Vote for me and all your wildest dreams will come true

We listened to our school's five candidates for student council president this morning. They were all quite well-spoken, and I imagine it will be a close race. Any one of them would make a fine student council president.

Still...

I think I'd have had an easier time deciding who to vote for if there had been some dancing. I had my iPod all cued up with Jamiroquai's "Canned Heat," but alas. Unfortunately, I don't think the humor of Napoleon Dynamite translates much beyond North America.

In other news, I learned today that my hair color is unacceptable.

This is unfortunate for me, as (aside from a few highlights in the front) my hair just happens to come out of my head that way.

We were going over the official school dress code for staff and teachers today in our morning meeting. This was mostly because some teachers had taken to wearing whatever they damn well pleased (hello, camouflage pants) and those of us who actually made attempts to wear our ugly navy blue pants and white button-down shirts every day were getting a bit annoyed by this.

Well, as it turns out, our governing body's dress code for us is something most of us had never heard until today. This doesn't come as a great surprise, as I can count on one finger the number of times I've actually seen a representative of our school's governing body at our actual school. (Yes, one FINGER. Once. In two and a half years.) We asked, hey, can we have a representative from our actual school on the governing body? No, we were told, someone from one of the other schools in the system will represent ALL of us.

Yeah, I'll give you a minute to process this.

So this governing body has ruled many things about uniforms, one being that all women have to wear, every day, the blue scarves that were issued to them at the beginning of the year. This was news to us. This wasn't good news to us, either, as the scarves are, frankly, ugly. My high-waisted mom pants and unflattering white shirt are bad enough. Now I allegedly have to wear this ugly old woman scarf, too. What's next? Standard-issue orthopedic shoes?

To make matters worse, the section on appropriate hair is worded so stupidly that my hair color is forbidden. I assumed this meant people with naturally black hair who dyed their hair dark blonde/light brown. No, the rule is worded so that specifically dyed hair or natural hair color is not mentioned at all-just forbidden hair colors. It doesn't say you can't dye your hair light brown or dye it unnatural colors, it just says "The following hair colors are not permitted:" and then goes on to list every color of the rainbow and then red and light brown or blonde.

I realize that, in a country where most people's natural hair color is black, this probably means you can't dye your hair any color that's unnatural for it, but it isn't worded that way. Of course, to change this we will have to ask our school's governing body, so...yeah, snowball's chance in hell is basically what I'm thinking.

I guess, if I have to wear my fugly scarf, I can figure out a way to tie it over my distracting, unnatural, freakishly light hair.

I just hope blue eyes are OK. Colored contacts are expensive.

Even better, this alleged three-page policy is something most of us have never seen. The dress code/hair/make-up policy in the teacher handbook is two paragraphs long, and basically says "wear your white shirts and blue pants, black or dark blue closed-toe shoes and have neat hair befitting your profession." So...yeah, I don't know.

The best (and by best I mean worst) part about this morning's little meeting was when our school's stellar (and by stellar I mean not so much) human resource department showed a little slide show they'd prepared. The slide show was photos of people with minor uniform infractions, taken ambush-paparazzi style. The people had no idea they were having their pictures taken, and were rather humiliated to be publicly singled out. It doesn't surprise me that HRD was chosing to spend its time and money on such a mean-spirited, time wasting endeavor, but that doesn't mean it doesn't disgust me.

Nine months. I keep telling myself, just nine more months...