Monday, June 25, 2007

I wonder what my hair looks like from the back? And other questions.

One of the deepest questions I know for an egotistical actor such as myself is – how do other people see me? What am I like? Would I like me, if I met me on the street? More to the point of this post – WOULD I LIKE MY HAIR?

I’ve never been a big risk taker when it comes to hair. My hair is long, brown, and cut into layers but not in a funky way. More in a please make my very thin limp hair look bigger kind of way. I haven’t always been so chicken. Once when I was in Australia I had a boyfriend chop it with kitchen shears and dye it red. (It was one of those kind of weekends). One other time when I was pretty slim I cut it short enough that it needed shaved in the back. I was very stylish then. I’ve discovered though, as my swivel chair spread is spreading further and further and my cheeks get chubbier and chubbier (that’s the cheeks on my face people), that longer hair is a good camouflage for a few extra pounds. On me, on this current office worker body, short hair makes me a pinhead on top of a pear. So I do the long hair thing.

Long as my hair is, though, there is an undeniable cowlick in the back. My hairdresser calls this a “whorl.” Whorl Schmorl, it’s a cowlick that leaves a spot of pasty scalp showing through my very dark hair. I struggle with styling this thing into oblivion. Sometimes I can manage it. Other times, when I’m running late, when I don’t have any customers or interviews set up at work, I just leave it and try not to let anybody walk behind me. Tall people are a problem. Tall people can see the whorl. I keep my distance from tall people.

So, from the back, if I had to guess, I’d say people describe my hair as long, dark, layered, with a whorl in the top right back “corner” (if round heads could be described as having corners), frequently tangled, and thereby frequently caught up in a claw barrette. This claw barrette style is my default ‘do. Few days pass without seeing me in a claw barrette by the end. It hides the whorl.

This is a wandering wondering post. It leads my mind to wondering about other questions, such as – Do people notice when my fingernails are dirty? How does my nose look today? And the inescapable - Does my butt look big/jiggly/bad in these pants?

I think this is a sea of questions that we don’t want to jump into, a road we don’t want to go down, an iceberg that’s submerged and should stay that way, and various other metaphors.

If this post has you thinking about questions that bring you down - if you're currently questioning the jiggliness of your butt and the wisdom of your choice of underpants today - if you're running your fingers through your hair self consciously and wondering if you look ok - then remember this mantra “If you can’t change the way you look, change the way you see.”

Peace and love to all of us, beautiful and flawed, jiggly and tangly-haired, however we may look to people from behind - G Love

3 comments:

super jane said...

oh my gosh, i am *rolling* right now. g love you are freaking hilarious!!!

seriously, i just peed a little.

Wicked M said...

Hilarious! I do wonder about this all the time. I share a cowlick issue with you, but mine isn't just one cowlick -- it actually extends across my entire head. It is. AWESOME.

The people in the office across from me just asked why I was laughing so hard! You rock, sister!

Anonymous said...

so many things to say. but i will say, your hair looked so nice when you cut it short, i made the hairdresser copy it for my recent voyage down the path of short hairedness, and you know how hard that was for me, the queen of long-a$$ hair.