Happy St Patrick's Day!!!

I love St Patrick's Day! It's my favorite holiday. :D I don't know why, really--it's not one people really do much to celebrate for. When my siblings and I were little, Mom told us leprechauns came to the house and kissed things, and wherever they kissed, there were shamrocks there. Then on St Patrick's Day, there were shamrocks stickers all over the house. We used to have fun running around and finding them on our alarm clocks and on the dryer and under the table and on the trashcan.... My favorite was when they kissed my stuff, because it made me feel like the leprechauns liked me. My sister and I sometimes would hunt for leprechauns, too, because if you catch them, you get a pot of gold and a wish.

Besides that, I just love the whole theme of St Patrick's Day. Shamrocks and leprechauns and pots of gold and rainbows and Celtic stuff with an overall green theme.

I toyed with the idea of trying a guiness (sp?) this year, but frankly, I don't like alcohol much. When I was in Utah, I played a ton of pranks on Katy and Tom--snuck into their house and left mint patties all over and dyed their toilet green and put green Kool-Aid in their showerhead. This year, I don't really have anyone to play pranks on (my roommates would definitely not appreciate it), so I decided to try something else for St Patrick's Day: I decided to dye my hair green. And while I was at it, I decided to cut it off too, because I seriously hate having it all in my face.

Originally, I was going to just get temporary hair dye. Not the spray-on stuff, because it's messy and looks just plain awful, but stuff that takes a week to wash out. But unfortunately, the only way that green dye would hold at all would be if I were to bleach my hair first.


I was really nervous about bleaching my hair because I seriously don't want to be blond. I had to leave the stuff in for a total of about an hour. It smelled terrible.


Actually, though, the blond hair looked pretty cool. I was almost tempted to leave it that way. It didn't bleach quite right, so it was almost white at the top, and then it turned orange and dark red in the back (you can't really see it in this picture). It looked like my head was on fire! It was awesome!

But it was St. Patrick's Day, and the whole point was to go green, so green it went. The color didn't turn out to be quite as dark a green as I had anticipated, but it looked pretty cool anyway.


Then I decided to get it cut, and to save some money, I thought I'd ask my friends if any of them were any good at cutting hair. All of them said, "No way Jose, I don't want to be responsible for ruining your hair!" Until I called Mandy, a really sweet girl from church who is, frankly, a little slow. I was kind of nervous about trusting her with the scissors, but well, she said she could do it.

Three snips into cutting my bangs an inch shorter than I'd asked, she added, "By the way, I've never done this before." *facepalm* She kept going, and after six or seven comments of "Oops, hang on, let me make this side shorter to see if I can level it out," she finally gave up and asked me to find someone else to do it. So I was left with a green mullet that had been cut literally right down to my scalp on top. It looked awful.


So I went home and begged one of my roommates to at least cut off some of the long stuff on the back so it didn't look like I had a mullet anymore. Amanda said she would "just as soon as the TV show ended." Two hours later, I wrote her off and convinced Amy to do it, only because I was going to the barber the next day to get it fixed and I assured her that there was nothing she could do to make it worse than it already was.

She did a very good job fixing it, considering. It was really frustrating, though, because I CAN cut hair, so I was looking at it in the mirror knowing exactly how to cut it and not being able to do it myself.

It was really funny, though, when we were sweeping up the hair afterward. Turns out my hair is the same color as the broom. (They are in real life--they shone differently when the camera flashed, though.)


So this morning, I wore a hat to class, and as soon as I was done for the day, I went to the barber to see if she could do anything at all to fix my poor green hair. I was fully expecting to have to settle with either looking stupid for a few months or just buzzing it all off. Fortunately, the lady who works in the campus barbershop is really fantastic! I gave her hardly any instructions, just told her what happened and asked her to fix it or finish the cut or just do whatever she could with it, and she went happily to work and did some kind of magic! She went ahead and buzzed it short enough to spike while leaving it long enough to look good and still be noticeably green. When she finished and I put my glasses back on to look in the mirror, I was stoked! This is the hairstyle that I've wanted since I was fourteen and never had anyone successfully do because they always want to leave it too long!


Yay, you can even see my pointy ears! :D

So overall, I'm pretty happy with it. The green's fading much faster than I had hoped, but that's okay, because the roots got colored and bleached a little patchy. Once it fades (I'm expecting the green to last only about a week), I think I'll have to bleach it again before using a different brand of coloring to dye it. Hmmm, should I go darker green, same green, lighter green, or blue?

This post has been brought to you by the word verdigris.