I got my cheveux cut today...

...and here is the result. I had a late-night crisis about giving up on my growing-it-out efforts but a few minutes of Photoshopping cleared that right up. I look terrible with long hair (and also with no hair...glad I didn't do the "baldies for boobies" campaign with the hippies last spring). And now that it's cut, it feels SO much better. I think that front part is too short to sit well once it gets wet and recurls--we'll see tomorrow--so might have to invest in a cheap blow-dryer.

Doing the whole training center thing was an experience. The salon consisted of a big room full of female coiffeuses in training dressed all in white who were getting systematically flirted with/criticized by a handful of gay male stylists in black. (Seriously, not one of the "expert" stylists was a woman, or straight-seeming. I guess hair is the one industry where gay men get to be privileged...oh wait, yeah, and French studies...). My coiffeuse was cute, although her hyper-speed French was very hard to understand over the blow-dryers. I've been having this problem lately with French women between 25 and 35 who, after hearing that I speak the language pretty well, speak to me in "valley girl" French. I guess I should be flattered but it's really frustrating to follow and embarrassing to keep asking them to repeat what they've said. Luckily, once we got through with the introductions and discussions of what I wanted I became nothing more than a mute practice head to be combed, dried, straightened, turned, sheared (Jean Louis David cuts exclusively with electric clippers) by a handful of people. I spent half an hour with straightened hair and decided that with the right cut that could actually look kind of cute, except that I will probably never care enough about hair to devote the time to straightening it.

Other than that, not much news. Been feeling migrainey for the past few days and worse today...waiting for the other shoe to drop. (So yes, I'm just tired in the above picture. Not emo.) It's always the weird symptoms that bother me more than the pain...the inability to filter out sounds (I kept getting distracted by the traffic noise during class, and the Metro was a nightmare) the sensitivity to light and movement and especially the way it seems to interrupt my communication skills. Stringing together sentences in English gets harder, it's like I have a chronic problem trying to think of the right word. French is even worse. Unfortunate timing, because we had an in-class essay today that I probably bombed, and I have a 20-minute oral "exposé" tomorrow morning...