Why I'd Rather Go to the Dentist Than the Hair Stylist

I'm going to be honest. I do not give anything resembling a damn about hairstyles. I'm not sure if that makes me unpatriotic or what. When people talk about waking up three hours early to straighten or curl their hair, I throw little funerals for the hours of excellent sleep they missed. When my grandmother gives me hair care products I try to see what the chemicals will do to the insects I find on the sidewalk (hydrogen peroxide on slugs...do it.) I think about hair in the way that the average American thinks about Iraq: infrequently, impatiently, and with less interest or focus than I give to the latest diet fad (seriously, soy-free, dairy-free, egg-free, wheat-free food is not food, now is it?)

No. No it isn't.

 However, recently I began to notice that the long(ish) hair hanging in my face all day meant horribly complicated things like brushing, blow drying, and styling. I was having to wake up a full five minutes before I stumbled out the door in the morning (not because I go to work or anything, but because I'm usually still hungover and accidentally in someone else's house.) I found this unacceptable as did, I might add, my mother (although possibly for different reasons.)

Enter the convenient trend that gives tribute to Rosemary's Baby without having to sacrifice embryos to the devil: the Pixie Cut. I love the Pixie Cut. I would like to French kiss Tinkerbell for introducing it to us (but not the one from the Disney movie, where she inexplicably had long hair, since obviously Disney hated freedom.)

Seriously, what is this shit?

The Pixie Cut is all about looking sexy without working at all. It is the simple solution for people like me who have flat, thin, straight hair and yet have never felt the urge to pump it full of steroids and try to get it its own reality show just to make it feel better about itself. Waking up late in the morning? Comb it for two seconds. Forgot your comb? People will think you messed it up on purpose to look cool. Can't find a hand towel? There's a perfect one right on the top of your skull. There is no going wrong.

Except.

Except that for some reason this sort of thing never goes right for me. Let's start at the beginning. Feeling I ought to do it right, I go to a salon where they ask me what I would like as far as a "look." This is what I had feared. A personal opinion of mine that would quite probably lead to tears. I had been hoping that I would walk through the door and be accosted by women in smocks who would tackle me to the floor, grab my hair and say, "This hair has got to go! Get this woman's head under an emergency upside-down strainer or we're going to lose her!"

"I'm sorry, ma'am, but it...doesn't look good."

But no. These people think that I know what I want. If they had known that I am a 23 year old with a B.A. in English, they never would have assumed that I know what I'm doing. So the woman asks, all smiles, what it is that I'm looking for. I, of course, gesture helplessly at my hair and just sort of say: "See this? Less of this."

Then I begin to worry that she might mistake such detailed instructions, so I say, "But not too short. I still want to look feminine." Which is something I haven't remotely resembled since the third grade. So this woman already has a task in front of her.

So then she makes her mistake. She hands me a stack of magazines and asks me to leaf through pictures of airbrushed plastic and ask me which starlet Barbie doll I would like to resemble. This has immediately given me false hope, as though perhaps she'd just offered me plastic surgery instead of four inches less hair. Suddenly the possibilities are endless! Clearly my problem isn't that I don't Photoshop my skin enough or bathe in big bathtubs full of foreign currency--it's that my hair is just too darn long.

Or possibly that I don't move in slow motion enough.

 So I pick a picture of a woman who looks like she spends more time grooming her two inches of hair than I will raising my own children. Perfect. Off we go. The woman gives my scalp an unnecessary and entirely erotic massage. Then I perch in the old sit-and-spin and try not to look in the mirror as the woman gives me an insanely long haircut. I don't look in the mirror because I know that inevitably I will change my mind halfway through, have an enormous panic attack, and start desperately trying to glue chunks of my hair back on. So I don't look, and I keep in mind the sexy, sexy celebrities that I will obviously resemble after a short amount of time.

So when I'm done with my appointment, I imagine that I am going to look something like this:

Sexy lips and all.

Unfortunately, as I'm sure you probably could have guessed, the whole thing turned out looking a lot more like this...

Above: My high school yearbook picture

I wish I were kidding. I look like Justin Bieber. I'm not sure if that makes me a tom boy or a really really girly girl. Either way, I'm looking into the most dignified forms of suicide. At least when you go to the dentist you're expecting to be orally violated and to experience a lot of pain. Somehow, with hair stylists, I never see it coming.