What's Making Me Happy: May 9

I got my hair cut this week. This is not normally a big deal, except for years I've only had tiny trims, done at those $10 hair-chop-shop places, and only about twice a year. So it's been a) long and b) boring. For years. I feel I'm setting the stage for a big "I got it all cut off!" revelation, which did not happen and will never happen again barring chemo or something setting it on fire. (You haven't seen me with short hair. It's scary. Trust me.) BUT. I did do an actual style, with an actual proper stylist, which was daring enough for someone who is the Ebenezer Scrooge of hair. Afterward she was done with me I looked like this:

Haha. OK, just my hair looked like that. It stayed that way for about 5 minutes, the time it took after the stylist had finished toying with it until I paid and walked out into the maelstrom that is springtime in these here parts. As soon as I stepped out of the salon I looked like this:

Which is pretty much how I remain unless I take a flat-iron to it. But STILL. I went out of my comfort zone and did something a little bit different. And it's nice to know I can rock my Ellen Pompeo look when I put my mind to it.

I also discovered a fabulous new artist this week, of the musical variety. Her name is Phildel, and she's got a backstory that's just waiting for a biopic. "Phildel" is really her real name, an amalgam of her Irish mother (Della) and her Chinese father (Philip. Don't ask). But although she spent her early years in the "moderate, liberal culture" of working-class Britain, when Phildel was 9, her mum married the man who worked beside her at the local grocery. Her new stepfather forced Phildel to change her name to Zara, took away all her possessions, put her in a headscarf, and banned music from the house. He was rather religious, it seems. "It’s impossible for people to comprehend, if they’ve always known music at home, the vacuum in your mind when you grew up without it," she said in a recent interview with the Guardian. Silence became a weighty thing, her mind filling the emptiness with bits of remembered melodies. She found a piano at her school and carved out the tunes playing in her head. Her debut album is named, appropriately, "The Disappearance of the Girl."

Check out this track, the one my daughter and I have been listening to nonstop since we discovered it on Pandora. You can hear the tinkling, ballerina-music-box quality of the piano; the keening melancholy of her voice.

And here are some protesting sheep, for your amusement:

Happy weekend, everyone!