Wonderin' If She'd Changed At All, If Her Hair Was Still Red

Sooo... cut my hair yesterday.

Kind of happened like this:  I've been overly annoyed with my hair at least four times per day for the last three weeks.  Which generally means I should probably cut my hair.  (I base this on the like four years that I've actually been cutting my hair, rather than just keeping it long.)  And oh goodness, I had a good experience and that made me so happy.

I'm very lucky in some ways because my hair is very straight and it is capable of being very low maintenance.  This is good because as I've mentioned I don't "do" my hair so much as my hair continues to exist on my head and I wash it and that's about it.  But I've had some really bad haircuts in my day.  I also have a really bad hair memory.  Like I've tried to have bangs roughly 72 times and this is what happens (in 11 easy steps!):

Step 1)  Bangs come "back into style" (for the fifth time that year) and I start thinking to myself "man, everybody looks so cute with bangs, I wish I looked cute like that."
Step 2) Brain turns off.
Step 3) Hair envy sets in.
Step 4) I start thinking "I would be cute if I had bangs."
Step 5) Repeat step 4 roughly 807 times.
Step 6) Completely overlook everything I have ever known about my hair and my ability to maintain it.
Step 7) Get bangs
Step 8) Bask in the cute bangs glow until my hair dries after the first time I wash it post-salon
Step 9) Watch as the cowlick at the top of my forehead points 3/4 of my new bangs to one side and the rest all over the place.
Step 10) Realize I'm going to have to learn how to do my hair in order to fix this.
Step 11) Spend next 4-6 months berating myself daily for falling for bangs again until they grow out.

The bangs trend is starting to have a new, related cousin too - the bob.  See this one is dangerous because at first bobs do actually look pretty cute on me.  And they can be kind of low maintenance.  Except for the part where you have to get them recut every six weeks (at most) and the second my hair starts to grow out from a bob even in the slightest little bit I have a pronounced duck tail sticking out of the back of my head and it appears as though I've grown myself a hair-textured helmet.  Not cute.  But I keep getting lured by those first few minutes right as I leave the salon going "wow, I look cute."

Aside from all of that I'm also frequently very intimidated when I go get my haircut because they all the girls in the salon have super cute hair and look like they actually put some effort into it and all that.  Me not so much.  Pretty much whatever happened naturally after I got out of the shower.  Plus I rarely have any idea how to talk about my hair or what I want done with it.  Particularly I'm usually so fed up by the time I actually go get my hair cut that I end up just sitting down in the chair and saying the hair equivalent of "I don't know, you deal with it."  I.E. "Just make it cute."  Which they do.  By cutting and styling it, and I've neglected to mention that I don't do that styling part and it just goes back to normal.

So I actually looked at some pictures before I went last night and tried to be honest with myself about how my hair works ("look away from the girls with the pretty wavy hair, it's just not going to happen.  Do not use this as a guideline.") and did actually have some things to say when I got to the salon.  I also went to a different salon than I have been going to for awhile.  (My stylist at that place was very nice, but very quiet and kind of overpriced for using my chin as a guideline and cutting all my hair to the same length.) My new stylist was, again, very nice and also very talkative.  This is a great quality in a stylist in my opinion because they do a lot of the work in the conversation and that makes it easier for me to be talkative too.  Also that's the stereotype and when I get a quiet stylist I get all nervous and start thinking "Am I doing this wrong?"  So it was like "well it sort of naturally parts down the middle, but I'd like to do something a little to the side - I do have this cowlick and a little bit of added body would be kind of nice."  "I had a bob, but I was pretty bored of it and I just got engaged so, even though I'm not getting married for quite awhile yet, I don't want to cut it all off again."  (Note:  No, we don't have a date set yet.)  "I wash my hair and let it air dry.  Sometimes I add in some mousse.  I've used a blow dryer twice this year and they were both for weddings.  I'm sure you'll style it before I leave and it will look lovely.  It will never look that good again, so I would really like something that looks decent as is."  And she sort of looked at me and was like "Totally.  We can do that."

And well, long story... upon review of all of the above, vaguely less long - then she did.

New hair, new hair.  La la la la la la.  (BTW, in my head that was to the tune of the "no king" chant by the hyenas in The Lion King.  Don't pretend you have no idea what I'm talking about, you know you do.)  Apologies for looking less than... bubbly here but the whole taking a picture without looking thing is a lot harder than it... looks.  Damn, that just didn't work out did it?

A slightly more side view:

Also pictured:  my new(ish) shower curtain (replacing the one that was officially more brown than it was when we bought it.)  (Upon reflection - that is very close to my "what the hell are you doing" face.  Which makes sense since I was trying to hit the button correctly backward - mirrors are hard!)

Even today it was still cute by my standards - way less volume due to my utter bewilderment at the sight of a round brush and all - but still cute!

By the way - the title today has a little bit of a story.  One of my secret joys of going to get my hair cut is because I know one or all of the following phrases will be uttered by my stylist at some point (and I'm a total sucker for any kind of praise.)

1) Your hair is so healthy!

2) This color is so pretty - do you color it?  No?  This is natural?  Wow.

3) Your hair is so pretty, I wish I had your hair.

I realize they probably say this to every single person they see.  I don't care.

Also - I almost went with simply "Tangled Up In Blue" as the title.  But then I was all like "Get it? Tangled.  Like hair gets tangled." in my head over and over and suddenly realized I was going to have to make that part of the title too and that would kind of kill the joke.  And even in my head the joke wasn't that funny.  Yet here I am, typing it out anyway.  Clearly time to stop.