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Well, it's 14 months for me today. I love my dreadies, even though they are not really that.
They don't look like that. At all. When I lift a part of my hair up, you can kinda see them, but when my hair is down, as it normally is, it just looks messy. Now, that wouldn't be a problem if I was at, I don't know, 6 months, or even 9. But I'm 14 months in, and for the past 4, nothing has happened.
Literally - nothing. One of them has maybe moved a loop a bit up, and that's it.
I am unemployed, and I really need a job. I realize they cannot discriminate against spirituality/religions, but I'm not even sure there is something like that in Serbia (regarding the law), and even if there is, they would never tell me I did not get the job because of my hair.
After the interview, they just don't call back. And even if I were to ask, the valid reasons they can give me is that I have no working experience in that field. Which is true. But in order to get experience, somebody has to hire me. And to get the job, I have to have experience... And so on. Catch 22.
So, I love them and I hate them.
Aaand, winter is coming, and I can't sit indoor all day drying my hair.
This is my hair last night,
and this is my hair 10 minutes ago, sunlight an all. And it's wet, so it's supposed to be more defined than usual, but... Well, you can see.
If I were to comb them out, which I believe I will do, I will keep a couple of them. The two behind my ears which are the the only mature ones I have (they have been that way for a looong time), I sometimes tie them back to keep the hair out of my face. And maybe a few more special ones.
But I'm afraid I'll regret it. On the other hand, I've been thinking about this for months.
It kinda frightens me that I used to break up with boyfriends and completely cut them out of my life after only a week of doubting the relationship, and I cannot bring myself to comb my hair after months of thinking about it. That sounds rather wrong...
So, I've been listening to a band I love, and felt really bad they never got the credit they deserved on a global level.
The band I'm talking about is Ekatarina Velika, a.k.a. EKV. (Named after a Russian ruler, Catherine the Great).
The thing is, if you are from Balkans, the world doesn't really know about you unless you played a major role in our wars, or play sports (Novak okovi (Djokovic) reference :D ).
But since wars are behind us, and this band's music still sounds amazing, and is a testimony of the time when there was a war (in the 90's), I wanted to share their music with you all. Some of you might like it.
Their music depicts a time when things here started to change. Tito died, and Yugoslavia started collapsing. A lot of nations lived here together, and suddenly, hate towards people who were not of your nationality was promoted. The younger generation (the part of it that was not brainwashed, at least) was miserable because of it.
They were hopeless, they did not want to see their friends moved to another country (a newly formed country, I might add) just because their last name was different, or because their great-grandfather was born somewhere else; let alone see them killed for the same reason.
They talked about weltschmerz (world pain) they felt, and made music to let their feelings out.
This was also the time hard drugs first came to this territory, and people had no idea how harmful they were.
The story I personally like the most about this band is the following.
Just before the war in Bosnia started,many musicians gathered in Belgrade, got a truck, and made a mobile concert. They stood in the trailer while the truck rode around the town, and played. They kept repeating ,,Mir, brate, mir!'' ('Peace, brother, peace!').
During the war, many young people left for the USA, Germany, or wherever else they could, in order to save themselves and their families.
But many artists, Milan and Margita, a.k.a. Magi (the pianist in EKV) included, refused to leave. Milan kept saying he could never leave his country (Yugoslavia, not Serbia). So he stayed.
He died in 1994 of pancreas cancer.
Magi was an amazing pianist with opportunities to go to Russia to continue her education. She decided to stay and work on EKV.
She was deeply struck by Milan's death, they were incredibly close.
She was a true bohemian, and a gentle soul. After the 90's she pretty much stopped playing, and has spent her last years in a homeless shelter. She died in 2002. The cause of her death was never public, but it is assumed she died of an infection due to heroin use.
They are the two most famous members of this band.
Most of the people who played in EKV are dead.
But their music lives on.
This is my favorite EKV video, since it was filmed in aSynagogue in my town (Subotica, Serbia) in 1992. I lived a 100m away from it at the time.
And this is my favorite EKV song of all times.
The lyrics are true poetry. I'll translate Sinhro for you.
,I will change the world by the end of this song. I will dance the drunken dance in therhythm of the wind. I will let the Sun melt the love, between the worlds, away from us. I came to take you away, so you wouldn't be afraid,so you wouldn't say 'I'm not here', so you wouldn't close your eyes, so you wouldn't forget word by word. I came to take you to the houses of my ancestors, to tell you there is no night, so you would give up. Desire is hunger is fire. I will change the language, the movement, the body. I will speak the words of someone else's songs. I came to tell you 'Keep me safe'. Your step is my name, keep me safe.I came to take you away, so you wouldn't be afraid.I came to take you to the houses of my ancestors.I came to take you away, so you wouldn't be afraid.'
If you do like this band, let me know, and I'll recommend more songs, translate lyrics, whatever you need. I'd really like to see them get as popular as they deserve to be.
They still are a voice of the oppressed youth in Balkans.
Oh, and if you people like this, I would be more than happy to share more bands from here in the future.
Okay, so.
My natural hair color is daaaark brown (so dark people usually think it's black). I've been dying my hair red for years, but I've decided I don't want to use chemicals anymore, so I've switched to henna.
All it does for me is intensify the part that has been dyed red before, but it doesn't do anything to the new growth. (Except for my gray hair which turns kinda gold.(I have more and more gray ones each day, and I'm 22. Genetics, baby. :D ))
What I want to know is how you people prepare it, exactly.
I've heard of people using lemon juice, but lemon juice is supposed to be conditioning, right?
I have about half kg (1 pound) of henna from India, and I would hate for it to go to waste...
Also, do you apply it to damp or dry hair?
I've been applying it to damp hair, since it spreads easier that way (since I'm unable to use a brush or a comb to spread it - obviously), but the dripping during the next 4 - 5 hours (which is how long I keep it on my head) is driving me crazy.
So, it's 2pm, August 11th here, and it has officially been one year since I've started dreading.
I actually did not know if I should even write and post anything since I've grown so comfortable with not brushing and basically not giving a damn about my hair, just letting it do it's thing, but I decided to do it anyways. They've been trying sooo hard during the past year, they deserve some credit. :D But since I did not give enough of a damn to take pictures on a regular basis, I will just make a kind of a timeline using what I can find on my computer.
So. After numerous start-and-comb-after-a-few-weeks-to-months, I have finally decided not to mess around, and that if I should do it, I should do it right. So last August, I told myself this will be my final attempt at dreading. If I comb them out this time, that's it. No more attempts.
I gave it my last shot. This is me at the beginning, 15 days in or so.
This is what my hair looked like at the 1 month mark.
Right about then, I got frustrated. I was always an overachiever in everything I wanted to do. I was known for failing many subjects inhigh school, but that was solely due to my not caring about them. But I always did things I wanted to do very good, and very quickly. So having the desire for my hair to dread, but it not doing anything, and me not being able to make it tangle faster was something I had a really hard time dealing with. My own hair was failing.
After awhile, I learned to accept it all. Maybe I wasn't as in control as I thought I was, but by New Year's, that was okay.
And this is a photo from the New Year's Eve, four months in. As you can see, nothing happened. :D
Speeding up again, we come to May 6th, which is St. George's day, a holiday my family celebrates. (Orthodox Christian families celebrate one saint, and it is carried down through family by men. So my grandfather, my great grandfather, and all men before him celebrated St. George. That's not really important for the timeline, and it wouldn't even be important for me, if it weren't for my entire family gathering at my grandma's house for the occasion.)
You can't really see much on this photo, but this is the best one I've got of the sectioning that happened by then.
And the side-view...
FF again, we come to 10 months!
By this time, I started changing what I wash my hair with. Having hard water, I couldn't use BS, and there are no dreadlock shampoos or bars here. Also, I can't find any clarifying or residue free shampoos. So I figured, if BS removes the residue from hair, it will do the same thing if added to a shampoo. So I started adding BS directly to the bottle, to the point where there are layers of liquid in the bottle, the bottom layer is the thickest, the one above less so, and so on. It works pretty well, I've had crazy loopiness happening since, each and every one of them has at least one loop now.
Loopies about a month ago - they've changed a lot since then.
And, that would be all. I do not have any one-year-mark photos, since my SD card reader died, and I cannot put any photos on my computer, let alone on the internet. I'll post them when I find a way.
As you can see, they are not even close to being mature. But I'm okay with it. I love the messiness, and even if they stay like this forever, I won't mind. But they are changing, so I know I will eventually have real dreads.
All in all, I posted this mainly for people who are frustrated with their hair to see they are not the only ones with slow progress, and that not combing for a year and still not having dreads does happen to people. It might even make someone who is on, let's say, 5. month mark feel better about those few loose hairs and 6 strands of normal hair. :D
Even if it is dreading extremely slow, letting your hair go can teach you so many things... I'm extremely happy I threatened myself a year ago and stuck to dreading this time. Though I can't see my hair developing much, I can see how much I have grown and developed, and that's the most important thing to me.
or any of you know him.
I just read Earthstudios'discussion in Escaping Babylon group, and I remembered someone I met in June 2007.
I was sitting in the center of my town (Subotica, Serbia), and there was a guy with long dreads, so we started up a conversation with him. His name is Andrew, he is from California, and had started traveling the world a few years back. He started his journey with short hair, and had dreads down to his lower back when we met him (if I remember the length correctly). His hair was blond, or light brown.
He told us about sunsets in California, and about the places he has traveled. During that summer, we all wanted to be him, he was the coolest person we have met so far.
He also may be known as meta4.
The last thing I know of him is that he was in Rijeka, Croatia on June 19, 2007.
I completely forgot all about this, until I read that discussion. And since he was such an inspiration for us 17 year old rebels, I would like to know where he is, and how he's doing now, 5 years later.
Since this is the greatest animal-loving community I can think of, I'll talk about it here.
Namely. I just got back from walking my dog with my friend, and something happened that really got to me. We were sitting on a bench, and a man with a dog came by. His dog wanted to play with my dog, but my girl did as she always does - hid under the bench, behind my legs, and then jumped up on my lap when the other dog was away for a split second. She was always afraid of other dogs, of some people, of walking up the stairs, getting out of the elevator (she has no problem with going down the stairs, nor getting into an elevator), she is afraid of sounds, barks when the phone rings, refuses walking through some streets and next to some people, afraid of CD-s, lighters (just lighters, I do not mean fire, but literally lighters as an object), USB sticks, my hoop... And million other things. I always justified it by saying that it's her personality, and nothing more. She's also really hyperactive, BTW. She runs around, plays with me and my friends, run in circles, and is the only dog I've ever seen drifting (as a car, Tokio Drift kind of a thing.)
But the man with the dog that came by tonight has experience with dogs and knows his stuff, and he told me my girl is mentally unstable.
It really got to me, I'm afraid I might have done something to trigger/intensify it, and I'd die if that's the case.
What I want to know if any of you has/had any animals like this, and what do you recommend? I would not have a problem with her being unstable, don't misunderstand me. I just want to know if there is any way for me to help her. I kinda made peace with the fact that I'll never be able to have her puppies (having a dog that close to her is unimaginable), but I see she really wants to play with other dogs, but is too frightened to do so. (What she does is get all excited when she sees a dog, and she runs after dogs and makes sounds to call them, but as soon as they turn around and get close, she starts running away.)
I have had her for two years now, I got her when she was 10 weeks old, so there are no bad experiences with dogs, or stairs, elevators, lighters, CD-s...
Anyhow. Is there a way for me to help her overcome her fear(s) and play?
So, The reason I haven't been on or posted anything in awhile is that not much has happened. Namely, it was 5 months of natural dreading on Jan. 11. for me, and I only have one natural dread that's now getting kinky. I tn'r-ed a couple, just to see if they would progress faster or slower than the natural one, but they seem to be doing just about the same.
This is just me telling you about my hair. I am not getting impatient, in fact, I like the phase I'm in. My hair is separated and kinda kinky, with knots everywhere (I find them occasionally, eg. when I get stuck in trees, on Christmas decorations, and when I move my hand rapidly, and my big ring pulls my hair. :D ), it just does not seem to be doing any real dreading yet.
My mother is convinced it will never dread, and one of my closest friends thinks that, since nthing has actually happened yet, it will all happen overnight for me.
It gets really funny sometimes, when I try to explain dreads to my mom's friends. They don't get it until I tell them I'll look like a Puli dog. :D
And the thing that's freakin' me out is... Well, when I use this site on my computer (I'm on my mom's laptop ATM), there is no music. But here, some tribal music (drumming) is played every few seconds, fr a few seconds. Is that coming from this site, or is this laptop screwed up? Or maybe I'm just going crazy... :D
So, that's it.I know this is just random stuff. The reason I wrote all of this is that I went to a funeral today, and did not feel like hangin' out with people tonight. And even though this was not the first funeral I attended, it sure was a wake up call. I realized I want to do and change so much before I go, so I decided to reconnect with this site, since it is a community I want to be an active part of, and I also would love to find/create a community like this right here where I live, one that's filled with love, hope, support...
Aaaaand... Cut! :D
P.S. I can't find blog categories here, so if it needs be placed somewhere, please tell me how to do it, or place it somewhere for me, oh, you people who run this site. :D