A cool story or fact you like to share but which doesn't come up very often?
(In honor of this ask, I looked up a potential employer’s contact information and drafted a letter to him.)
I’m the youngest of five children (by a pretty significant margin), so I grew up in the same house as my nephew, who’s only a couple years younger than me.
My parents like to talk about what a studious bookworm I was as a child, but they hardly ever mention what an impulsive hellion I could be when I got an idea into my tiny head. So here’s a story.
I cycled through aspirations like some people cycle through outfits. The Scripps Spelling Bee is on television? Cue little Carp flipping through the dictionary because that’s gonna be me someday. Attending a performance of The Nutcracker? For some reason my parents aren’t jazzed at the prospect of packing our bags and moving to NYC so little Carp can pursue a dance career.
On this particular day, I wanted to be a hairdresser. My mother’s hairdresser was one of the coolest guys I had ever met, and he worked in a salon with a glass M&M dispenser in the waiting room, so obviously this was my dream career. But I needed practice. Which meant I needed someone else’s hair.
I pitched the idea to my nephew, who was the epitome of Too Young to Know Better. I probably promised that it would look really cool when I was done.
I raided the closet for all of the soap, gel, and mousse products we owned. I did not discriminate based on whether or not the products were intended for hair care. I sat my nephew down on the edge of the tub and got to work, layering hand soap on top of No More Tears shampoo on top of Tresemme.
Thankfully, my mother found us before I could snip any of my nephew’s hair with the mini-scissors. She was livid, not least because it took her about an hour to rinse all the soap-gunk out of his hair.
“Hand soap. Is not. For hair.”
And that’s the story of why I’m studying communication and not cosmetology.