In my effort to make myself over to be tan, blond, and fun, I’m making progress with my tanning. Next step: blonding. I’ve contacted a salon in Hollywood that works on celebrities, and one of their people can see me tomorrow! Wow. It’s just a consultation, but it’s perhaps the most major step forward in getting my hair transformation started: from dark brown and wavy, about shoulder length, to platinum blond with tighter waves past my shoulders. That’s a drastic hair color change, with the length and texture change requiring extensions, but at the place I’m booking my appointment with they don’t miss a beat when someone asks for a transformation like that. They don’t even flinch!
At the undisclosed location I used to call home, any salon that was local would have run for the hills at a request of that nature…and even the few willing to do it in the nearest major city would not have the skills required to do it properly: maybe, just maybe I could get to some brassy take on Southern blonde (you know the type…). Hollywood blonde is flat-out beyond their abilities. For that you need to come to…well…Hollywood (or at least somewhere like New York).
Indeed, the stylist I’ve selected to oversee my transformation does Hollywood platinum blonde transformations from hair darker than mine all the time, complete with extensions that look fantastic; she even roams the country teaching other hairstylists to do blonding…and happens to be followed on Instagram by my previous hairstylist. Wild.
Even after the consultation, assuming it’s successful, it will likely take some time to get my hair transformed, but by the time it is my tanning program should be more or less complete. Already on the parts of my body that as of August 31 looked like a Milanese vampire the tone is looking healthier, and since I’ve stayed out of the sun during the height of the day my farmer’s tan has faded, so my tone is looking noticeably more even now. After five days and five tanning sessions (the place was closed on Labor Day, so I’ve only been able to go for five out of the previous six days since I started), I’m even all clear to ramp up from three minutes per session to four minutes tomorrow if I want to, since I’ve had a good reaction to the ultraviolet radiation: just tanning, no itching or pinkness or anything else of a morbid nature.
So soon, perhaps within the next couple of months, I’ll have a deep golden tan evenly all over my body, and I’ll have platinum blond curls extending past my shoulders.
I’ll also be a Greater Los Angeles resident: I’m pleased to report that I’ve secured a short-term rental through the end of March, which I’ll be moving into in a few weeks. The place is in Santa Monica, just one mile from the beach; further than I’d like, but it seems to be in a nice area, is definitely convenient to everywhere I’d like to go around here, and will grant me a physical address to use to establish California residency. I might even be able to register to vote in plenty of time for the election on November 5! All much faster than I expected.
I’ll be tan and I’ll be blond, but will I be fun? To be fun, first I must have a lot more fun, and in the selfies I’ve been taking nothing seems to bring out a smile in me more than going to the beach. Perhaps I should lean on that more? What would I even do on the beach a lot? I do love it…maybe I should get one of those bicycles everyone seems to use around here and lug my laptop around or some such. I’ll have to look into all that.
Another thing I need to look into is becoming trimmer and building a physique I’ll be proud of. I’m already trying to limit my food intake so my midsection doesn’t balloon, and I really ought to join a gym, ideally one that offers personal training. Of course what I really need is not only weight training, but also anabolic steroids. The two work hand-in-hand, letting me attain a top-tier naturally-attainable physique while putting in well short of top-tier naturally-attainable levels of work (which with my temperament and the time I have to work with is just going to be impossible). Basically the same formula Hollywood actors use. I might despair about how exactly to go about this…but I live right next to Hollywood. So I’m sure it won’t be hard to figure out.
Literally right down the street from me within easy walking distance is an outdoor gym filled with old guys who seem suspiciously fit and lively…and lo and behold the club building has a Cenegenics affiliate attached to it. “Aha!” I went, when I saw that. Explains everything. For those not in the know, Cenegenics is a clinic designed to optimize health and performance in aging men, using a variety of techniques…including hormone replacement therapy (i.e. testosterone). Uh huh.
Not exactly what I’m looking for, since I’m just 30, but from where I’m living on the South Bay clear to the original Gold’s Gym at Muscle Beach (yes, that’s the original one that Arnold Schwarzenegger was at), I may well be in the “juiciest” place in the whole country. If you’re after attaining a dream physique there are no shortage of options to get a little help from your medicine cabinet…
Once all that is accomplished I suspect I’ll be feeling pretty chipper. The more my physical appearance improves and lightens up the better I feel; the sunshine and surf help a lot too, not to mention how the whole world around me feels like a video game or movie set come to life, perhaps a big reason why I seem to fit in here a lot better than even the Bay Area, let alone the rest of the country. Over time I’m finding it harder to stay too sad, morose, or upset for long. So I think I’m moving in the right direction.
A direction that was pretty much set when I hit on the idea of “returning to childhood”. It might sound strange, but it struck me that as a small child I was tan, trim, and blond; my life started to go downhill when I got less tan, less trim, and my hair changed to its natural dark brown adult color. I probably would never have noticed were it not for a stray road trip into San Diego last winter, where at Capistrano Beach I was happy as a clam upon seeing a spike strip for the first time in my real life. Yes, you read that right: a spike strip. Because it was exactly like the racing games I played as a kid.
That was so weird it snapped me out of my thought patterns of many decades, realizing that what I really needed was to live in the world of the games come to life and turn back the clock: restore (an adult version of) my childhood appearance and launch an all-out assault on the approach of age. Redemption for the youth I was denied.
Well…soon I will be tan, blond, trim, and fit, and I’ll live in Santa Monica, a place I specifically selected because it was as close to Simcity 4 come to life as any place can be. The very street I’ll be staying at looks like it came straight out of a video game.
That sounds like a lot, but there’s still more work to be done: I haven’t selected a gym yet, I haven’t selected a spa yet for my other beauty treatments, and I haven’t selected any places to dance yet, which will be crucial for honing my skills in the art and for expanding my dance lessons business in this area. I love that work; it’s fun. But for the lifestyle I need to attain I’ll need millions, which dance isn’t going to get for me, at least not directly; entrepreneurship of a slightly different sort in the performing arts beckons, as does a position in a high-tech startup of some sort, and most especially real estate, which I suspect might be the answer.
To that end I’ll be seriously researching paths to get licensed in California, training that I will be pursuing in earnest after I establish residency here, which may well take several months until I have a license in hand. It’s an uncertain path, especially for someone most interested in the luxury space as I am, but perhaps the most rewarding.
Once I complete my makeover acting and singing training is on the menu, coupled with perhaps getting work and experience in those areas, and even getting into modeling. I’m hell-bent on “looksmaxing” myself anyway, since improving my appearance is the only lever I’ve got that’s proven effective to get people to treat me better, so why not become a model? I’m low-key giddy when it comes to imagining the actual workflow of being a model anyway, warts and all, and I do have performance talent. What’s more: I’m at a stage now where I’m approaching fashion-model pretty. I’ll need more work, but when I look even here on the west side of Los Angeles, I see very few people who look much better than I do.
In the industry I’m sure the competition is stiffer, but I only need light processing to stand up easily against the people on the posters in the mall…and they too get some processing to help their pictures come out better. I wouldn’t stake my future on it, but I might have more of an opening in the modeling space than I would have imagined for most of my life.
There are many other paths available; a date I had once said I had such a knowledge of history I really should do something with it. What that might be I don’t know. My first thought was just directly teaching it to students as a tutor, one-on-one, which I dismissed as not having a large enough market…but that was before. Here in Southern California there might be enough people interested in such a service to support someone like me. Who knows what other possibilities might present themselves?
But the ones I’ve outlined above are almost enough to keep someone busy for a lifetime. It’s almost enough to suggest that I’m taking on too much at one time and it’ll be so much hard work…maybe enough to stop me from having a fun time. Oh no! Maybe steroids could help with that too, but I suspect I’ll have to pace myself to avoid becoming like the titular tired dancer on the painting I used as this post’s featured image. Even if I do, however, I’ll make rapid progress. It’s just been over a year since I got my facial filler for the first time, let alone gone to Europe on my first-ever overseas vacation, so I’m just imagining where I’ll be next year at this time…can’t wait!