I seriously can’t understand how so much variation can exist from one day to the next, when it comes to my hair. As many of you already know, I have naturally curly hair. It’s not tight, frizzy curls. It’s a mess of relaxed curls that straighten out on top when it gets too long. It’s Sheryl Crow-ish, to make a comparison you can envision, though not nearly so sexy and photo-shoot ready as Sheryl Crow’s hair. Last October I cut it short. At first I straightened it everyday and it looked all right. Straightening it everyday is a lot of work and I’m lazy when it comes to primping. Or, more accurately, when it comes to primping, I don’t at all. I’m not a priss, if you must know, plus it puts a lot of strain on my hair. What with my wild imagination and visions of it just falling out one day from highlighting it too much and burning it every day to make it straight*, I just stopped doing it. And Stoker likes it curly. That’s incentive to give up the work of actually ‘doing it.’
So anyway. What I don’t get is how one day it curls up just right, in little adorable clumps that I love, much like a Greek statue. Just how I want it. But the next day it falls limply over my ears in separated strands like angel-hair pasta, still curly but not curly enough for my taste. Stupid angel-hair pasta hair. On those days I feel ridiculous and out of place and I want to hide myself in a hat or a brown paper sack. Like today. I feel ridiculous.
How can it vary so much? I’m really wondering. How many factors go into how my hair behaves day after day? Does it react, one day, to an increase in humidity? And the next, to the dryness? Does it matter what shampoo I use? And when I use conditioner or I don’t use conditioner, does that affect it? I try not to give a crap about my hair (there’s an expressive phrase), but I do. Though not enough to spend an hour— or even a half hour—on it. I suppose this means I don’t have the right to complain.
Still I complain, because there are incontrollable environmental factors contributing to how it behaves. And that’s what chaps my hide. It really does.
And in other words, I’m having one of those ugly days.
But I’m listening to the new Spoon album, and just in case it matters to you (whoever you are, wherever you are), my favorite song on it is “I Summon You.” And here’s something else I’m thinking about: how is it that the song I end up absolutely loving on an album, is also the song the radio stations love and all the people in the world love (who listen to that band) and also the song the band loves the most? (In the case of Keane, it was “Everybody’s Changing.” The crowd went WILD when they started playing it at the show the other night. See previous post.) Like I’ve said before, I guess I just have generic taste that I sometimes mistake for good and eclectic taste.
p.s. If you thought no one could outdo my bad-hair, sunburned-shoulders day (oh yeah, I have sunburned shoulders. Stupid sun-block that I forgot to put on before my hike), my friend who just got back from climbing Mt. Rainer has 7 cold sores**.
*not the technical term for it, but that’s essentially what it is.
**I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, At least you don’t have the Ebola-like fever the people in Angola, Africa are suffering from. And I’m thinking you’re absolutely right, and that’s why I’ll never go to Africa.
1 comment:
Deararies327: I am SO aware of the hair trama you experience, as I have also thought about many of the points you brought up. I, like you, get impatient after about 5-10 minutes of trying to style my hair, and I refuse to spend crazy amounts of time on it. I teach school, and this afternoon I walked into my classroom and one of my students said, "What did you do to your hair?!" And I laughed because I knew it looked hideous--I got out of the shower this morning, gelled it, and pulled it up wet in a fashionable clip, but it maintained the gel-wet look all day, regardless of my efforts to make it look like I meant to do it that way, as if it was supposed to look hot and stylish--all crispy and sitting on the top of my head. Blah. Stupid hair. And the sad truth is that I already knew that my hair was in a bad way and I made a haircut appointment before the student made the comment. The first step is recognizing the problem I suppose. Anyway, I laughed at the comment because I love how kids have the ability to point out what we already know, and when they do, it's funny and real, and there's no offense taken. However, if someone on the faculty would have made that comment, I might have curled up in a ball in the teacher's lounge for 15 minutes, secretly desiring that teachers be allowed to wear baseball caps as part of the dress code.
Hair, schmare. Why does it torture us?! Best of luck to you in your hair adventures...
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