Hair: Something Different

This postsecret reminded me of an essay I wrote last year.






I hacked off my hair with Barbie scissors. They were meant to cut paper, so it took a few snips before the clump of hair from the back of my head fell to the floor. I hid the hair at the bottom of the garbage can, pulled the remaining hair back into a ponytail to cover the damage, and went downstairs to eat dinner.

This was the latest debacle in a series of hair woes. The unruly, curly mass of hair that sprouted from my head was the bane of my existence, eating hair brushes and snapping their plastic skeletons in half. It sheered combs of their tines without mercy. It was a malignant, seething life, and I was just an attachment providing it with protein.

After being born bald, I had morphed into a Chia Pet. The hair sprang up and out. When it grew long enough, my mother braided it. When more of it grew, she braided it into pigtails. And when I had too much hair for that, in the months before my First Communion, I trapped it in a ponytail.

For my First Communion, my mother had taken me to get my hair straightened. I emerged from the salon triumphant, admiring myself in store windows and flinging my head to feel the hair flow. When I woke up on the morning of the event, the hair was a ball of wavy frizz. My mother’s attempts to straighten it before Mass were futile. I watched in the bathroom mirror. Her hands flitted around my head, patting the hair down as she reminded me to keep my head firm against the pulls of the hot iron. When she finished, the frizz was just as large. In the few moments I had alone before church, I cried on my bed and wrenched the poof of frizz in frustration. During Mass, I sat in a pew in the front of the church staring at Christ nailed to the cross, thinking about what a luxurious head of hair he had.

It was a life-size, wooden statue, frozen mid-sacrifice, that hung behind the altar. Christ’s head was bowed, his eyes searching the sky. The blood dribbling down his face from the crown of thorns stopped before his eyebrows and welled up in the creases of his wrinkled forehead. His feet were crossed, a single spike driven through both of them; his palms, too, were fixed with nails, the fingers curling slightly around them. But despite his obvious distress, his pain, and his emaciation, his hair remained immaculate, unmatted by blood.

Jesus was virtuous, white, and straight haired. And as a good Catholic girl, he was my ideal. The statue floated behind the altar as a reminder. Hair was the only of Christ’s three qualities the church had not addressed. I had reconciled myself to the fact that I was a sinner. I could receive forgiveness for that. Being white had never been of particular interest to me; the priest had said that souls have no color. But if I was going to go 0 for 2, was it too much to ask that I have shiny, straight hair?

My mother and I had a weekly ritual to subdue the beast. I would have been happy to leave the hair as a single, gravity-defying dredlock and avoid the process, but she had other ideas. Every Sunday night, after church, she sat me down in the bathtub and untangled the hair. She moved around my scalp, methodically yanking apart tangles, section by section; each tug felt like she was pulling it out by the roots. My father made up excuses to leave and avoid the screams that suffused the entire house. He would remark that the car sure could use a wash or remember that a library book needed returning before making an exit.

It was on an afternoon just before the ritual, almost a year after the First Communion disaster, when I took matters into my own hands and cut out a hideous tangle. My neighbor, Hannah, had tried to French braid my hair at a sleepover the night before. By the time she had pulled her hands away, a third of the hair in the middle of my head had conspired to bind together. Putting my hand to it, I could already feel the tug of my mother’s hands, could hear the sound of hair tearing.

When I got home the next morning, the mutant braid hidden in a bun, all I could think of was the impending pain. But until I saw the scissors, I did not know what I was going to do. It was a moment of clarity: the hair would resist being pulled apart, it would hurt, and the obvious solution was to sever it from my body.

When my mother came across the missing patch of hair that evening, she paused. “What happened?” she gasped.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“Your hair’s been breaking off in the back. Almost a third of it is gone! Must be the scrunchies.”

The ponytails that I then used to strangle the beast broke off hairs. It was a reasonable assumption on her part that they were to blame. She did not suspect that my hate of the hair was so powerful as to intentionally destroy it.

I longed for the control that my straight-haired friends seemed to take for granted. They were oblivious to the tortures I endured because of the hair. “It doesn’t get all limp and stringy when it’s wet!” or “It’s just so much more interesting than my hair,” they said. Living with the hair was interesting in the way that living in a cage with a silverback gorilla is interesting. One is always waiting for an ugly end.

I did not have to wait long for it. There was a gruesome resolution, but I was the aggressor. I always had been. The hair was inanimate, a victim of my frustration. It was silent and without intent. My obsession was what had a voice, what had chipped away at my grasp of reality. I had not seen that it was grotesque, to cut off a third of the hair with blunt scissors. But acts of desperation are always ugly. The hair suffered so that I could know that.

My perception of beauty had been tied entirely to hair and my interactions with hair tied to pain. I had amputated the hair partly to save myself from the pain, but also because it felt like carving out the ugliness. I finally had control. But too much hair was gone, and what remained had to be cut short. I came to church the next week with an afro. The hair was back down to its early state, strands only able to curl twice before ending.

I sat in the first pew and tried to stare down Jesus, but he kept his eyes stubbornly skyward. Defeated, I slouched against the hard wood. And for the first time in years, I listened to the homily. The priest paced back and forth in the aisle, waving his hands and evoking the Bible. He said something about welcoming neighbors.

In the end, the hair was not conquered; it grew back and resumed its old ways. It still snapped and spit out the skeletons of brushes. It still tangled. But in the five years the hair took to return, we began to coexist. I could go for whole days without thinking about hair. And set loose from the scrunchies’ stranglehold, the curls exploded in all directions. We were released.

Leggings

Dear Girls Who Think Leggings are Pants:

No, no, no. Leggings are not pants. I understand the temptation. They are comfortable and don't have annoying zippers or buttons. I confess that I made the terrible decision of wearing my long johns under skirts during junior year of high school, and thought I was super cool. And yes, there were some really nice outfits involving leggings and mini dresses/long shirts. But seriously, your leggings offend me.

Calf-length leggings came in a few years back to be worn under skirts. Which I thought was a terrible and usually unflattering idea, with one with which I was willing to live. And then came skinny jeans. We all squeezed ourselves into them, admired our butts, and went through a series of inappropriate shoes before finally finding ones that looked right. Even guys were in on the skinny jeans, whose pants were/are tight enough to cut off circulation and the possibility of children. It was only a matter of time before someone had the brilliant idea to combine the two trends.

You look comfortable, yes, but also like someone who fumbled around in their closet during the morning and got confused. No one wants to see your panty-lines or the exact shape of your lower body. Leggings are not flattering, and wearing them with a top that doesn't cover your butt is no good. No, I'm not your mother. If I was, you'd be wearing pants out of the house.

Love,
A Girl Who Hates Pants, Too, But...Seriously?

The Lessons of Chinese History

Since everyone I know is taking the History of China lecture this semester, I have plenty of opportunities to talk about it. We've only had two lectures and two readings so far, but some salient points have already come out. Since in college it's essential be able to distill readings to a sentence for those friends who utterly fail at homework, I've become pretty adept at picking out main points. This is especially easy since Spence's book is much more readable than the majority of history textbooks, and occasionally has these crazy one-liners that give me pause.

The first important point from the Ming Dynasty is this: Don't trust eunuchs. We read 40 pages about the late Ming Dynasty, and that was the one salient point. Sure there was something about court intrigue, massive famine and plague, and the encroachment of the Manchus, but the main problem was the eunuchs.

The second chapter dealt more with the Manchus and the fall of the Ming Dynasty. One of the Ming generals gets trapped between the Manchus and a rebel group. He chooses to side with the Manchus. Midway through the reading, there was one of Spence's one-liners. General Wu seems to have chosen the Manchus either for some completely logical reason, or because the rebel general stole his concubine. After reading this, I was unable to focus on the rest of the reading, except for the portion about a man either committing suicide or being beaten to death my peasants. How can there be an ambiguity there? How are those things at all similar? But anyway, the second point is this: If you want to take over a country, don't steal an important generals' concubines. Or generally avoid stealing anyone's concubine. They might set eunuchs on you.

For Monday: The return of my fashion rants.

In other news, I forgot a password for a site I'm on, and the password hint was, "What is a relationship?" What the fuck was I thinking?

Biblical Disasters, College Edition

So, I received  panicked call from one of my suitemates four days before I was set to return to campus.  Hadn't I received the call from the college's master? Our suite flooded! Shortly afterward, I received a cryptic email from the master saying that our suite had indeed flooded, and that some unspecified amount of stuff had been damaged or ruined.  My roommate, who found out at two in the morning, called me to flip out.  We bitched to each other about how a recently renovated dorm at a college with a lot of money shouldn't have hot water pipes bursting and destroying people's belongings.  And we concocted elaborate scenarios that had all of our clothing sitting as soggy messes after the water seeped into the wardrobes, our television short-circuiting, and our walls stained.

I came in on Saturday and found nothing wrong.  The only discernible damage was a couple curled floorboards in one of the rooms.  But since, due to our pipe, the ceiling of the suite below us fell in, we were exiled to another dorm three blocks away for the month it will take them to do the repairs.  I can live with the hassle of having to move all of my stuff at the beginning of the semester and then move it back during midterms.  At least none of my stuff was damaged.  And I can deal with the outrage that if any of my stuff had been ruined, the college wouldn't have paid me a dime for it.  But what I really can't stand is living with a bunch of freshmen.  I tried my best not to hate them, but they make it really hard.  I try to remember what I probably seemed like when I came in as a freshman, but it's like living with aliens, and I can't even explain why.

At least now when people ask me what I did for break, I have a story beyond, "Oh, you know.  I ate, slept and watched television."  Asking what people did for break is like asking them how they are: You're not expecting a real answer, but the connection that arises from your shared experience of an unexciting break.  It's exciting to me to have a story, even if the reality is somewhat inconvenient, since I usually find small talk so unbearable.  Little victories.

Shopping Period

My shopping period by numbers.

1: The number of classes I walked out of in sheer terror.
2: Number of language classes for which I am inadequately prepared but am taking anyway.
6: Average number of people who wander in late and have to stand uncomfortably in the back of a class.
12: Average number of disgruntled people who are in front of me in line at the copy store where they sell us overpriced course packets, and only in cash.
35: The number of people wearing large, ironic glasses and/or scarves in my Intro. to Theory of Literature class of 200 people.
150: Dollars it cost for two textbooks.
1,000,000: The apparent number of undergraduates who shopped my History of China course.
99,999: The expected number of people who are actually going to take it.

For Wednesday...the epic tale of a pipe bursting, flooding my entryway, and forcing twenty people (including me) out of the dorm.

The Hollywood Baby Army

*n.b. The Bloggies are back! Vote for mine and other blogs you like by Friday at 10 EST. As a hint: teen, best-kept secret, most humorous, etc.

Being around for the week after everyone else has returned to school has driven me to drastic measures. Some people work out to alleviate boredom. Others watch television. I peruse gossip blogs. In sifting through the obligatory bikini pictures of women I've never heard of and articles about Britney Spears' descent into the patron demon of baby-dropping, hair-shaving, car-crashing, dance-impaired women with cheap weaves, I saw a disturbing trend.

Has anyone else noticed that every famous female in the entertainment industry is pregnant? Because I have. Nicole Kidman, Jamie Lynn Spears, Christina Aguilera, etc. Some came out with it early, like Jessica Alba. And some (J. Lo) sashayed around in a bell-bottom jumpsuit that revealed her five-month-pregnant belly while simultaneously denying that the baby existed. But whether or not feign surprise that million of strangers are interested in their offspring, there's no denying that the women are curiously in sync with each other.

I read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale when I was in middle school, and I've never been able to shake suspicions about money, modernity and strange women in supermarkets that it raised. The essential point in this case is how a pseudo-religious oligarchy forms. The people have given up on paper money and rely entirely on credit cards. It's just a matter of cutting off people's bank accounts and cards to leave an entire population crippled and vulnerable to a takeover. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I never like to rule out the possibility.

Thus, I have decided that Hollywood is building an army. Of drugged-out wastrels who will spread their bad influence to the innocent, unsexed youth of middle America? Legions of genetically enhanced men and women who will slowly destroy the world with their succubus and incubus powers? Or perhaps something even more nefarious. Enough terrible child actors and singers with famous parents to fill every adolescent movie role and corporate-constructed preteen boy band?

My attempt to impress the enormity of my discovery on my neighbor was met with derision. He informed me that there are many at least moderately famous women in the entertainment industry, and it makes sense that at any given time, several of them are pregnant. I tried to explain to him that this is what makes any conspiracy genius, and he tried to explain to change the subject. We both failed.