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I am by no means a frivolous, feminine woman. I’m the kind of person who’s too cheap to get pedicures every week, so I get them every two months instead. My notion of the perfect shopping trip is 2,000 pesos and a morning at 168. It takes me ten minutes tops to prettify myself for a night out in town; twenty minutes if I have to take a shower before that. Heavy makeup for me is black liquid liner applied thickly on my upper eyelid.

So what compelled me to shell out a ridiculous amount of money and spend a ridiculous amount of time to get my hair color changed yesterday?*

Beats me.

Well okay, ever since I got hired by a company that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about how their employees look, I’ve been itching to dye my bangs bright red again. I announced the idea to my parents, only for me to change my mind when I saw them exchange horrified looks that said, “Her toilet-training went smoothly when she was two. Dear God, what have we done to produce such a freak?” So red bangs was out of the question. I was, however, really itching to do something new about my appearance so I decided to try a color combination that was outlandish yet relatively normal–ash blonde streaks on black hair.

I went to the Salon de Manila branch at Katipunan extension for my hair dying project. My mom had her hair colored at the Makati branch sometime last year and though their rates are pricier than other salons, I liked how her hair turned out. The streaks were very fine and distinct; you could tell that the colorist knew which strands of hair should be colored and which ones shouldn’t to create the most flattering look.

The original plan was just ash blonde streaks, but somehow the colorist sales-talked me into adding red streaks to create a more “confused” look. Confused is good, so I accepted her suggestion and let her do her magic.

What I thought would take at most two hours turned out to be a three-and-a-half hour ordeal. Getting most of my hair wrapped in foil took maybe an hour, and then I had to wait around half an hour for the bleach to eat out the color from my hair. By the second hour I was already squirming like an overactive toddler during Sunday mass. After what seemed like centuries, the dye was ready for rinsing but the rinsing process took ages to finish too. Once they got the foil out, they rubbed in some awful chemical that made my scalp sting and it had to stay there for maybe ten minutes.

When the shampooing and rinsing was finally done, I had to have my hair treated with more chemicals so it doesn’t turn out to be frizzy and dry. I’d forgotten the exact reason as to why I needed to have all these oils and chemicals rubbed into my hair, but by the third hour I didn’t really care anymore. I just wanted to see what my freaking hair looked like, and I wanted to go home and eat dinner.

At long sweet last, the torturous ordeal of the hair-dying process was finally over. But I couldn’t go home yet because I needed to get my hair trimmed, which ate up another thirty minutes. Seriously. The entire time I kept wondering how the hell can women sit still and spend so much time in the salon. And it made me wonder if I were any less of a woman because if I had known that getting my hair done would take this long, I would’ve risked the ire of my parents and gotten the red bangs instead. That takes half an hour tops, and costs way less too.

When I finally saw the finished product though, I couldn’t believe my eyes. My hair looked amazing. There’s a lot more blonde than I would have liked, but the colors somehow worked well with the new cut and my skin tone (I kicked the guys at work for telling me I now look like Tina Turner). While I don’t think I’ll ever do another three-hour hair-dying session again, it was definitely worth the eternity spent sitting on my ass, waiting for the peroxide to bleach out the black.

Time spent: 3 and a half hours
Total spent: a little over 5 thousand pesos
Cost of looking good: priceless

* Actually, I didn’t pay to get my hair done. I was drastically low on funds, so I made pretty eyes at my mom and asked her to help me out here. I owe her a day at the salon once I get my first paycheck though.

I can still remember the day when everything stopped being simple and started being complicated. It was the day, or a few days after, I broke up with the ex. Before that day, my life was in order. Everything was in black and white. People were either smart or dumb. Women were either sluts or virgins. Men were either assholes or gentlemen.

I’m starting to realize that the world isn’t as simple as that, that there are a lot of gray areas in everything and people are more complex and can’t be boxed into categories A, B, or C.

God knows I did everything I could to make today a good day, or at least an okay day. But I saw the traffic this morning and no matter how many cheerful songs I played on my iPod, I knew I was going to go through a depressive spell sometime today. I was running a little late this morning, but not late enough to actually be late and get fined an hour’s worth of my salary. The fifteen-minute difference meant far more cars on the road than I’m used to and I started getting depressed over the traffic. The traffic, for fuck’s sake. It’s such a stupid yuppie bourgeois thing to get all stressed over, but I never used to think this way about traffic. I was thinking about how all these people on the road probably work in Makati and left early so that they could avoid the headache of rush hour and actually get to the office on time. Except two million other people have the same brilliant idea so the traffic is still the same no matter what time it is. And that thought really got me down, for some reason. Life’s shitty enough without people being assholes on the road and everyone trying to get to work at the same time.

It used to be that going to work was something I looked forward to because the friends I’m making there are wonderful people and the workload isn’t even all that bad. Seriously, it’s a fucking comedy show everyday, and how many people can say that about their jobs? But no thanks to some stupid drama, the thought of work tomorrow makes want to throw up. I wish my cubicle were in a more inaccessible place so I can just sneak in and out of the room without being seen or seeing anyone. I dread having to wake up every morning to do the same old same old and for what? Yeah I have vague plans of taking a cross-country trip in the US maybe after a year of working, but what’s going to keep me going until then? The band? What band? We’re making songs yeah but where is this going to get us? It’s been two months since we had an actual rehearsal and though I scheduled one for tomorrow, I have this sinking feeling in my stomach that someone is going to back out and I swear to God if that happens I’ll snap, throw an embarrassing hissy fit, then quit. I’m sick of being the band nazi, I’m sick of being the one who has to get things moving. I’m sick of doing everything and getting nowhere.

The point I’m trying to make out of all this is that today was one of those days where I realized that shit, I’m not a kid anymore. I’m waking up to the real world everyday and I don’t like what I see. Everything I used to take for granted, like parking fees and foot spas, suddenly costs way too much. The money I make is never enough to buy me all the stuff I want, and I’m not even sure why I want all that stuff in the first place. Sometimes I think that maybe parents should never read children fairy tales with happy endings because it’s such a fucking shock to discover that there is such a thing as Prince Charming, but he’s so fucking charming that all the Prince Charmings in all fairy tales are one and the same guy. But then again, maybe all that happy-ending propaganda is good for something because if it weren’t, I bet kids as young as eight would start swinging from their bedroom windows. They’re not old enough to know just how shitty life gets. Maybe I’m not old enough to know how shitty life gets. Maybe this is all just a prologue.

I’m told that I think too much about stuff like this and that’s why I get depressed. But nobody’s going to teach me this shit and if I don’t think about any of this, I’ll just go through life without knowing anything. Ignorance may be bliss, sure, but I’ll just feel like I lived for nothing if I just go through the motions without examining my life as Socrates says.

Oh, I know that in a couple of years or so I’ll eventually snap out of this angst or growing pains or whatever you call it. I’ll get my head back on straight and life will be simple again. Then I’ll laugh at everything I ever wrote and I’ll be business-minded enough to condense all these angst-ridden entries into a book that I can market to depressed 21-year olds. I just wish there was some way I can fast-forward the next four or so years of my life and move on to the part where I’m mature and happy, or as close to happy as anyone can get.

This moment of angst was brought to you by Thom Yorke and the rest of Radiohead.

No alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises please.

These days I make it a point to learn as much about life as I can by talking to all sorts of people and doing things I would normally never do. This system seems to be working fine because all the out-of-the-box experiences and mad socializing is helping me rid myself of my prejudices. But some prejudices will always remain, and for good reason, I think.

Embassy has a reputation of being the place to party in Manila. Anyone who is Someone in the Philippines can be found in that club, mingling with the country’s socialites, wannabe-socialites, and the just plain filthy rich while sipping 800-peso cocktail drinks. For months I proudly swore that I would never set foot in that place because I would instantly suffocate in a roomful of conyo party people. But when the idea to go to Embassy randomly struck my friends sometime early Saturday morning, I shrugged and went along with the plan. My excuse is that at 2 am, the intelligent part of my brain stops working.

I immediately regretted agreeing with them when we were ushered to line up outside the club. You know how sometimes you think that a certain event is going to suck, but when it actually happens it turns out that it isn’t as bad as you thought it would be? Embassy for me is not one of those things. As we stood in line, I tried to convince myself that maybe I’ll actually have fun, but I immediately erased that thought with, “Seriously, Lauren. Who are you kidding?” I was surrounded by the kind of people I used to make fun of in college–the ones who spoke in valley-girl Taglish and jock-boy English. We were lining up on the open air but despite the wind, I was choking on the strange stench of mixed expensive perfume. You could tell that the girls spent days picking out the perfect outfit to wear for tonight and hours doing their hair and putting on their makeup, in the hopes of attracting the eye of a hot male celebrity or at least, a photographer from the newspapers’ society pages. The guys were delicious eye candy, but did I really have to shell out five hundred bucks to see pretty faces when I can easily do that for free on the Internet?

From where I was standing I could see what was going on inside, and what was going on inside was…nothing. Just a bunch of gorgeous people standing around with their drinks, taking pictures of themselves, and talking about god-knows-what. Everyone was smiling and laughing, but no one looked like they were really having fun.

I didn’t want to be a brat and kill everyone’s plans, but as the line grew shorter and we approached the entrance of the club, I was desperately trying to think of a way to change their minds. I made eye contact with my friends and wanted to jump up and down when the looks on their faces said that maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea after all.

“Do you really want to go in?”

“NO!” I replied, giddy with relief. We were almost at the front of the line.

We ended up at Jaipur next door where the cover charge was cheaper and where we can actually enjoy ourselves and dance the rest of the night away. I might have changed my mind about going out dancing and feel no shame in gyrating to hip-hop. But I still maintain that the only way I can be found in Embassy is if I get dragged in kicking and screaming. Standing around like a dolled-up social robot trying to get noticed by other social robots is not exactly the way I like to spend my evenings.