Another time

This is my submission for the March, 2025 IndieWeb Carnival, hosted by Pablo Morales. The theme is "Self-Expression." You shoud submit something!

You can read my past submissions here.

A tale of self-expression gone awry

After shaving an "N" into my head in a perhaps excessive display of school spirit, I had a problem. No, the problem was not that I had shaved an "N" into my head. Down in the back, hecklers.

The problem was that my hair is brown. Northwestern's "N" is purple. I'd already gone this far. I had to finish the job. I didn't know the first thing about dyeing hair, but I was in the Chemistry department! All of my friends were in the Chemistry department! And they were graduate students! I was surrounded by some of the finest chemical minds in the country. This was going to be the purplest* "N" you ever saw.

* we weren't English majors

One night, 7 or 8 of us were gathered. There was chemistry going on. After a couple hours, I revealed my intention to dye my "N" purple and everyone was eager to help. We knew that I probably needed to bleach my hair first before a color would take, so we figured we could take care of that and then I could figure out the purple part later. I headed over to the tub to get ready for the bleaching while someone else went to get the bleaching agent.

From the laundry room.

Now, Clorox is a powerful bleach. It will make your whites whiter. It will make your blues whiter. If you throw it at some laundry, it's going to make it whiter. What it will not do particularly well is make your hair whiter. Somehow, in a house full of advanced Chemistry students, none of us knew this. We jumped into the exercise with gusto.

While Clorox isn't great at bleaching hair, it is fantastic at administering chemical burns. It's even better at this if applied to something like, say, a freshly shaved scalp. After about 20 minutes of lying over a bathtub saying things like "Ow" and "No, it's cool, keep going," I stood up to find a prefectly brown "N" in the back of my head and a ring of red, scabbed skin around it. This was the end of the N-purpling experiment.

For the next couple of weeks, I walked around with that ring around my head. I'm not sure whether it or the "N" got more attention.

I had set out to express school spirit, and while the attempt was at best a partial success, I did still manage a feat of self-expression. For a couple weeks in the fall of 1996, anyone who looked at me could know from a glance at my forehead that I had no idea how to dye hair and that I wasn't above doing dumb if well-intentioned things in the name of a good time. The first is no longer true - I got a pretty cool blue-black going a couple years later. The second has faded over the years, and that's a shame. I think it's time I rekindle that spirit. I could stand to take myself less seriously.