Hair!

Because I apparently live in a world where romantic comedy clichés about sad single women actually apply, after getting dumped by the person I don’t think I was even technically dating, I decided to go to a salon on the Lower East Side a few weeks ago and lob off all of my hair. I have never had short hair before. Up until a few days before it was well below my shoulders. There were giant tumbleweeds of it rolling through my apartment and tangled wet nests clogging up my shower drain. Now the longest parts come down around my ears and to the nape of my neck. When it starts to grow out and if I don’t take care of it, it will look like a mullet.

I’m not sure why I did this. I had just spent three hours at a student salon on Thursday getting the most time consuming two inch trim of my life. Actually, this is a lie. Half the time I go there it ends up taking an eternity because the person cutting my hair either feels too lazy to work on two people in one night, decides to give me a spontaneous makeover that leaves me looking like someone just beat me up/barfed glitter all over my face, or is so insecure they feel the need to call their instructor over ever five minutes to make sure they didn’t somehow fuck up snipping off my spit ends. I keep going back though because it’s so ridiculously cheap and for some reason I seem to think $20 is a reasonable rate for my entire Thursday night. My hair looked fine ie, the same way it has for the past four or so years, and I wasn’t too concerned about it until I got home and my roommate decided this would be the perfect opportunity to do a photo shoot for an online dating site. Apparently those extra frayed inches they cut off pushed me over the edge from clearly straight to “kinda dikey.”

After she’d finished taking a couple dozen pictures in which my attempts to appear sultry/friendly mostly resulted in me looking high/confused I began to realize I sort of liked the way I looked without a gigantic mass of ratty curls hanging partway down my back. The theory being that maybe if I stop trying to look like a delicate flower I will stop getting trampled on so often. Two minutes later I was making an appointment at this place that only does short haircuts for women and two days after that I was sitting in a tiny studio salon on the lower east side telling a weirdly awkward hairdresser who reminded me of the serial killer from Silence of the Lambs to do whatever he wanted. He did a good job. I’m still getting used to it. It’s also possible this little “gaykeover” won’t be as transformative as I’d hoped it would be. Whatever. Maybe I just need to buy some beaters and a hoodie.