Girly gigs

PROS

• No bad B.O.
• No fear of being squashed up against shirtless, sweaty guys
• No fear of drunken males

CONS

• Epic toilet queues

Have I left anything out?

I love short hair

I am going to sing the praises of short hair.

When it comes to hair, I go through phases. I like my hair really really long or really really short. I dislike it in-between. It usually drives me nuts.

My hair is quite short now. This is what I like about it:

- So much easier to wash. No more long strands getting tangled in my hands while shampooing, no more longs strands to pick up after your shower.

- So much quicker to wash.

- So much less product (shampoo/conditioner) to use.

- So much easier to dry. I grab a towel and give my hair a good shake and I'm done.

- So much easier to comb/brush. I can use a lot less pressure to comb/brush my hair because there's a lot less of it to brush

- No need to tie it up.

- It doesn't get in the way of my food/drink (I confess, this was a pretty big reason for me cutting it :P)

- It's all healthy because yucky split ends have been cut off.

I LOVE SHORT HAIR!

Although to be absolutely fair, since there is now no hair covering the nape of my neck, I feel the cool breeze a lot more. I guess if you're a man, you're probably used to it. That's probably the only thing I dislike (if you could call it that) about short hair.

Fat sausages are wrong.

Why do supermarkets even sell them? They are so gross. They take longer to cook. They are gross and inconvenient and wrong.

Thin sausages are just superior in every way. I'm not even going to make 5 dot points for you, thin ones are better.

Humid.

Before Sydney I lived in Bowral for 6 months, where it is cool and pleasant and nobody sweats. My first summer in Sydney was a nasty shock, because I had forgotten what humidity was and I felt sticky and sweaty all the time. This current warm, steamy spell is just as yucky. Washing isn't drying, you sweat, you get heat rash and other itchy skin flare-ups, mould is thriving, dry food is going stale and soggy instantly.

But it's not all bad. Here are some pros to cheer you up.

• No dry skin. Save money on moisturiser and lip balm!
• Air plant is thriving!
• Wisps of hair form cute curly ringlets!

Haircuts.

Pro: Really needed a haircut for a long time, the split ends were causing my hair to curl.

Con: I don't like making appointments; also fancy salons make me feel daggy.

So last night I walked into the asian one on the corner of the 9ways and got it over with.

Pro: The cheap impulse haircut basically works: split ends are gone, hair is shorter.

Con: But it is too short and heavy at the front to sit off my face. My whole head is also uncontrollably wavy. This is the worst haircut I have had in 3 years.

Now I face the dilemma of the next haircut.

Pro: When my hair grows out I can get a better cut. Hurry up hair.

Con: I have to go through the whole saga all over again.

Self service checkouts.

Pros:

• You don't get asked for flybuys
• You can bag your own stuff at your own speed in your own way
• Early on there was novelty
• Early on there was no queue because most people were afraid or objected to them

Cons:

• The bagging area always rejects my backpack, so I have to stack then pack.
• Now the novelty has caught on with a whole lot of people who have no idea how to navigate the system, so they take 4 times longer than if they let a professional do it for them at a regular checkout. They clog up the whole show.

Newspaper subscriptions in red-brick blocks of flats; the joys and sorrows.

I live at the top of a 3 story block of flats, and took up a weekend SMH subscription on special. I sometimes found that it was missing when I went down to get it, but would reappear later in the day neatly placed on the table just inside the building door. Which was kind of considerate, but kind of annoying to have made the trip down 6 flights of stairs for nothing. I wrote a note one Friday asking politely if people would please not 'borrow' my newspapers, and happily the borrowing stopped and there is now another weekend newspaper being delivered to the building.

However, now I always have to open my own newspapers—they have that pink glad-wrap around them and you can't find the end and then you can't unpeel it cleanly because it is stretchy and shredded. It was almost worth the inconvenience of having the newspaper borrowed just to have someone else unwrap it for me.

A bitter-sweet victory.