The Five Dollar Haircut

Making appointments for myself is something I try to avoid if I can. It's just too easy to become overscheduled, lose efficiency at work, or cut into Scrabble time. This desire to be more appointment-free, and to cut down on driving time and gas money, has led me to try and get as many things as I can done within walking distance from my office. Therein lies the reason for my humidity-sensitive hair curling out around my ears the last few weeks (like extra ears of some sort).

It's not like I didn't try to get a haircut. Trying to walk in to a salon that advertises "Walk-Ins Welcome" is like trying to get a prescription filled at Wal-Mart. They look at you like you're eight shades of crazy and tell you they might be able to accomodate you in about five hours. I'd even tried calling a day or two in advance to the high-end salon at the end of the block. It was frustrating to not even be able to get this haircut I so desperately needed when I was willing to pay a premium price for it!! And now...I'm so glad that didn't work out...because I've discovered the five dollar haircut.

In the opposite direction of the day-spa salon, but still on the same block as my office, there's a school of cosmetology. I KNOW...I know. The idea of getting my haircut at a beauty school scared me, too. My hair is short, and, in theory, getting it cut will only make it shorter. There's not going to be much room there to repair anything which might go wrong.

But yesterday I'd finally had it with the hair, and there was no way I was going to spend hours sitting in one of our local walk-in salons, waiting for my turn to be fit in between people who actually had appointments. Besides, I'm still in counseling for the walk-in-mall-salon experience that made me cry the night of my birthday dinner. (Crying because of a bad hairstyle is hard to explain, but all that's a whole other story. I will say that Eric thought I had wrecked the car when he answered the phone to find me choked up so badly on the other end, and Melissa eased my pain by reminding me that it never looks as bad to anyone else as it does to us.)

So I marched into the beauty school, as confident as always when I'm doing something I haven't thought through enough (which is "very"). I reminded myself that: (1) cosmetology students are likely to be very careful to not make mistakes; and (2) from what I've heard an instructor checks each hairstyle during the process and double-checks the style before you leave. And it's a fivedollarhaircut.

I guess the next student who was "up" on the list for was Taylor. ("Taylor" like Taylor Dayne and not Taylor Hicks, although Taylor Dayne was kind of masculine back in the 80's.) About twenty minutes later, Taylor had done a great job with my hair and, although my hairstyle is...um...simple, it looked exactly like my other short cuts. I was so pleased that I snapped a picture of Taylor and me BUT the angle was odd and a piece of my hair looked weird (although it's not). I didn't think it was fair to post it because then it would look like I didn't really get a good fivedollarhaircut...but just need new glasses. Anyway, the one thing no stylist has ever understood about how I like my hair is that, unless I'm wearing cocktail dress or something like that, I don't like my hair to look too neat. And I don't mean I want it to look that purposeful sort of messy....which looks too planned.

So I bounced back to my office (as in "light-footed," not like 2006 Hip Hop slang) and ran my fingers through my hair until it felt more natural. Are you dying to see the result? Are you? Are you? Are you? Beg no longer, my friends...and bask in the glow: