Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Monthly Review #15

Funny how people's opinions change. I talked about how so many people have thought my hair must have grown all at once when I switched from pinning the bottom up to pinning the top in the back.

Well my grandmother commented on how long it looked when I saw her this month and I said "Remember when you all said I should cut the bottom so it would look styled before? And I didn't so now it looks super long."

To which my grandmother replied. "Yes well. I changed my mind - you shouldn't have cut it. Letting it grow was right."

HA! I win.

Apparently when I saw my grandmother, aunt and mother the next day, though, nobody liked my hair. So my mother called later and schmoozed me with shaved head compliments and "Why don't you shave it again? I liked it like that." She saw me a week later and exclaimed that it looked great.

I'd like to address one reason why I'm nervous to shear again: My hips feel big when I have no hair to balance them out. I have a tiny head and torso. it just feels unbalanced. In the words of Wendy Williams: "The bigger the hair, the smaller the hips" This isn't a plea for compliments or a self-loathing thing (and god help me if anybody leaves a "Why do you think you're fat? You're beautiful just the way you are!! <33" in the comments). It just feels different. I am well aware there are many shorn ladies out there of every build. But - I'll have to come to grips with the feel (not so much the actual look) before I go under the razor again.

I just re-read last month. Why was I feeling so self-deprecating? In any case, I have kept up the half-up do as noted before. And I love it - especially as a way to get through days 4-6 of not washing my hair. Really camouflages well. And especially this month where I tried out plopping to make it curlier and that just did not work for me at all (though sleeping with the hair in a t-shirt did keep the flakes out of my bed for the most part). my hair came out flat on top and weirdly oily looking curls on the sides. I'll take frizzy looking curls to wet looking curls any damn day! Some things happened in these weeks that made my hair extremely oily between washes:
1) I became dependent on using rye flour as a dry shampoo - powdering the hell out of my roots before bed or in the morning and rubbing it in. So the top of my head was super dry looking and around the ears was shiny. I thought I was just being nit picky. I was wrong.
2) It didn't rain. I mean at all. For over 3 weeks. My hair loves the rain. I mean loves it. LOVES it. The first day it rained my hair bounced up into this beautiful effortless volume. When considering moving to the PNW I considered just how great my hair would look daily without effort. I mean seriously. Va Va VOLUME!
3) Remember that fluffy body pillow I have that I thought might be helping me go 2-3 weeks without washing my hair in early 2015? Then it mysteriously stopped working and I blamed the length of my hair? I have a new guess: It absorbed all the oil it could. And now when the top of my head touches it (it sits at the head of my bed blocking the other pillows from touching the padded wall.) as I sleep it deposits that 8 month old oil back onto my head. Ew. I'm hatching a plan to wash it as we speak, even if I have to cut off the outside or throw the whole thing in the machine!

Ah, when was the last time I talked about sex on here? Well my hair is definitely long enough to make that lovely sex tangle. But when I had super long hair it would form a little lower down. This one forms at the top of the crown. The way to get these out, if you were wondering, is to grasp it with both hands as if you're grasping a biscotti delicately (thumb to forefinger and middle finger pads with nails angling out). Pull randomly -without squeezing your fingers or yanking. The point is to just do whatever will be undone without hurting the hair - get the outskirts of the knot untangled first so you don't reinforce the knots. Also - I've noticed that my hair seems to get un-oily if a partner puts his hands in my hair from the front (not grasping up from the neck but proximal palms on the temples/cheeks and fingers into the hair, we don't need to go into when that happens).

Stay tuned for next month as I transition away from rye flour and back to normal people (okay Whole foods shoppers) shampoo!