Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Yesterday I drove my vehicle over to Great Harvest for my favorite oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. I mean sometimes you get a good batch and they are soft and hearty. The chips they drop in those cookies come from happy chocolate farms. Not only that, but the oats are so present that it's more like eating a bowl of chocolate chunk oatmeal in a form of a cookie bigger than your face. Say that three times fast.

I want oatmeal chocolate chip cookies when I am missing somebody. Or something. Last year when my husband left me for a sojourn with the Discovery Channel in Moab, I made a batch of my own just to pass the time. While every cookie I ate staved off more and more loneliness, I must admit that Chocolate Chunks are no substitute for the Chupa. I know, you know, I like that man.

I guess it is because of the consistency of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. So thick and full of bulk, that there is not any physical or emotional void that these hunks cannot fill. It is what the Brawny Man eats when his wife goes to The National Women's Loggers Conference every year in October...when he is forced to sit home, eat raw hamburger and clean his suspenders.

With a cookie in hand and two bags more in the drivers seat, I started on my way to visit my husbandless sister who, of course, had the tragedy of being alone on such an important over-commercialized, guilt-inducing, (do women really like teddy bears?) holiday. I hoped to medicate her loneliness with a giant cookie. But as I devoured my own I wondered why I was so in need of the baked solution myself. What was I missing?
I caught a glimpse of myself in my rear view mirror and I remembered.

I was missing my hair.

A couple weeks ago I saw a woman who had the haircut of my dreams. I would explain it, except that I don't have any stylist vocabulary ("It was layered, no piecey, no blended, no...") which is what got me into trouble in the first place. Knowing that I, in my weakness, could not describe the cut to my regular amazing stylist, Ashlee (at Platinum Studio in Orem) I approached the woman and inquired about her cut. As it turns out she was a stylist and did most of the cut herself, but a fellow salon friend helped her out a little. She gave me the name of the friend, as she was off to trade her scissors for scalpels in medical school. Not to down the whole beautician profession, but I was admittedly shocked when I heard that, and good luck to her.

So I went to the friend, who spoke like a robot and promised big, but in the end gave me a haircut so departed from the haircut in question that I didn't even recognize myself. To prove my innocence, there was a picture of the Medical School girl in the salon with my haircut. I pointed at it before the cutting began, but never-you-mind I had about 6 inches of my hair cut off in less than five minutes. It was a cut that looks like a doozy from bordering towns that once were called hick but because of real estate prices are now turning hip.

Which is when I fled back into the arms of Ashlee, who forgave me and fixed my color and chopped here and there so that I looked somewhat like myself again, though I am sharing the haircut with most soccer moms who boast five children, ( and one on the way) and an Aerostar minivan. Not to down the whole soccer mom profession (the profession of my dreams), but I already get asked how many children I have every two hours and now my hair is not helping convince anybody of my childless state.

"You mean, you've got that haircut and no children? Weird."

So I ate that fat cookie and felt my missing go away. The best thing about hair is that is grows. And in July this haircut is going to turn heads at the Fourth of July parade. Turn heads, I tell you. Mayor Lewis is gonna be jealous. From now until then, if you see me wandering around town--especially if I am doing so with a big chocolate chip oatmeal cookie in hand--please know, I am fine.