Niche Market

Hello, my name is Frecklepelt. I'm here today because I'm forty years old and I still haven't figured out what to do with my hair.

(This is a support group, right? You guys are supporting me in my lack of hair awareness? Cool, thx.)

I feel about my hair like old people feel about technology: it's mysterious and confusing, and although I am somewhat envious of others' abilities to wrangle the technology, frankly I'm not terribly inclined to learn how to use it myself. I'm all like, Why isn't it working today? It worked yesterday and I didn't change a thing! Why does it hate me?! Screw it, I'm going to deal with this the old-fashioned way that I understand (i.e., ponytail).

This is not to say that I haven't gotten some solid mileage out of my hair over the years - there's always been a certain market for the red hair/green eyes thing. Often of the basement-dwelling variety (thanks, perhaps, to the fantasy genre?), but y'know, in a pinch, I figure I can always catch some D&D D. I'd also like to thank kids' shows for deeply ingraining in people that the redhead with glasses is the smart one - I got glasses at the ripe old age of 6 so I feel I've benefitted from that unconscious bias for most of my life.

So I don't hate my hair, it's just that our relationship is somewhat... adversarial. I wake up every day knowing there's going to be some kind of battle with it, and I approach the mirror with the same look of grim determination on my face that my Grandma Mabel got every time she had to use her cell phone. I can remember her mashing the absolute hell out of those tiny buttons (wise of her to pass on before the advent of the touch screen), then getting angry-scared something had gone wrong and starting over, over and over, until she finally rage quit and just put it in a fucking ponytail again.

Oh wait, sorry, got my analogy a little tangled there.

To give Grandma credit, she had her hair absolutely 100% figured out - you've never seen a more luxurious head of winter-white weekly-set curls than she had. Never a lock out of place. I suspect she was just as frustrated by my apparent inability to do anything with my hair as I was whenever she tried to make a cell phone call. "If you'd only..."

I'm starting to get a few grey hairs myself - or rather, winter-white hairs. I like to arrange them on top for business meetings to give myself some street cred. Because it seems as if it will turn white I've been envisioning my hair one day magically becoming just like Grandma's, but the reality is that she maintained a complex hair regimen that she guarded as closely as her molasses cookies recipe and it is unlikely I'll ever be able to recreate either in my lifetime. Probably my hair will be just as mental as ever, except white. 

I'd like to tell you that I'm at least keeping up on technology to make up for my hair-styling ineptitude, but that would be a lie. By this point, it's looking like I'm going to have to cultivate some other skill set for my grandkids to appreciate me for. I'll be sure to let you know when I figure out what that's going to be, in case anyone else in the support group is in a similar boat.