Several seasoned stylists gathered around me, trying to untangle my hair and envisioning yet another long night of struggling to emerge from the thicket. 

A quiet melancholic barber approached us and shyly extended a flimsy little brush. 

” Ha! Look at him!” the head stylist exclaimed. “All he knows is his male customers with a bald patch and two wisps of hair. He thinks we can do something with his tiny plastic brush!” 

The other stylists roared with laughter but the barber just stood there with his offering. The stylists continued cracking jokes at him and ridiculing his typically male incapacity to comprehend female hair when one of the enormous utensils that they tried to push through a particularly bad knot snapped in two.

” Drat!” the head stylist exclaimed and snatched the small plastic brush from the barber’ s hand to use instead of the one that broke. 

When she drew it through my hair, we all heard the sound of  free, unimpeded movement through the strands.  

And silence fell.

” What the hell just happened ?” the salon owner finally asked. 

” It worked!” the stylist whispered. ” The barber’ s little plastic brush untangled Clarissa’s hair.” 

” It’s a miracle!” the manicurist exclaimed.

Everybody stared at the shy barber. He smiled self – consciously and apologetically and retreated to the male side of the house . 

I’m  the only person left at the salon aside from the stylist ( because my hair needs hours of work), and the music playing is in its entirety from my youth back in Montréal  (” you are my angel, you are my darling angel”, ” banging on the bathroom floor”, ” algo en tu cara me fascina”, etc.) 

It’s a very strange feeling . 

I knew that the losing side was getting desperate but I had no idea how much before they presented a new iteration of the fake ” damn emails” scandal.

And here people were saying Trump was incapable of being funny.

There are two things that make me feel accomplished, responsible and kick-ass cool:

1. Having a mailbox with no unanswered, unread and forgotten emails.
2. Knowing that I’ve done all the grading and there is no more of it to do.

If you want to know why Illinois politics is such a freak show, look up yesterday’s debate between Tammy Duckworth and Mark Kirk. Both have been trying to outweird each other for months and the result is predictably pathetic.

The state is falling apart around them, and these two useless clowns are arguing about such a ridiculous and outdated nation-state trapping as ” Daughters of American Revolution.” These endless appeals to cheap patriotism have got to stop. And Duckworth has  got to realize that the line of ” I’ve been here longer than that more recent off – the – boat trash so I have more value” will eventually be turned against her. Rolling out ancestries is outdated and ridiculous. 

From my newsfeed, I got the impression that the protesters were a bunch of weirdos. All that the million and one sources in my feed mention about the protesters is that they are “defending sacred ancestral sites”, and it’s hard to take this concept seriously.

But then I finally saw a representative of the Standing Rock Sioux on TV and he explained that the protests are about preserving water from being contaminated by the pipeline. That is, the protest is important and reasonable and the protesters are not kooks but people who should be supported in their good fight. I Google photos of the protest, and sure enough, people are standing with placards that say “Clean water!” 

It’s almost like there is a conspiracy to shit on the protest and make it sound like a bunch of weirdos being extra special weird.

One should always go to the source and not trust retellings – that’s the lesson here. I almost condemned people who defend an issue I care the most about because I trusted retelling.