As a living, breathing, female human being of modern-day society, you know you’ve hit the hairstylist jackpot if you can walk into a salon for a hair cut, tell them you don’t want “anything taken off the length,” and witness them nodding unflinchingly in total understanding.

I’ve had hair salon issues over the years — namely my years in New York City, where it shouldn’t be that difficult to find a fabulous stylist to stick to — ranging from their doubting that I really, truly “needed” highlights to their pretending not to be cutting off more than a fraction of a centimeter but then chopping off several inches due to their claims (after the fact!) of “breakage” that is not visible to the naked eye.

Part of it is that my hair is low maintenance. On purpose. I don’t want them to give me some style that I will never be able (or want) to maintain. I have — I demand — to be able to pull my hair back into a ponytail in a pinch now, after losing hours, days, weeks of my teens and twenties to blow-drying and straightening. I owe it to myself. I don’t look right with a “style” — it isn’t me. Styles make me look like I’m pretending.

I will let them add layers, though, for depth/dimension, and the only other exception is that ever since freshman year in college — when Marie & I were the first chicks in Pennsylvania to dye our own hair with crazy stripes of blue, purple, and green Manic Panic — I’ve dabbled in the semi-frequent highlighting of my hair. Usually I do it myself, which has resulted in the further dried-out crackage of my hands from the chemicals, and is generally a pain in the ass since you can’t see the back of your head and have to open all the windows, lest you poison the cats.

Salons over the years have often scoffed at the idea that I would want to ruin my oh-so-wonderful natural blonde hair with unnatural highlighting — to the point that on more than one occasion I’ve covertly been given too-subtle, barely visible pretend highlights that faded almost immediately — with the exception of one little joint in the West Village that I’d forgotten about, as I only visited once as a walk-in customer when I first moved to the city and was living in Chelsea in 2001.

It must have been before 9/11 because I only remained living in Chelsea for a few months longer following 9/11, and that salon is close enough to Ground Zero that I’d have remembered that lingering afterchill in the air. I’d have remembered, because getting highlights takes approximately (upwards of) four hours if the person knows what they’re doing, and the windows of this salon look out upon Seventh Ave. — right out specifically upon a chain link fence that is now covered with 9/11 remembrance tiles done by local school kids. I don’t remember anything in particular being tacked to that fence during the multiple hours I sat inhaling bleach and staring out upon it in 2001. And then the world turned on a dime, and that fence hasn’t had a moment’s downtime these past seven years.

I bring it up now because I’d forgotten what a good job this place did on my hair — how nice the staff is despite it being kind of a dump — and how insane it is to drop everything to spend five hours brushing chemicals onto a walk-in who — for all you know — has been swimming in an old-school, pre-Baquacil, chlorinated pool all her life and doesn’t even tip well. I’d forgotten until I walked into the place again last week for the first time in seven years, and was greeted with the same friendliness and silent looks of knowingness. I’d neglected to sign on as a regular patron at the time because I was new to the city and assumed there would always be better.

And because getting highlights done professionally is not cheap! When I first moved to the city, I was making (as it dawned on me last week while sitting in the chair with foil-wrapped hair, looking out at painted tiles of the American flag and eagles and towers, doing the calculations in my head) around the same salary as I am just now beginning to earn again — after being laid off from my decent-paying job in the tech field and then having to live hand-to-mouth in publishing for seven years, and you know what?

I survived. I’ve even kind of had a life! I’ve somehow stumbled around these seven years, experiencing things, living, breathing, and now? Planes flown into buildings, thousands dying, several years of the white house’s small-penis compensation wars, skulking around not altogether unhappily on a wing & a prayer and quietly collecting the corporate world’s crumbs and hoarding them away for a rainy day until — finally, at last?

I can afford professional highlights again.

From someone who nods in complete understanding when I say I don’t want anything taken off the length, and means it.

“Don’t be hilarious, Elizabeth. She is nice girl, but you are beautiful woman. Your face has more… characteristics.”

- Natalya, Y: The Last Man — Whys and Wherefores

I was actually accused of being optimistic recently — by a dear friend of mine whose opinion I value above most if not all others. She said it half-joshingly with a playful side-smirk, but it seriously caught me off-guard. “Don’t be so optimistic, Bess,” I believe were her exact words, and I think I even looked behind me instinctively to see if she was talking to someone else.

Earlier this year I was accused of being both “giggly” and “little”, both of which threw me for a loop at the time — as nobody has ever used anything resembling either of those adjectives to describe me — but after awhile I realized that this person had up until then only been familiar with my web site persona, which of course is neither giggly nor little, because what is there to write about on either subject? The frowning and big, scary and serious facets are what we need to get down on paper cathartically — not the cup-overflowethy happiness and the pink and fluffy hearts and stars. I mean, those who can, giggle. Those who can’t giggle, write. You can do both, of course — just not simultaneously.

I guess lately I’ve been doing a bit more of the former than the latter. Maybe because it’s summer, I’m enjoying where I live, my job is chill, and I’ve taken up running — which really does clear one’s head to the degree that it’s quite difficult to find something to sit down and bitch & moan about right afterwards, as it turns out that endorphins and thinking grave thoughts don’t mix.

I mean, en route to my last Monthly Big Loan from the Jersey Girl Zone Meeting, as I was sort of half-assedly forming a mental agenda on my train out of the city, I kept coming up empty-handed. I realized I wouldn’t be bringing much to the table. I kept getting distracted by the sunset o’er the impossibly green Meadowlands and the new double-decker car in which I was riding for the first time. I really (knock on wood) don’t have very much to gripe about these days.

Of course, it’s all a matter of how far you’re able to spring away from past misfortune on a daily, hourly, up-to-the-minute basis. Your relative buoyancy varies. My optimism is just a side-effect of how powerfully I’ve kicked off the ground at any given nanosecond, and maybe my legs have grown stronger from running. Maybe my brain has been cleansed by giggly little endorphins.

Whatever it is, I will tell you: it’s an odd sensation, getting called out on being optimistic.

Even odder, though? Genuinely feeling it.

Last weekend when I was engaging in one of the many possible activities that make me stand out as a typical white person in my mostly-black neighborhood — in this instance, trudging the few extra blocks home from the express stop I had to pretend I meant to get off at (so as not to draw attention to the whiteness of not knowing when trains randomly decide to go from local to express with no warning) with a recycled plastic tote full of WholeFoods organic frozen fruit bars about to melt slung o’er my shoulder — a little girl who’d been zipping up and down the sidewalk on her scooter looked up at me and said, “Oh, hi.”

Now, keep in mind that by “little” here, we’re talking three, maybe four years old. Completely unsupervised, as far as I could tell — a little roly-poly thing with a pink pontail holder / barrette scheme, a pink-themed outfit, on a pink scooter — the littlest, cheeks-pinchable, squeezable chublet with the most attitude I’ve ever seen, out there on the sidewalk by herself, positively owning Bed-Stuy.

“Oh, hi,” she said, as though she’d been expecting me.

“Hi!” I replied, perhaps over-cheerfully, not because that’s what’s expected of white people in black neighborhoods, but because I was genuinely elated to be receiving a genuine greeting from someone, as opposed to a slow, frowning nod from an elderly man making his way scowlingly up his front stoop with a cane, pausing on step three for long enough to note the blonde jogger with headphones passing by without breaking stride to come sit down and chat for the rest of the afternoon, because that is how we do here in this ‘hood, and if you don’t comply, obviously you’re an evil harbinger of gentrification.

The little girl continued zipping back and forth as I made my way homeward along Jefferson Street. And then I thought I heard something over the music on my mp3 player:

“Girl!”

No, that must have been coming from someplace–

“Girl!”

I turned around, and the little roly-poly pink-clad tot was paused with her scooter, staring down the sidewalk at me.

“You live here, gir’?”

I don’t think I can accurately do justice to the amount of good-natured sassiness pouring out of this little girl, but I think I began to tear up at this point.

“Er, yes — I live right over there,” pointing west.

She looked at me for a moment, like she was trying to picture where, exactly, I meant, and then:

“Oh. Okay. Bye-bye.”

And with a smile she turned on her three year-old heel, literally to push off from the ground and start her scooter scooting in the opposite direction.

Too young and innocent to know that she’s supposed to hate me because I’m white; just thought she was making a friend.

And? She made one.

Plus, now I can sleep better at night, knowing the sassiest little pre-kindergartener in Brooklyn’s got my back.

Throughout my life, I have walked past Ed Vass’s house. I have moped past Ed Vass’s house. I’ve driven past, biked past — strolled, crept, slunk, slithered, crawled by the light of the moon past Ed Vass’s house. Up until last weekend, I’d done just about everything that one can do involving both ambulation and Ed Vass’s house.

Except jog.

I should have known in advance that it would be viewed as blasphemous. To show off, to exhibit pride in front of Ed Vass’s house. To refrain from reapplying lipstick and adjusting one’s decolletage prior to tiptoeing within about three-hundred yards of Ed Vass’s house.

As I huffed and puffed past — makeup-less and red-faced, voiceless and unsmiling — for the first time in my life I didn’t care what Ed Vass (who, by the way, has been married for awhile now with at least one child, and living several towns away) thought. I didn’t care if anyone was looking out the window to catch a glimpse of Bess Jankowski coughing up phlegm in a chest-flattening sports bra and dorky salmon-colored sneakers, winded and disoriented — out for herself and herself alone — instead of leaning up against a lamppost smoking a cigarette in the shadows — sparkly-eyed and flowy-haired, shy and oblivious — waiting for a sign of the dog of the cousin’s twice-removed brother’s step-sister of Ed Vass, like they’re used to.

The goddesses could forgive me on the way out, but on the way back? Not to care how I looked going up The Hill in Front of Ed Vass’s House™? Panting unembarrassedly, sweating unsexily; the illustrated death of femininity?

I have run and run through Bedford-Stuyvesant and Clinton Hill, jogged and power-walked through Crown and Prospect Heights. I have jump-jigged and kick-twirled over Fulton Street cement squares and Clifton Place bluestone slabs alike — every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, for half an hour each, with no more serious physical ramification than good ol’ healthy thigh pain — up until last weekend.

Ever since I jogged past Ed Vass’s house last weekend, I’ve had tendinitis in both ankles and can hardly walk down a flight of stairs, let alone run.

Ever since I inadvertently renounced my childhood god, I’ve been plagued.