WTF?

This little horn stands up and won't go back down. It's like a reverse unicorn. Or Alfalfa. A hairection that's lasted more than four hours and I should therefore contact my doctor immediately.

Reactions/ Awkwardness

So, I may have gotten a couple of my best reactions yet as of late. On Friday, my parents saw me (in person) for the first time since I shaved my head. My dad said I was a G.I. Joe with Real Action Hair. My mom screamed, but that was expected. Later in the evening she slapped me on the back of the head. By then she seemed to have come to terms with it. I also saw a handful of old friends, one of whom, the more she drank, the braver she seemed to think my decision was. From the rest, I got a lot of the compliment I've gotten a lot lately: it suits me. Now, for the best: my mom and I have a friend who recently took off to live in Texas and has been out of the loop as of late. She was on the phone with him and told him what I did and insisted he look at the web site. She told me he got on his computer immediately and spent the next 5 minutes shrieking and laughing so hard that she couldn't understand anything he said. At long last, he was able to choke out: "I SPIT ALL OVER MY SCREEN!" And then laughed some more. So, this next picture is for (and of) you, Troy:

I blurred out the (relatively) innocent in the picture to protect their identity.

Now for the awkwardness: somehow my hair has already grown enough to be at a really awkward stage. It is sticking out EVERYWHERE. I actually have to brush it now. I didn't expect this so early. I'm kicking myself for not taking a picture of my wake-up this morning: I had devil horns. It's strange, strange stuff.

But I still love it. :)

Le Pictures!

All right, my demanding darlings, I just stood in front of the mirror for a good ten minutes trying to get good pictures for you. And this on a day when I'm just feeling generally homely about being bald. All for you. (Imagine me striking a martyred starlet pose right now, left hand draped over my forehead, right clutched to my breast.)

Not clutching my breast, pervoids. Clutched to.

Anyhow, I've got a picture of me sans wig in all my fuzzy glory, one of my pink wig and one of my "professional" wig. Oh, and I've included a hat picture because it cracks me up every time I look at it. And you all know how I love to make myself laugh. The final picture is just some of the fun afforded by my wearing a wig. :) Finally, ignore the fact that in most of the pictures (the ones taken today) I'm wearing my ridiculous fake eyelashes. I needed a little fabulousness today.

I don't know why I look so mug-shotty in this one.

Finally!

Hello again, friends! Sorry for the unexpected radio silence. All is well: just busy. :)

Well, as most of you already know, I bit the bullet. I went ahead and shaved my head. Basically, it came down to a matter of anticipation. It was killing me. I was staying up at night thinking about it. It’s in my nature to get obsessive and I definitely did on this issue. Beyond that, I was just running out of things to say. I thought a month would be a good period of reflection and preparation, but it turns out that’s a REALLY long time. I would have started repeating myself and blah, blah, blah. So: I cut it off. Richard was away on business and I was bored, so I grabbed some scissors and snipped away. When he got back home, he did the actual shaving for me. No way was I doing that on my own.

As promised, I do have videos! I don’t have anything of the actual haircutting. Just the shaving. There are two videos: the first is the initial shaving. The second is when we decided we needed to go shorter. And, seriously : don’t feel like you need to watch the entire things. Unless you want to watch me make idle chit-chat for about ten minutes, you get the hair cutting idea pretty much in the first few seconds.

Okay, so the screen shots alone crack me up. I always knew I had a lot of facial expressions (seriously: I'm 26 with deep-set wrinkles), but watching this killed me. YouTube does a thing when uploading a video where it shows a row of stills of whatever it's uploading at the time. I captured the following screen shot from one of these rows because it made me laugh:

Oh. And I feel I should address the eyelashes issue. I like wearing gaudy fake eyelashes on occasion. It's a fabulosity thing. Once my head was shaved all the way, Richard looked at me and said, "The eyelashes might be too much now". And he was definitely right. I looked like a de-wigged drag queen. Which is fine. Except I'm not.

A Few Ground Rules

Any good experiment has parameters within which it operates. My experiment (though not scientifically sound by any stretch of the imagination) should also have such parameters, rules to govern the shape of the plan. So here's what I've come up with so far:

1) I will not Bic-shave my head - I plan on keeping some fuzz like, as my friend Kittie says, a duckling. This is a matter of laziness and wimpiness. I think by the time I've gone through with the hair cutting and shearing, I will be so traumatized, I won't be able to handle a razor to my head as well. I'll be a quivering mass of emotion, hardly a suitable shaving subject.

2) I will go out and about bald at least once a week. Part of the fun of this is playing around with scarves and wigs and I can see myself falling into a reliance on them. That, however, would partially ruin the purpose of doing this. So, at least one day a week I will spend openly bald and proud.

3) I will blog the good and the bad. I have a tendency to think that if my tone is one way in one post, it should remain consistent in others in order to have a solid "voice". However, that's not how emotion works, particularly not for me. I'm a rainbow mess of feeling with reds and blues and ugly yellows and I need to let that happen for the sake of honesty. Otherwise, there's no point to this.

4) Even on my wig days, if someone asks to see my crazy shaved head, I will oblige no matter how good a wig day it may be or how crappy I may feel about myself.

Ummm . . . I can't really think of anything else. Do you guys have any ideas?

Other news: I asked my doctor today about head shaving making my hair grow back differently. (He already thinks I'm weird, so he hardly blinked at this). He said it's a matter of genetics, so he doesn't see how it would make a difference. He did, however, mention that I should never, ever shave my eyebrows (I didn't even ask about that one!). Evidently doctors have been sued because they've shaved a patient's eyebrow to give stitches or something and the eyebrow never grew back. Sometimes they just don't come back in after having been shaved. Interesting, huh? I spent a few years with three eyebrows after the Unfortunate Nair Incident of '01, but lucky for me, the bare patch came back eventually. In preparation for The Big Day, though, I have been plucking my eyebrows like mad. I mean, really: I can't be baldheaded and have mountain man eyebrows, right?

Biggest Fear

So, I can easily choose one single Biggest Fear in this project. I haven't vocalized it to this point because I'm _that_ concerned about it. It has threatened to end this entire experiment before it even happens. So, what should one do when dealing with one's Biggest Fear? Go to the internet of course.

And I did.

And I found NOTHING.

At least nothing related to shaving one's head.

*Tugs collar awkwardly*

So, anyway, I took the next step. I posted in a forum. Here was my question:

"So, I've decided to shave my head as an experiment. I've always wondered how I'd look and my curiosity has reached unignorable proportions. I'm not worried about it looking bad (seriously, it probably will: that's what wigs are for). I'm not worried about social stigma (I've done worse). The thing that really, really concerns me is: will it grow back the same? I truly love my hair. I love being a curly girl. It's an identity I'm proud to call mine. I would hate to ruin my hair to sate curiosity. Is there a chance that it can grow back straight? I've found very little on the internet one way or another and I would really like to ease this fear. Oh, and I should probably add that I'm a 3b.

Thanks all!"

3b is a hair type, pervs.

I've gotten a couple responses so far and they're comforting, but I'm still waiting on some more before I'm fully Big Fear Free. Do any of you know about this?

In other news, I'm getting impatient and almost cut it off last night.

Ta-dah.

A Potential Change of Plan (No, Mom, I've Not Changed My Mind Re: Head Shaving)

I’d planned another post for today, but in light of a very interesting comment I received, I felt we should discuss the following instead:

“Ndever” (awesome handle, BTW) said:

“I did some back reading and noticed that you plan to donate to Locks of Love. The last time I checked, Locks of Love charges the cancer patients for their wigs; so I donate to Pantene Beautiful Lengths instead (http://www.pantene.com/en-US/article/our_beautiful_partnerships.jspx) because Pantene provides the wigs FOR FREE to cancer patients. Just in case that makes a difference to you!”

And it definitely does make a difference. I did some research and found the following quote on the Locks of Love web site:

“Our mission is to return a sense of self, confidence and normalcy to children suffering from hair loss by utilizing donated ponytails to provide the highest quality hair prosthetics to financially disadvantaged children. The children receive hair prostheses free of charge or on a sliding scale, based on financial need.”

There were some other sites, scathing in their reviews of Locks of Love, but I don’t think that’s either helpful or necessarily true. So we’re going to deal with what we have from each side.

Okay. So, it’s a sliding scale “based on financial need”, which is fairly reasonable. But then we have Pantene Beautiful Lengths, which works with the American Cancer Society and provides the wigs entirely free of charge, from what I’ve seen.

Now, here’s the other part of the discussion: Locks of Love works for children. Pantene Beautiful Lengths is more focused on women. Does that matter?

What do you all think? Should I stick with the original game plan and go with the better known organization with which I started (though made no specific pledge to) or should I go with the group that donates their wigs freely? And has anyone heard anything one way or another on these organizations? Any input would be welcome and appreciated!