Ok, here’s the deal. I’ve been blogging my face off about celebs and pop culture for the past six years, but I’ve been ranting about the more ridiculous aspects of my life FOR-EV-ER. I’ve found that the best way to stop myself from crying (or sometimes cry even harder, but in like a healthy way) is to write my shitty circumstances into funny stories. And now it’s time to share those funny stories on The Salty Ju. Cause sometimes I just wanna talk about myself and not relate it back to a celeb headline from that week. So now, if you want to laugh at my life instead of the rich and famous, head on over to “Salty Stories” and start cackling. 

My first installment is equal parts sentimental and hilarious. Today is the one year anniversary of losing my grandma AKA “Gams.” Gams told me I was hilarious all the time and always loved my writing, so I’m posting this story in her memory about the time I got a no good, very bad haircut the same day as her funeral. I hope she’s down there (or up there, but more likely down there–where I will join her some day) surrounded by beanie babies, uproariously laughing at my jokes and still wondering why I didn’t just become a model because I’m so beautiful. (True Story.) Miss you, Gammy Gams.

I’ve always been a fun mix of unfiltered word vomit (usually at inapprops times) but also with a heavy dose of refusal to speak up for myself in the real world. Confrontation gives me the nervous poops and therefore I end up apologizing and scampering away into the shadows rather than saying what I want. And as every woman in the world knows, there’s no bigger risk than your hair. Getting your hair done is putting complete trust in a stylist to do the exact thing that you want them to do, and you’re usually paying them an obscene amount of money to do so. There has been far too many times to count when I’ve paid hundreds of dollars that I saved up to have my hair colored, to then come home, look in the mirror and immediately burst into tears. Once I finally realized that $200+ dollars will never buy me the hair of my dreams, I started settling for regular trims from my mom, FO FREE. This went swimmingly for a few years up until Mom started mixing in a glass of vino while snipping and I ended up with one side that was clearly longer than the other. It was time for me to stop being ratchet and take my haircare to the professionals, but still keep it dirt cheap, which leads me to SuperCuts. I’m sure this is what they love to be referred to as–dirt cheap “professionals”. 

S-Cut’s isn’t known for their expertise or fancy styling techniques. They’re known for giving you a $20 haircut, dry style. And that’s really all I was looking for. Anyone with curly hair knows that the longer and rattier the ends get, the limper your curls become. All I really need is a quick dead end chop to liven up my head again. The first time I went to SuperCuts, I used a coupon and it was a G-D steal. Breezed in, got a nice trim, and was out in 20 mins with a half dry/half wet bun on top of my head. Sure, it’s a real treat to have a professional blowout where your hair will LITERALLY never look that good again, but that’s for the richies. I can’t afford that lifestyle. Leave that to the people who drink mimosas and have someone blow dry their hair just for fun on a Saturday night. Maybe one day I’ll be wealthy enough to enjoy that luxury, but for now I was happy to have removed my split ends for a bargain. 

Close to a year later, I was desperate for another snip. In that previous year, I had witnessed my mom get distracted and literally shave a hole in my dad’s head because the electric trimmer was set to the wrong number. She also gave my boyfriend at the time a fresh cut before he had to be in someone’s wedding and the following weekend I had to even it out because it was so clearly botched. My mom had officially been fired (although now that I think about it maybe she had sabotaged her hair career on purpose because she was so sick of giving free cuts to everyone in this family.) Also, it was a few days before my grandma’s funeral and it wasn’t really an ideal time for me to be like hey mom, sorry your mom just passed but I could really use a snip snip before her services. So I begrudgingly returned to Supes Cutz, sans coup this time. I sat down in the chair and told her that I wanted a basic trim to clean up the dead ends. Nothing fancy. This particular hairdresser was on the young end and v. chatty. This was already a strike in my book. There’s nothing worse to me than forcing chatter with someone that I will literally never see again. Especially when this transaction should only last about 20 mins. Let’s get our small talk out of the way and be done with it, we don’t need to be besties. Am I a bitch for saying this? Obviously. But I’m ok with it. I think we need to normalize not talking our faces off with strangers. It’s not always necessary. My tip to you will not increase the more that you talk about your favorite TV shows, in fact, you run the risk of it decreasing if you tell me your favorite TV show is American Idol. Jus Sayin. Chatty was yapping about the weather, and work and the upcoming holiday. As it was only a couple days out from Halloween, she wanted to discuss costumes. I was closing in on 30 with no children and my grandma had just died a few days ago. Halloween really wasn’t a zesty topic for me at the time. In fact, I was looking to skip it completely. She shared with me that her and all of her friends would be dressing up as Beanie Babies. That perked my ears up. I took that as a sign because my grandma—who we so obnoxiously called Gams— LOVED beanie babies. She believed they were collectors items, purchased a new one for each of us at every occasion, would wait in lines for the limited edition beanies or bid for them on EBay and had a particularly impressive collection of them displayed in a glass case in her home. She was INSISTENT that these would be worth big money someday. As all of you children of the 90’s know now, Beanie Babies are straight trash. You can’t even give them away to kids now. They are worth absolutely nothing. We constantly razzed my Gams about how wrong she was about that trend and then continued to use our knowledge of the beanies as a fun drinking game party trick, after all, we were Official Beanie Baby Club card-carrying members. 

Feeling sentimental from just losing my Gams, I told myself this HAD to be her way of reaching out to me from beyond the grave. Her last haha was to channel through this youngster SuperCuts employee and make a Beanie Babies reference. I warmed to this stranger and stopped being a twat about how yappy she was. I became more responsive and stopped telling her with my eyes that she was being annoying. Right up until she asked me if I wanted to angle my hair in the front. Knowing that this is something that my mom usually does, I said yeah that’s fine. She then gets in front of me and pulls out a strand and goes where should I start with the angling? And pushes her scissors up to my forehead as if she were going to completely obliterate all hair in the front of my head and call it an angle. I quickly told her that was a little high, so she moved and goes, this will still be long enough to put behind your ear, and then chopped. I watched in horror as this chatty monster cut me bangs without my permission and tried to pass it off as “angling.” I distinctly remember 7th grade when girls were VERY into the side bang trend. This was a less dramatic way to commit to bangs. Instead, you would have extremely short front pieces and call them a side bang. Essentially all they did was fall into your eyes and force you to brush them away every 30 seconds. Every girl who committed to the side bang ended up bobby pinning these monstrosities back until they grew out, immediately regretting their decision. I was happy to never have been a side banger. Especially because I desperately wanted them but knew they wouldn’t work with curly hair, was insanely jelly of my friends with silky smooth hair and then felt SO vindicated when it turned out to be such a terrible hair decision. Let that be a lesson to all that it’s not always great to blindly follow trends, ESPECIALLY when it comes to hair. 

Back to the chair, where my “stylist” continued to prove that her expertise in hair extended no further than her practicing on her dolls’ heads in her childhood bedroom. When you start off “angling” by cutting someone bangs, where does one go from there? Nowhere great. She moved backward, snipping at my head like she was Edward Scissorhands on a creative mission. She was Picasso and my head of hair was her blank canvas. Might I also add, that a few months prior, I had paid almost 300 dollars to have this head of hair “painted” blonde for a natural sun-kissed look. And down the blonde went to the SuperCuts floor to die as she chopped away. I was horrified and there was literally nothing I could do to stop it. It’s not like I could ask her to glue the hair back on my head. The deed was done and there was no going back. I was no longer making small talk with this assassin. I stared at her in silence until she finished attacking my precious head, threw it up in a bun (it BARELY made it), over tipped out of guilt, walked out the door and texted everyone I know that I was hair-assaulted.

Here’s the thing about my friends and family—they know I have a flair for the dramatics. So when I texted them that I had the most horrific haircut of my life, that I paid a dum dum at SuperCuts $22 to take a rusty machete to my head and now I am bald, they all replied “it can’t be that bad, you’re overreacting.” And so, when I got home, I sobbed looking at my ugly mug in the mirror and then I sent them all a picture. And I KNEW it was bad when not one person tried to reassure me after they saw the proof. Responses varied from yikes to it’ll grow out to it’s not horrible but maybe just style it differently for a while. What I heard was, wear a paper bag over your head until it grows out. I tweeted out that I would not be returning to work or seen in the public eye until it grew back and then I went home for my Grandma’s funeral where I had to display my hack job to friends and family members I hadn’t seen in years. Hi, nice to meet you, I’m Nancy’s youngest granddaughter and I used to have beautiful hair up until yesterday when a poorly-trained hair stylist had a vendetta against my scalp. I sent a new round of pictures to my loved ones when I straightened it. Straight hair shows ALL of the flaws and you really got to see the varying dramatic lengths of my hair this way. People were floored by how uneven it was and how the pattern of lengths seemed to erratically change from front to back, toeing the line of a mullet.

In therapy that next day I pointed at my head and started to cry telling her that it may sound stupid but this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. That I was about to travel to Portugal in a few weeks time and I had SPECIFICALLY purchased a felt hat that I called a “trendy Euro hat” that I couldn’t wait to rock for far too many photos (because in Europe you can get away with wearing felt hats to bop around town and not be seen as a total a-hole like you do in small-town America because we are all uncultured swine) and this Euro hat would NOT LOOK GOOD WITH A KATE GOSSELIN HAIRDO. It’s possible that my hysteria had forced me to go beyond dramatics about my hair. But like I said, it was a breaking point for me. Since my therapist is chill as hell and gets that I can be a little ridiculous at times, she reassured me that it made sense to freak out about this because it feels like I have control over nothing in my life and then my hair, which I’ve always had control over just got chopped off and added to the list of things to make me spiral. And then she recommended a natural hair and nail growth supplement that I ordered on Amazon 30 seconds after leaving her office. I took those growth vitamins through the new year, until I felt like my hair had finally gotten back to an acceptable length. Unfortunately, Vidal Sassoon had cut so many varying layers against my will that even as it grew out, it still grew out unevenly, something that will probably be fixed in 5 years—thanks for that, B. But at least I survived my most horrific haircut. 

Recently my mom pointed out that my hair was looking a little long and ratty and I had to admit to her that I was terrified of ever letting scissors near it again. Anytime the mere mention of a haircut comes up, I get a chill down my spine and PTSD back to that fateful October day when that sweet, sweet, dumb idiot fired up her chainsaw and beelined it for my hair. And for the record, my butt cut looked dumb as hell in my Euro hat. So not only did she take my willingness to ever get a trim again, but she took EVERY opportunity I had to look cute and Instagrammable as hell in Porto with a maroon felt hat. So I hope she reads this and has trouble sleeping at night. JK I hope she quit and pursued a job in sales where talking is welcome and scissors are not. I ain’t trying to curse her and get anymore bad juju surrounding this head of hair. I can’t emotionally handle another haircut trauma for as long as I live.