Darren Holloway

I’ve never liked my hair. And I think it knows it – it’s not receding, it’s trying to get away.

My earliest memory about my hair specifically was in grade 7. There was a girl in my class, and I thought she was great – she was the prettiest girl in the whole school.

And I thought “Wow, I wish I could hang out with her – We’d, um, go somewhere, um, not sure where, and then we’d um, do something, um, not quite sure what, and er, um… um.”

But before I had a chance to make my move, we had a new student transfer in – he was Italian and he had hair like out of a shampoo ad.

And of course, she fell for him.

And I was convinced it was because he had straight hair, and because I had curly, unmanageable hair. It had to be the hair. It couldn’t be that I was shy and could barely talk to a girl, whereas he was confident and had that whole “foreign-person” vibe going. No, it was because of the hair.

Fast forward to the future. My hair, what’s left of it, is even more unmanageable. If I let it grow longer than about two inches, it starts bunching up at the side of my head like clown hair; I know this because one of my girlfriends once said to me “I think it’s time for a haircut, Binky the Clown.”

And, what with going to Japan for a month-long vacation, I didn’t want to have to deal with trying to control my uncontrollable hair when I didn’t have 40 lbs of glue to try and make it stick down.

The way I solved this problem before I went to Europe for a two-month trip was to shave it all off. But I wasn’t really in the mood for that. So it was time for the internet…

And I didn’t really find anything useful, other than lots of information about flattening irons (wouldn’t work well on my 2.5 inch hair,) thousand-dollar spa treatments to straighten hair (a bit out of my budget), and, of course, lots of pr0n. Nothing for me here. Yep, ignored the pr0n… yep.

Later, I went to the drug store to pick up some things for the trip, and I took a wrong turn down the haircare aisle and found myself in the “Ethnic Hair Products” section. I didn’t really know such a thing existed, but I was quite pleased it does, because there were tons and tons (metric tons) of hair straightening products.

So, it was me, a Saturday afternoon, and a full-blown chemical warfare assault on my hair …

It’s been a week now, and I’m quite pleased with how my hair behaves. Out of the shower, it just lies there or spikes up. It brushes with no trouble. It needs no product. The only downside is that anytime it gets wet, it smells like sulfur. Apparently I needed to harness the forces of darkness to make my hair straight.

So, grade 7 fantasy crush girl, where are you now?

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 14th, 2009 at 7:54 pm and is filed under Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.