I showed Bobby this baby picture and asked
(with shameless sincerity),
“B., do you think I should cut my hair like this again?”

He looked at me, somewhat perplexedly, and said,
“Chief, that is your haircut. It’s just longer now.”

I’ve been wearing the same haircut for 20 years.
Which is hilarious, but also a little bit sad.

What these pictures don’t show you is that I have curly, frizzy hair. Or, as my good friend LKP once called it, “sexy jungle woman hair.” I much prefer her description over the characterizations that the other kids made up. Middle-schoolers are really the biggest assholes ever.

 Anyway, being that it’s poodle sexy jungle woman hair, it’s not easily tamed. Once, in 7th grade, I went over to this popular girl’s house after school. She promptly shoved my head under her shower faucet, moosed me up, and blow dried my “mess” straight. I didn’t shower that night and the next day at school everyone was like, “OMG you don’t look like a wild animal anymore… but you do smell like one!!” I’m just kidding. They totally still thought I looked like a wildebeest.

But that was the night I begged my mom to buy me a hair straightener, and for the next six years, even though straight hair never made me cool, I was hostage to the beauty judgments of bastard preteens, a blow dryer, and flat iron. I couldn’t get out of the house with less than 50 minutes of nearly lighting my hair on fire unless I wanted to look like a jungle woman. Nobody wants that.

This story has a happy end, though. I grew up to love my hair. Once I realized how much easier it is to work with nature rather than against her, I stopped resenting my curls and started appreciating them.

I’ll never give in to that unibrow, though.