Out of Place

For 25 years, I've been fighting the curse of curly hair. When you're young and don't have the hand-eye coordination to simultaneously smooth down all the baby hairs in the front, hold your hair back and wrap a scrunchie around the pony tail, you sit down, shut up and go along with whatever hairstyle your mother thinks is appropriate. For me, this meant years of side ponies, hideous headbands, and serious lamenting of my grade school peers.

Throughout high school, I thought I had things under control, but looking back, boy was I sorely mistaken. My hair was too long, too flat on top, and all-around unflattering. Having limited access to products in the various, backwards countries I was living in didn't help. It wasn't until half-way through college that my cousin introduced me to a curly-haired girl's best friend - a serum that's only available over the internet. Since then, my hair has been various lengths (most recently, 'baby sheep'), but the curls have been pretty consistent in their volume and structure.

A bad hair day is not only a waste of products, but it throws off my whole day. A few minutes out of the shower, I can tell whether my wet rat look will air dry into movie star curls, or whether I'll be the butt of "Look! She put her hair in the blender!"-type remarks. This morning, I was a bit too excited about watching the episode of 'Entourage' that had downloaded overnight, so rather than use my precious time to caress my curls, I did my hair and raced out of the house to make it to my morning meeting on time. You can imagine my shock and horror when I excused myself ten minutes into the meeting to look in the mirror (as all curly-haired girls do about 49023789743 times a day) and found that several curl bunches decided to be STRAIGHT. STRAIGHT! Head, who are you trying to kid?!

For the rest of the day, all I could think about was twisting the straight bits around my finger to encourage the curl. I found myself pretending to be deep in thought, with my hands rested on my head, so as to ward off curious glances. Tomorrow I'll probably wear my hair up just to avoid a repeat performance of today's monstrosity. I may think about doing my job in the middle of all this. I'm pretty distressed though, so it's highly unlikely.