After all that hot air yesterday about how I refuse to update my hair to be stylish in an attempt to keep the Youths from mocking me, I have something to admit.
I cut my own bangs.
I made it through 11 and a half months of this pandemic without taking scissors to my own hair. But this weekend my streak ended.
Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t do it impulsively. I thought about it for a whole twenty minutes while I watched most of a YouTube video that gave me a pretty good idea of how to do it. Then I went to the bathroom, dug out the shears, and had at it.
Halfway through the big cut, as I was holding the doomed strands in front of my nose ready to sever, I experienced that drop in the belly you may remember from childhood when you were fully locked into the terrifying roller coaster that you weren’t sure you were ready for. Then that click came in the safety vest, and you knew all the screaming in the world couldn’t get you out. The ride was chugging off to whatever kind of doom awaited you.
It was like that. There was nothing for it but to keep cutting.
I flatter myself, though: I didn’t do a terrible job. I followed the tutorial (sort of) and ended up with pretty much what I wanted.
As for my hair, it doesn’t agree yet. My hair is, like me, millennial. It has a long memory of deep side parts. It rejects my halfhearted attempts to update it into a more middle part recently, instead flopping itself over to where it stubbornly belongs.
In the same way, my bangs (cut to fall gracefully to either side of my eyebrows) strongly prefer to skew as a single unit to the right side, as they did in the long swoopy-bangs phase of the aughts.
When I try to force the left half to stay in its lane by my left eyebrow, it gives me the metaphorical finger and curls itself up into the center of my forehead as though arching desperately toward where it wants to lie.
I’m embracing it. Feeling the gentle skimming of hair on my brow puts me right back in 2006-08. There were worse years. And nostalgia is the prerogative of the aging.
