My Short Flirtation with Long Hair

Sorry folks, summer school actually gave me something to do, so I'm going to have to recycle something old I've written. I work-shopped this piece in Creative Writing, and received some good comments on it. I made several revisions based on those comments but have lost my revised copy. This piece breaks from the norm in that it doesn't have a scripture back-up or Bible based message, but it does have me being very stupid. Really, what more could you want?

However, if any of my astute and good looking readers can suggest a way to tie a scripture into this I'll rewrite it and give them my thanks (and maybe some cookies.)

My Short Flirtation with Long Hair

It started around the end of my freshman year. I was minding my own business, watching an episode of Battlestar Galactica, when a very strange idea hit me alongside the head.

This wasn’t that new Battlestar Galactica either, this was that one made in the seventies, the one with robot dogs, leather jackets, and space casinos. I found it all very humorous and awesome at the same time.

As I watched the characters Apollo and Starbuck run around on screen, two manly men with long, seventies hairstyles, it occurred to me that I could have long hair and yet still be cool. So, I resolved to grow what I referred to from that point on as “Starbuck hair.”

You see, I had had the same haircut since I was three years old. Prior to that age, I had never had a haircut. I had long curly little girl hair. This was all fine and dandy until I started to receive free cookies at the bakery because I was “such a cute little girl.” My father decided that I had to stop receiving free cookies and be a man. So, my mother attempted to cut my hair, until she had to stop halfway through and start crying because I was growing up too fast. My father then finished the job creating the short style that I kept for sixteen years.

But now, that was all going to change. I would grow Starbuck hair, and be as manly and cool as he was, except without the smoking and sleeping around parts.

This saved me ten dollars, because I no longer needed to get a haircut that semester. I let it grow, and grow it did, until halfway through the summer I discovered I had a curly mop on the back of my head. It looked like I was being hugged by a wookie. I didn’t want curly hair; I wanted long, straight hair. But, nature worked against me.

This was not what I wanted at all, so only one choice remained. I must get a haircut. Therefore, I fled to my mother and asked for a haircut. She didn’t cry this time. I think she was relieved.

I admit haven’t been entirely honest. I wanted a new hairstyle not just for the sake of having a new hairstyle. I was influenced by the fact that a girl I was dating at the time had told me that she liked guys with long hair. This was a sentiment I had seen expressed by other members of the fairer sex, and I therefore concluded that longer hair was the sole deciding factor in what the average Adventist American girl was seeking in men. This is an exaggeration, but only partially.

I look back on it now and realize how stupid it all was. I allowed my hairstyle to be dictated by peer pressure, and while this is a seemingly harmless thing to change, my motivation to do so was wrong. In high school and adolescence, many people face tremendous social pressures to change things about themselves. While this isn’t necessarily always a bad thing, our motives need to be examined. If we are changing something about ourselves just to please someone else, we are changing for the wrong reasons.

Adolescence is a time of change for everyone, but don’t change just to please a crowd, because the crowd can never decide exactly what it wants. Change because you think it will make you a better person.

I like my hair better short, and that is how it is going to stay.