Going Gray

Sometime toward the end of 2009, I started thinking about my hair. Which is not to say I didn't think about my hair before that, but I started thinking very seriously about my hair and what my hair was saying and what my hair meant.

Busy hair? Clearly.

Slow brain day? Possibly.

First, some background:

I found my first gray hair when I was 16. It came as quite a shock.

Pretty much since college I have been coloring and/or highlighting my hair every six weeks (or more often) in order to keep it some color other than gray.

I have had black hair, red hair, reddish brown hair, brown hair, blond hair....I have colored it myself and paid people large amounts of money to do it for me.

I shudder to think what I paid over the years in hair color and to hair colorists, so I'm not going to.

In considering my hair, I think it's important to note that I had short hair almost all my life. I grew it out for my wedding, but immediately after WHACK it was short again.

When I say short, I mean "The stylist used a razor to cut my hair and I looked more like a Marine than a Pixie."

That's how short.

I started growing my hair about 5 or 6 years ago. Now it's "mid-length," otherwise known as somewhere between my chin and my collar.

Lots of back story to get to the point.

Which is, I am letting my hair go gray.

Why?

I actually have no idea. Because I feel like it, I guess. Same reason I grew it out and that ended up good, so why not?

Going gray is not an easy process, unfortunately. You can't one day decide that you are going to remove layer after layer of hair color from your hair and Presto-Chango your hair is now natural.

No, it requires highlighting and cutting and more highlighting and more cutting.

I figure that I will have my real color 100% throughout my hair by November. Or possibly Christmas.

In the meantime, I get to deal with silver roots and blond highlights and generally waiting things out.

Either that or I have it cut back into a Pixie/Marine 'do and go from mid-length brown hair with highlights to extremely short silver hair. Pretty much overnight.

That may be a bit too drastic. Or by April I may be begging for it to be chopped off. I suppose we'll find out.

After this entire process, my hair will be saying something completely different than it was saying before. Of course, I would have to figure out what it was saying before to know what it will be saying then.

What does my deciding to go gray have to do with turning 40?

My guess is: a whole bunch. And eventually I'll figure out the connection.

Probably.

Welcome Gentle Readers

I turned 40 on January 2, 2010.

I am still waiting for the world to end.

The circumstances of turning 40 were more than a little odd. I celebrated my birthday with my parents in New Mexico a day early, because on my actual birthday, I was in airports and on airplanes and standing in lines and riding in vans. In other words, I spent that day coming home from my parents' house.

This oddness was underlined when my fantabulous friends and my husband threw me a surprise party on the 11th. (Hence the tiara, sash, adult beverage and goofy smile in the picture.)

So I guess the best way to put it was that my birthday was both early and later than the actual date.

Perhaps this is why I have not collapsed as a result of this so-called landmark birthday.

40 right now feels a heck of a lot like 39.

Which felt a lot like 35 which felt a lot like 30 which felt a lot like....well, you get the point.

There were a number of things I wanted to do by the time I was 40, I recall. Sadly I never wrote them down, so I have no idea if I did them or not.

Probably not.

I don't feel deprived about that, however, so maybe I did. Or maybe they didn't matter anyway.

In any case, over the next year I will be considering what it means to be 40, what it means to be a feminist, and hopefully other fun and exciting topics.

I hope you'll hang around.

Chris