Pixie bob haircut
Bob Cuts
2013.03.23 06:01 Hisotensoku Bob Cuts
A bob cut or bob is a short haircut for women (and occasionally men) in which the hair is typically cut straight around the head at about jaw-level, often with a fringe (or "bangs") at the front.
2011.05.03 21:19 FemaleHairAdvice
Welcome to femalehairadvice! We are a community focused on hair advice for women, non-binary, trans, and gender non-confirming individuals. We have a zero tolerance policy for hateful, negative content, and hair fetishism.
2008.09.23 13:27 /r/hair
Welcome to the /hair community! This community is all about hair and beauty.
2023.06.04 14:54 TwinklesForFour AITA for how I handled this bullying situation?
I tried to post this on AITA but can't respond to a bot so expect it will get deleted. Would appreciate some outside perspective, copied and pasted below. :::::::::::::::::: Yesterday my nearly 11 year old daughter and a 12 year old friend went to our neighborhood park. They returned after 30 minutes and told me that a neighborhood kid and his friends had chased my daughter, calling her dora the explorer for her sunhat (it's not my fave but it's a gift from her late Nana so she likes it. She died suddenly last February and D took it the hardest), and yanked the hat off her head when they caught her. They continued by yelling insults at her pixie haircut, then walked off to another park. These boys are all 13-14, and are known trouble makers. We have video of them clipping the strings on a tree swing, and they've targeted the neighbors before throwing pine cones, but they never get in trouble because they don't do it around adults who hold any authority with them.
Once daughter came home and explained what happened, I decided to go see if I could talk to these kids to try and get an apology or some reason why they'd pick on someone else instead of mind their own business, but the were gone. They had left their scooters though... So I took them home and posted a notice to our neighborhood board saying briefly what has happened and that when I have a formal written apology, they get the scooters back.
I've met both parents now after the kids tried to whine and get the scooters back, making threats about damaging our car. I'm not afraid of a kid, and the house is covered by security cameras, so they were forced to involve a parent. When I spoke to the dad, he was upset with his son, apologized, and told us to expect an apology later today. Then mom came over (very entitled, now I know where he gets it from) saying we had stolen the scooters and can't keep them, blah blah, going to call the cops. I told her that was fine, and they could speak with my daughter about how he had chased and assaulted her by taking clothes off her by force. That's when her family started to pull her away. I have yet to hear a knock on my door from either the kid or the police, and I don't think I was unreasonable in expecting an apology. AITA for my response to this bullying? I have no intention of damaging their property or not returning it, I just want then to accept they messed up and apologize.
Asking judgment: I think I may be the asshole because these are kids, and in fairness, I am holding their property hostage . Parents are not always the clearest sighted about their kids.
submitted by TwinklesForFour to TwoHotTakes [link] [comments]
Once daughter came home and explained what happened, I decided to go see if I could talk to these kids to try and get an apology or some reason why they'd pick on someone else instead of mind their own business, but the were gone. They had left their scooters though... So I took them home and posted a notice to our neighborhood board saying briefly what has happened and that when I have a formal written apology, they get the scooters back.
I've met both parents now after the kids tried to whine and get the scooters back, making threats about damaging our car. I'm not afraid of a kid, and the house is covered by security cameras, so they were forced to involve a parent. When I spoke to the dad, he was upset with his son, apologized, and told us to expect an apology later today. Then mom came over (very entitled, now I know where he gets it from) saying we had stolen the scooters and can't keep them, blah blah, going to call the cops. I told her that was fine, and they could speak with my daughter about how he had chased and assaulted her by taking clothes off her by force. That's when her family started to pull her away. I have yet to hear a knock on my door from either the kid or the police, and I don't think I was unreasonable in expecting an apology. AITA for my response to this bullying? I have no intention of damaging their property or not returning it, I just want then to accept they messed up and apologize.
Asking judgment: I think I may be the asshole because these are kids, and in fairness, I am holding their property hostage . Parents are not always the clearest sighted about their kids.
2023.06.04 13:55 Hayate-kun 60 most-viewed ASMR videos on YouTube last week (2023-05-21 to 2023-05-27) [Discussion]
No eatingslimekinetic sandmagnetic ballsstop motion cookingnoisy reaction/comedymarbles<2 minuteanimatedchiropractic
2023.06.03 15:38 obeliskposture Short story about bad times & bad jobs
I've shared fiction here before and it didn't go altogether too poorly, so I'm going to press my luck and do it again. This was written about a year ago, and I'm tired of trying to peddle it to lit magazines. Might as well share it here, know that it met a few eyeballs, and have done with it.
It's relevant to the sub insofar as it's about urban alienation and the working conditions at a small business run by IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE people. (I tried to pitch it as a story of the great resignation with a momentary flicker of cosmic horror.) It's based on a similar job I took on after getting laid off during the lockdown, and the circumstances of the main character's breakup are faintly similar to one I went through several years back (her job sucked the life out of her).
Without further ado:
* * *
It was getting close to midnight, and the temperature outside was still above 80 degrees. We’d locked up the shop at 10:15 and walked over to Twenty, the dive bar on Poplar Street, where a single wall-mounted air conditioner and four wobbly ceiling fans weren’t putting up much resistance against the July heat baking the place from the outside and the dense mass of bodies giving it a stifling fever from within.
Just now I came close to saying it was a Wednesday night, because that was usually when the cyclists descended upon Avenue Brew, the gritty-but-bougie craft beer and sandwich shop I was working at back then. Every Wednesday between March and November, about fifteen to twenty-five Gen Xers dressed in skintight polyester, all packages and camel toes and fanny packs, locked up their thousand-dollar bikes on the sidewalk and lined up for IPAs and paninis. They reliably arrived around 8:00, an hour before we closed, making it impossible to get started on the closing checklist and leave on time at 10:00. The worst of them were demanding and rude, and even the best got raucous and stubborn after a couple drinks. There were nights when bringing in the sidewalk tables couldn’t be done without arguing with them. Most were sub-par tippers, to boot.
After Wednesday came and went that week without so much as a single 40-something in Ray Bans and padded shorts stopping in to double-fist two cans of Jai Alai, we dared to hope the cyclists had chosen another spot to be their finish line from there on out. But no—they’d only postponed their weekly ride, and swarmed us on Friday night instead.
I was the last person to find out; I was clocked in as purchaser that evening. The position was something like a promotion I'd received a year earlier: for twenty hours a week, I got to retreat from the public and sit in the back room with the store laptop, reviewing sales and inventory, answering emails from brewery reps, and ordering beer, beverages, and assorted paper goods. When I put in hours as purchaser, my wage went up from $11 to $15 an hour, but I was removed from the tip pool. On most days, tips amounted to an extra two or three dollars an hour, so I usually came out ahead.
This was back in 2021. I don't know what Avenue Brew pays these days.
Anyway, at about 8:15, I stepped out to say goodbye to everyone and found the shop in chaos. Friday nights were generally pretty active, the cyclists' arrival had turned the place into a mob scene. The line extended to the front door. The phone was ringing. The Grubhub tablet dinged like an alarm clock without a snooze button. Danny was on the sandwich line and on the verge of losing his temper. Oliver was working up a sweat running food, bussing tables, and replenishing ingredients from the walk-in. The unflappable Marina was on register, and even she seemed like she was about to snap at somebody.
What else could I do? I stayed until closing to answer the phone, process Grubhub orders, hop on and off the second register, and help Danny with sandwich prep. After the tills were counted out, I stayed another hour to take care of the dishes, since nobody had a chance to do a first load. Oliver was grateful, even though he grumbled about having to make some calls and rearrange Sunday's schedule so I could come in a couple hours late. Irene and Jeremy, Avenue Brew's owners, would kick his ass if he let me go into overtime.
Danny suggested that we deserved a few drinks ourselves after managing to get through the shift without killing anyone. Not even Marina could find a reason to disagree with him.
The neighborhood had undergone enough gentrification to support an upscale brunch spot, an ice cream parlor, a gourmet burger restaurant, a coffee and bahn mi shop, and Avenue Brew (to name a few examples), but not yet quite enough that the people who staffed them couldn’t afford to live within a ten-minute walk from the main avenue where all these hep eateries stood between 24-hour corner stores with slot machines in back, late-night Chinese and Mexico-Italian takeout joints with bulletproof glass at the counters, and long-shuttered delis and shoe stores. Twenty on Poplar was the watering hole set aside for people like us. It was dim, a bit dilapidated, and inexpensive, and usually avoided by denizens of the condos popping up on the vacant lots and replacing clusters of abandoned row houses.
When we arrived, Kyle waved us over. He didn’t work at Avenue Brew anymore, but still kept up with a few of us. He was at Twenty at least four nights out of the week.
So there we all were. I sat with a brooding stranger freestyling to himself in a low mumble on the stool to my left and Oliver on my right, who tapped at his phone and nursed a bottle of Twisted Tea. To Oliver’s right sat Marina, staring at nothing in particular and trying to ignore Danny, who stood behind her, closer than she would have liked, listening to Kyle explain the crucial differences between the Invincible comic book and the Invincible web series.
I recall being startled back to something like wakefulness when it seemed to me that the ceiling had sprouted a new fan. I blinked my eyes, and it wasn’t there anymore. It reminded me of an incident from when I was still living with my folks in South Jersey and still had a car, and was driving home from a friend’s house party up in Bergen County. It was 6:30 AM, I hadn’t slept all night, and needed to get home so I could get at least little shuteye before heading to Whole Foods for my 11:00 AM shift. I imagined I passed beneath the shadows of overpasses I knew weren’t there, and realized I was dreaming at the wheel.
I was pretty thoroughly zombified at that point. Heather and I had broken up for good the night before, and I hadn't gotten even a minute of sleep. Calling out at Avenue Brew was tough. Unless you found someone willing to cover your shift on like six hours' notice, you were liable to get a writeup, a demotion, or your hours cut if you couldn't produce a doctor's note. So I loaded up on caffeine pills and Five-Hour Energy bottles at the corner store, and powered through as best I could.
I finished the last thimbleful of Blue Moon in my glass. Oliver wiped the sweat from the back of his neck with a napkin and covered his mouth to stifle a laugh at the KiwiFarms thread he was scrolling through. Pool balls clacked; somebody swore and somebody laughed. The TouchTunes box was playing Bob Dylan’s “Rain Day Woman #12 & 35,” and enough bleary 40-something men around the bar were bobbing their heads and mouthing the words to make it impossible to determine which one of them paid two bucks to hear it. A guy by the cigarette machine who looked like a caricature of Art Carney in flannel and an old Pixies T-shirt was accosting a woman who must have been a toddler when he hit drinking age, and she momentarily made eye contact with me as she scanned the area for a way out. Danny was shouting over the bartender’s head, carrying on a conversation with the Hot Guy from Pizza Stan’s, who was sitting on the horseshoe’s opposite arm.
I never got his name, but when Oliver first referred to him as the Hot Guy from Pizza Stan’s, I knew exactly who he meant. Philly scene kid par excellence. Mid-20s, washed-out black denim, dyed black hair, thick bangs, and dark, gentle eyes. He was only truly alluring when he was on the job, because he seldom smiled then—and when he smiled, he broke the spell by exposing his teeth, stained a gnarly shade of mahogany from too much smoking and not enough brushing.
“How’s Best? Marcus still a joker?” Danny asked him.
“Yeah, you know Marcus. You know how he is.”
So the Hot Guy had been working at Best Burger (directly across the street from Avenue Brew) ever since Pizza Stan’s owners mismanaged the place unto insolvency. (Afterwards it was renovated and reopened as a vegan bakery—which incidentally closed down about a month ago.) Danny used to work at Best Burger, but that ended after he got into a shouting match with the owner. I happened to overhear it while I was dragging in the tables and collecting the chairs from the sidewalk the night it happened. It wasn’t any of my business, and I tried not to pay attention, but they were really tearing into each other. A month later, Oliver welcomed Danny aboard at Avenue Brew. I hadn’t known he’d been interviewed, and by then it was too late to mention the incident. But I’d have been a hypocrite to call it a red flag after the way I resigned from my position as Café Chakra's assistant manager two years earlier—not that we need to go dredging that up right now. Let's say there was some bad blood and leave it at that.
Anyway, I was thinking about giving in and buying a pack of cigarettes from the machine—and then remembered that Twenty didn’t have a cigarette machine. I looked again. The Art Carney-lookalike was still there, fingering his phone with a frown, but the girl was gone—and so was the cigarette machine.
I had only a moment to puzzle over this before Danny clapped me on the shoulder and thrust a shot glass in front of me.
“Starfish!” he said. (Danny called me Starfish. Everybody else called me Pat.) “You look like you need some juice.”
He distributed shots to everyone else. Marina declined hers, but changed her mind when Kyle offered to take it instead.
She and Kyle had stopped sleeping together after Kyle left Avenue Brew to work at the Victory taproom on the Parkway, but Marina was still concerned about his bad habits, which Danny delighted in encouraging.
We all leaned in to clink our glasses. Before I could find an appropriate moment to ask Marina if I could bum a cigarette, she got up to visit the bathroom. Danny took her seat and bowed his head for a conspiratorial word with Kyle.
I watched from the corner of my eye and tried to listen in. Like Marina, I was a little worried about Kyle. He got hired at Avenue Brew around the same time I did, just before the pandemic temporarily turned us into a takeout joint. He was a senior at Drexel then, an English major, and sometimes talked about wanting to either find work in publishing or carve out a career as a freelance writer after graduating. But first he intended to spend a year getting some life in before submitting himself to the forever grind.
He read a lot of Charles Bukowski and Hunter Thompson. He relished the gritty and sordid, and had already been good at sniffing it out around the neighborhood and in West Philly before Danny introduced him to cocaine, casinos, strip clubs, and a rogue’s gallery of shady but fascinating people. (None were really Danny’s friends; just fellow passengers who intersected with the part of his life where he sometimes went to Parx, sometimes came out ahead, sometimes spent his winnings on coke, and sometimes did bumps at titty bars.) Kyle recounted these adventures with a boyish enthusiasm for the naked reality of sleaze, like a middle schooler telling his locker room buddies about catching his older brother in flagrante and seeing so-and-so body parts doing such-and-such things.
Marina hated it. She never said as much to me, but she was afraid that the template Kyle set for his life during his “year off” was in danger of becoming locked in. The anniversary of his graduation had already passed, and now here he was trying to convince Danny to contribute a couple hundred dollars toward a sheet of acid his guy had for sale. He wasn't doing much writing lately.
I was the oldest employee at Avenue Brew (as I write this I’m 37, but fortunately I don’t look it), and when Kyle still worked with us I felt like it was my prerogative to give him some advice. The longer he waited to make inroads, I once told him, the more likely he’d be seen as damaged goods by the publishing world. He needed to jam his foot in the door while he was still young.
I could tell the conversation bored him, and didn’t bring up the subject again.
The bartender took my glass and curtly asked if I’d like another drink.
“No thanks, not yet,” I answered.
She slid me my bill.
I missed the old bartender, the one she’d replaced. I forget her name, but she was ingenuous and energetic and sweet. Pretty much everyone had some sort of crush on her. Sometimes she came into Avenue Brew for lunch, and tipped us as well as we tipped her. Maybe three months before that night—Danny witnessed it—she suddenly started crying and rushed out the door. Everyone at the bar mutely looked to each other for an explanation. (Fortunately for Twenty, the kitchen manager hadn’t left yet, and picked up the rest of her shift.)
She never came back. None of us had seen her since. But drafts still had to be poured and bottlecaps pulled off, and now here was another white woman in her mid-twenties wearing a black tank top, a pushup bra, and a scrunchie, same as before. Twenty’s regulars grew accustomed to not expecting to see the person she’d replaced, and life went on.
“How’re you doing?” I asked Oliver, just to say something to somebody, and to keep my thoughts from wandering back to Heather.
“Just kind of existing right now,” he answered. His phone lay face-up on the counter. He was swiping through Instagram, and I recognized the avatar of the user whose album he hate-browsed.
“And how’s Austin been?” I asked.
“Oh, you know. Not even three weeks after getting over the jetlag from his trip back from the Cascades, he’s off touring Ireland.” He shook his head. “Living his best life.”
He’d hired Austin on a part-time basis in September. We needed a new associate when Emma was promoted to replace a supervisor who'd quit without even giving his two weeks. There was a whole thing. I'm having a hard time recalling the guy's name, but I liked him well enough. He was a good worker and he seemed like a bright kid, but he was—well, he was young. Naïve. One day he found Jeremy sitting in the back room with his laptop, and took advantage of the open-door policy to ask why the store manager and supervisors didn’t get health benefits or paid time off. Jeremy told him it "was being worked on," and that he couldn’t discuss it any further at that time. I understand the kid got argumentative, though I never knew precisely what was said.
Irene started visiting the shop a lot more often after that, almost always arriving when the kid was working. No matter what he was doing, she’d find a reason to intervene, to micromanage and harangue him, and effectively make his job impossible. A coincidence, surely.
It’s something I still think about. By any metric, Jeremy and Irene have done very well for themselves. They’re both a little over 40 years old. I remember hearing they met at law school. In addition to Avenue Brew, they own a bistro in Francisville and an ice cream parlor in Point Breeze. They have a house on the Blue Line, send their son to a Montessori school, and pull up to their businesses in a white Volkswagen ID.4. But whenever the subject of benefits, wages, or even free shift meals came up, they pled poverty. It simply couldn’t be done. But they liked to remind us about all they did to make Avenue Brew a fun place to work, like let the staff pick the music and allow Oliver and me to conduct a beer tasting once a day. They stuck Black Lives Matter, Believe Women, and Progress flag decals on the front door and windows, and I remember Irene wearing a Black Trans Lives Matter shirt once or twice when covering a supervisor's shift. None of the college students or recent graduates who composed most of Avenue Brew's staff could say the bosses weren't on the right team. And yet...
I'm sorry—I was talking about Austin. He was maybe 30 and already had another job, a “real” job, some sort of remote gig lucrative enough for him to make rent on a studio in the picturesque Episcopal church down the street that had been converted into upscale apartments some years back. Austin wasn’t looking for extra cash. He wanted to socialize. To have something to do and people to talk to in the outside world. He wanted to make friends, and all of us could appreciate that—but it’s hard to be fond of a coworker who irredeemably sucks at his job. Austin never acted with any urgency, was inattentive to detail, and even after repeated interventions from Oliver and the supervisors, he continued to perform basic tasks in bafflingly inefficient ways. Having Austin on your shift meant carrying his slack, and everyone was fed up after a few months. Oliver sat him down, told him he was on thin ice, and gave him a list of the areas in which he needed to improve if he didn’t want to be let go.
When Austin gave Oliver the indignant “I don’t need this job” speech, it was different from those times Danny or I told a boss to go to hell and walked out. Austin truly didn’t need it. He basically said the job was beneath him, and so was Oliver.
It got deep under Oliver’s skin. He did need the job and had to take it seriously, even when it meant being the dipshit manager chewing out a man four or five years his senior. He earned $18 an hour (plus tips when he wasn’t doing admin work), had debts to pay off, and couldn't expect to get any help from his family.
The important thing, though, the part I distinctly remember, was that Oliver was looking at a video of a wading bird Austin had recorded. An egret, maybe. White feathers, long black legs, pointy black beak. Austin must have been standing on a ledge above a creek, because he had an overhead view of the bird as it stood in the water, slowly and deliberately stretching and retracting its neck, eyeing the wriggling little shadows below. As far as the fish could know, they were swimming around a pair of reeds growing out of the silt. The predator from which they extended was of a world beyond their understanding and out of their reach.
The video ended. Oliver moved on to the next item: a photograph of the bird from the same perspective, with a fish clamped in its beak. Water droplets flung from the victim's thrashing tail caught the sunlight. And I remember now, I clearly remember, the shapes of like twelve other fish stupidly milling about the bird's feet, unperturbed and unpanicked.
Danny peered at Oliver’s phone and observed a resemblance between the bird—its shape and bearing, and the composition of the photograph—and a POV porn video shot from behind and above, and he told us so. Elaborately. He made squawking noises.
“And mom says I’m a degenerate,” Oliver sighed. “Can you practice your interspecies pickup artist shit somewhere else?” Oliver flicked his wrist, shooing Danny off, and held his phone in front of his face to signal that he was done talking.
Danny sagged a little on his stool and turned away. I sometimes felt bad for him. For all his faults, he had the heart of a puppy dog. He really did think of us as his tribe. There was nobody else who’d only ever answer “yes” when you asked him to pick up a shift, and he did it completely out of loyalty.
He was turning 29 in a week. I wondered how many people would actually turn out to celebrate with him at the Black Taxi. Kyle probably would—but even he regarded Danny more as a source of vulgar entertainment than a friend.
Then it happened again. When I turned to speak to Oliver, there’d been a pair of pool cues leaning side-by-side against the wall a few stools down. Now they were gone.
This time it might have been my imagination. Somebody passing by could have casually snatched them up and kept walking.
But a moment later I seemed to notice a second TouchTunes box protruding from the wall directly behind me. I let it be.
Marina returned from the bathroom. Danny rose and offered her back her seat with an exaggerated bow. Before she got settled, I asked if she’d like to step outside with me. She withdrew her pack of Marlboro Menthols from her canvas bag, which she left sitting on the stool to deter Danny from sitting back down.
Marina never minded letting me bum cigarettes from time to time. I couldn’t buy them for myself anymore; it’s a habit I could never keep under control, and was only getting more expensive. Like everything else in the world. About once a month I reimbursed her by buying her a pack.
The air out on the sidewalk was as hot as the air inside Twenty, but easier to breathe. After lighting up, Marina leaned against the bricks and sighed.
“I wish Oliver would fire Danny already and get it over with.”
I nodded. Marina rarely talked about anything but work.
“He sneaks drinks and doesn't think anyone notices he's buzzed,” she went on. “He steals so much shit and isn’t even a little subtle about it. He’s going to get Oliver in trouble. And he’s a creep.”
“Yeah,” I said. These were her usual complaints about Danny, and they were all true. “At least he’s better than Austin.”
“That’s a low bar.”
Three dirt bikes and an ATV roared down the lonely street, charging through stop sign after stop sign, putting our talk on hold.
“Remind me. You’ve got one semester left, right?” I asked after the noise ebbed.
“Yep.”
Marina was a marketing major at Temple. She’d had an internship during the spring semester, and her boss told her to give her a call the very minute she graduated. Her parents in central Pennsylvania couldn’t pay her rent or tuition for her, so she was a full-time student and a full-time employee at Avenue Brew. Her emotional spectrum ranged from "tired" to "over it." She’d been waiting tables and working at coffee shops since she was seventeen, had no intention of continuing for even a day longer than she had to, and feared the escape hatch would slam shut if she dallied too long after prying it open.
She’d considered majoring in English, like Kyle. She went for marketing instead. I couldn’t blame her.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You’ve been kind of off all day.”
“I’m terrible.”
“Why?”
I gave dodgy answers, but she asked precisely the right follow-up questions to get me going about what happened with Heather the night before.
It was the new job. Before the pandemic, Heather worked as a server at a Center City bar and grill. (That's where I met her; we were coworkers for about a year, and then I left to work Café Chakra because it was quieter and closer to where I lived.) When the place closed its doors and laid everyone off during the lockdown, she got a stopgap job at the Acme on Passyunk, and hated it. Then in March, she found a bar-and-lounge gig in a ritzy hotel on Broad Street. Very corporate. Excellent pay, great benefits. Definitely a step up. But her new employers made Irene and Jeremy look like Bob and Linda Belcher by comparison. It was the kind of place where someone had recently gotten herself fired for leaving work to rush to the hospital after getting the news that her grandmother was about to be taken off life support, and not finding someone to come in and cover the last two hours of her shift.
Heather seldom worked fewer than fifty-five hours a week, and her schedule was even more erratic than mine. At least once a week she left the hotel at 1:00 or 2:00 AM and returned at 9:00 the next morning. Neither of us could remember the last time she’d had two consecutive days off, and it had been over a month since one of mine overlapped with one of hers. She’d spent it drinking alone at home. All she wanted was some privacy.
I’d biked to South Philly to meet her when she got home at 1:30. The argument that killed our relationship for good began around 2:30, when I complained that we never had sex anymore. Heather accused me of only caring about that, when she was so exhausted and stressed that her hair was falling out in the shower. Quit the job? She couldn’t quit. The money was too good. She had student loans, medical bills, and credit card debt, and for the first time in her life she could imagine paying it all off before hitting menopause.
So, yeah, I was cranky about our sex life being dead in the water. Say whatever you like. But at that point, what were we to each other? We did nothing together anymore but complain about work before one or both of us fell asleep. That isn’t a relationship.
She said my hair always smelled like sandwiches, even after bathing, and she was done pretending it didn’t turn her off. I told her she was one to talk—she always reeked of liquor. As things escalated, we stopped caring if her roommates heard us. “You want to be a father?” she shouted around 4:00 AM. “Making what you make? That poor fucking kid.”
We fought until sunrise, and I left her apartment with the understanding that I wouldn’t be coming back, wouldn’t be calling her ever again. I biked home and sat on the steps facing the cement panel that was my house’s backyard. After my phone died and I couldn’t anaesthetize myself with dumb YouTube videos or make myself feel crazy staring at the download button for the Tinder app, I watched the sparrows hopping on and off the utility lines for a while.
At 11:40 I went inside. One of my roommates was already in the shower, so the best I could do was put on a clean Avenue Brew T-shirt before walking to the shop and clocking in at noon to help deal with the lunch rush.
“That’s a lot,” Marina finally said. “Sorry.”
I don’t know what I was expecting her to say. She was sixteen years my junior, after all, and just a coworker. She didn’t need to hear any of this, and I definitely didn't need to be telling her. But who else was there to tell?
She’d already finished her cigarette. I still had a few puffs left. She went inside.
I decided to call it a night.
The second TouchTunes box was gone—naturally. Danny had taken my stool, and regarded my approach with a puckish you snooze you lose grin. I wasn’t going to say anything. I’d just pay my bill, give everyone a nod goodnight, and walk the five blocks back home.
And then Danny disappeared.
One second, he was there. The next—gone.
Danny didn’t just instantaneously vanish. Even when something happens in the blink of an eye, you can still put together something of a sequence. I saw him—I seemed to see him—falling into himself, collapsing to a point, and then to nothing.
You know how sometimes a sound is altogether inaudible unless you’re looking at the source—like when you don’t realize somebody’s whispering at you, and can then hear and understand them after they get your attention? I think that was the case here. I wouldn't have known to listen if I hadn't seen it happen. What I heard lingered for two, maybe three seconds, and wasn't any louder than a fly buzzing inside a lampshade. A tiny and impossibly distant scream, pitchshifted like a receding ambulance siren into a basso drone...
I don’t know. I don’t know for sure. I’m certain I remember a flash of red, and I have the idea of Danny’s trunk expanding, opening up as it imploded. A crimson flower, flecked white, with spooling pink stalks—and Danny’s wide-eyed face above it, drawn twisting and shrinking into its petals.
For an instant, Twenty’s interior shimmered. Not shimmered, exactly—glitched would be a better word. If you’re old enough to remember the fragmented graphics that sometimes flashed onscreen when you turned on the Nintendo without blowing on the cartridge, you’ll have an idea of what I mean. It happened much too fast, and there was too much of it to absorb. The one clear impression I could parse was the mirage of a cash register flickering upside-down above the pool table.
Not a cash register. The shape was familiar, but the texture was wrong. I think it was ribbed, sort of like a maggot. I think it glistened. Like—camo doesn’t work anymore when the wearer stops crouching behind a bush and breaks into a run. Do you get what I’m saying?
Nobody else seemed to notice. The pool balls clacked. A New Order track was playing on the TouchTunes box. A nearby argument about about Nick Sirianni continued unabated.
Finally, there was a downward rush of air—and this at least elicited a reaction from the bartender, who slapped my bill to keep it from sailing off the counter.
“Danny,” I said.
“Danny?” Kyle asked me quietly. His face had gone pale.
“Danny?” Oliver repeated in a faraway voice.
After a pause, Kyle blinked a few times. “You heard from him?”
“God forbid,” said Marina. “When he quit I was like, great, I can keep working here after all.”
“Oh, come on—”
“Kyle. Did I ever show you those texts he sent me once at three in the morning?” The color had returned to Oliver’s face.
“No, what did he say?”
Oliver tapped at his phone and turned the screen toward Kyle.
“Oh. Oh, jeez.”
“Right? Like—if you want to ask me something, ask me. You know? Don’t be weirdly accusatory about it…”
I pulled a wad of fives and ones from my pocket, threw it all onto the counter, and beelined for the exit without consideration for the people I squeezed through and shoved past on the way.
I heard Marina saying “let him go.”
I went a second consecutive night without sleep. Fortunately I wasn’t scheduled to come in the next day.
The schedule. It’s funny. Oliver was generally great at his job, and even when he wasn’t, I cut him a lot of slack because I knew Irene and Jeremy never gave him a moment’s peace. But I could never forgive him those times he waited until the weekend to make up and distribute the schedule. This was one of those weeks he didn’t get around to it until Saturday afternoon. When I found it in my inbox, Danny’s name wasn’t anywhere on it.
As far as I know, nobody who hadn’t been at Twenty that night asked what happened to him. We were a bit overstaffed as it was, and everyone probably assumed Danny was slated for the chopping block. The part-timers were, for the most part, happy to get a few additional hours.
Oliver abruptly quit around Labor Day after a final acrimonious clash with the owners. I never found out the details, and I never saw him again. Jeremy and Irene took turns minding the store while a replacement manager was sought. None of the supervisors would be pressured into taking the job; they knew from Oliver what they could expect.
About three weeks after Oliver left, I came in for my purchasing shift and found Jeremy waiting for me in the back room. I knew it was serious when he didn’t greet me with the awkward fist-bump he ordinarily required of his male employees.
“You’ve seen the numbers,” he said. Business for the summer had fallen short of expectations, it was true, and he and Irene had decided to rein in payroll expenses. My purchaser position was being eliminated. Its responsibilities would be redistributed among the supervisors and the new manager, when one was found. In the meantime, I'd be going back to the regular $11 an hour (plus tips of course) associate position full-time.
Jeremy assured me I'd be first in the running for supervisor the next time there was an opening.
I told him it was fine, I was done, and if he’d expected the courtesy of two weeks’ notice, he shouldn’t have blindsided me like that.
“Well, that’s your choice,” he answered, trying not to look pleased. His payroll problem was solving itself.
I racked up credit card debt for a few months. Applied for entry-level museum jobs that might appreciate my art history degree. Aimed for some purchasing and administrative assistant gigs, and just for the hell of it, turned in a resume for a facilitator position at an after-school art program. Got a few interviews. All of them eventually told me they’d decided to go in a different direction. I finally got hired to bartend at Hops from Underground, a microbrewery on Fairmount.
I’m still there. The money’s okay, but it fluctuates. Hours are reasonable. I’m on their high-deductible health plan. There’s a coworker I’ve been dating. Sort of dating. You know how it goes. In this line of work you get so used to people coming and going that you learn not to get too attached. I walk past Avenue Brew a few times a week, but stopped peering in through the window when I didn't recognize the people behind the counter anymore.
submitted by obeliskposture to stupidpol [link] [comments]
It's relevant to the sub insofar as it's about urban alienation and the working conditions at a small business run by IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE people. (I tried to pitch it as a story of the great resignation with a momentary flicker of cosmic horror.) It's based on a similar job I took on after getting laid off during the lockdown, and the circumstances of the main character's breakup are faintly similar to one I went through several years back (her job sucked the life out of her).
Without further ado:
* * *
It was getting close to midnight, and the temperature outside was still above 80 degrees. We’d locked up the shop at 10:15 and walked over to Twenty, the dive bar on Poplar Street, where a single wall-mounted air conditioner and four wobbly ceiling fans weren’t putting up much resistance against the July heat baking the place from the outside and the dense mass of bodies giving it a stifling fever from within.
Just now I came close to saying it was a Wednesday night, because that was usually when the cyclists descended upon Avenue Brew, the gritty-but-bougie craft beer and sandwich shop I was working at back then. Every Wednesday between March and November, about fifteen to twenty-five Gen Xers dressed in skintight polyester, all packages and camel toes and fanny packs, locked up their thousand-dollar bikes on the sidewalk and lined up for IPAs and paninis. They reliably arrived around 8:00, an hour before we closed, making it impossible to get started on the closing checklist and leave on time at 10:00. The worst of them were demanding and rude, and even the best got raucous and stubborn after a couple drinks. There were nights when bringing in the sidewalk tables couldn’t be done without arguing with them. Most were sub-par tippers, to boot.
After Wednesday came and went that week without so much as a single 40-something in Ray Bans and padded shorts stopping in to double-fist two cans of Jai Alai, we dared to hope the cyclists had chosen another spot to be their finish line from there on out. But no—they’d only postponed their weekly ride, and swarmed us on Friday night instead.
I was the last person to find out; I was clocked in as purchaser that evening. The position was something like a promotion I'd received a year earlier: for twenty hours a week, I got to retreat from the public and sit in the back room with the store laptop, reviewing sales and inventory, answering emails from brewery reps, and ordering beer, beverages, and assorted paper goods. When I put in hours as purchaser, my wage went up from $11 to $15 an hour, but I was removed from the tip pool. On most days, tips amounted to an extra two or three dollars an hour, so I usually came out ahead.
This was back in 2021. I don't know what Avenue Brew pays these days.
Anyway, at about 8:15, I stepped out to say goodbye to everyone and found the shop in chaos. Friday nights were generally pretty active, the cyclists' arrival had turned the place into a mob scene. The line extended to the front door. The phone was ringing. The Grubhub tablet dinged like an alarm clock without a snooze button. Danny was on the sandwich line and on the verge of losing his temper. Oliver was working up a sweat running food, bussing tables, and replenishing ingredients from the walk-in. The unflappable Marina was on register, and even she seemed like she was about to snap at somebody.
What else could I do? I stayed until closing to answer the phone, process Grubhub orders, hop on and off the second register, and help Danny with sandwich prep. After the tills were counted out, I stayed another hour to take care of the dishes, since nobody had a chance to do a first load. Oliver was grateful, even though he grumbled about having to make some calls and rearrange Sunday's schedule so I could come in a couple hours late. Irene and Jeremy, Avenue Brew's owners, would kick his ass if he let me go into overtime.
Danny suggested that we deserved a few drinks ourselves after managing to get through the shift without killing anyone. Not even Marina could find a reason to disagree with him.
The neighborhood had undergone enough gentrification to support an upscale brunch spot, an ice cream parlor, a gourmet burger restaurant, a coffee and bahn mi shop, and Avenue Brew (to name a few examples), but not yet quite enough that the people who staffed them couldn’t afford to live within a ten-minute walk from the main avenue where all these hep eateries stood between 24-hour corner stores with slot machines in back, late-night Chinese and Mexico-Italian takeout joints with bulletproof glass at the counters, and long-shuttered delis and shoe stores. Twenty on Poplar was the watering hole set aside for people like us. It was dim, a bit dilapidated, and inexpensive, and usually avoided by denizens of the condos popping up on the vacant lots and replacing clusters of abandoned row houses.
When we arrived, Kyle waved us over. He didn’t work at Avenue Brew anymore, but still kept up with a few of us. He was at Twenty at least four nights out of the week.
So there we all were. I sat with a brooding stranger freestyling to himself in a low mumble on the stool to my left and Oliver on my right, who tapped at his phone and nursed a bottle of Twisted Tea. To Oliver’s right sat Marina, staring at nothing in particular and trying to ignore Danny, who stood behind her, closer than she would have liked, listening to Kyle explain the crucial differences between the Invincible comic book and the Invincible web series.
I recall being startled back to something like wakefulness when it seemed to me that the ceiling had sprouted a new fan. I blinked my eyes, and it wasn’t there anymore. It reminded me of an incident from when I was still living with my folks in South Jersey and still had a car, and was driving home from a friend’s house party up in Bergen County. It was 6:30 AM, I hadn’t slept all night, and needed to get home so I could get at least little shuteye before heading to Whole Foods for my 11:00 AM shift. I imagined I passed beneath the shadows of overpasses I knew weren’t there, and realized I was dreaming at the wheel.
I was pretty thoroughly zombified at that point. Heather and I had broken up for good the night before, and I hadn't gotten even a minute of sleep. Calling out at Avenue Brew was tough. Unless you found someone willing to cover your shift on like six hours' notice, you were liable to get a writeup, a demotion, or your hours cut if you couldn't produce a doctor's note. So I loaded up on caffeine pills and Five-Hour Energy bottles at the corner store, and powered through as best I could.
I finished the last thimbleful of Blue Moon in my glass. Oliver wiped the sweat from the back of his neck with a napkin and covered his mouth to stifle a laugh at the KiwiFarms thread he was scrolling through. Pool balls clacked; somebody swore and somebody laughed. The TouchTunes box was playing Bob Dylan’s “Rain Day Woman #12 & 35,” and enough bleary 40-something men around the bar were bobbing their heads and mouthing the words to make it impossible to determine which one of them paid two bucks to hear it. A guy by the cigarette machine who looked like a caricature of Art Carney in flannel and an old Pixies T-shirt was accosting a woman who must have been a toddler when he hit drinking age, and she momentarily made eye contact with me as she scanned the area for a way out. Danny was shouting over the bartender’s head, carrying on a conversation with the Hot Guy from Pizza Stan’s, who was sitting on the horseshoe’s opposite arm.
I never got his name, but when Oliver first referred to him as the Hot Guy from Pizza Stan’s, I knew exactly who he meant. Philly scene kid par excellence. Mid-20s, washed-out black denim, dyed black hair, thick bangs, and dark, gentle eyes. He was only truly alluring when he was on the job, because he seldom smiled then—and when he smiled, he broke the spell by exposing his teeth, stained a gnarly shade of mahogany from too much smoking and not enough brushing.
“How’s Best? Marcus still a joker?” Danny asked him.
“Yeah, you know Marcus. You know how he is.”
So the Hot Guy had been working at Best Burger (directly across the street from Avenue Brew) ever since Pizza Stan’s owners mismanaged the place unto insolvency. (Afterwards it was renovated and reopened as a vegan bakery—which incidentally closed down about a month ago.) Danny used to work at Best Burger, but that ended after he got into a shouting match with the owner. I happened to overhear it while I was dragging in the tables and collecting the chairs from the sidewalk the night it happened. It wasn’t any of my business, and I tried not to pay attention, but they were really tearing into each other. A month later, Oliver welcomed Danny aboard at Avenue Brew. I hadn’t known he’d been interviewed, and by then it was too late to mention the incident. But I’d have been a hypocrite to call it a red flag after the way I resigned from my position as Café Chakra's assistant manager two years earlier—not that we need to go dredging that up right now. Let's say there was some bad blood and leave it at that.
Anyway, I was thinking about giving in and buying a pack of cigarettes from the machine—and then remembered that Twenty didn’t have a cigarette machine. I looked again. The Art Carney-lookalike was still there, fingering his phone with a frown, but the girl was gone—and so was the cigarette machine.
I had only a moment to puzzle over this before Danny clapped me on the shoulder and thrust a shot glass in front of me.
“Starfish!” he said. (Danny called me Starfish. Everybody else called me Pat.) “You look like you need some juice.”
He distributed shots to everyone else. Marina declined hers, but changed her mind when Kyle offered to take it instead.
She and Kyle had stopped sleeping together after Kyle left Avenue Brew to work at the Victory taproom on the Parkway, but Marina was still concerned about his bad habits, which Danny delighted in encouraging.
We all leaned in to clink our glasses. Before I could find an appropriate moment to ask Marina if I could bum a cigarette, she got up to visit the bathroom. Danny took her seat and bowed his head for a conspiratorial word with Kyle.
I watched from the corner of my eye and tried to listen in. Like Marina, I was a little worried about Kyle. He got hired at Avenue Brew around the same time I did, just before the pandemic temporarily turned us into a takeout joint. He was a senior at Drexel then, an English major, and sometimes talked about wanting to either find work in publishing or carve out a career as a freelance writer after graduating. But first he intended to spend a year getting some life in before submitting himself to the forever grind.
He read a lot of Charles Bukowski and Hunter Thompson. He relished the gritty and sordid, and had already been good at sniffing it out around the neighborhood and in West Philly before Danny introduced him to cocaine, casinos, strip clubs, and a rogue’s gallery of shady but fascinating people. (None were really Danny’s friends; just fellow passengers who intersected with the part of his life where he sometimes went to Parx, sometimes came out ahead, sometimes spent his winnings on coke, and sometimes did bumps at titty bars.) Kyle recounted these adventures with a boyish enthusiasm for the naked reality of sleaze, like a middle schooler telling his locker room buddies about catching his older brother in flagrante and seeing so-and-so body parts doing such-and-such things.
Marina hated it. She never said as much to me, but she was afraid that the template Kyle set for his life during his “year off” was in danger of becoming locked in. The anniversary of his graduation had already passed, and now here he was trying to convince Danny to contribute a couple hundred dollars toward a sheet of acid his guy had for sale. He wasn't doing much writing lately.
I was the oldest employee at Avenue Brew (as I write this I’m 37, but fortunately I don’t look it), and when Kyle still worked with us I felt like it was my prerogative to give him some advice. The longer he waited to make inroads, I once told him, the more likely he’d be seen as damaged goods by the publishing world. He needed to jam his foot in the door while he was still young.
I could tell the conversation bored him, and didn’t bring up the subject again.
The bartender took my glass and curtly asked if I’d like another drink.
“No thanks, not yet,” I answered.
She slid me my bill.
I missed the old bartender, the one she’d replaced. I forget her name, but she was ingenuous and energetic and sweet. Pretty much everyone had some sort of crush on her. Sometimes she came into Avenue Brew for lunch, and tipped us as well as we tipped her. Maybe three months before that night—Danny witnessed it—she suddenly started crying and rushed out the door. Everyone at the bar mutely looked to each other for an explanation. (Fortunately for Twenty, the kitchen manager hadn’t left yet, and picked up the rest of her shift.)
She never came back. None of us had seen her since. But drafts still had to be poured and bottlecaps pulled off, and now here was another white woman in her mid-twenties wearing a black tank top, a pushup bra, and a scrunchie, same as before. Twenty’s regulars grew accustomed to not expecting to see the person she’d replaced, and life went on.
“How’re you doing?” I asked Oliver, just to say something to somebody, and to keep my thoughts from wandering back to Heather.
“Just kind of existing right now,” he answered. His phone lay face-up on the counter. He was swiping through Instagram, and I recognized the avatar of the user whose album he hate-browsed.
“And how’s Austin been?” I asked.
“Oh, you know. Not even three weeks after getting over the jetlag from his trip back from the Cascades, he’s off touring Ireland.” He shook his head. “Living his best life.”
He’d hired Austin on a part-time basis in September. We needed a new associate when Emma was promoted to replace a supervisor who'd quit without even giving his two weeks. There was a whole thing. I'm having a hard time recalling the guy's name, but I liked him well enough. He was a good worker and he seemed like a bright kid, but he was—well, he was young. Naïve. One day he found Jeremy sitting in the back room with his laptop, and took advantage of the open-door policy to ask why the store manager and supervisors didn’t get health benefits or paid time off. Jeremy told him it "was being worked on," and that he couldn’t discuss it any further at that time. I understand the kid got argumentative, though I never knew precisely what was said.
Irene started visiting the shop a lot more often after that, almost always arriving when the kid was working. No matter what he was doing, she’d find a reason to intervene, to micromanage and harangue him, and effectively make his job impossible. A coincidence, surely.
It’s something I still think about. By any metric, Jeremy and Irene have done very well for themselves. They’re both a little over 40 years old. I remember hearing they met at law school. In addition to Avenue Brew, they own a bistro in Francisville and an ice cream parlor in Point Breeze. They have a house on the Blue Line, send their son to a Montessori school, and pull up to their businesses in a white Volkswagen ID.4. But whenever the subject of benefits, wages, or even free shift meals came up, they pled poverty. It simply couldn’t be done. But they liked to remind us about all they did to make Avenue Brew a fun place to work, like let the staff pick the music and allow Oliver and me to conduct a beer tasting once a day. They stuck Black Lives Matter, Believe Women, and Progress flag decals on the front door and windows, and I remember Irene wearing a Black Trans Lives Matter shirt once or twice when covering a supervisor's shift. None of the college students or recent graduates who composed most of Avenue Brew's staff could say the bosses weren't on the right team. And yet...
I'm sorry—I was talking about Austin. He was maybe 30 and already had another job, a “real” job, some sort of remote gig lucrative enough for him to make rent on a studio in the picturesque Episcopal church down the street that had been converted into upscale apartments some years back. Austin wasn’t looking for extra cash. He wanted to socialize. To have something to do and people to talk to in the outside world. He wanted to make friends, and all of us could appreciate that—but it’s hard to be fond of a coworker who irredeemably sucks at his job. Austin never acted with any urgency, was inattentive to detail, and even after repeated interventions from Oliver and the supervisors, he continued to perform basic tasks in bafflingly inefficient ways. Having Austin on your shift meant carrying his slack, and everyone was fed up after a few months. Oliver sat him down, told him he was on thin ice, and gave him a list of the areas in which he needed to improve if he didn’t want to be let go.
When Austin gave Oliver the indignant “I don’t need this job” speech, it was different from those times Danny or I told a boss to go to hell and walked out. Austin truly didn’t need it. He basically said the job was beneath him, and so was Oliver.
It got deep under Oliver’s skin. He did need the job and had to take it seriously, even when it meant being the dipshit manager chewing out a man four or five years his senior. He earned $18 an hour (plus tips when he wasn’t doing admin work), had debts to pay off, and couldn't expect to get any help from his family.
The important thing, though, the part I distinctly remember, was that Oliver was looking at a video of a wading bird Austin had recorded. An egret, maybe. White feathers, long black legs, pointy black beak. Austin must have been standing on a ledge above a creek, because he had an overhead view of the bird as it stood in the water, slowly and deliberately stretching and retracting its neck, eyeing the wriggling little shadows below. As far as the fish could know, they were swimming around a pair of reeds growing out of the silt. The predator from which they extended was of a world beyond their understanding and out of their reach.
The video ended. Oliver moved on to the next item: a photograph of the bird from the same perspective, with a fish clamped in its beak. Water droplets flung from the victim's thrashing tail caught the sunlight. And I remember now, I clearly remember, the shapes of like twelve other fish stupidly milling about the bird's feet, unperturbed and unpanicked.
Danny peered at Oliver’s phone and observed a resemblance between the bird—its shape and bearing, and the composition of the photograph—and a POV porn video shot from behind and above, and he told us so. Elaborately. He made squawking noises.
“And mom says I’m a degenerate,” Oliver sighed. “Can you practice your interspecies pickup artist shit somewhere else?” Oliver flicked his wrist, shooing Danny off, and held his phone in front of his face to signal that he was done talking.
Danny sagged a little on his stool and turned away. I sometimes felt bad for him. For all his faults, he had the heart of a puppy dog. He really did think of us as his tribe. There was nobody else who’d only ever answer “yes” when you asked him to pick up a shift, and he did it completely out of loyalty.
He was turning 29 in a week. I wondered how many people would actually turn out to celebrate with him at the Black Taxi. Kyle probably would—but even he regarded Danny more as a source of vulgar entertainment than a friend.
Then it happened again. When I turned to speak to Oliver, there’d been a pair of pool cues leaning side-by-side against the wall a few stools down. Now they were gone.
This time it might have been my imagination. Somebody passing by could have casually snatched them up and kept walking.
But a moment later I seemed to notice a second TouchTunes box protruding from the wall directly behind me. I let it be.
Marina returned from the bathroom. Danny rose and offered her back her seat with an exaggerated bow. Before she got settled, I asked if she’d like to step outside with me. She withdrew her pack of Marlboro Menthols from her canvas bag, which she left sitting on the stool to deter Danny from sitting back down.
Marina never minded letting me bum cigarettes from time to time. I couldn’t buy them for myself anymore; it’s a habit I could never keep under control, and was only getting more expensive. Like everything else in the world. About once a month I reimbursed her by buying her a pack.
The air out on the sidewalk was as hot as the air inside Twenty, but easier to breathe. After lighting up, Marina leaned against the bricks and sighed.
“I wish Oliver would fire Danny already and get it over with.”
I nodded. Marina rarely talked about anything but work.
“He sneaks drinks and doesn't think anyone notices he's buzzed,” she went on. “He steals so much shit and isn’t even a little subtle about it. He’s going to get Oliver in trouble. And he’s a creep.”
“Yeah,” I said. These were her usual complaints about Danny, and they were all true. “At least he’s better than Austin.”
“That’s a low bar.”
Three dirt bikes and an ATV roared down the lonely street, charging through stop sign after stop sign, putting our talk on hold.
“Remind me. You’ve got one semester left, right?” I asked after the noise ebbed.
“Yep.”
Marina was a marketing major at Temple. She’d had an internship during the spring semester, and her boss told her to give her a call the very minute she graduated. Her parents in central Pennsylvania couldn’t pay her rent or tuition for her, so she was a full-time student and a full-time employee at Avenue Brew. Her emotional spectrum ranged from "tired" to "over it." She’d been waiting tables and working at coffee shops since she was seventeen, had no intention of continuing for even a day longer than she had to, and feared the escape hatch would slam shut if she dallied too long after prying it open.
She’d considered majoring in English, like Kyle. She went for marketing instead. I couldn’t blame her.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You’ve been kind of off all day.”
“I’m terrible.”
“Why?”
I gave dodgy answers, but she asked precisely the right follow-up questions to get me going about what happened with Heather the night before.
It was the new job. Before the pandemic, Heather worked as a server at a Center City bar and grill. (That's where I met her; we were coworkers for about a year, and then I left to work Café Chakra because it was quieter and closer to where I lived.) When the place closed its doors and laid everyone off during the lockdown, she got a stopgap job at the Acme on Passyunk, and hated it. Then in March, she found a bar-and-lounge gig in a ritzy hotel on Broad Street. Very corporate. Excellent pay, great benefits. Definitely a step up. But her new employers made Irene and Jeremy look like Bob and Linda Belcher by comparison. It was the kind of place where someone had recently gotten herself fired for leaving work to rush to the hospital after getting the news that her grandmother was about to be taken off life support, and not finding someone to come in and cover the last two hours of her shift.
Heather seldom worked fewer than fifty-five hours a week, and her schedule was even more erratic than mine. At least once a week she left the hotel at 1:00 or 2:00 AM and returned at 9:00 the next morning. Neither of us could remember the last time she’d had two consecutive days off, and it had been over a month since one of mine overlapped with one of hers. She’d spent it drinking alone at home. All she wanted was some privacy.
I’d biked to South Philly to meet her when she got home at 1:30. The argument that killed our relationship for good began around 2:30, when I complained that we never had sex anymore. Heather accused me of only caring about that, when she was so exhausted and stressed that her hair was falling out in the shower. Quit the job? She couldn’t quit. The money was too good. She had student loans, medical bills, and credit card debt, and for the first time in her life she could imagine paying it all off before hitting menopause.
So, yeah, I was cranky about our sex life being dead in the water. Say whatever you like. But at that point, what were we to each other? We did nothing together anymore but complain about work before one or both of us fell asleep. That isn’t a relationship.
She said my hair always smelled like sandwiches, even after bathing, and she was done pretending it didn’t turn her off. I told her she was one to talk—she always reeked of liquor. As things escalated, we stopped caring if her roommates heard us. “You want to be a father?” she shouted around 4:00 AM. “Making what you make? That poor fucking kid.”
We fought until sunrise, and I left her apartment with the understanding that I wouldn’t be coming back, wouldn’t be calling her ever again. I biked home and sat on the steps facing the cement panel that was my house’s backyard. After my phone died and I couldn’t anaesthetize myself with dumb YouTube videos or make myself feel crazy staring at the download button for the Tinder app, I watched the sparrows hopping on and off the utility lines for a while.
At 11:40 I went inside. One of my roommates was already in the shower, so the best I could do was put on a clean Avenue Brew T-shirt before walking to the shop and clocking in at noon to help deal with the lunch rush.
“That’s a lot,” Marina finally said. “Sorry.”
I don’t know what I was expecting her to say. She was sixteen years my junior, after all, and just a coworker. She didn’t need to hear any of this, and I definitely didn't need to be telling her. But who else was there to tell?
She’d already finished her cigarette. I still had a few puffs left. She went inside.
I decided to call it a night.
The second TouchTunes box was gone—naturally. Danny had taken my stool, and regarded my approach with a puckish you snooze you lose grin. I wasn’t going to say anything. I’d just pay my bill, give everyone a nod goodnight, and walk the five blocks back home.
And then Danny disappeared.
One second, he was there. The next—gone.
Danny didn’t just instantaneously vanish. Even when something happens in the blink of an eye, you can still put together something of a sequence. I saw him—I seemed to see him—falling into himself, collapsing to a point, and then to nothing.
You know how sometimes a sound is altogether inaudible unless you’re looking at the source—like when you don’t realize somebody’s whispering at you, and can then hear and understand them after they get your attention? I think that was the case here. I wouldn't have known to listen if I hadn't seen it happen. What I heard lingered for two, maybe three seconds, and wasn't any louder than a fly buzzing inside a lampshade. A tiny and impossibly distant scream, pitchshifted like a receding ambulance siren into a basso drone...
I don’t know. I don’t know for sure. I’m certain I remember a flash of red, and I have the idea of Danny’s trunk expanding, opening up as it imploded. A crimson flower, flecked white, with spooling pink stalks—and Danny’s wide-eyed face above it, drawn twisting and shrinking into its petals.
For an instant, Twenty’s interior shimmered. Not shimmered, exactly—glitched would be a better word. If you’re old enough to remember the fragmented graphics that sometimes flashed onscreen when you turned on the Nintendo without blowing on the cartridge, you’ll have an idea of what I mean. It happened much too fast, and there was too much of it to absorb. The one clear impression I could parse was the mirage of a cash register flickering upside-down above the pool table.
Not a cash register. The shape was familiar, but the texture was wrong. I think it was ribbed, sort of like a maggot. I think it glistened. Like—camo doesn’t work anymore when the wearer stops crouching behind a bush and breaks into a run. Do you get what I’m saying?
Nobody else seemed to notice. The pool balls clacked. A New Order track was playing on the TouchTunes box. A nearby argument about about Nick Sirianni continued unabated.
Finally, there was a downward rush of air—and this at least elicited a reaction from the bartender, who slapped my bill to keep it from sailing off the counter.
“Danny,” I said.
“Danny?” Kyle asked me quietly. His face had gone pale.
“Danny?” Oliver repeated in a faraway voice.
After a pause, Kyle blinked a few times. “You heard from him?”
“God forbid,” said Marina. “When he quit I was like, great, I can keep working here after all.”
“Oh, come on—”
“Kyle. Did I ever show you those texts he sent me once at three in the morning?” The color had returned to Oliver’s face.
“No, what did he say?”
Oliver tapped at his phone and turned the screen toward Kyle.
“Oh. Oh, jeez.”
“Right? Like—if you want to ask me something, ask me. You know? Don’t be weirdly accusatory about it…”
I pulled a wad of fives and ones from my pocket, threw it all onto the counter, and beelined for the exit without consideration for the people I squeezed through and shoved past on the way.
I heard Marina saying “let him go.”
I went a second consecutive night without sleep. Fortunately I wasn’t scheduled to come in the next day.
The schedule. It’s funny. Oliver was generally great at his job, and even when he wasn’t, I cut him a lot of slack because I knew Irene and Jeremy never gave him a moment’s peace. But I could never forgive him those times he waited until the weekend to make up and distribute the schedule. This was one of those weeks he didn’t get around to it until Saturday afternoon. When I found it in my inbox, Danny’s name wasn’t anywhere on it.
As far as I know, nobody who hadn’t been at Twenty that night asked what happened to him. We were a bit overstaffed as it was, and everyone probably assumed Danny was slated for the chopping block. The part-timers were, for the most part, happy to get a few additional hours.
Oliver abruptly quit around Labor Day after a final acrimonious clash with the owners. I never found out the details, and I never saw him again. Jeremy and Irene took turns minding the store while a replacement manager was sought. None of the supervisors would be pressured into taking the job; they knew from Oliver what they could expect.
About three weeks after Oliver left, I came in for my purchasing shift and found Jeremy waiting for me in the back room. I knew it was serious when he didn’t greet me with the awkward fist-bump he ordinarily required of his male employees.
“You’ve seen the numbers,” he said. Business for the summer had fallen short of expectations, it was true, and he and Irene had decided to rein in payroll expenses. My purchaser position was being eliminated. Its responsibilities would be redistributed among the supervisors and the new manager, when one was found. In the meantime, I'd be going back to the regular $11 an hour (plus tips of course) associate position full-time.
Jeremy assured me I'd be first in the running for supervisor the next time there was an opening.
I told him it was fine, I was done, and if he’d expected the courtesy of two weeks’ notice, he shouldn’t have blindsided me like that.
“Well, that’s your choice,” he answered, trying not to look pleased. His payroll problem was solving itself.
I racked up credit card debt for a few months. Applied for entry-level museum jobs that might appreciate my art history degree. Aimed for some purchasing and administrative assistant gigs, and just for the hell of it, turned in a resume for a facilitator position at an after-school art program. Got a few interviews. All of them eventually told me they’d decided to go in a different direction. I finally got hired to bartend at Hops from Underground, a microbrewery on Fairmount.
I’m still there. The money’s okay, but it fluctuates. Hours are reasonable. I’m on their high-deductible health plan. There’s a coworker I’ve been dating. Sort of dating. You know how it goes. In this line of work you get so used to people coming and going that you learn not to get too attached. I walk past Avenue Brew a few times a week, but stopped peering in through the window when I didn't recognize the people behind the counter anymore.
2023.06.03 12:47 oksalon Beauty clinic in Kolhapur
 | submitted by oksalon to u/oksalon [link] [comments] Beauty clinic in Kolhapur From trendy haircuts to intricate hairstyling, these beauty clinic in Kolhapur offer a range of hair services that are tailored to suit individual preferences. Whether it's a classic bob, a daring pixie cut, or luscious long locks, the skilled hairstylists work their magic, transforming hair into a crowning glory. The clinics also provide various hair treatments, including nourishing hair spas and rejuvenating oil massages, leaving customers with healthy, glossy tresses. Aside from hair services, these beauty clinics excel in providing impeccable skincare treatments. Trained estheticians analyze the skin's unique needs and recommend personalized facials, designed to cleanse, hydrate, and revitalize. Through the use of high-quality products and advanced techniques, they strive to achieve a youthful and radiant complexion for their clients. Additionally, professional makeup artists are on hand to enhance natural beauty or create stunning looks for special occasions, leaving clients feeling confident and glamorous. |
2023.06.03 12:26 BuoyantBoomer I'll give you one guess!
 | submitted by BuoyantBoomer to facepalm [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 07:57 blehmeow What is this haircut/style called?
 | I want to get a haircut like this and kinda in a pixie style with long strands. THE THING IS I CANT FIGURE OUT WHAT IT'S CALLED. Pics for reference: submitted by blehmeow to Hair [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 07:35 shynailgirl Brooklyn Decker Debuts a Dramatic New Haircut - See Pics of Her Chic Bob!
 | submitted by shynailgirl to ThisCelebrity [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 04:11 ParkingLotParks I Was Harassed Outside My House
I live in Utah. I specifically live in a progressive community apartment complex. People have all sorts of pride flags hung in their windows, there are protect trans kids, blm posters, abortion finder flyers up all over. I feel safe in my complex for the most part.
For context, the complex is situation between a gas station and a Fiz. Fiz is one of the many fountain drink drive thru chains that are advertised to Mormons who can’t drink coffee or tea for their caffeine intake so they instead cannot live without soda. I took my dog out to go potty one afternoon though. I get out my door and onto the grass latch by my parking space and I heard a boy yell “Kill Your Self F****t”
I don’t pass so I know I look like a woman right now, I’ve just gotten my first gender affirming haircut and it’s not shorter than a bob would be. It is so strange because after the fear of being screamed at so vulgarly, and taking the long way back inside so they don’t know where I live, I also felt dysphoric. I knew they saw me as a lesbian when I am actually just masc presenting and married to a man. I took note of the car and saw that there were 5 men of all ages in the car.
After this I’ve been more diligent about my safety, but it’s getting worse. I am getting harassed all the time. People who drive on my street will make a point to honk, stare, make a very dramatic face of disgust or mockery at me. I didn’t think I was even visibly trans yet. I feel like this is the repercussions of unsafe laws and rhetoric. I know women who look like me and are cis and straight. I worry for myself and others with everything getting so hateful.
submitted by ParkingLotParks to transftm [link] [comments]
For context, the complex is situation between a gas station and a Fiz. Fiz is one of the many fountain drink drive thru chains that are advertised to Mormons who can’t drink coffee or tea for their caffeine intake so they instead cannot live without soda. I took my dog out to go potty one afternoon though. I get out my door and onto the grass latch by my parking space and I heard a boy yell “Kill Your Self F****t”
I don’t pass so I know I look like a woman right now, I’ve just gotten my first gender affirming haircut and it’s not shorter than a bob would be. It is so strange because after the fear of being screamed at so vulgarly, and taking the long way back inside so they don’t know where I live, I also felt dysphoric. I knew they saw me as a lesbian when I am actually just masc presenting and married to a man. I took note of the car and saw that there were 5 men of all ages in the car.
After this I’ve been more diligent about my safety, but it’s getting worse. I am getting harassed all the time. People who drive on my street will make a point to honk, stare, make a very dramatic face of disgust or mockery at me. I didn’t think I was even visibly trans yet. I feel like this is the repercussions of unsafe laws and rhetoric. I know women who look like me and are cis and straight. I worry for myself and others with everything getting so hateful.
2023.06.03 04:10 ParkingLotParks I Was Harassed Outside My House
I live in Utah. I specifically live in a progressive community apartment complex. People have all sorts of pride flags hung in their windows, there are protect trans kids, blm posters, abortion finder flyers up all over. I feel safe in my complex for the most part.
For context, the complex is situation between a gas station and a Fiz. Fiz is one of the many fountain drink drive thru chains that are advertised to Mormons who can’t drink coffee or tea for their caffeine intake so they instead cannot live without soda. I took my dog out to go potty one afternoon though. I get out my door and onto the grass latch by my parking space and I heard a boy yell “Kill Your Self F****t”
I don’t pass so I know I look like a woman right now, I’ve just gotten my first gender affirming haircut and it’s not shorter than a bob would be. It is so strange because after the fear of being screamed at so vulgarly, and taking the long way back inside so they don’t know where I live, I also felt dysphoric. I knew they saw me as a lesbian when I am actually just masc presenting and married to a man. I took note of the car and saw that there were 5 men of all ages in the car.
After this I’ve been more diligent about my safety, but it’s getting worse. I am getting harassed all the time. People who drive on my street will make a point to honk, stare, make a very dramatic face of disgust or mockery at me. I didn’t think I was even visibly trans yet. I feel like this is the repercussions of unsafe laws and rhetoric. I know women who look like me and are cis and straight. I worry for myself and others with everything getting so hateful.
submitted by ParkingLotParks to FTMMen [link] [comments]
For context, the complex is situation between a gas station and a Fiz. Fiz is one of the many fountain drink drive thru chains that are advertised to Mormons who can’t drink coffee or tea for their caffeine intake so they instead cannot live without soda. I took my dog out to go potty one afternoon though. I get out my door and onto the grass latch by my parking space and I heard a boy yell “Kill Your Self F****t”
I don’t pass so I know I look like a woman right now, I’ve just gotten my first gender affirming haircut and it’s not shorter than a bob would be. It is so strange because after the fear of being screamed at so vulgarly, and taking the long way back inside so they don’t know where I live, I also felt dysphoric. I knew they saw me as a lesbian when I am actually just masc presenting and married to a man. I took note of the car and saw that there were 5 men of all ages in the car.
After this I’ve been more diligent about my safety, but it’s getting worse. I am getting harassed all the time. People who drive on my street will make a point to honk, stare, make a very dramatic face of disgust or mockery at me. I didn’t think I was even visibly trans yet. I feel like this is the repercussions of unsafe laws and rhetoric. I know women who look like me and are cis and straight. I worry for myself and others with everything getting so hateful.
2023.06.02 16:28 estyyww I need advice as I can't accept my new haircut
I had my haircut 2 months ago. And I hate it cause it is too short for me. It is a bob. I wanna cry cause I am incapable of accepting it. My hairdresser made hair milling so my hair is amenable to styling. I wanna grow my hair again but when I see myself in the mirror I wanna cry over and over.
submitted by estyyww to femalehairadvice [link] [comments]
2023.06.02 11:13 Visible-Tune-5942 3 Popular Hairstyles For Older Ladies
 | IntroductionWhen it comes to fabulous hairstyles for older ladies, age is just a silly number! We get it - with a gazillion options out there, choosing the perfect hairstyle can feel like navigating a never-ending labyrinth.But don’t throw in the towel yet, ladies, for we've got your back and hair! Why waste precious time lost in the internet jungle when we can be your trusty guides? Here are the top 3 trendiest hairstyles fit for you marvelous mavens: dazzling pre-styled wigs that require zero effort, turning you into a majestic queen right out of the box! Bid farewell to those tedious salon appointments on Saturdays because convenience is the name of the game, ladies. Top 3 hairstyles for older ladies 1. Pixie Hairstyles For Older LadiesWe have a hair tale that'll make you flip your perfectly coiffed locks in excitement.Picture this: pixie hairstyles for older ladies, the timeless classic that's hotter than a summer day in the tropics, making a triumphant return year after year. It's the ultimate style craze! And we're not suggesting you go all Edward Scissorhands on your natural hair. Nope! We're talking about pre-styled pixie wigs, the glamorous miracle workers that effortlessly add depth and dimension to your overall look. Cue the applause for the fabulous Lauren WhisperLite® Wig by Paula Young®! With its playful layers and charming side-swept bangs, it's a true showstopper that'll leave you breathless. And the fringe gracefully sweeps across your brows with wispy, feathery magic, framing your face like a work of art! What’s not to love about it? 2. Bob Hairstyles For Older LadiesWith summer practically waving hello, it is the perfect time to rock bob hairstyles for older ladies! If you want to be the talk of talk with one of the most fabulous hairstyles for older women, this is it!For this, go with Shelby Wig by Paula Young® - a pre-styled bob with bangs that's ready to steal the show! With lush, feathery layers and a face-framing silhouette, this wig is all about texture and dimension. It's made from easy-care Kanekalon® synthetic fibers, so you can enjoy minimal upkeep while still turning heads. That’s a big win in our hair book! 3. Beachy Bob Hairstyles For Older LadiesBeachy bob hairstyles for older ladies Finally, we have a beachy bob hairstyle that is all about volume with a natural bounce. It is by far one of the most popular hairstyles for women over 60! The beachy bob hairstyles for older ladies with side-swept fringe will make your eyes pop while the texture-rich sides effortlessly frame your gorgeous face. To achieve this modern and trendy look, we highly recommend getting your hands on the Mya VersaFiber® Wig by Paula Young®. This beauty is made with heat-resistant VersaFiber® that can withstand heat tools up to a scorching 350°F! Show some love using a heat-protectant spray, and you will be rocking fabulous beachy bob hairstyles for months to come! ConclusionWith pre-styled wigs from Paula Young®, flaunting popular hairstyles for older ladies has never been easier.Don't believe us? Head over to Paula Young® and see it for yourself! This wig brand is the ultimate genie in a wig bottle! Their vast collection includes various wig styles, colors, and lengths, ready to fulfill all your hair fantasies! Craving a style revival? Read 7 Stylish Wigs For Older Women That Revitalize Your Look and rock that new hairstyle flair! |
2023.06.02 05:59 VernScissors Asymmetrical Bob Ideas for A Modern and Textured Haircut - The hidden secret technique of the most professional hairdressing design in the world
 | submitted by VernScissors to Youtubeviews [link] [comments] |
2023.06.02 04:11 Vast_Illustrator924 AITA for letting my niece pick her own haircut?
My(33f) sister(38) and brother-in-law(52) recently went on a couple's summer vacation to Spain for 2 weeks. Their daughter (16) "Kasey", wanted to stay home for the summer since she wanted to hang out with her friends so she's currently staying with me since I only live a couple minutes away.
Since it was getting hot, Kasey texted her mom saying that she wanted to get her hair cut for the summer who was fine with it. When we went to the hair dressers, Kasey wanted a shorter bob with some layers, which is a pretty big difference from her waist-length hair. I thought it was fine since she was excited about it and it was just hair. I also thought it was fine since she was a teenager, and assumed that she was the one normally picking her own haircuts previously and that she just wanted a change.
Anyways when I sent her parents a picture in the group chat, my brother-in-law immediately called me and blew up. He was really pissed off at me for letting Kasey cut her hair so short and that she now "looked like a boy". My sister didn't really say much, but now I'm getting messages from our mom and dad saying they're on their way to pick up Kasey. I've been talking it through with my parents and they don't exactly agree with my brother-in-law, but says I still should've asked them first or stopped them from cutting it too short. AITA?
submitted by Vast_Illustrator924 to AmItheAsshole [link] [comments]
Since it was getting hot, Kasey texted her mom saying that she wanted to get her hair cut for the summer who was fine with it. When we went to the hair dressers, Kasey wanted a shorter bob with some layers, which is a pretty big difference from her waist-length hair. I thought it was fine since she was excited about it and it was just hair. I also thought it was fine since she was a teenager, and assumed that she was the one normally picking her own haircuts previously and that she just wanted a change.
Anyways when I sent her parents a picture in the group chat, my brother-in-law immediately called me and blew up. He was really pissed off at me for letting Kasey cut her hair so short and that she now "looked like a boy". My sister didn't really say much, but now I'm getting messages from our mom and dad saying they're on their way to pick up Kasey. I've been talking it through with my parents and they don't exactly agree with my brother-in-law, but says I still should've asked them first or stopped them from cutting it too short. AITA?
2023.06.02 01:17 rebelspade Hair
I have haie that is a little shorter han a bob, I don't get haircuts often so it has just een growing. Yesterday I was staring in the mirror and next thing I knew I had cut of some of my hair. It wasn't enough to get noticed by it mant everything to me. My hair was very small ponytail length and now I can barely hold the hair on the back of my head. This will problably be something i do often but how do I explain it to my parents why my "hair won' grow" I didn't think about how to explain the keeping of short hair with out coming out to my transphobe parents.
Please hep me come u with a reason my hair wont grow.
(Happy pride)
submitted by rebelspade to ftm [link] [comments]
Please hep me come u with a reason my hair wont grow.
(Happy pride)
2023.06.02 00:36 JessJessTheJetPlane Traditional mum made me feel bad about my appearance
For context I am a 17 year old woman, 162cm tall and 64kg. I am not overweight or obese but I do look a bit chubby. My shoulders are fairly broad for a woman. These are insecurities that I've had since hitting puberty.
5 years ago I got a pixie cut and have been growing it out ever since. In this time my mum became Christian, conservative and very traditional. Her entire personality changed.
Last year my hair was already quite long and I wanted to get a long bob (to my shoulders). She said no and I fought it a bit before giving up.
Now that my hair is waist length I have brought it up again and worked to convince her until she finally gave in. So yay I get the hair cut. The entire time since I asked she's been telling me not to get it because it will look horribly, terribly ugly. Particularly on me, but really on women in general. She has told me that a shorter style will emphasize how chubby I am. That it will make me look shorter, I won't be pretty anymore and it will make my shoulders look even broader. I might be getting braces soon so she has pointed out how shorter hair and braces will look even worse and more like a little kid.
I was really excited for the haircut before and even thought I would look pretty good. It will be much easier to manage and I really wanted a change in style. Now I feel anxious that she's right and I will look bad without my long hair. I want to be excited though and I am too stubborn to change my mind now. So, really, I don't know what to do.
submitted by JessJessTheJetPlane to TwoXChromosomes [link] [comments]
5 years ago I got a pixie cut and have been growing it out ever since. In this time my mum became Christian, conservative and very traditional. Her entire personality changed.
Last year my hair was already quite long and I wanted to get a long bob (to my shoulders). She said no and I fought it a bit before giving up.
Now that my hair is waist length I have brought it up again and worked to convince her until she finally gave in. So yay I get the hair cut. The entire time since I asked she's been telling me not to get it because it will look horribly, terribly ugly. Particularly on me, but really on women in general. She has told me that a shorter style will emphasize how chubby I am. That it will make me look shorter, I won't be pretty anymore and it will make my shoulders look even broader. I might be getting braces soon so she has pointed out how shorter hair and braces will look even worse and more like a little kid.
I was really excited for the haircut before and even thought I would look pretty good. It will be much easier to manage and I really wanted a change in style. Now I feel anxious that she's right and I will look bad without my long hair. I want to be excited though and I am too stubborn to change my mind now. So, really, I don't know what to do.
2023.06.01 21:31 DearDiscipline3082 Am I wrong for not liking my girlfriends new hairstyle?
My girlfriend recently got a pixie cut and hate it. My girlfriend has long hair, she always talked to me that she was going to cut it short. I had no problem with it because when she said that I thought she was going to get a Bob hair cut style. Totally fine with that. But what I'm not fine with, is it being a pixie cut. I don't like it when women have that hairstyle, it's a big turnoff for me and dislike the look. I thought nothing of it. So my girlfriend went to her hair appointment yesterday. Again, I thought nothing of it. When she came home, she cut all her hair off and it was short and pixie cut. My mouth almost literally dropped, not in a good way. She asked me if I like it and I was silent for 5 seconds and I asked "why did you do that for?!" She said "I told you I was going to get it cut short!" I said "yeah but, I didn't think you were going to cut it that short!"
Her hair has literally been bothering me this entire day. I cannot stand to look at it, it's really getting under my skin.
submitted by DearDiscipline3082 to amiwrong [link] [comments]
Her hair has literally been bothering me this entire day. I cannot stand to look at it, it's really getting under my skin.
2023.06.01 18:20 RedHeadridingOrca I really hate these haircuts! I hate my high forehead and thin hair.
 | No matter what I do, my hair is thin, flat, and straight. I tried different layers, bob, inverted bob, medium, short, pixie. I really don’t like long hair. I prefer short haired especially in the summer. Do you have recommendations? Maybe a picture from internet of hairstyle? Help please?!? I never seem to have best haircut for a long time! submitted by RedHeadridingOrca to Hair [link] [comments] FYI: the black shirt one, I lost weight. I lost 68lbs. I’m planning to lose until my ideal weight. I’m almost there. |
2023.06.01 17:24 serkankarayilan How to Make a Pixie Haircut? Short Haircut Techniques
 | submitted by serkankarayilan to u/serkankarayilan [link] [comments] |
2023.06.01 15:13 Riccikapricci Hair Cut Salon in Armitage
When it comes to getting a fabulous haircut salon in Armitage, look no further than [Salon Name]. With a team of skilled stylists who stay up-to-date with the latest trends and techniques, this salon is renowned for its exceptional service and attention to detail. Whether you’re looking for a classic bob, a trendy pixie cut, or a complete hair transformation, their experienced stylists will listen to your preferences and deliver a hairstyle that perfectly complements your features and suits your lifestyle.
submitted by Riccikapricci to u/Riccikapricci [link] [comments]
2023.06.01 12:27 Big_Independent8584 Styling a Bob Haircut with Fine Hair: Tips & Tricks
 | submitted by Big_Independent8584 to u/Big_Independent8584 [link] [comments] |
2023.06.01 11:33 StretchOrganic9019 Help... hairdresser ruined my hair
I had long hair that I had grown out from a pixie cut for the better part of 4 years. Decided it was time for a change so I went to a new stylist and asked for a blunt chin length bob, no layers and minimal thinning through the ends. When I got home, I realised she has put so many short choppy layers in my hair and thinned it out sooo much :(
It looks terrible - flat at the back with layers starting from really high up, and thin and scraggly at the front. My natural hair is wavy but the waves have been destroyed so now it just sticks out at weird angles. My hair at the sides of my head was already thinner than the rest of my head, so now it just looks like a few strands that are all different lengths, and puffs up around my head in a very unflattering way.
I'm devastated, as I have a big event coming up in 8 weeks. What can I do? Is there a chance that it will have grown out somewhat by then and I can go and get a corrective cut to bring my hair up to meet the longer layers and make it look a bit better? I'm focusing on good nutrition and daily scalp massages with oils, but I've never really been this self conscious about my hair growth so don't know how what to expect in 2 months :(
submitted by StretchOrganic9019 to femalehairadvice [link] [comments]
It looks terrible - flat at the back with layers starting from really high up, and thin and scraggly at the front. My natural hair is wavy but the waves have been destroyed so now it just sticks out at weird angles. My hair at the sides of my head was already thinner than the rest of my head, so now it just looks like a few strands that are all different lengths, and puffs up around my head in a very unflattering way.
I'm devastated, as I have a big event coming up in 8 weeks. What can I do? Is there a chance that it will have grown out somewhat by then and I can go and get a corrective cut to bring my hair up to meet the longer layers and make it look a bit better? I'm focusing on good nutrition and daily scalp massages with oils, but I've never really been this self conscious about my hair growth so don't know how what to expect in 2 months :(
2023.06.01 11:09 girlnamedalisha_ HAircuts lolol
Hii i wanted to cut my hair and im feeling like going short with bangss. I have an oval face shape ( i think lol help me) And theres some haircuts i wanna do like:
Collarbone length hair with long layers and curtain bangs / wispy bangs and face framing pieces
Lob with curtain bangs
Shoulder length bob with curtain bangs/ wispy bangs with face framing pieces..
Some of the pics i add is like the haircuts that seem instresting.. But i cant figure out the haircut for pic no.2 tell me if ya knoww
anyways, would my face suits the haircut i listed? And would it look good with wispy bangss?? :)) thanks in advancee
submitted by girlnamedalisha_ to Haircare [link] [comments]
Collarbone length hair with long layers and curtain bangs / wispy bangs and face framing pieces
Lob with curtain bangs
Shoulder length bob with curtain bangs/ wispy bangs with face framing pieces..
Some of the pics i add is like the haircuts that seem instresting.. But i cant figure out the haircut for pic no.2 tell me if ya knoww
anyways, would my face suits the haircut i listed? And would it look good with wispy bangss?? :)) thanks in advancee