Wednesday, Aug. 25, 2004 - 2:57 p.m.
It's been too busy to write when I wanted to, so I'm shifting back a couple of days, to the beginning of the weekend.
Thursday. On Thursday I met a friend, Jason, of mine to shop for hair dying products, having no idea what I wanted to do with my hair, but only that it at least needed some highlights to give it the look of some texture. It was a good chance to hang out with him and get something done in the meantime. He was needing company because his girlfriend had just asked for space.
Instead, I found this awesome red color and grabbed that as Jason egged me on.
And I realize something kind of funny. I've never had any qualm with going off the wall colors completely or even with adding several colors to my hair at once, but for some reason, I've always had a weird aversion to going all red.
And in the end his mom had to help us. But his highlights ended up perfect. And my hair is now an interesting shade of red.
The box called it "ruby red" but I think a better description might be "wine." I don't know. If I can manage it I'm going to try to get a digital photo to show people. But after the initial oddness of seeing myself with a majorly different haircolor, I really liked it. I've gotten tons of compliments. Apparently it goes well with my skin tone and "brightens me up."
Then on Friday Jairo took me to a concert at the Knitting Factory in New York.
It was fantastic. We were one of the very few people over 20 there though and that was kind of weird. But it was cool.
The venue was a perfect small venue. You could see the band from anywhere in the room.
And it was so great. I missed that. I missed seeing live music in small venues. I needed it. There's an energy that is there that is missing in other situations. There's something about being able to see the exact finger placement of the guitarist (even when the punk guitarist was playing nothing but power cords), to be able to focus on each band member's role in the creation of this music that I had forgotten was so important to me.
And there's an electricity about live music. A communal experience with the rest of the crowd.
It was essentially a punk show. The bands were Audio Karate, Pipedown, The Lawrence Arms, and Tsunami Bomb. I recommend all of them highly.
The thing I liked about it was that there was an inherent political voice to it all. The bands were speaking about something, the fans were responding to that message, they brought Music for America with them to register those old enough to vote. It was nice.
And when you throw a bunch of people together that hold similar views, you usually have something of a group experience.
There was moshing, but nothing too violent (although I hold that moshing is disruptive and rude to people who get stuck on the outskirts of the pit and just want to watch the show).
Audio Karate was a little late so they played a short set, but very energetic.
Pipedown started off feeling kind of like a caricature, but after the first song I found myself really digging them. They had an amazing energy and charisma. They had a fan that had followed them to several shows. He had a bright pink mohawk and reminded me vaguely of a friend of mine. Similar facial structures and something about how much the music seemed to mean to him.
The Lawrence Arms had a bunch of fans, but they were the most obnoxious fans there. They had some great songs and were the really political (read: anti-Bush) ones there, but I felt that I'd like their stuff better recorded.
Tsunami Bomb also rocked. Also tons of fans, mostly cool except they started crowd surfing, which especially in a small crowd is annoying. But they were great!
Jairo kept trying to keep me safe from the moshers. A couple of time I had to move his arms as he was trying to shield me because it was causing me to lose my balance.
He's very protective of me and I find myself uncertain how to take it most of the time. I'm not used to someone really worrying. And I have to try not ot take it personally. Because I know that it's not that he doesn't think I can take care of myself, but I'm so used to doing just that that it can feel that way.
I'm adapting to it. To having someone want to, I don't know, take care of me. But I'm also vocal about it with him, making sure he understands where I'm coming from about it.
