Sticks and Stars

I got my hair cut today. Yesterday — the whole weekend in fact — I was so unmotivated that I couldn’t even bring myself to post the entry I wrote about how unmotivated I was, but despite the fact that I couldn’t manage to complete anything useful like laundry or dishes or plucking my eyebrows, I still managed to complete a small and odd number of tasks including finally implementing GTD through my gmail account, the aforementioned discovery of how to finally get PHP working on my computer, and scheduling a hair cut for myself.

The hair cut was kind of a big deal. There was a time, post-newborn and pre-breakup, that I actually put some effort into my hair. I had it cut in a cute style and I regularly had it highlighted with bright red and blond streaks. I felt happy with my hair and even a little vain about how cute it looked.

But then I moved to my current city and suffered through a bad hair cut and worse dye job and have pretty much ignored my hair ever since. It grows longer and my brown roots dominate my stripey ends and all I ever do is wash it, condition it heavily (the ends are so damaged from the repeated foilings that I must use massive conditioner if I ever want to see my brush again), pick through it while it’s wet (never brush wet hair, my mother the hairdresser admonished me endlessly), part it on the side and leave it. Maybe if I’m feeling really motivated and want to feel pretty I’ll brush it at some point through the day (once it’s dry, of course), but even before I can tuck it back to its usual spot behind my ears, it’s back to its tangled nest of slightly frizzy, straight, thick hair.

I hate it, but what can I do? I like having longish hair (a few inches below my shoulders currently) and the only thing I can think to do with it is dye it because there’s no way in hell I’m getting up early to style my hair. I graduated from all that bullshit when I graduated from high school and there’s no way I’m going back. But more dye equals more damage and I’m already sad about this frizzed blondish mess that encompasses the bottom eight or so inches of my hair. However, something had to be done. It’s getting long enough that the length in combination with the damaged ends makes it truly impossible to manage (even my minimal “management”) and not to be excessively vain, but when my hair is long and not dyed, it’s so very sleek and shiny! I miss my sleek shiny hair.

A while back I stumbled across an ad for a free hair cut on craigslist. A salon was looking for hair models upon whom their stylists could demonstrate particular techniques. Yesterday while I was imagining all the ways I might make use of a personal assistant and was, among other things, imagining how I might have my assistant locate and make an appointment for me at a well reputed salon, it occurred to me that these craigslist model requests might be just the ticket so I decided to peruse the ads again and hope for the best. I figured I was up for pretty much anything. It couldn’t be worse than my current ‘do and it was the perfect price. If you can’t have an appointment made by your personal assistant at a well reputed salon, then what could be better than a free hair cut at a salon that at least requires their stylists to be competent enough to recruit strangers off the internet?

So I searched for ads and subscribed to the search feed (did you know that you can do that? You can do a craigslist search and then subscribe to the results so that anytime an ad is posted that meets your criteria, it shows up in your feed reader? So useful!) and within a few hours someone had posted needing a model for today at 11am. I sent her a quick email describing my hair, she called me and confirmed that my hair sounded perfect, and voila, the appointment was made.

My coworkers were dubious, but like I said, anything was better than what I had, I was more than willing to subject my hair to the mercies of a random craigslist hair stylist.

At promptly 11am, I showed up this fancy downtown spa/salon that was way, way out of my league. They brought me to a room where I was supposed to put on a robe and it was only in the nick of time that I realized it was meant to go over my clothes. I felt so huge and dowdy in comparison to all these tiny, primped, made up, coifed 20 year olds (girls and boys) dressed in their fashionable little clothes, calling each other “doll” while smiling in the most sincerely fake manner possible. But I was there and I was going to get my hair cut, damnit, regardless of whether their robes didn’t quite fit or their chairs were just a little too snug or their magazines just a little too…I don’t know, but until today I’m pretty sure I’d never opened an issue of Glamour in my life.

And get my hair cut I did. Despite any misgivings my coworkers might have had about hair stylists who advertise on craigslist, the stylist did an amazing job. She’s been doing hair for about four years but is only in her second year of apprenticeship with this particular salon. She had a senior stylist checking in occasionally but I could tell she was doing an excellent job regardless, thanks to many, many years of subjecting my head to the ministrations of my mother. When she was done I couldn’t believe how my hair looked. She cut off a couple inches of the bad ends and layered the bottom and layered the hair around my face. It’s still long but it looks so styled. I still have my blond and reddish ends but because of the layers you can see the brown beneath so it looks intentional, like I did it that way to highlight the texture of the layers. It looks so pretty! I had no expectation of looking pretty. I had no expectation of anything other than my hair would be easier to brush. It shocks me every time I look in the mirror. And best of all, she wants me to come back in April when she needs to demonstrate some color techniques.

So there you have it, the story of my hair cut. A complete treat, entirely unintentionally.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 8:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.