Saturday, June 25, 2011

Everything I need to know about life I learned from cutting my own bangs


1. Be bold. If you pussy out you will end up with thin, wispy, shitty, wimpy bangs. They will be limp and greasy and fall in your eyes. What you get will not be what you wanted because you only went halfway.

2. Sometimes you will fuck up and look like an asshole. This is how life goes. Not everything you do is great.

3. But in about two weeks or so you will totally get over it, and soon nobody will really even remember the fortnight you spent looking like a retarded kindergarten teacher. Seriously. You will get over it.

4. And also seriously, not everybody is paying attention to every little thing you do all the time. Most of your most intimate and profound traumas they not only don't care about or want to know about, but they don't even notice.

5. Unless you were stupid enough to capture your awkward phase on camera. Be very careful about who you let photograph you. You do not want to end up tagged in blurry, shitty pictures on Facebook where you always seem to have your mouth open like you're screaming underwater just because someone "likes candid shots."

6. But also sometimes you will cry. This is inevitable when you end up looking not like Ana Karina but the aforementioned kindergarten teacher. It is OK to cry sometimes, even out of self pity. You're only human. And, if you have someone in your life who will sympathize and maybe even take you out to dinner to cheer you up because you are ugly and miserable, cherish that person forever.

7. Along these lines, don't be so hard on yourself if you don't look like Kate Moss when you're finished with the kitchen scissors. You're just a regular person. Don't expect the world.

8. And, don't expect that anything that can be performed in ten minutes or less will transform you completely. That's just greedy.

9. Nothing in nature is perfectly symmetrical. Do not strive for perfection unless you enjoy being unhappy.

10. Sometimes you will get hair in your eyes and it will kind of hurt. Sometimes you will slice open the skin on your brow-bone. You cannot complain about these things. You are the one who took up the scissors in the first place, remember.

11. Also, don't blame the scissors. It's a poor workman who blames his tools.

12. Although, you really do want to try to get your hands on the best equipment possible for the job you're about to do, if you can afford it. It will make things a lot easier. If you can't afford it, that kind of sucks. It sucks to be poor so try to avoid that if you can. This is the real point of lesson #12.

And finally, because who doesn't like a baker's dozen,

13. Maybe you shouldn't wear bangs at all. Sometimes in life you fool yourself into thinking you're more special than you are, have more talent that you really do, can pull off something you can't really pull off. Maybe you are wise enough to know when to give up. If not, I hope you have a special person in your life who can gently take you aside and say, "Dude, stop doing this to yourself." Or maybe you can pull off a heavy, dramatic fringe. If so, good for you. But they need a lot of upkeep. Prepare for constant maintenance.

Remember kids: your bangs will break you down. Especially if you are really shallow, like me.