Today was kind of a waste of a Saturday. It seemed like I was thwarted at every turn, but now, in the evening, I can't really recall why I felt that way without giving it a lot of thought, and that doesn't seem productive.

I got my hair cut and colored, which was productive--my regular, like clockwork, every-six-weeks appointment.

The woman who cuts my hair is the salon's senior stylist; I started going to her on the strength of a recommendation from a friend--I'd asked her who did her hair, and she told me, and I called and made an appointment, and was satisfied with the results. Well, more than satisfied, she does a wonderful job. Always perfect. Unlike the last stylist I had--my hair was a different color every time I went to her. I wasn't sure perfection was possible, but I've found it. She's deaf; I don't know if she's totally deaf or just partially deaf, she watches her clients in the mirror and reads their lips, so really, if you didn't notice the hearing aids, you might not know.

Since she's the senior stylist, her assistant usually applies the color and washes my hair, and the stylist cuts it. The assistant, perhaps in counterpoint to the calm quiet of the stylist, is a fireball. She got married a few weeks ago to a soldier (a Marine) stationed in one of the Carolinas (North? South? You would think I'd know, as much as she talks about it). She talks constantly.

She has asked him and asked him not to do her laundry, but he persists in doing it, and in drying it too hot to boot. He wants to get some more tattoos when he gets out in August, as well as getting his ears, eyebrow, and possibly tongue, pierced. He buys her clothes when he comes home on leave, and likes her to wear them. There will undoubtedly be lots of parties when he gets out, and they have to find a new place to live, and move, and they're having trouble deciding where to live since he wants to live in the small town where his family live, and she doesn't. He's going to enroll in junior college; his brother will be going there, too, and they'll be freshmen together, despite the fact that her husband will be "almost 23," possibly too ancient to attend college . . .

At least I don't really have to do much except smile and nod. Small talk isn't one of my strong points.

In the wake of the recent Yahoo! changes that everyone has probably seen by now (they changed their privacy policy and decided this gave them the perfect opportunity to subscribe everyone who uses their service to about a hundred different types of spam, whether or not you had previously asked them not to pass your name along, and also added home addresses and phone numbers to user profiles so they can send you offline spam), as well as an interesting (to me) lawsuit involving some people who, perhaps injudiciously, posted their opinions about a retailer online (Heaven forbid!), I've been thinking about privacy, defamation, and the sad state of the internet in general.

What's the difference between expressing an opinion and defaming someone? I don't know the answer to that. I also don't know the solution to the quest to make money on the internet; however, I think it's probably not inundating unsuspecting users with waves of "Get Rich Quick" emails.

It makes me sad to think that expressing an opinion online is enough to get you sued, and it's scary to think that if you do get sued, the only recourse of a regular person is, in most cases, to settle, since few of us have the resources to mount a legal defense.

It makes me angry to see what's happened to Yahoo!--it started out as such a cool service, and it has evolved into a huge spam-generating machine. Wow. I wonder if that could get me sued. I suppose it could. That makes me both angry and sad.

However, in spite of everything, there are still such things (in Kansas City, anyway) as online pizza ordering.

Life is good.