Good-bye, wig, good-bye!

My hair is currently the longest it's been since my high school senior picture. Shoulder-length, nothing to write home about. But it feels like I could braid it and throw it over the balcony for some handsome young fellow to climb up. Or that I could be posing nude on a half-shell and be decently covered, like Botticelli's "Birth of Venus."

I can't stand it this long. And yet I get suckered to keep it like this because it can go in a ponytail. And as my sister Kristin has long told me, men like women with long hair (and also with blond hair, so I am at a double disadvantage when I cut it short).

I never feel like I look my best with longish hair. It's thick and weirdly curly in some places and basically feels like a heavy wet towel on my head. It has no style.

I never thought I'd say this, but I think I want "the Posh" cut (it actually kinda embarrasses me to even admit that). Maybe not that short, but sassy and shaped and with a definite style. Yet this may be one more step in a long history of focilular missteps. If it please the court:

Exhibit A: During a spring-break mission trip to Mexico my senior year of high school, I decided I simply could not wait one more moment to have my hair like Winona Ryder's in Reality Bites. (Un)luckily, I had a magazine with an ad for the movie (it was 1994) as an example, and told the first person I saw to just do her best with a pair of kitchen scissors. Without a mirror. And no haircutting experience. I thought Winona's hair could be achieved by a messy, non-methodical cut...of course, I know better now how much artistry and effort slacker bed-head hair takes. The cut: a bit of a disaster.

Exhibit B: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. I decided to go for that same cut my freshman year of college, and stopped the first girl on my dorm floor who looked competent to hold scissors. Misjudged that one. Again. Should have known where this was headed. Tears, mostly. I should have known it was a mistake when she told me to flip my head upside down and she just started hacking away. The cut: a bit of a disaster.

Exhibit C: You will never know how short is too short until you go there. Just before Joelle's wedding and my move to Memphis, I got a way-too-short cut from my trusted stylist (because by then I had learned that you cannot put a price on good hair). It felt like she had given me a men's cut: tight on the sides, kinda longer and poofy on the top. I came home in a panic and decided the best step would be to even out the length myself. I literally had the scissors in my hand, poised to take a chunk out of the front of my hair when Joelle intervened. We still talk about this as the day she saved my life. The cut: a bit of a disaster. And sooo short.

Exhibit D: Various times when I have decided what I need to freshen my look is a full set of bangs...which are never straight and always the wrong decision. No one who cuts bangs is ever happy with them.

But it's not been all bad. I have had some great color and style along the way, most notably the winter of 2002-03, when Ashley told me, "I don't care how much it costs to keep what you have going now, but you should do it." I should have listened. Now I'm stuck with hair that not even Britney Spears would wear on her head, and she wears some broke-ass wigs.

Under it all, remember this: it always grows back.