I studied under George Singleton for a summer. I was in a small class of just-became-teenagers who were gathered from all corners of South Carolina and not one girl left without a maddening crush on him. He was funny. Smoked a lot. Liked junky garage sales. Wore the same black leather jacket just about every day. Gave a reading in front of a crowd of distinguished guests and said “camel toe” and then chuckled at himself under all the shocked stares. And he had these piercing blue eyes that said “I think in long sentences that are coherent and more intelligent than anything you will ever write.” Ugh. And UNG.

It was the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities before it became an actual school. At age 15 I qualified for the then-summer program because I wrote a short story about how a boy who lived in the plains got into trouble because he let the wind into the house. Made a big mess, he did. Sand everywhere. Anyway, I don’t know why George thought I belonged in the program. Maybe he actually got the extended metaphor I was weaving with the whole wind thing. Or maybe I just made that up when he asked me about the story. Neither one of us knew that at the time. I still don’t know. Can’t find the original copy.

So I went for about a month and a half (the duration). Wrote some good stuff. Wrote some awful stuff. The stuff that George called awful wasn’t too unlike the plot line of Grindhouse or Transformers, though. Maybe I was ahead of my time? Didn’t matter. Those blue eyes and that stubbly chin reduced me to tears on more than one occasion. In the end, I walked away from George Singleton a disillusioned pencil hater with an armful of short story books written by guest authors. For years I didn’t write a single thing besides messages in ICQ and a haiku on the first iteration of Zeldman.com. Anyone remember the martini haiku contest? I’d love to know.

Today I still don’t write like I did 13 years ago. Sure, I do blog stuff and try to be witty on Twitter, but that’s different stuff, much in the way a sonnet is different from a limerick. I got to thinking about George because I was itching to close the laptop, and I happen to still have all of those books I mentioned before. So I re-read These People Are Us one afternoon. And it got me to thinking about what a waste of time that summer was. I was an unfertilized plant, so to speak. Nothing to build a good story upon when you’re from a tiny southern town, and your only friends were people who feared eternal damnation for going to a party where there might be beer. I was a green, stiff, slightly dry little twig. Couldn’t do a thing with me, so he snapped me in half.

So how to get juicy and colorful and perhaps aromatic? Hell if I know. I’m out of practice. But here’s my guess v1.0 (for all you 15 year old aspiring writers out there): Be reckless. Fail miserably. Let people into your heart and allow them to ransack the place. Triumph. Travel. Forgive. Maybe be slightly mentally ill. Think in long sentences. Note I didn’t say “think in long sentences and use big words”–Big words are intimidating and impressive but they don’t do shit for telling a good story. And the best stories are short ones, in my opinion. We live life in episodes of varying lengths and each has its own theme. Divide into chunks, analyze, add to the mixture or toss in the compost bin so they can become something else. It’s really tough to make a point with just a few pages of text. George Singleton can, and he’s amazing at it.

Ah, George. This is how it works, eh? In my overly dramatic teenage mind you were stabbing me to death with a butter knife. Now I want that knife for my bread.

I wonder what he’d think of my blog?

I’m not a licensed hair person. At one point I thought I wanted to become one, but that didn’t pan out. Not to go on a rant about Aveda, but having my product sales numbers read out loud to the class wasn’t the kind of beauty school for which I thought I’d signed up. Nope. I did sales at The Container Store. Hell, I taught people how to sell at The Container Store. Why the eff would I want to be Aveda’s product pushing corporate pawn when all I wanted to do was learn how to cut hair really, really well?

And no, the Aveda Institute’s stupid sales stuff didn’t run me out of beauty school. You see, I’m grateful for learning that hair is really about products. I now can do some cool stuff with pomade and hair spray. But! I didn’t want to pervert my purpose, which was only about the art of giving a good hair cut. Being “just a good hair cutter” won’t sustain you in the beauty business, though. No, it’s product sales. And up-selling. That deep penetrating hair treatment that costs $120 in the salon? It will wash out in 48 hours and you’ll be back to looking like a frizzy mess. Worse yet? You’ll feel disappointed and misled. Take it from me: You’ll get greater satisfaction out of that money if you book yourself an amazing massage with a huge-handed guy named Sven.

I couldn’t keep lying to people in order to make money off of them. It’s wrong. I had to get out of hair sales before I ended up like Willy Loman. Worrying about what people thought of me and having to constantly watch my back was literally driving me crazy.

After about three months I withdrew from the Aveda Institute/Aveda Product Sales Machine and had myself a good old-fashioned summer vacation (those of you who know me personally are probably saying, “Whew!” because there is truth here that I am withholding because the Internet doesn’t get to know everything about my life). Thought I’d sworn off hair. Truly, I swore off sales.

When I go back and read the journal I kept during that period of time I see a lot of conflict between giving a good haircut and asking for money. I walked all over town and sweated and drank coffee and read books and contemplated selling my hair-doing kit. People, I have a golden curling iron. It’s ridiculous. I looked at it for weeks and said to myself, “Hair is so stupid. Look at this impressively shiny, yet poorly functioning piece of equipment.” That thing embodied everything I hated about hair school. It merely looked expensive. And I said to myself on a long walk from from NW 20th and Flanders to SE 50th and Hawthorne, “The only way I can do hair for people is if I don’t take money.” It was a breakthrough. A hot, caffeine-charged realization that freed me to pick up the scissors again.

“That’s right,” I thought, “I don’t want to do hair because I want to swim in cash. I want to do hair because it’s fun for me and helps people feel good about themselves.”

It’s all or nothing. I don’t want to ask for just a few bucks for a haircut, let alone a lot of bucks. When you put a dollar amount on something, an expectation is set. Nobody goes to Rudy’s expecting the most fantastic razored haircut ever. Why? Because Rudy’s is cheap and the people who work there want you cut, styled and paid up in as little time as possible. On the flipside, when you pay $80 for a smashing new style you expect better than smashing. You kinda hope that new ‘do will get you laid. In Nyco’s One-Woman Unlicensed Salon? I’m just honored that you asked me to do your hair. That’s it. If you want to make me cookies, cool. Otherwise, thanks for letting me do what I love, and do it for you.

There’s that whole “does my pet look like me or do I look like my pet?” cliché. Though pretty uncanny in some instances, that’s not what I mean when I say “our pets are us”. If I asked you “Why do you have a pet?” I’d get varying answers (none of which would be “because s/he looks like me!”). Some of us want to nurture, some of us want an excuse to do something like hiking or just plain going outside, others want someone to talk to, a few of us want to feel like a hero, and on and on and on. What we choose to have as a pet says a lot about us, too. Dog? Cat? Bird? Snake? Regardles of species, our pets have the exact same needs we do, whether we know it at the time of adoption or not. That, my friends, is what I mean by “our pets are us”.

You see, a pet’s survival is fairly uncomplicated. It needs to eat, excrete, and have something to do. So do we, right? Get a little deeper and we animals like a comfortable place to sleep, companionship, and to have some fun once in awhile. Beyond that we get into the “nice to have” kind of things like chairs and elevators, which animals use but wouldn’t necessarily want. I won’t go further because we’re all pretty good at calling to mind and naming off the “nice to have” human stuff. We know where to get it and how much it costs. But that simple stuff–The needs that involve our own minds and our own hearts… It gets forgotten. Our pets bring us back to–remind us of–what we essentially need.

…A little adventure without smart phones, city buses, squeezing through crowds, and explaining yourself to others. Smell fresh air, watch the birds, listen to the ocean, feel the sand and water as it dirties your feet, and cower at the mercy of the wind. Dig. Laugh. Run. Jump. To disconnect from all worry and care only about yourself. And your dog. Your human.