hippy hair

I've been trying to decide for awhile now what I should do with my hair. Cut it? trim it? keep growing it out until I can throw it out a tower window? ( I am not sure I am crazy about any of these ideas. So in the meanwhile, I continue to pull it back and do nothing).

If you know me, you've probably met my hair (as its own entity) as well. Seriously. My hair probably literally ended up on you - not to be found until some time later (even after I have left your presence). I am not sure how this happens, but this just so happens to be how my hair has been coined a "creeper." (Actually, it first got this name when my then housemate, Connie, found a piece of my hair on her when she was taking a shower. See? creeper).

The longer my hair gets to worse this problem seems to become. I live with a dog and I think Scooter and I are in a race to see how much of our hair we can leave all over the house. (Though I think Scoots is winning by a lot). My winter coat is the worst. My hair gathers on it, just in case I want to save it for later. Even weirder yet is that it tends to gather in the armpits of that coat. Why does it do that? Gross and weird. ugh.

See? This madness has got to end.

However.

I am not a risk taker. Cutting my hair might not seem like a risk to y'all, but I am such a non-risk taker that it feels like it is. After all, I've spent years (the first 20) of my life trying to figure out what was going on with my hair. (The first time I allowed myself to wear it down and curly was my sophomore year in college). Now that I've figured it out, I'm terrified to cut it only to realize I have no idea what to do with it anymore. (irrational fear). Also, I have convinced myself that my hair is my best feature. I keep thinking about the line in little women where Amy says "Jo! Your one beauty" after Jo chops off her hair).

So there is that.

Plus, I started growing my hair out before I went to South Africa, thinking I would cut it and donate it to Locks of Love when I got back. Then, I discovered I liked having long hair. It worked a lot nicer with curly/wavy hair.

Currently, I would have to cut my hair really short in order to get the 10 inches needed for that donation. And I don't think I want to do that. So now my guilt conscious has kicked it up into high gear since I started to doubt my donation idea.

I need to do something though since it's getting so long, it won't even curl properly because of the weight.

On the flip side, (and the only part of the post that has to do with the environment), having long hair makes it easier for me to not wash it as often (saving money on shampoo, less time in the shower, reducing my carbon footprint, etc. etc). I can pull it up a few days in a row and it looks the same. That is really nice.

For some reason, whenever I try to think about reducing my carbon footprint when it comes to my shower habits, I aways think of my senior capstone class at Bluffton. We spent some time talking our environmental impact, which got us talking about hygiene. I remember my professor, Trevor, saying something along the lines of "maybe we need to get used to different smells."  That sounds grosser than he meant it. We were talking about having more imagination when it comes to reducing our carbon footprint. And in our culture, for some reason not taking a shower every day feels taboo.

(One of the most predominate things I remember about this class is that if we reduced our shower time to 7 minutes, we would significantly deduce our carbon footprint. The summer after I took that course, I used to set my alarm on my phone when I was in the shower so I knew when I needed to get out. That was maybe crazy, since I really don't need one more thing to make me extremely schedule driven. But it worked pretty well. And then I stopped doing that - until last night when I left something in the oven and took a shower knowing I needed to my butt out of there ASAP otherwise my oven fries were going to burn. It worked).

I know I have hippy hair (due to the fact that it is long and crazy), but it's not in dreads and I don't think it smells. But I also don't wash it very often. And if i cut it, I will have to go back to washing it everyday.

So, in conclusion, I have no conclusion other than the fact that I want to pay attention to how I can better care for the earth we live on, even when it comes to things like my hair.