first haircut

well, it's not really my first haircut, but it is my first here in the US.

i was trying to hold back fears of walking out of the salon with cropped top that would look like a bird's hurricaned nest. my first instinct was to search the web for haircut terminologies that would best describe what i want to be done to my hair. je warned me of the language barrier that pose as a problem. back home, i have no problem telling the hairstylists what i want. i just go, "onting bawas dito, tapos layered ng onti dito, yung length na hindi titikwas pag nakasuot ako ng may kuwelyo". now, how would you translate that to the hairstylists here without pissing them off? =P

so there, thru the web, i figured it's still called "layered". and to be specific, i kept a mental note to tell them "gradually layered", starting from a couple of inches below my chin. that should do it.

i headed out to the gas station first, coz i'm running low on gas. now the last thing i want is to push a car with my newly trimmed hair. =) salon next. as soon as i pulled into the parking lot, i saw an asian-looking woman attending the front desk of the salon. i secretly wished she's a pinay. but when i got inside, nope, she's not.

as i learned from our conversation a minute after i got seated in front of the mirror, she's a half-chinese, half-japanese, raised in vietnam. she has a familiar twang when she speaks. we immediately fell into an engaging conversation. it's an "asian thing", you know. hehehe!

i discovered she's got 3 kids, all blonde and blue-eyed, 2 sons and a daughter. she has 6 grandkids. she speaks French, because it was mandatory in the vietnam school she attended. she's been here in the US for more than 20 years now. she had her first kid at the age of 16, and that she's now in her late 40's. oh, and that she has lots of gray hairs too. =P

in return, she learned that i just emigrated from the Philippines last august, and that i am just 25 years old. she knows i married my high school sweetheart, and that my hubby drives a 2005 ScionTC.

she wouldn't have known the last item if her co-hairstylist didn't come up to us and saw my car keys. je and i keep a spare key of each other's car, so if by chance we lock the keys inside the car, we have a way of going home without breaking the windows or the windshield. hehe!

so after a bit more chitchat, she's done with my hair. i liked what i saw, so i resolved to giving her a fat tip. i knew she's happy that an asian came by and became her customer, coz when we were talking, she said something like "good thing you came in before 8(pm), we wouldn't be able to talk like this if you didn't". our little chitchat made me feel more at home, and i hope it had the same effect on her too.

i bet she's happy, in a way. most especially when i learned that a $3.50 tip is a little too high for a normal haircut. =P