pre-wedding anxiety dream

As a psychologist, I don’t “buy into” dream analysis. All in all, I think it’s crap, because I subscribe to the theory that dreams are the product of random neuronal firings. Our neurons get active in weird ways while we sleep, and our brains try to make sense of it by building a story around it.

Last night I dreamed that it was the night before the wedding, but I was already dressed. All of my hubby’s Scandinavian relatives were staying in the same house with us. The house was totally surrounded by water, and the cats went swimming in it for koi-like goldfish and what appeared to be deep-fried shrimp. While swooshing around the house in my entire wedding ensemble and trying to get the cats out of the water, I suddenly remembered that I’d neglected to buy Christmas presents for hubby’s younger brother, and that I still had data that needed to be analysed. I plunked myself down a table in order to crunch some numbers on my laptop, when hubby’s big brother came by and said “You’re doing that wrong… you need to analyse the covariance matrix instead of the raw data” [keep in mind, IRL, hubby's big brother is in business management, not statistics!]. He then sat down and proceeded to modify my data file and do my analyses for me. In the meantime, hubby came by and started whining about my eye makeup and veil. It seems that he didn’t want me to wear my veil at all, and that big brother also had some ideas about my eye makeup [NO IDEA where that one came from.... big brother is married, has 2 beautiful kids, and to my knowledge, has never worn eye makeup!]. At this point of the dream, I locked myself into the room where all the Scandinavian aunts and girl cousins were also getting ready. Hubby knocked and banged on the door, pleading with me to come out and get married. Yet, when I opened the door, his brother still had his ideas about my eye makeup…

At this point I forced myself to wake up, thank goodness. Some of the details make me laugh a little bit (the eye makeup, and that I can’t get away from data analysis, even in my sleep). Others are just weird. For example, my hubby is one of the most easy-going guys in the world, and has no preference about whether I wear a veil or not. He just prefers that I don’t wear it over my face when I walk down the aisle. As I’m already pretty clumsy, wearing a layer of netting over my face for a ritual walk seems like a very bad idea. He’s also been a little fussy (or in his words, “fuzzy”) about the processional and recessional marches, but certainly not to the degree that I’d lock myself in a room and not come back out.

I guess it’s all just stress and my brain trying to play tricks on me.

it seemed like a good idea at the time

I noticed I had split ends within days of my last haircut, but have been obsessing about them for the last week or so. It’s gotten to the point that I trim them off at work because I hate noticing them out of the corner of my eye. They also tickle my neck, which drives me absolutely crazy. I’ve planned to wear my hair up for the wedding, but down as always at all other wedding events. Split ends do not look nice, and I was starting to be bothered by the fact that my hair would look like crap for most of the wedding events.

So last night I decided to take matters into my own hands and did a home treatment in order to fix, mask, or prevent the annoying things. I decided to follow a recipe I found on the internet (Mix 1 tsp honey with 2 Tbsp olive oil, then beat in 1 egg yolk. Massage on hair in small sections. Wrap head with shower cap for 30 minutes. Rinse and shampoo).

Being a thrify girl, I opted to save my olive oil for my cooking, and chose to use the end of a small bottle of lemon-infused safflower oil instead. I added 2 t of honey to the bottle, plopped the bottle into some hot water to soften the honey. I skipped the egg yolk, thinking that if I made a mistake it might be embarassing to explain to the plumber why our shower drain was clogged with cooked eggs. I used less than half of the mixture on my hair and let it sit for 30 minutes. My cats sniffed my hair a lot during this time, but didn’t try to eat it, per their usual nightly routine.

When 30 minutes was up, I rinsed, and rinsed, and rinsed, but the sticky-slick mixture didn’t want to leave my tresses. I toweled my hair dry, only to notice that it looked like I’d never rinsed it at all. Two shampoos later, my hair still felt oily and I could still smell a little bit of lemon. I wrapped a towel around my pillow before going to bed, in the hopes that I wouldn’t ruin our brand-new pillowcases.

I took another shower and washed my hair for the 4th time in 24 hours this morning. Lo and behold, all the oil washed out this time around. I skipped conditioner, and was more careful with combing, blowdrying and curling. An inspection at the office revealed fewer noticible split ends but overall substantially duller color. So it did what it was supposed to, but still doesn’t seem to have done much good for my hair. I have a feeling that today will end up as a ponytail day after all!

40 more days until life returns to normal, and I will be able to cut my hair properly!

“The only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that is laughable is vanity.”

Henri Bergson (French Philosopher, 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature, 1859-1941)