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Junior Member
Join Date: Mar 10
Location: Columbus
Posts: 1
Girls Just Wanna Have...Tacky Themed Picnics -
We had to write a definition essay for class. I chose fun. It was not fun.
Slowly sinking in one of four uncomfortably soft suede chairs that lined the wall, my eyes floated around the small room, noting the different mousses and shampoos I wanted to try in the future and eventually landing on a neat little rack of fashionable hair magazines placed suggestively by the door. I tried to look away—honest—but the muted atmosphere procured by the deep teal wallpaper decorated with sporadic orchids was just enough to convert iron-clad determination into a quick and gentle tapping of the foot and eventual defeat. As I was hovering over an old issue of People, the middle-aged women in the salon telepathically convinced me to pick the one that didn’t have Octo-mom on the cover. I shuffled nonchalantly back to my seat and immediately went to work on the lesser scandalous hair catalog, only folding down pages depicting very blonde girls with very blonde hairstyles my very coarse black Asian hair could never imitate.
After fifteen more minutes of unreasonable goal setting, it was finally my turn for a life changing haircut. Except when I put down the magazine, I realized the voice that called my name did not belong to the petite perky twenty something blonde who I was used to but instead to a tall serious looking thirty something brunette. A twinge of discomfort overcame the left corner of my mouth as I realized I would have to have the Forming A Relationship With Your Hairdresser Conversation all over again. She quickly introduced herself to me and she, Rebecca—actually, no, she seems more like a Rebekkah—led me into the shampoo room—a dark, dimly lit space about the size of a broom closet—very intimate.
After watching me struggle to let my neck relax and lie down, the questioning began. They were all standard, typical, socially acceptable pieces of small talk—questions I could answer truthfully and still feel comfortable about afterwards. Unbeknownst to me, she was about to drop an A-bomb that would traumatize the entire left hemisphere of my brain.
“So, what do you do for fun?” she asked with a smile, maniacally squirting conditioner into her palms.
I blanked. My eyes widened. My throat closed up. The first thing I thought of was Picnic Club[1] which is absolutely why I could not say anything. I could feel her eyes judging me as I simultaneously felt like I was drowning (I leaned my head too far in the sink…Just kidding. Strictly metaphorical drowning). I finally choked out a string of words with a wave of uncertainty and a very obvious decrescendo,
“Uh…what normal highschoolers do for fun…?” Great. Now Rebekkah with two ‘k’s and an ‘h’ thinks either one of two things: I’m a loser or I’m some kind of substance abuser. Luckily, she recovered from shock much quicker than I did and kept running down the list of things to talk about when there’s nothing to say. Too bad the next category was sports.
It’s been four days since then and although the excitement of a new haircut faded (people stopped complimenting me), the anxiety caused by the seemingly innocent question remained. I became a woman obsessed. I kept trying to brainstorm things I did for fun but all of them ended up matching my new trendy mom doo and my old trendy mom cardigans. The list consisted of things like cooking, cleaning, doing yoga, reading, making crafts, grabbing lunch, and watching romantic comedies (Martha Stewart is my daytime hero). This would not be such an unfortunate list if I were a mother of three who drives a Subaru Forester and takes spinning class on Thursdays. Instead, I am a sixteen year old girl who still has bleach stains on her laundry and a very skewed view of the idea ‘fun’.
The more I thought about it, the more I started to despise the blanket term that I thought implied ‘having a good time.’ But in reality, ‘fun’ only connotes genuine fun half the time. Every event I have ever gone to, that I have ever been asked about, somewhere in my response I manipulated the word, wringing it of its initial goodness with a swarm of voice inflections so that fun really meant anything from ‘It was an enjoyable experience that I would not mind doing again’ to, and lately more often, ‘I wanted to kill myself. Twice.’
Thoroughly distraught and no longer able to trust my own judgment, I started polling the masses. I found that Daniel, my longtime neighbor-friend, likes to stay confined in his basement, eyes glued to a piece of glass and plastic while realistically slaughtering fake enemies of freedom and justice or as he refers to it, “playing Call of Duty IV”. He also enjoys occasionally banging on the drum set he bought off some guy on Craig’s List in no particular pattern or rhythm or as he refers to it, “having a jam sesh”. At the same time, my other friend, Jenny, likes to stalk boys, or rather a boy, in her spare time. And yet according to Spongebob, fun can be broken down into a simple acronym: f is for friends who do stuff together, u is for u and me, n is for anywhere and anytime at all down here in the deep blue sea! That’s when I came to the conclusion that not everyone is a fictional cartoon sponge (or a stalker, or a boy) and that not everyone has the same idea of what fun actually is. My personal definition of the word, although slightly embarrassing, is neither wrong nor accurate. Fun is loosely defined. Fun conforms to the user. Fun has emphasis when given to it. Fun is being with pleasant people, doing pleasant things, whoever and whatever that may be.
Define fun. What is going to Joanne’s Fabrics and spending too much money on chocolate molds and then going home and making chocolate? Correct for $200. Done. Too bad the next time I visit the salon, Rebekkah and I will have already moved on to the Maintaining That Relationship with Your Hairdresser Conversation, one that involves other weapons of mass destruction such as “What’s your family like?” or “Do you have a boyfriend?” Hopefully, I will be able to look her firmly in the eye and respond with a golden ring of confidence: Picnic Club.
[1] Picnic Club: an arbitrarily wonderful social club I made up as an excuse to eat food and to give people a reason to hang out with me. Available to all Dublin Coffman students (and beyond). We literally go around Dublin and eat. Most of the time, they are themed.
Slowly sinking in one of four uncomfortably soft suede chairs that lined the wall, my eyes floated around the small room, noting the different mousses and shampoos I wanted to try in the future and eventually landing on a neat little rack of fashionable hair magazines placed suggestively by the door. I tried to look away—honest—but the muted atmosphere procured by the deep teal wallpaper decorated with sporadic orchids was just enough to convert iron-clad determination into a quick and gentle tapping of the foot and eventual defeat. As I was hovering over an old issue of People, the middle-aged women in the salon telepathically convinced me to pick the one that didn’t have Octo-mom on the cover. I shuffled nonchalantly back to my seat and immediately went to work on the lesser scandalous hair catalog, only folding down pages depicting very blonde girls with very blonde hairstyles my very coarse black Asian hair could never imitate.
After fifteen more minutes of unreasonable goal setting, it was finally my turn for a life changing haircut. Except when I put down the magazine, I realized the voice that called my name did not belong to the petite perky twenty something blonde who I was used to but instead to a tall serious looking thirty something brunette. A twinge of discomfort overcame the left corner of my mouth as I realized I would have to have the Forming A Relationship With Your Hairdresser Conversation all over again. She quickly introduced herself to me and she, Rebecca—actually, no, she seems more like a Rebekkah—led me into the shampoo room—a dark, dimly lit space about the size of a broom closet—very intimate.
After watching me struggle to let my neck relax and lie down, the questioning began. They were all standard, typical, socially acceptable pieces of small talk—questions I could answer truthfully and still feel comfortable about afterwards. Unbeknownst to me, she was about to drop an A-bomb that would traumatize the entire left hemisphere of my brain.
“So, what do you do for fun?” she asked with a smile, maniacally squirting conditioner into her palms.
I blanked. My eyes widened. My throat closed up. The first thing I thought of was Picnic Club[1] which is absolutely why I could not say anything. I could feel her eyes judging me as I simultaneously felt like I was drowning (I leaned my head too far in the sink…Just kidding. Strictly metaphorical drowning). I finally choked out a string of words with a wave of uncertainty and a very obvious decrescendo,
“Uh…what normal highschoolers do for fun…?” Great. Now Rebekkah with two ‘k’s and an ‘h’ thinks either one of two things: I’m a loser or I’m some kind of substance abuser. Luckily, she recovered from shock much quicker than I did and kept running down the list of things to talk about when there’s nothing to say. Too bad the next category was sports.
It’s been four days since then and although the excitement of a new haircut faded (people stopped complimenting me), the anxiety caused by the seemingly innocent question remained. I became a woman obsessed. I kept trying to brainstorm things I did for fun but all of them ended up matching my new trendy mom doo and my old trendy mom cardigans. The list consisted of things like cooking, cleaning, doing yoga, reading, making crafts, grabbing lunch, and watching romantic comedies (Martha Stewart is my daytime hero). This would not be such an unfortunate list if I were a mother of three who drives a Subaru Forester and takes spinning class on Thursdays. Instead, I am a sixteen year old girl who still has bleach stains on her laundry and a very skewed view of the idea ‘fun’.
The more I thought about it, the more I started to despise the blanket term that I thought implied ‘having a good time.’ But in reality, ‘fun’ only connotes genuine fun half the time. Every event I have ever gone to, that I have ever been asked about, somewhere in my response I manipulated the word, wringing it of its initial goodness with a swarm of voice inflections so that fun really meant anything from ‘It was an enjoyable experience that I would not mind doing again’ to, and lately more often, ‘I wanted to kill myself. Twice.’
Thoroughly distraught and no longer able to trust my own judgment, I started polling the masses. I found that Daniel, my longtime neighbor-friend, likes to stay confined in his basement, eyes glued to a piece of glass and plastic while realistically slaughtering fake enemies of freedom and justice or as he refers to it, “playing Call of Duty IV”. He also enjoys occasionally banging on the drum set he bought off some guy on Craig’s List in no particular pattern or rhythm or as he refers to it, “having a jam sesh”. At the same time, my other friend, Jenny, likes to stalk boys, or rather a boy, in her spare time. And yet according to Spongebob, fun can be broken down into a simple acronym: f is for friends who do stuff together, u is for u and me, n is for anywhere and anytime at all down here in the deep blue sea! That’s when I came to the conclusion that not everyone is a fictional cartoon sponge (or a stalker, or a boy) and that not everyone has the same idea of what fun actually is. My personal definition of the word, although slightly embarrassing, is neither wrong nor accurate. Fun is loosely defined. Fun conforms to the user. Fun has emphasis when given to it. Fun is being with pleasant people, doing pleasant things, whoever and whatever that may be.
Define fun. What is going to Joanne’s Fabrics and spending too much money on chocolate molds and then going home and making chocolate? Correct for $200. Done. Too bad the next time I visit the salon, Rebekkah and I will have already moved on to the Maintaining That Relationship with Your Hairdresser Conversation, one that involves other weapons of mass destruction such as “What’s your family like?” or “Do you have a boyfriend?” Hopefully, I will be able to look her firmly in the eye and respond with a golden ring of confidence: Picnic Club.
[1] Picnic Club: an arbitrarily wonderful social club I made up as an excuse to eat food and to give people a reason to hang out with me. Available to all Dublin Coffman students (and beyond). We literally go around Dublin and eat. Most of the time, they are themed.
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