or many wedding and prom hairstyles, for Tom and Jason). There’s just a static weight sort of glommed onto my skull.

But that’s a small price to pay for hair that only takes thirty seconds to blow dry!

So without further ado (updo?)… (Forgive the goofy photo!)

Happy Friday!

15 comments September 19th, 2008

Now I can be mean again.

About five years ago (right when I married the husb — coincidence?), I started noticing little white hairs sprouting around my temples. Not a lot, mind you, but a few. As the years went by, more of these little white hairs appeared. I thought, ah, who cares? My little sister liked plucking them out and I thought it was kind of cool to have pockets of albinoism on my head.

So then about two and a half years ago, I was talking to some co-workers, who are much cooler than I am and have much better fashion sense, too. And I said, “Look at these little white hairs!” and one of them said, “Honey,” (she being from Louisiana), “those may be white hairs, but they are called gray hair.”

Me?? Gray hair? Impossible! So I did what any self-respecting Los Angeles resident does:

I went blonde.

Oddly, it never occurred to me to go darker. For one thing, it was supposed to be highlights, you know? But before I knew it, I was “the girl with the long blonde hair”.

Only weeks into my transformation, I began to feel, in fact, like “the long blonde hair with the girl”. It didn’t help that the length was getting out of control. It took me ten minutes to comb it out every morning. Ten loud, whiny minutes. When I walked into a room, it seemed that my hair was walking in first, and I was just buried somewhere underneath it.

The winds of change, they a-blowed. And I went from bra-strap length to just-longer-than-chin length. The second my dear hairstylist chunked off those ponytails, I looked at myself in the mirror and felt like I could breathe again. The Hair was vanquished! And then we handled The Blonde. We covered it in a rich chocolate brown.

It had taken me a week to get used to seeing myself blonde (and a year and a half to undo it) — but the moment I saw myself in a mirror with short brown hair, I felt like me again.

I like blonde hair. I even like my blonde hair, in retrospect. Sometimes I look at pictures of myself and think, “Gosh, why on earth did I cut off all that pretty blonde hair?”

But the truth is, it’s hard enough in this city (this world, this life) to hold onto who you are, without having one of your prominent physical features sailing around selling you as something you can’t identify with.

With short, dark hair, I can say cynical things in a deadpan voice around people I’ve never met, and they don’t look at me like I’m a Disney princess who just fell off her throne. I can ride with the top down (the CAR top, get your mind out of the gutter). I can be me.

I know it’s not healthy to base that much of your identity on something like hair. I know there are a lot of very hilarious and cynical blondes out there who crack jokes much more deadpan than mine and set the crowds rotflmaoing. I know if I were more fully actualized as a human being, I could be content with myself blonde or brunette, at ideal weight or at ideal weight plus twelve-and-a-half. A truly healthy person would acknowledge (cough cough) that if I were really being honest with myself, I would stick with my natural hair color and not darken the mousy out of it.

I guess I’m not there yet. And maybe that will come with age. But for now, and especially since I finally got up off my duff and got my fading demi-permanent chocolate hair darkened the other day, I feel comfortable under my own hair.

I might even grow it long again. And then I could be the evil Disney princess!

For the morbidly curious, Here’s a before & after picture.

6 comments June 3rd, 2007

I yam what I yam.

Recently, due in part to having to renew some domain names and wanting to start up a redesign of ye olde website (look for it in April), I gave a good deal of thought to the question of my name. Mind you, I see nothing wrong with the name Katie. I have known a few Katies in my day, and I’m pleased to report that we are a mischievous lot. The name itself and the implications of it are dear to me.

But as an author…? My book is a thriller. It’s told in what I hope is a fresh, funny voice, but when you come down to it, scary things are happening, and the overall effect is on the darker side. And judging by my work-in-progress, there’s more of the same where that came from.

Is that writer really a Katie? I started to have my doubts. I began to think about other possibilities: K.S. Alender. Kate Alender. Kat Alender. Kade Alender. My husband vetoed a couple right off the bat, but there were one or two that stayed with me. So I did that annoying thing where I ask for everyone’s opinions even though I’m clearly not ready to decide. And, as I tend to do, I agonized a little. Agent M and my lovely editor remained mum, except to offer encouragement in my quest.

So I did a mockup of the web redesign, except I used K.S. Alender instead of Katie Alender. I was at the edge of the platform, one foot off, ready to commit.

And then as I was driving to work one day, I was thinking about the possibility that at some point I may actually meet someone from my target readership. And then I would get to talk to this person about the book!

“My name is Katie,” I will say. “Nice to meet you. I hope you like the book.”

“What’s it about?” asks this reader, who is dressed kind of cool and has no way of knowing that I once dressed in a way that may have been considered cool, especially if you take into account that 90s thing of tucking your jeans into your boots.

“It’s a ghost story about this misfit girl who has nobody to help her when her little sister goes crazy,” I will answer.

“Hmm,” says the girl, and looks at the cover.

“It’s about being yourself,” I will add. “And, like, not having to be what other people think you are.”

“Oh, okay,” she will say. And then she will glance at the cover of the book and see K.S. ALENDER. And she will look back at me and ask, “Why does it say KS Alender if your name is Katie?”

And I will say, “I didn’t think a person named Katie would write a book like this.”

Splat.

That was my lightbulb moment, right there. Everything I write tries to be about being just who you are, not adjusting yourself to fit some mold or expectation. I mean, first and foremost, they try to be good stories, but under that I can’t help but try to make this point again and again.

So what should I do, hide behind some initials because my name doesn’t sound enough like a person who would write this book? But I did write this book. And my name is Katie.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

(Agent M and the Lovely Editor were both like, “Oh, that’s what I hoped you would decide!” Of course.)

February 27th, 2007

The ones that got away.

How strong does a gust of wind have to be to knock over a metal chair with mesh seats? Thankfully, not strong enough to push said chair through our sliding glass doors — just strong enough to knock it into them and give us a nice midnight scare.

I’ve never experienced anything like this wind. Certainly not last year, when we first moved into the house. It’s a strange, lonely kind of wind. It cuts right through what you might have assumed were warm clothes and knocks the neighbor’s wicker reindeer all atumble. I don’t like it.

In writing news, as the internet access is out again at home, I’m blogging from the office. Which is a great opportunity to depart from the Relics series and write about things I don’t have anymore.

Two things, in particular:

First, yesterday’s idea.

I’m not a big writer-downer. I tend to think that if an idea is worth writing about, it’ll stick with me. I have one “what-if” scenario that’s been bopping around my head for a few months. It’s just the faintest germ of an idea, and it might not be the kind of thing I could write, but to my knowledge, it’s a new take on a current issue. And that one has stuck. But yesterday’s new idea, which, when I thought it up, seemed equally as sticky AND new AND worthwhile… Well, that’s one’s gone. And I’m trying to give myself the chance to get it back — gently but persistently suggesting possibilities, which so far have all been rejected.

So wish me luck. I’m going to keep poking around for it. If I can’t find it, I’ll just chalk it up as a bad idea.

Second, going back to the idea of relics —

I was in fifth grade when my father’s mother died of lung cancer. The wake took place during a school trip to Sea Camp, or whatever they called it. My parents determined that I should go to Sea Camp and not to the wake. One of our assignments at Sea Camp was to keep a journal of our time there.

Let’s get one thing straight: I am not an adventurous person. I don’t WANT to swim with sharks — even nurse sharks (or “nursing sharks” as Chris accidentally said last night, which is gross and hilarious). I don’t WANT to play tag in the swamp (although I had a good time). I did enjoy the thing where we started with a piece of coral that looked like a plain old piece of coral and ended up finding bazillions of awesome sea creatures on it. That was cool.

But overall, it’s not my kind of thing. Add to that the fact that the kids from my school actually started a full-on, boy vs. girl RIOT, complete with brooms in the air and rocks being thrown, etc., and it was an interesting weekend.

I’m sure I documented all of that just fine in my green journal, which I turned in as instructed.

My teacher’s note, after reviewing it, was some dour observation that I didn’t seem to have a very good time at Sea Camp. Looking back now, I don’t know if it was an actual criticism (knowing this teacher, it was) or just an impression. This is the teacher who marked down my Pioneer Game journal a few points because I named the pioneers’ donkey “Jonny” and “that’s not the correct spelling of Johnny”, and also because one of the character’s brothers went back to Ireland to care for their dying mother and “people didn’t go BACK to Europe.”

Flash forward to 6th grade, safety patrol trip to Washington, DC. Another journal is assigned. This time, I am determined to please the teacher. So despite all of the actual, real emotions and spats and drama and boredom, etc., I experience, I make sure my journal is jam-packed with sunshine and roses. The whole thing is a sham, which I know as I write it. It’s full of vapid praise for Our Nation’s Capital and whitewashed accounts of sharing a room with three other girls, who fought the entire time. It’s a lie.

The teacher loved it, and was so glad I enjoyed this trip more than Sea Camp.

The green journal is gone. I’m sure I destroyed it, feeling ashamed of my honest accounts of a trip I didn’t want to take taken two days after the death of my grandmother. Probably the first really true-to-myself thing I ever wrote — struggling to fit in, struggling to live up to expectations under which I struggle to this day — tossed away because a teacher told me it was too honest.

I kept the Washington DC journal, but I didn’t pack it up and bring it to California. I didn’t even crack it open and read it.

Why should I? It’s just a big fat lie, and I even knew it when I was 11 years old.

January 5th, 2007

The pull of film school.

I went to an arts high school; I was accepted for writing, but then I switched my focus to video production. (Incidentally, this is the same school that my agent got kicked out of.)

I do work in production now, but I’m a writing producer — I don’t get out and about with the lights/camera/action very often. The closest I come is working the producer/talent table at the National Championship, which is amazing and exhilarating but is still mostly script oriented. Other than that, I spend the year cloistered at the office or working from home.

But the pull of the visual medium is very strong. Every once in a while, I’ll see a movie that makes me want to go make a movie.

(Incidentally, though I’m completely devoid of musical talent, I also think very much in terms of sound; I can probably thank my film school sound teacher, the inestimable Richard Portman for that.)

Today, I want to go make a music video. Here’s why.

That’s Micah Levenson, singing “Trash”, directed by the husb.

There’s something about images that make me yearn to see my story. Almost a little sadness, like nostalgia, behind that, somehow. Or maybe it’s me being a control freak…?

Comments from original posting:

Maia said…
You “yearn” to SEE your story because it will soon be an academy award winning film starring Nicole Kidman. By the way, I LOVE watching dog shows. When one is on, I eschew everything else, even LOST (well, maybe not LOST). I love watching the toy category because inevitably, our favorite breed, King Charles Cavalier gets chosen and goes on to best in show category. Sometimes I wonder if there’s more money and satisfaction in dog breeding than writing!
5:10 AM

Alex said…
That video is awesome! Matt Elblonk is your agent?
5:23 AM

Katie said…
Maia: I’m not sure about the money part, LOL. But I know these people love their dogs! I think I’m content with knowing everything about them and buying them from other people. I’m glad you dig the dog show, though! Woohoo!
Alex: yeah, isn’t that a trip? I figured out that he and the guy the husb works with constantly are both arts school rejects. Kinda funny.
7:40 AM

Anonymous said…
Alex!!!
Wait, who is the guy the husb works for?
M.E.
2:44 PM

December 12th, 2006

Bye, bye, Blondie!

Tomorrow is the day… the day the hair comes off and the blonde goes away. I am so excited. No one is excited about this except me, Jean, and the hairdresser. But that’s enough for me.

August 4th, 2006