I think it was about the time that I found myself kneeling in my bathtub in a pool of swirling purple water, rubbing my head with my fingers, upside down under the faucet, eyes squinched shut against the onslaught of overly cheery smelling hair dye that was running down my forehead, across my eyelids, and off the tip of my nose, that I thought - this may not be worth it.

These things never start off at quite this level of slight insanity.  No, they usually start with boredom, actually - which is a fairly innocuous thing on it’s own, but when you combine it with a vague irritation about your general appearance and a natural dislike of a regular exercise routine, and these things coincide with the timing of your hair growth in such a way that your roots actually seem to be screaming at you in the mirror each morning - well, then, things have reached a dangerous state.  All you need at that point is Bryan Jones egging you on.

Perhaps it would help to explain at this point that there are a couple of background factors that influence these sorts of events at the casa de Jones:

  1. I am cheap.  I don’t know how else to say it.  I hate paying actual money for things, especially things that for some reason I think I could do myself.
  2. I have a little trouble with overestimating which things I can actually do myself.
  3. Bryan is the youngest of 6, and the only boy.  That’s right, 5 older sisters, and a mother, all of whom color their hair.  Do you see where this is going?

Actually, to be fair, this is not even close to the first time that Bryan has colored my hair.  He’s pulled it through a cap and highlighted it for me, too (all the while being incredibly manly about it.  Really.).  And he has a pretty good track record too.  So, last week, when the perfect storm of Needing Something Different and Hello These Are My Roots came together, we felt confident in our abilities.  Overly confident, perhaps. So I came home with my $3.23 box of hair color, he put on the gloves, I sectioned my hair, and we colored it.  While watching Baby Mama.

So the timer goes off, and I go upstairs to rinse.  In the shower.  Which turned out to be something of a mistake.  Remember when you were in elementary school and the dentist sent you home with those nasty red tablets to chew up after you brushes, so that you could see every place you had missed?  This was sort of like that, only in this instance:

  1. the inside of your mouth would equal the inside of my shower,
  2. the red residue would instead be purple, floral-smelling dye, and
  3. you would have never brushed your teeth in the entire time you had been alive.

It’s just something you don’t really think about: all the hundreds of places inside of your shower where a water droplet can land after it bounces off of the back of your smelly purple head.  At least, you don’t think about it until every single one of those many, many droplets are deep, dark, wonderful, purple.  Still, it was a fairly minor setback, and after rinsing, and rinsing, and rinsing, I moved on.  An early appraisal of my hair was positive, but as it dried, we began to notice some…shall we say, inconsistencies in the color.  Hmm, I thought, maybe that will just even out over the next few days.

Over those next few days, I got quite a few comments about my hair, my favorite quite possibly being from my pastor.  Who, by the way, has NO hair.  On purpose.

What exactly do you call that color, anyway?

Ah, the gentle, sensitive soul of a minister…

By the weekend, I knew something had to be done.  We had decided the problem was not enough product (couldn’t possibly be user error!) and so we came back with more, more, more.  Bryan went through the whole routine again, and when he finished, I took matters into my own hands.  Determined that no hair would be left behind, I found myself in front of my bathroom mirror with the last of the dye, haphazardly squirting it into any part of my head that wasn’t already dripping with it.  My shirt looked like it came off the set of a bad slasher flick.  There was hair dye on my pants, my feet, the counter, the floor.  People, this is where you end up when you underspend and overreach.

My hair is, once again, all the same color.  What exactly that color is - is hard to say.  In a certain light, it might be dark auburn.  Under other light, it might be a leftover Halloween wig.  Last night, my friend Rhonda saw me and said, Did you redo your hair?  It looks darker.

To which my son Will replied, It’s PURPLE.  My mom’s hair IS PURPLE.


this time last year: you could call it roadblog. or idrive. (10. 11. 2007)