Saturday, February 11, 2006

Curly hair: a social analysis metaphor


ever since the last epic mullett-inducing, ceramic straightener-imposing haircut bestowed upon me by the virtuous hands of one Claudia at Godin's salon, i have taken to washing my hair far less frequently: the result is as unpredicatable from one day to the next as the bartendender at Sala Rossa; flirty vixen one day, glowering misanthrope the next. on the first detergentless day, my hair is a black cloud of ripe grapes that follows me around, obscuring my peripheral vision with large circular shiny locks wherever i turn. the invasion of dark coarse ropes take on a life of their own, leaving me their humble and lucid servant. my hair is funny, literally. it plays bad pranks on me and tries to out-do (pardon the pun) itself on a daily basis. after a series of aerobic workouts and nights of induldging sleep, the curls become more like teenagers struggling to assert their individuality in a mess of sameness. as is the case in any social organization, each strand of hair fights for membership in some clique or another, in a system of locks and cluster of curls, but there will always be those that don't quite belong thereby ostentatiously trying to be 'different' everytime; some doing gravity-defying karate kicks to the heavens, others posing as straight, others eager to show off their curvaceous figures among wide tubular slides for pondering fingers. today i was Miss Hannigan from Annie, my hair toppled atop my head like a messy crown of weightless ringletts. two days ago i tried channeling a twenties coupe of head-hugging waves but ended up looking more the part of a Victorian composer or worse, its damaged pet poodle. but maybe that's better than the look of stacked chocolate doughnuts that i seem to end up with after a full week of unattended vanity. fittingly, like any long and enduring love, grasping the complexities of this impossibly knotted relationship requires acknowledging the ratio of strong roots to dead split ends... a metaphor worth exploring at great length, but pardon me, i have to go shampoo my hair now.

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