grooming experiments, continued

i also had to mention that i am doing more grooming experiments, and the voices are always nagging me to talk about that. they particularly want me to talk about body odor, and i will get to it on a day when i have more time, but i'm not going to write about it again on my 'real world' blog.

i think my hair has grown to its fullest length. it is 'classic length,' where the longest tip of it reaches to almost my knee, but that's only a very thin little bit, as it narrows more and more towards the end. i am not trimming split ends at all anymore, so it is gradually growing as long as possible.

since that goal is accomplished, if it's true my hair won't get any longer, then i would get bored and want a new goal. in order to prevent me from changing my hair or cutting it, the new grooming goals are to go further in the direction i was already going.

so i am doing more experiments. i haven't been using toothpaste, because fluoride is a myth (read weston price - i have to talk more about weston price one of these days). on the internet, they're calling it "no 'poo," as in no shampoo, and poo is a play on words, that shampoo is a chemical that goes through the skin, and like a lot of chemicals, it's bad for you, so they're calling it 'poo.' so i'm not using any shampoo, and i'm also not using soap. i used to use shampoo all over my body, after dating eric, as he washed himself that way since it doesn't leave soap scum and leaves you feeling very smooth. it also prevents pimples, if you don't use soap on your face and clog your pores with soap. anyway, no shampoo, no soap, and no toothpaste. i don't know how long i've been doing this, but it's at least been a week now, i think. i've been taking baths and showers, but not necessarily every day, and i'm just using a cloth, but not cleaning agents of any kind.

to brush my teeth, i'm chewing on raw cabbage, with the goal being to deactivate the acids in the coffee that i drink, to make my mouth alkaline. the cabbage really freshens my mouth surprisingly well. i was using sea salt at first, but it dried out my lips really badly, and it was uncomfortable and gave me strange feelings in my head. so i switched, and the cabbage is what i'm using currently. i still use a toothbrush, with nothing on it, and i run the faucet while brushing, and just rinse out the brush with water. i floss a little bit as needed.

this serves the purpose of giving me a new set of goals and grooming obsessions. i read in someone else's blog, on wordpress somewhere, that she too had a 'grooming obsession' or 'hair obsession.' they would love it if they learned how to obsess about achieving the goal of the longest possible hair length that your DNA allows you to grow. anyway, i've achieved the fullest hair length goal, and i always wondered, all these years, what goal i would set for myself after that. for a while i considered that maybe i would do something drastic to it, like perm it or color it and then chop it all off and start over. but i don't want to do that. i want to keep it, and also, convince others to participate.

about 'wanting others to participate,' this is especially true with respect to men, because there is no religion and no culture on earth that requires/encourages/allows men to grow all of their hair and all of their beards to full length. some cultures TOLERATE hair growth in men, and the result is that we have almost everybody chopping off all of their hair, and irregular, inconsistent beard growth, or people who grow long beards but keep their head hair short, or people who are phobic/terrified about growing long hair while the rest of the head has gone bald. also, black men have problems with it because of the kinky afro hair textures, and i want to work with that to develop a set of natural grooming standards for afro-textured hair. the afro textures, the bald-with-long-back style, and the growing to full length instead of keeping it at some arbitrary length, and also, not worrying about split ends anymore at all - all of those challenges need to be taught to people and implemented.

the men need ways to pin up their beards, like a braid, or a clip of some kind, so that they can work in situations where society is beard-phobic.

the image we're getting at is 'old dumbledore.' the first dumbledore, with his very long hair and very long beard.

but that shouldn't be the ONLY 'ideal' image, because we want to have bald men growing their remaining hair also, and we want black men with afro-textured hair to grow theirs. they can leave it loose, or use dreadlocks or braids, and i want to work with some afro hair to find out the reality of how it looks and how it handles. i've thought that i would probably advertise a request on craigslist in order to find people with long afro hair for me to braid, brush, etc, to find out what it can realistically do. i've read that their hair grows only about two years' length, instead of growing for several decades the way straight-haired people's does. straight hair or wavy hair can grow to floor length and beyond, but afro hair cannot, unless it's in dreadlocks.

so that is the hair obsession - one of the other topics i don't like writing in my non-anonymous blog. already, one of the guys at work shaved his nose bridge eyebrow hair because i wrote a blog about monobrows and how i want all types and shapes of eyebrows to be left natural and appreciated for their variety, beauty, and touchability. (when i've written about this or thought about it, one of the voices quoted the prisoner of azkaban movie, and the monster book of monsters: 'you're supposed to STROKE it!' i love stroking eyebrows.) i don't know whether he actually read my blog, or whether he shaved his nose bridge on impulse because he was a 'puppet' and just had a sudden urge to do that, or if it was a totally meaningless random coincidence. who knows. i don't want all the guys becoming as idiotic about their eyebrows as the women are, and if i even talk about the subject AT ALL on my other blog, they will do things like that as a test. believe me, plucked eyebrows look HORRIBLE. i really mean it. i looked at a photo of my own, from years ago, and i've looked at other women's, and every time i see them, i feel this intense desire to force them to let their eyebrow hair grow back. it looks disgusting, it looks like they're cancer patients on chemotherapy and all the hair has fallen off. there's some disease, something with the thyroid, where it makes your eyebrow hair fall off.

okay, now i really do have to go to work.

the idea behind the retmeishka blog is that if somebody ever decides that they want to know more about me, about my slightly-more-private thoughts or sexual thoughts, or about my grooming obsessions, i can give them this secret glossolalia word and send them here.