“i have curly hair” could be the biggest understatement of the year.

That, and “i only ate a few of those red hots”.

 

(Does your stomach feel like you’ve been kicked by an angry goat after you’ve eaten an entire box too? Oh, you don’t eat the whole box at one time? Yeah…neither do i…)

 

But back to my hair. It is REALLY curly.

Like, somewhere in time, one of my Northern European great-great-great-great grandmas took a ride on a hot air balloon across Africa, crashed, and was nursed back to health by a hidden tribe in the Congo, where she fell in love with a tribesman, had a long happy life and a few kids with gloriously curly hair, who, over the generations, gradually made their way back to Europe and eventually America where, generations later, a very curly haired little girl was born, repeating the pattern that one child in every family carries this centuries-old genetic trait.

i mean, how else does a wonder-bread white girl with blue eyes and semi-straight-haired parents come out with hair that turns into a big, round, loofah in the rain? Duh….

 

But, back to today.

The day i reached the end of my hot-air-balloon-tie-down-rope and decided that the Hair. Must. Go.

Like, NOW! i had put off getting it cut, having had some difficulty finding anyone in my area of town that can cut curly hair without making me look like Candy the Clown, Balloon Sculptor Extraordinare. (Ya gotta cut it DRY!! It shrinks!! And never, NEVER slither-cut it, sliding those open scissors from temple to ends expecting it to blow gently in the breeze in a beautiful, natural-looking layered look. Oh no. No, no, no. That’s a sure-fire recipe for the Dreaded Triangle.)

Which was where i was at right now. Staring at myself and my Dreaded Triangle in the bathroom mirror. i mean, you could do geometry with that isosceles mess on top of my head! i couldn’t take it one more minute.

In an oddly-timed circumstance, i happened to have my iPad on and playing one of my favorite YouTube sensations, Zach Anner – brilliant comedian, inspirational guru and author of “If At Birth You Don’t Succeed”.

 

 

Go there. Check him out. Follow him. Your life will change.

And possibly, so will your hair.

Because as i watched Zach attempting pull-ups and shouting out positive reinforcements and ‘you can do it’ and generally cracking me up and making me feel good, i realized – i CAN do it! i can do anything i put my mind to! And that includes? Cutting my hair.

 

Step one: Find Scissors.

Okay….we have scissors for cutting paper. Nope. Too dull.

We have scissors for boning meat. (And slicing through fingers. Ask me how i know.) Nope. Too dangerous.

We have those weird serrated scissors for cutting fabric so it won’t fray. (Yeah…like i have a lot of fabric sitting around in danger of fraying. More like, scissors that hang out in a drawer for years and somehow, inexplicably, rust, until they can no longer be of help in any sort of fraying emergency. }

 

i was beginning to despair when i came across these dinky things which appear to be scissors for really small hairs in really small places. Like…nose hair.

 

Now, i didn’t know much about nose hair before moving in with my guy. Other than my father and brothers, i have never lived with guys before and don’t recall ever noticing their nose hairs. i seem to remember a bit of hair sticking proudly out of my grandpa’s twin nostrils but it never occurred to me that he might cut it. People cut nose hair? Well, if they do, they must use THESE scissors:

 

And so, off to hacking i went. You can’t cut a lot of hair with tiny nose-hair scissors. At least, you can’t cut a lot of hair very quickly. So it took a while. 15 minutes later and half of my head done, i came out of my Zach-Anner-positiviey-induced daze and realized….

OMGiAMCUTTINGMYHAIRWITHNOSEHAIRSCISSORS!!

But by then? Too late. Either i start a new asymmetrical triangle hair craze or i finish the job and see what happens. You can probably guess which option i chose. Never having been a fashion icon, and “let’s see what happens” being my middle name, i chose option B.

So, now my isosceles triangle is a much smaller equilateral triangle (oooh…maaaaatthhhhhhh…..) and although slightly impressed, my more-than-a-little surprised Beloved has gently informed me that it is now time to find a PROFESSIONAL.

 

 

i am pretty sure he meant a professional HAIR STYLIST.

 

…Pretty sure.