Shane used to put his pj pants on his head and call it his "Long Beautiful Hair"

Have you read The Crying of Lot 49? Have you read it in Dr. Anthony Farrow's class at St. Bonaventure University? Well then, you will know that all extra meaning we give to life events is always a figment of our overactive imaginations. This is not just a theme of the book, it is true. According to Dr. Farrow. Who looks remarkably like the Lorax.

I think of this because I'm thinking of cutting my hair, and I've always placed a symbolic value on my hair. It's rather Victorian of me, and you would think it's an affectation, but I think you can easily stop affectations, and I can't escape my little hair problem.

I mean, besides the pulling.

The Other hair problem swam beneath the surface until I allowed my mom to treat me to a haircut at her salon on winter break. I think I was a junior in college, maybe a sophomore. At that time I was none too comfortable wearing my hair down, and when I did I was feeling pretty good about myself. It was so long... it reached my waistband if I pulled it straight. And back then I wasn't pulling it, so it was very thick and crazy and sometimes cool.

It was around New Year's, and I know this because this is where the artificial meanings come into play. On New Year's Eve I went to a party in Rochester. This older guy, a friend of the hostess, picked me up. And then later, he picked me up... Umm...

I remember that someone had spilled her screwdriver down my shirt, that I was wearing a long skirt, that my driver and I were the only non-Goths at the party, and that my hair was down and he could not stop touching it. The rest is pretty blurry. (Or I'm too much of a lady?)

Two days later, Mom and I went to the salon. The woman cutting my hair was my mom's age and had clearly given my mother the exact same haircut she had. I was worried but tried not to panic. She marveled at my hair - how curly, how thick, how long... "You know, people pay big money to get their hair like this," she said. So why, I wondered, would you want to do anything to it?

She cut it. And then she kept cutting it. And then she did something else weird to it. And then she cut it s'more. And in the end my hair was 10 inches shorter.

And no, this did not mean my hair was short by any means... It still reached past my shoulders. But I definitely took it badly. I had lost control somehow, and it was due punishment for losing control on New Year's Eve. Of course the part of me that had lured this man into temptation should also be the part that got a brutal chopping mere days later.

So if I cut it short now, what will it do to me? Will I feel less feminine, somehow? Or perhaps I will walk out of the salon with a sudden lightness, a weight literally and figuratively lifted from my shoulders.

And then there is the threat of the Ronald McDonald effect...



But Sarah looks awful cute with short hair. There is hope.