Hair and a Hard Place

Somehow it seems that most ladies and many men are "good with hair."  I am, alas, not in that number.  I have no patience whatsoever for dealing with hairstyles and cannot tell one end of a curler from another.  If I can get away with fixing my hair in 30 seconds in the morning, I consider that to be almost too much time spent.

My haircut experiences have frequently ended in disaster--like the time I tried to trim my own hair and ended up sheering off 16 inches of it.  And then there was the time my neighbor gave me a free hair cut and the scissors slipped.....a simple two-inch trim on my shoulder length hair turned into a chop-job that left me with a Dutch-boy-do that barely reached my earlobes; it was about ten months before my hair was long enough to gather into a ponytail without fly-aways.  I could easily describe several other disasters but I'll spare you those.

I've got Irish hair.  Remember those big floofy hair-dos from Lord of the Dance?  Yeah.  That's Irish hair.  There's no point in me trying to do a hairstyle with that--waste of time and waste of patience!  The heat from the hairdryer tames things down a bit but that's all I'm willing to do, and mainly that happens only because I dry to avoid the icky feeling of wet hair.

My mother had thin, fine, hard-to-style hair that she forced into submission by spending 3 hours every Friday at the beauty salon to have her hair helmeted into a rock-hard beehive.  Every Friday.  Every week.  For years.  Certainly every year that I can recall anyway, and for decades after the style had ceased to be popular.  Frequently I was called upon to sit there in the salon patiently waiting for her.  You'd think I'd have learned something about hair from that experience but the only thing it taught me was that this was Something I Did Not Want to Deal With.  Ever!

So I don't mess with my hair.  I just let it grow and keep it clean.  I get a trim every year or two--by trim, I mean whacking off a half foot or so of hair.  And I get the stuff out of the way daily by resorting to an easy pontail or a simple braid or, more often than anything else, a French knot that I fasten with four old-fashioned chignon pins.  I have, in fact, been using the same four pins for more than ten years but that was only after the first four pins that I used persistenly for twenty-five years wore out.  This reminds me that I really should start looking for a spare set of pins to buy just in case of further pin failure. 

Anyway, I am actually (yet again) digressing.  My issue at the moment is that I am having trouble doing anything whatsoever with my Irish hair (and that includes simply brushing it) because I have got a lovely goose egg on the side of my head.  Goose egg?  Yeah.  An ouchie.  Okay, let's be more precise and call it a contusion. 

Why?  I am a nitwit.  Of course.  I know the limits of my disability, really I do, but I got impatient the other night because I simply wanted to take out the trash.  I knew I was tired.  I knew it could wait until the next day.  My intuition was screaming at me to let it go.  But I told myself not to be a big baby.  After all, anybody can take out the trash, right?  Wrong.

I know well enough to step up with my right foot.  Well, I do if I'm paying attention.  But I wasn't so I stepped up with the left and went down hard, really hard, and cracked my head on the porch doorframe.  I'm not one for crying and screaming when injured.  But there's a horrible sick feeling you get when you know you've done yourself a damage--so I sat there in the dirt by the back step while I assessed the situation.  No blood.  That was good.  Nothing apparently broken.  Very good.  Minor sprain to the wrist.  No surprise.  Some bruises and general pain.  Nothing serious.  And one heck of a whack to my head--honestly I heard an echo when it hit the wood and metal (maybe my head is empty after all).  Since I was mobile, no big deal really.  I got up rather gingerly and went in the house to have a mug of sweet hot tea.  (As you might recall, I was taught strictly that sweet tea is only for when you're poorly and this situation certainly fitted the bill.)

Did I bother to tell anyone?  Of course not.  This was nothing like as bad as the time I fell out of the attic and knocked myself out.  Or the time I dropped a hammer on my own head.  I never told anyone then either.  (Does it sound like I hit myself in the head a lot?  Well, I have done ever since I was a kid--I always seem to come down head first; just a fact of nature.) 

There is really no point to fussing and complaining.....but that is precisely what I'm doing now when I try to brush my hair.  I mind stings and aches a lot worse than actual pain.  It's just a whole lot more annoying, and I dislike the inconvenience very nearly as much as I dislike doing hair.

Learn from my poor example:  listen to your intuition.
Life is good.....even when you have to brush your Irish hair.