Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Vainposting and the Art of Not Caring

My long term battle with my hair is well documented.

At this point, we've sort of come to an impasse - I don't like it, it doesn't like me, and we've accepted that fact. There was a bit of a scuffle very early in January, when it refused to conform to anything remotely professional looking and I responded by cutting it all off to within an inch of my scalp. But that was resolved pretty squarely in favor of the hair, when I got the pictures back from my January visit to Austin and I looked like the world's most confused and drunken escaped mental patient in every single photo.

But lately I've just let the hair do its growing thing, and it's been perfectly happy to just there lie like a bushy mass on my head. Part of this hair indifference included letting semi-professional hair people do pretty much whatever they wanted to it for the first quarter of the year. When Jordan went to cosmetology school for a month and needed a hair dying model person, I volunteered my unruly mop for a coloring. And then the next month when his friend David needed a model as well, I signed up for a second coating without a thought.

People kept just politely nodding their heads and secretly rolling their eyes when I said that I really didn't care what my hair looked like, but I quite literally meant it. I would still attempt to tame it into something respectable on the off chance that it might finally have given up the battle, but I had truly decided to make a concerted effort not to put too much stock in how my hair reflected my worth as a human being.

And omigosh, it's so great. I realize now that the difference between great hair and normal hair is so much wider than the difference between normal hair and bad hair. And that the difference between bad hair and truly horrible hair is the widest gap of all. Or more plainly - there's pretty much nothing I can do to my head to get out of the normal-bad range, and no one in the world is going to care one way or the other.

So now I go with all out non-caring - I wash my hair in the morning, towel it dry, and then run my hands through it until it's roughly flat on my head. And then I don't mess with it for the rest of the day. Except on occasions when I'm in the privacy of my own home and I wear a headband to keep the hair out of my eyes, as previously disclosed. It's so awesome. And functional.

Plus, it doesn't look that terrible.

Okay, maybe I do look like I've wandered straight out of an 80's movie, what with the feathered nature of how it now falls. And sure, it's gone from 'mildly bushy' to 'so bushy that it brushes the ceiling of car when I get in' while rapidly approaching 'white boy afro' levels. And yes, I have grown out my sideburns down my chin, to offset the 80's look of the upper hair by doing a throwback to the mid 1920's. ...Wait, I forget exactly where this whole story was going.

Um, hair. Yes. Not caring is awesome. I never want to go to a barber ever again. We'll see how long I can hold out. We're currently somewhere around month three. I probably give it another three weeks, roughly, or until I can see my hair at all times in my field of vision. That's usually what causes me to snap. But maybe my willpower and self image have gone up so much lately that I'll be able to last for ages without caring what others think of my crazy 80's mane.

(Yeah, seriously, three weeks)

1 comment:

Sean said...

I fully support your hair decisions.