Bad Hair/Good Mood

Pin It That's the secret to life . . . replace one worry with another.
Peanuts
Charlie Brown

I am having such hair issues lately.

I like to think that I’m not really all that vain….except that I really am about my hair.

I think the one of the reasons is that there were a couple of people in my family that were hairdressers and my family even owned a salon for awhile. That sounds like it would be a great thing doesn't it? Always someone to do your hair and for free on top of that. Problem with having a family member do your hair (and do it for free) is you tended to get the salon equivalent of leftovers. You usually get the last appointment of the day when all the paying customers are done. And they’re not all that worried about impressing you because hey, where else ya gonna go right? So I got a lot of mood haircuts over the years…good mood = good hair cut. Bad mood = …well you get the idea. Plus some of that time was during the 80’s when there was a lot of big hair, curling irons, hot rollers and hairspray happening – how happy were any of us our hair really?

But at some point about 10 years ago I had had enough. I picked out someone whose hair I especially liked and begged her for the name of her hairstylist. I went to him (yep, I said HIM) and he was and is awesome. After just a few visits I got to the point where I pretty much liked my hair all the time. I liked it so well that it became a non-issue for me in a way that only a woman who has spent hours pouring over those “New Haircut’ magazines or bouncing around the millions of internet hairstyle sights would really understand. I paid way too much for this peace of mind, but on the other hand it did free up my brain to concentrate on other things so it was kind of a bargain if you think about it from an normative economic sense (how’s that for justification?).

But then about a year or so ago I experienced a hair upheaval to go along with my mental and emotional upheaval. An arm-chair psychiatrist would probably say that it was some kind of control issue - I guess when you don’t have any control over what’s going on in your life – at least you have control over what to do with your hair.

Now I didn’t dye it purple or anything, but I did have my guy chop it all off. And, I’m sorry to say that I wasn’t entirely happy with it short. It’s totally not my hair guys fault – he just did what I asked him to do (with a pretty skeptical expression on his face now that I think about it). The problem with me and short hair has less to do with the hair stylist and more to do with the fact that I have the roundest head next to any Charles Shultz character that you’ll ever see outside the funny pages and short hair just makes me feel like my whole world is about the roundness of my head.

So, sadly I find that I am once again uncomfortable with my hair and spend way too much time worrying about it. I need something comfortable that doesn’t accentuate my Charlie Brown head and is also cool enough that my hair can become a non-issue for me again. It needs to look good, it needs to look effortless because I don’t have the space in my brain to worry on a daily basis if my hair is being weird. I already have to leave room in my head for the perpetual - how big does my butt look in these pants – I really need my hair to take care of itself.

So let this be a lesson – mood hair is never a good idea. You don’t want it from your hairstylist and you don’t even want it from yourself. I’m not in the same mood I was a year ago, but my hair hasn’t gotten the memo yet.