The Lazy Girl Curl

The perfect curl (if it exists) requires effort, time and patience (which frankly, I’m not willing to give). I don’t enjoy sweating under the heat of a curling iron that I’m holding at an uncomfortable angle much too close to my face/head, and I’ve never tried the curler things but even just watching a video of the process is too much work.

What I do enjoy is doing absolutely nothing and still looking decent. That’s not a very successful strategy, so I spend a lot of time looking a little homeless in the hair department, but I did recently experience a successful incident of minimal work having decent payoff.

I call it: the lazy girl curl. I guess it could also work if you’re a dude with long hair, nothin wrong with that.

Here are the steps:

1. Take a shower. it just resets your hair to a natural setting. So actually, I guess you don’t need the whole shower, just wash your hair. (Side story: one time I was at my dad’s house and I asked why he had shampoo and conditioner by his kitchen sink and he said it was to wash his hair. I, of course, thought he was being sarcastic, so I challenged him. And then, I don’t know if it was to flex on me or prove to me that it’s a regular occurrence, but he put his head in the sink and rinsed, lathered, and repeated. So if you prefer that method, go for it.)
2. Let your hair dry. You could also use the hair dryer if you enjoy burning your ears and neck with hot gusts of air.
3. Put your hair in a bun. Like, collect your hair as if you’re going to put it in a ponytail, and then just twist it around like a cinnamon roll at the top/back of your head. (Some people have an easier time if they twist their hair and then twist it around like a cinnamon roll. I used to do it that way and then I stopped, couldn’t tell you why.)
4. Secure it with a hair tie or two.
5. Live your life.
6. Sleep on it.
7. Take it out with the intention to style it.  
8. Realize it doesn’t look half bad. Naw, you can definitely work with this.
9. Take a couple selfies. Or a lot, nobody is judging you (except the FBI agent that may or may not be watching you through the camera on your phone. Maybe they’ve had enough).  Unless you have that ridiculous habit of posting too many selfies for no reason on social media so you can “bless” someone’s timeline. Yikes. Stop doing that.
10. Blog about it. wait no that’s my job.

The sides of the hair might not look as good as the front.

Results may vary. Keep a straightener on hand just in case (or I suppose you could shower again to reset the hair). And I guess I just revealed that I don’t always shower every day and maybe I should be ashamed but I’m just not, ok? xoxo stay beautiful.

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Finding My Niche

Ever since I heard about blogging, I really wanted to be a blogger. The problem was, I didn’t know what I wanted to blog about. So I kept putting it off…

and off…

and off…

because I didn’t want to commit to something stupid. Or worse, something controversial (I really hate confrontation and internet hate).

Over the years, I started different blogs for various things–my LDS mission, the time I taught English in Russia (Miss Tyf Mischief was such a good blog title, tell me I’m wrong), church related topics. (My church one still actually exists at everydayparallels.blogspot.com) But none of them really took.

When I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I was really upset. I believed that as a psycho (someone who took antipsychotics), I couldn’t be a wife, or a mother, or even just a productive member of society. I went to work devastated. My boss told me I should start a blog. He was a huge proponent of “feed your crazy.” And he was so excited to tell me that I should call my blog “Heckfest at Tyffani’s.” You can’t argue with that kind of creativity.

Thus, the heckfest was born.

It started out as a mental health blog. Not this url, but heckfestattyffanis.blogspot.com chronicles my early days of being diagnosed and going through medications and adjustments. It’s still up if you care to check it out. I started it because when I was acclimating to the idea of actually being mentally ill, I wanted some guidance. I scanned the blogosphere for anything that could be helpful, but all bipolar writers were just like me: so consistently inconsistent. I couldn’t really find anything. So I decided to try and be for someone else what I wish someone was for me. I had probably one reader, a dear friend who was desperately trying to understand me so she could help me through it.

Because I didn’t really see anything come from it, I abandoned the blog. But I didn’t want to abandon the url or the blogging, so I bought a domain at a different site (here, wordpress) and instead of wait for the perfect niche idea to hit me, I decided to just blog about my life. I wanted the key element to be humor. I have enough embarrassing stories and socially awkward encounters to fill a library, so why not a blog?

Now that I’ve been doing that a while, I realize that I’m pretty much a mommy blogger minus the kids. I don’t have very many readers, because only like 10 people really care about my life. So if I want to get serious about blogging (which I do), I have got to amp up my game.

So I’m trying to find a niche. What do people like to read about? What’s hot these days?

Recipe blogs are pretty popular, but I’m really average at cooking, so it wouldn’t be good enough to enjoy or bad enough to laugh at; it would just be sad.

Weight loss blogs are pretty popular but ya girl does not have the humility or dedication enough for that.

Blogs about how to make money are pretty popular, but if I knew how to make money, I wouldn’t be spending all my time job hunting and pinning pins on Pinterest about how to make money blogging.

Fashion blogs are a thing, but I personally look homeless much of the time. However, I’m pretty good at judging the heck out of some pieces of designer clothing.

I want to play on my strengths. I want Heckfest to be a blog that makes people laugh. That doesn’t take things too seriously. That covers topics in a way that isn’t boring and stale. So I put together an About Me page where you can read the ABC’s of me. And I’m going to play on some of those. I’ll probably flaunt the mental health angle, because the sufferers need to hear the voice of survivors.

I want to spread good news–there are enough sites that broadcast the bad. I want to learn something new every day and share it. I want to rant about grammar sometimes because social media bums with lots of followers tweet stupid stuff and I can’t correct them on twitter without all their blind, believing followers coming after me. I wan’t to make fun of modern day fashion and talk about selling certain items in my imaginary store called “yIKEA.”  I want to sometimes share the burden of being bipolar. I want to try out Pinterest pins and see if they work. Mostly, I just want to write. And I hope there are people who want to read it.

I’m still finding my place in the blogosphere. But I hope it’s not just as another childless mommy blog.