One reason I don't ask my brother for advice

I'm not loving my hair. In fact, I kind of hate it. I went in for highlights and a trim, and came out with short beige hair. In a weird sort of hair mourning, I'm wearing an entirely beige and brown outfit today. If I were in the desert, I'd be invisible.

I don't tend to get upset about hair anymore - it's just hair, after all. But lately my stylist and I are not speaking the same hair language and it bums me out. I'm willing to stick it out for a couple more haircuts and see if it goes back to good again. Because changing stylists is almost as stressful as changing jobs.

I've been going to the same salon for years. The stylist I go to now is my fourth at this place.

The first had a horrible nasal voice with a Michigan accent and gave me bangs, and when I asked why, she denied it. How do you deny bangs? So I ditched her, although there was that weird flinch moment when I wound up getting my hair cut at the next station. We pretended we didn't know each other. Kind of like when you're out on a date and run into someone you went on one or two dates with. Awkward.

The second stylist was this hilarious woman who had incredible stories and got fake boobs somewhere along the way. She quit to open a salon with her boyfriend, so I started going to a friend of hers. Who told me, among a variety of shocking things, that her friend's boyfriend had the most ginormous penis you could imagine.

Anyway. So I went to her for a while, and then she moved to Miami to live the high-heels-by-the-pool life. Which is how I started going to my current stylist, who she recommended and who I generally really like. We just need to get back on a wavelength (no pun) and I pray that happens. I dread starting over.

When I moved to San Diego after grad school, I asked my brother for a recommendation for a hair stylist. Because you can't just pick one out of the blue. He'd been there several years, and he worked with a lot of women. I figured he could help me.

He said, without hesitation, "Absolutely! I've got a woman I love. A bunch of my friends go to her, too."

And so I went off to see this woman, who was in a nice salon. She ignored everything I asked for and gave me a horrible haircut. Horrible.

Which caused me to call up my brother all kinds of upset.

"She sucks! Your stupid haircut woman sucks! She gave me a terrible haircut. Why do you like her so much? What's so great about her?"

"Oh," he said. "Well, she's really hot. Plus when she washes my hair she brushes her boobs against my arm."

Honestly.

A Halloween version of car camping?

I hate to be all, "When I was a kid, a can of Coke cost five cents..."

But honestly. When I was a kid, none of us dressed like sluts. We just wore kid costumes. I was a really good witch one year, with a long papier mache nose that my mom had made for me. My brother liked to be a cowboy.

I remember one year I was a bunny. But not a sexy bunny. A big, dorky, white, flop eared bunny. They weren't supposed to flop. We just couldn't get them both to stand up at once. And of course since I wore thick glasses, I was a big, dorky, white, thick glasses-wearing, flop eared bunny. With sandals. Because it was hot. It was Bangladesh, after all.

I know Halloween has gotten popular all over the world in recent years. Who doesn't like a holiday with costumes and tons of candy? But in the 70s in Bangladesh and Egypt? Not so much.

We went to American or international schools, so of course we'd celebrate with a parade at school. But then Halloween night? We'd get all dressed up in our costumes. And then our parents would drive us around. Because the houses with Americans were few and far between.

There was no house-to-house trick or treating. There was get in the car, drive, park, get out of the car, and run up to the house all excited.

We'd go to the door, "Hi Mrs. Novins! Trick or treat!" and then the parents would chat a bit, and maybe have a cocktail, and then we'd load back up in the car, and we'd drive to the next house. I suppose it made for more drama per house, but it lacked that excitement of tromping around in the dark with a bunch of your friends, wondering what you're going to get at the next house.

And of course you were never going to pull any Halloween tricks. Like that was ever a consideration when you're standing in a nice living room with friends of your parents. It was more "Treat or treat! And Mr. Davis? Can I have a grape lolly pop? I hate cherry."

The good thing was, you had more time to select candy.

I think they must've given us a lot of candy per stop, because we'd always wind up with a ton, and the whole adventure can't have been more than ten houses. But ten long houses. I'd wind up falling asleep in the car on the way home.

See? We did American kinds of things...In a modified kind of way.

The guy's answer to the slutty nurse costume

Bob's birthday is on Halloween. And so of course we wanted to know what he was going to dress as. Because it's his favorite holiday. And if Halloween is your birthday, you ought to be able to come to the office in costume. In fact, you ought to be obligated to. Don't you think?

The area that we sit in is all women except Bob. And at the lunch where we were having this discussion, it was a huge group of women and two guys. So Bob jokingly said he was going to dress as a rooster. And he got all fake-swaggery. Rooster in the hen house. Heh heh.

But then someone else suggested Bob dress as Superman. She hinted that we'd all like to see him in blue tights and a cape.

But if you've leapt from rooster to Superman in one go, of course Supercock was the only natural next suggestion. Don't you think? You know, he could leave his shirt open and you could see the feathers instead of an S, and, yeah, well anyway. Heh.

I thought it was hilarious. So did Bob. The rest of the table thought we were retarded.

Bob loved the Supercock idea. He even told his parents about it the last time he talked to them. And told them it was my idea. Which of course it was. But really.

So I ever meet them, which is unlikely, but still, these nice, conservative, Pennsylvania people are going to be like, "Oh, Bob, is this your little Supercock friend?"

Sparkles! Puppies! Hand holding! Rainbows!

Say you start a date with dinner on a Friday night and it ends on Sunday afternoon.

And you spent a good number of the hours in between those two moments in time doing the following: wandering around your neighborhood, holding hands, taking pictures of stuff to turn into silk screens (and he, like much of the Western world, is so much taller than you, with such longer arms, was totally willing to extend the long reach over the fences of neighbors to photograph a particularly enticing leaf much closer than you'd be able to manage), poking your noses into fun shops, meeting up with friends, and grabbing meals and glasses of wine along the way.

And when you said goodbye, after what turned out to be quite an extraordinary amount of time in a row, you realized you could easily, comfortably, happily have spent more time with this fellow.

Then, even though you have this well-constructed terror, based on multiple data points, that everything can be arbitrary and anything can end at any moment...And you are self-aware enough to realize full well that sometimes the arbitrary and the complicated can be traced back directly to you...

All of this still makes you wish it were Wednesday already.

Just remember: people speak English!

A friend is talking about going to Paris. And how she's worried because she doesn't speak French. And of course Parisians have this terrible reputation.

I said that I love Paris, and I've only had amazing experiences there, and that, with the expected exception of a couple bitchy saleswomen in swanky stores, people are always lovely to me. I do speak French, but at this point it's pretty sketchy. I smile a lot, though, which probably helps.

And then I reminded her that people speak English.

Which in turn reminded me of an embarrassing little story.

Because sometimes? Even though I don't go to Europe looking like I'm dressed to mow their lawns? Even though I wouldn't be caught dead wearing white sneakers, a fanny pack, and a visor?

Sometimes I'm the loud American you don't want to be associated with in public. Although actually, now that I think about it, that could be said for me in the US as well. Maybe it has nothing to do with travel.

A few years ago I was in Paris with my friend Kris, an American friend of mine who lives there. We were out shopping. I think it's worth mentioning that at the point this conversation took place, we were shopping for an outfit for her daughter. In other words, we were in children's clothing.

We'd been talking about a variety of things, as you do, but we'd somehow gotten onto the topic of health care and medicaments. And how in France it's not terribly unusual to have medications offered in suppository form, which is something you don't really encounter much of in the US.

And then something caught her eye and she darted over to it. So we were a good, oh, two rows of clothing apart when I proclaimed, and not quietly, "Honestly, the whole idea of sticking anything in my anus really makes me twitchy."

This man a couple feet away from me whipped around, eyes wide. My friend held up a dress on a hanger in front of her face.

She hissed, "People speak English!"

Yikes. They sure do.