If you’ve ever had a pixie cut you’ve probably Googled* “How do I grow out a pixie cut? And save my marriage? And will this sense of dread ever go away?” and discovered that boolean searches don’t work like that. You should use “OR” instead.

I had a really good haircut. A beautiful woman with silver scissors of legend took each strand and whispered spells into it, and coaxed that which was no longer needed into its next cycle where it could live and die again. It could have taken seconds or minutes or hours or days. Time meant nothing while this angel reconstructed my DNA with her scientific and also magical scissors. What is science, anyway, if not magic that we can observe and document? This woman had mastery over every domain, explicable and inexplicable.

I had this terrible weird grey green hair:

Did I have the grace to be ashamed of myself? The grace, maybe, yes, if by grace you mean cleavage that came from stuffing myself into a dress several sizes too small. I did not have the knowledge, though. I did have an undercut that was rapidly growing in. So I went and saw the magical woman, Carly, at Talking Headz.

Man, what a babe. It’s not incestuous to date yourself, right? Like if that picture of me were another person, I could date her. And it’d be legal and moral and actually against the law to NOT do it.

But that woman in the picture is dead. Nothing that hot can survive. All she could do was burn brightly and then suffer a horrible fire death. RIP, that woman. You didn’t even have a name, because we couldn’t have BOTH been Mary and then dated each other. THAT would be fucked up.

I would like to clarify that the fire death was a metaphor. The real life thing that happened, because fire deaths don’t happen in real life, at least not to metaphorical dateable doppelgangers, is that my hair started getting longer and I knew that my hairdresser was not available so I got impatient and went to dang ol’ Hair Cuttery. Dang ol’ Hair Cuttery must have codified rules about how you are never, ever to listen to the customer. After all, the customer is not a hair scientist.

Hair scientist or not, I knew what I wanted. “I would like to keep my bangs piecey. Please make them shorter.” I said to the lady.

“I’m not going to go shorter” were the words she used. The words her shears used were “I am going to obliterate the contrast between your bangs and the top of your head so that everything is one weird length that no product or comb will be able to change.”

Friends, you know I don’t use rhetorical or literary devices (too expensive), so please take it at absolute face value when I say that the moment this lady started brushing my hair back with a round hairbrush, the round hairbrush that has a societal if not actual label on it that says “FOR AGES 70+”. she created a monster. I will call this monster Joy.

Joy is that lady who stops at the top of an escalator. Joy cares about shit like Thank You notes and judges you for not writing them, as if your friends or anyone you know actually has refrigerator space for that. Fuck you, Joy, you’re the fucking worst. Joy comes up to you when you’re just trying to navigate the nightmare of clothes shopping and says some absolute tripe like, “You know, dear, I’m not exactly small myself. You might want to try a larger size.” Joy is also that algorithm that thinks you want to look at your ex’s facebook even though you haven’t looked at in like two years but every time you type in the letters “Z-o” the first thing that pops up is STILL THEM. Yes, I have an ex named Zoo. He is a zoo. And I don’t want to look at or hear about him.

You know a lady like Joy and she has that haircut. Young cool ladies who totally have friends, like me, that’s a description of me, do not want to be or look like that.

Of course I looked up ways to manage growing out a pixie cut. Lots of them mentioned the use of hair straighteners, to which my immediate thought was always, “IN WHAT WORLD?”

Well, it is a good world, because unlike in the real world where my neuroatypicality is a delicious mix of a lack of common sense that nears the dangerous and a sense of visuo-spatial reasoning that is too low for diagnostic tests to measure, in the world of using straighteners on inch-long hair, I am the King of Thinking. I alone am brave enough to not burn my face or scalp. Hair goos and gels and waxes were also listed, presumably for an audience that values making their short hair slightly less ugly more than they value paying their rent. $85 for Beach Extreme Hair Scuzz? Yes, sold.

My outrage at being Joy and not having $8000 for Beach Man Hair Scam manifested the way all my outrage usually does and I got some nail scissors and gave myself a bowl cut.

Look, I know the conceit about renaming myself based on the qualities I think my hair evokes was not even funny to begin with and worn really thin by the BEGINNING of that paragraph, but is this guy not fucking Chad? Or Ryan? Fuckssake Ryan we know you like Dave Matthews Band and that you’re sad that you ran out of hair gel. You should be sad. You made mixed CDs where you would put multiple songs by the same artist next to one another and you deserve a hell too merciless and evil to describe. If I were a thin person I could pull this off ironically.

If you were looking for some advice about pixie cuts or anything at all that was sort of comprehensible, I will tell you: Uhhhhh be beautiful to begin with or don’t base your self-esteem on your looks and don’t worry about it. Get a trim…regularly…with all that money you have…

I could mention that I just moved back to England but what is there even to say about it? It’s the same as always: not part of Europe, experiencing sub-tropical temperatures, and Sue and Mel are not the hosts of Great British Bake Off.

I have started my Masters of Science at a school whose name sounds fake but in some lists is the 3rd or 4th Best School At Taking Your Money And Looking Good On A CV If You Stay in England. My cohort is almost alienatingly friendly. They had me eat lunch with them and made me take free ice cream. They have not made fun of my hair in any of its stages.

 

Best thing I’ve eaten lately: Pear made a rose lychee jam and lemon buttercream Victoria sponge for me

Worst thing I’ve had to drink lately: Half a pint of “rum-infused beer”. Infuse me with sweet sweet death my misery to dispel.

Best story I’ve read about lesbian crocodile wives: This one for sure.

Best time I spent 3 hours trying to figure out the retractable clothesline: Who, me? No I am a genius. Look elsewhere for such folly.

Best view of London?: Pulling into London Blackfriars while trying not to cough-vomit on the 30 people standing on top of you on the Thameslink.

*I just had a conversation about this with my friend. what is the word that is like synecdoche but refers specifically to when you use a name brand in place of the larger term?? is it really just proprietary eponym or genericized trademark? well.