diners

Since about September, my Dad and I have been meeting every Monday to hop in his car and drive far enough away to get lost in an unfamiliar town, at which point we will hunt down a completely random diner to eat at and evaluate in my little sketch/journal. We started our little diner-review days when my twin sister moved away and I was left all alone with a disoriented heart, an empty room, and a home-town I was working hard not to resent for its lack of coffee shops and its lack of an airport. It seems travel is my coping mechanism for loneliness but a couple commitments made that look impossible.
So my folks got tired of worrying about my sleep-less, meal-less, dodgey-eyed and pathetic lifestyle, so they stepped in with compromises I've come to love.
Mom and I traveled from coffee shop to coffee shop every Friday and Dad and I went on our diner hunts each Monday.
These little weekly adventures could make a blog of their own one day. (dream big...i know.)

All this is simply to say that I found myself in a random diner in a random town on Monday morning and for the first time in quite awhile I noticed a few head-turns. I cherish these turning heads like trophies. I am, after-all, a reaction-motivated punk of a kid most of the time, despite the adult life I try to look like I'm leading.

As a matter of fact, an entirely different set of events that can most easily be summed up, though not entirely accurately, as "car trouble" landed me in Massillon in the middle of a snow storm last Thursday. I had about a buck 75 and the only places still open included a pawn shop, a bar, and a little Italian Restaurant. I figured a buck 75 couldn't get me anything in a pawn shop, and couldn't get me anything good in a bar, so I tried my luck at the Italian restaurant. I popped in, still wearing my scrubs from work and hoped I looked helpless and pathetic enough to earn me loitering privileges.
"Can I wait for a ride in here? I don't have any money but..."
before I could finish my sentence a young man named Smiley told me to have a seat and "would I like a cup of coffee or hot chocolate, on the house?"
I love meeting strangers like this. I wish I had money to shower on people who make my day in such simple and satisfying ways. But as I said...a buck 75...
I accepted SMiley's kind offer and commenced in a delightful bout of eavesdropping.
"A guy came in here the other day with dread locks that went all the way down to the floor!" I heard Smiley say to a couple sitting just in front of me.

a kid like me loves to know she's started some chatter

I would like to give some major props to Smiley who started his own chatter simply by giving me some free coffee and good conversation.

props Smiley

props parents

friends!

I don't know it happens, but people keep creeping out of the woodwork: people with dreds or people who have considered dreds. Maybe I was being naive when I first got dreds and thought I would be this rare, crazy individual in this county. Although...now that I think about it...most of the dred-heads I've met have been in neighboring counties.

I now know of 2 people in this particular county who have dreds, or have had dreds (myself included.)
I now know 2 people in the county next door who have dreds, one of which I participated in the dreds-making, and 2 people in the neighboring county who used to have dreds.

I visited my sister in Kansas City and there was no creeping out of woodwork there. The dred-heads there are everywhere. It's just another hairstyle there. (Isn't that true?)
but here it still feels like a statement of some kind. (isn't that true too?)

No one mentions them at church anymore.
The woman who used to readjust her grip on her walker in order to brandish a fist at me and threaten to chop my hair off..doesn't do that anymore. The guys who used to ask to touch my hair don't ask anymore either.

things are normalizing.

not sure how i feel about that: statement-maker that i am.

campfire

well, it's been almost 3 months of dreadfulness and I'm still loving it. :)
THere is this new issue i've stumbled into however.

Last evening I enjoyed the first bonfire of the season and now I've got a campfire smell to figure out. Usually I can chase any other odors away by burning incense in my room, but this may be tougher.
I may have to break down and wash those suckers again.
but washing means waxing the dreds afterwards
so that's about half an hour to wash, 2 hours to dry, 45 minutes to wax...

how long does it take you to wash and do your hair?

grandmaaaaaa!!!!

I visited the other Amish country this past weekend to celebrate my grandma's 80th birthday. I was a little amused and maybe somewhat nervous about the trip because I knew it would be grandma's first time seeing my dreds. And I knew she wouldn't like them.

My grandma's a good person. She's not a scrooge of an 80 year-old: certainly not. But she's Mennonite to the core. She's as spiritually wise as Ghandi and as admiring of tradition as Reb Tevye. The mix is actually a fairly splendid one. She's one of my heroes, really. She'd win you're heart, I know it.

My mother had forewarned grandma about my dreds, bless her heart, but I don't think grandma knew what to expect. When I arrived at my uncle's house, he admitted that grandma had warned him "not to react too strongly to Carrie's Guatemalan hair-style." (None of us can figure out where she got the idea that dreds were Guatemalan.) My uncle happens to co-run a coffee shop with all sorts of bohemian-style patrons and he is most definitely not the kind of person who would need a forewarning about seeing his niece in dreds. To be honest, he barely noticed.

Grandma asked me questions about the dreds.
"How did you do that?"
"Well Grandma, the process is actually pretty unglamorous. First you...etc etc"
"How do they come out?"
(This is where someone usually chimes in with the popular suggestion that I'll need to shave my head.)
"Well ya I could cut them all out, grow them all out and gradually cut them away, or get a special kind of conditioner that will help me to comb them out."
"So what will you do next with your hair in a couple months?"
"Oh well I'd like to keep them at least a year and even longer if they'll cooperate..."

This brought a momentary pause to the questions. I don't think she liked that.
Someone else sort of took over the questions and work came up. I explained how I had to wear the dreds up in a pony-tail or braid for work and no sooner had I said this than grandma re-joined by simply saying,
"Wear it in a pony-tail for church tomorrow."

On the one had, I'm a 24 year old adult who had just been told by her grandma how she must do her hair for church.
On the other hand...I'm a 24 year old adult who has dedicated an entire blog to the amusement that comes from getting a reaction out of this hairstyle. I have to admit...I enjoy disapproval as much as I dislike it...

The next day, I did indeed wear my hear up in a braid and grandma turned to me and with sweet honesty she looked at me and said, "Carrie, that looks very nice!"

We were both pleased. :)


I love my grandma.

fall fest

My friend knit me a rasta hat for my dreds and it really has made something click in me. It makes me feel like a character from a book. I pop into coffee shops and stroll down sidewalks feeling as though I'll be remembered as some carefully designed character: just slightly more than a stranger.

This past weekend I felt myself getting restless in this tiny county of mine. My twin sister is a days drive away and I am rendered "individual". Some call it lonely.
What do you do with restlessness? What do you do with loneliness for that matter?

I stuck a sketch-book, my little acer laptop and a borrowed book about road-tripping into my little red backpack and headed out the door for a different place. Somewhere out of Holmes County where I could simply be the girl with the yellow hat and dreds.

Don't let me get away with this independent picture of just painted of myself. The truth is I had my mother pick me up at Java Jo's in downtown Berlin and drop me off at the coffee-shop in Canton. Yes. I hitched a ride with my mother.

The feeling of anonymity I get from going to some other town's coffee shop is a refreshing one. I'm just some girl.

When my mother dropped me off in Berlin, the Harvest Festival parade had just begun. The road was lined with conservative Mennonite families and occasional clusters of tourists. If you grow up in this community, you have no trouble spotting what variety of "conservative" or what variety of "Mennonite" a family may be. Shirts are tucked into straight-leg jeans and denim skirts hang just above flashy white sketchers. The place is full of children who have churches to attend on Sunday and good schools to spend their weekdays in. One day these children may become mothers with the ability to make delicious home-cooked meals or fathers with 9-5 jobs and chairs at the head of the dinner table.

or perhaps one or two of them will become single 20-something bloggers with sketch-books in their backpacks instead of cheerios in their purses or sales reports in their briefcases.

It felt good walking down the road on the heels of the floats just watching people...and being watched.

Am I really that cliche? Am I really just out to be "unique?"

Perhaps this little character I've created for myself is the beginning of a better understanding of something less cliche: something more than getting a reaction.

ah adults

Yesterday someone told me I should take a saw and cut off my hair.


I'm not sure why a saw would be the instrument of choice for such an act.

I said I'd rather not.

ah children

Yesterday on my way home from someplace I got stuck behind a school bus. After staring into that void of space between me and the kids in the back of the bus for awhile, I realized the kids were waving at me and trying to get my attention.
I waved back, which is apparently horribly entertaining, and the kids responded by all giving me the peace sign and giving these cool, chilled out sorts of looks. You know the kind. It usually comes with a protruding lip and a nod of the head and probably half-closed eyes.

Little hippies.
I loved it.

how i'm not fired

So, I got an email from my manager at work explaining that the doc (boss to us both) had asked if I could take out my dreadlocks as he wasn't sure they were suitable for an environment with so many Amish clients.

I said no.

but when you're an adult and a boss asks you to do something...you can't just say no. There are consequences. So I said "no, and I understand that there may be consequences."

that's the adult thing to say, right?

Well the doc was busy for quite a few days so the manager and I spent a few nail-biting days unsure as to whether or not I would be losing my job over this refusal or not. The manager was pullin for me, so she had me continue to come into work while we waited for the boss to have time for the question of my dreads.

I have to admit, that day that I was asked to come in to cover for someone and was given the freedome to "come in whenever I could," I spent an hour waxing my dreads before I came in. Probably out of spite. A moment to be un-adult.

Well the doc found some free-time to address the issue of my dreads and admitted that he didn't want it to be the kind of issue that caused me my job or anything. He said he was perfectly happy with me simply pulling them back into a pony-tail each day.


SO i got to keep my job, but until a few days ago I had no idea if my dreads had really cost me my job or not.

hm

i think i might have just lost my job on account of these locks.

more to come

day 9: i love my menno's

Awwww shucks.

My lil Mennonite Church congregation is great. Just great. :) I could do far weirder things and they would still make me feel loved and cared for. I think that's great.

There's this idea that "church-folk" are a special breed of people who don't care as much about making people feel loved as they do about following the long-standing rules of "propriety." There are sadly many congregations and many Christians in general who have undoubtedly made people feel this way. (I apologize on behalf of anyone who has received that kind of feeling from a Christian. And i apologize doubly so for times in my youth, and even now, when I forget or have forgotten the humble creature I am, and have treated people in any way other than loving.)
...and... There's this other idea that "church-folk" are terribly disappointing if they're not shining beams of joy and purity out their fingertips and leading spotless lives full of heroic endeavors. But the truth is, church-folk are just folk. They're just people and as such, are just as susceptible to the ugly sides of human nature as any other person. The only way any of us (church-folk or non) cross over that ugliness to show something more beautiful and loving is because there's something (or someone, as I believe,) more Divine and merciful to share some Beauty in the faces, actions and words of others and ourselves: Someone willing to fill us with something good and something loving.

anyway....I had no fear that my congregation would shun me or anything, but I have to admit there was this tiny fear that my church congregation would be disappointed in me for making such an unfamiliar and arguably strange aesthetic decision. But instead I was met with a lot of...well...curiosity: none of it demeaning. And think about it. Curiosity is a form of flattery I think or at least it feels that way for me. I've always been particularly flattered by people showing their interest or curiosity in me. There's no easier way to lift me up a bit than to simply show some interest in what I'm up to.
I do love talking.
Perhaps too much.
Yes yes, too much.

hence a blog for everything under the sun.

and now I'm blog-rambling and that is a humbling thing.

off i go.

day 6. Wash that mop

today i washed my dreads for the first time, which is something I'm excited about but feel compelled not to share. "Hurray! I washed my hair!" That just makes all the dread-nay-sayers continue to believe that dreads are gross.
They're not gross. They are clean. It's not like I only shower once a week. That would be gross. It is a precarious thing trying to shower without getting the mess ontop of my head wet, but I've been doing that for a week now.
But hurray! Today I crossed some invisible and unnamed sort of dread-lock bench-mark and I washed my hair for the first time. Celebrate with me everyone!
Yesterday I went to the natural food store in Wooster where a wonderfully helpful lady pointed me straight to the soap she used for her dreads once upon a time. Her hair was long and beautifully curly now: no trace of knots left. She told me stories about bike trips and told me how her dreads came about. Hers were legitimately "neglect dreads." She was my new hero that day, although I did find myself feeling like a less legitimate "dread-head" next to this woman who just literally let her hair do what it wanted.
Mine were not neglected. As i said, 6 hours and 6 hands. That's sort of the opposite of neglect.
But that's the trend I want to set. Now that I know I can do it without 6 hours of work poofing into a matted ball of loose hair, I am going to be the cleanest dread-head I can be.

If only all this beeswax didn't feel so gross to touch, maybe people would stop touching my hair and saying "eww."

That's the next benchmark: when I don't need beeswax anymore.

Sunday I get to show off my dreads to my Mennonite Church community for the first time. Lovely people: They feel like family, but sometimes family has an authority to speak with a bite. I won't be one bit surprised if one or two folks sing the same tune as my mother: "why would you do that to your hair!"

I can't wait.

day 4

Yesterday a lady rolled down her car window and shouted an enthusiastic "I love your hair" as she approached the traffic light and turned the corner out of view. It made me feel like a million bucks that a random stranger would feel compelled to cross that invisible barrier we put up here in the western world: this "privacy wall" I love to see shattered.
I've been somewhat surprised by the reactions so far. Really the only signs of disapproval I've gotten haven't been more than "no comment," and the occasional "that's gross..." As the receptionist at a midwifery with a mostly Amish clientele, I didn't know what to think when it came to work. The staff is the best you could ask for with personalities that make me feel like I'm just hanging out; so I wasn't too worried about what my co-workers would say. And to be honest, my experience with the Amish is that, regardless of how opinionated they may or may not feel, they tend to show faces of even-keeled humility more often than strong emotions of disapproval or negativity.
I remember my Amish cousins telling my sister her short hair looked "dumb" when we were all too young to counteract that urge to say exactly what we felt and to laugh at whatever looked different, but I really can't remember any other strong words of disapproval since then. My energetic little Amish granny barely said anything even when I chopped all my hair off about 3 years ago.
I do remember her shuffling up to my ponytail about a year ago and squinting with her slowly failing eyes, waiting until she was so close that she could reach out and feel the ponytail with her fingers to say, "Oh good, your hair's growing back. I like it better this way."

...I think i'll visit grandma this weekend.

day 2: showing the folks

I went to the local coffee shop this morning for the public debut of the dreadlocks. The reactions were as to be expected: some enthusiastic and curious and some less so...

The real event however was a trip to my parents' place to celebrate my older sister's birthday. My parents have known about my plan for dreads since I sprung the idea on them on Thanksgiving: (not the least obnoxious holiday conversation I've had.) My mom fought it for awhile sending me various clever little texts and emails in attempt to "show me the light" about how gross and ugly they would be. One day she called and told me she had dyed her hair half blonde and half black. I played along for a few minutes affirming her and such until he finally admitted she hadn't really dyed her hair but "wouldn't that have looked rediculous? Wouldn't you have wanted to stop me?"
you see where she was going?
of course.
As the weeks went on she quieted down and accepted that, A: it was never going to graduate from just talk, or B: I would do it without a second thought to whether it looked "gross and ugly" to her or not.
so she resigned gracefully.
My dad must certainly dislike the idea of dreads. He doesn't even like when I straighten my hair. But he makes it his primary goal to make me feel free to do with my hair, body, or life as I choose. He's quite successful at it too. I could do any number of crazy things to my appearance and Dad would keep his opinion respectfully to himself.

I was expecting a bit of a show when I went to my parents' place tonight: even hoping for it perhaps but my parents responded beautifully. Mom looked at them, shrugged and said that it looked a little like when my hair was straightened. Dad barely commented at all.

Tomorrow's adventure will be attempting to deal with grody, post-run dreads. I will wash them and I will probably hate re-twisting them for who knows how long.
we shall see

day 1 pics

pics of the dreads only an hour old. 6 hands; dread-wax; 6 hours.

Day 1

Here's the scoop.
I am a young, 24 year old Mennonite girl who's just moved back to my hometown in Amish Country Ohio to help the church of my growing-up years start an intentional community.

Now if i've just gotten you all excited about intentional community-living, go visit my other blog: http://www.livingactsmmc.blogspot.com

This particular blog is about the little endeavor that I'm sure will become a sometimes frustrating/sometimes delightful adventure....

having dreadlocks in Holmes County Ohio.

This whole shinannigans started about...12 hours ago when i returned from my best bud's wedding. It's generally a nice gesture to look as pretty as possible if you're in a friend's wedding party so I've been holding off on this little experiment until now.

It took roughly 6 hours to do, but two other bridesmaids, my twin sister and college friend, and myself have dreadlocked my otherwise ordinary hair into nice little nappy strings. The first hour or so had me staving off some panic as my older sister reminded me of our family pictures in two weeks, and my brother-in-law reminded me of the traditional Mennonite "tent-revival" I had agreed to go to in a week.

Thus: a blog.

If anyone reads this crazy little scribble-fest, you will get to read about how these awkward events go.
How does a little mennonite girl surrounded by her loving but very Amish relatives get by with a less-than traditional hair-style?

That's the question i'll be thinking over as I try to sleep tonight.

If you have questions about the Amish or dread-lock tips, send them my way! (That is, if I have any readers. Otherwise i'll start signing in with "dear diary".)