False Positives

My hair is way past due for a cut and spends everyday in a balled heavy, saggy wad at the nape of my neck. My bangs are overgrown, wavy, and limp. I need a haircut.

Unfortunately, the woman who is so very skilled at cutting my untameable hair in just the right way so that it doesn't look like a hairy pyramid, is also uncomfortably loud, crass, and very into gossip - both celebrity and bystander. But worst of all, she is excessively rough.

She has yet to provide a haircut wherein pain didn't send streams of involuntary tears running down my face. She violently shoves my head to my knees and flips my hair over.  This allows her to simultaneously tangle my hair with the blow dryer and rip hair from my head with a hard wooden brush, all from the most delicate parts of the scalp.

Then she commands that I sit up and she repeats the process from the top side - ripping and tangling; tangling and ripping.  The first time it happened, I was simply aghast that I was actually paying for this to be done to me. At one point, a whimper/yelp escaped my lips, and I surreptitiously brushed the tears off as I sat up. The next time, I dramatically bobbed my head and did my best impression of a fountain and openly let the tears roll down my cheeks hoping she would take a hint. However, she was too busy talking about shoving her rear end into the Palace Guards at Buckingham Palace in an attempt to make them flinch.

Most people emerge from salons looking refreshed, I come out looking like I've been mourning the death of a beloved pet - eyes red, tight-lipped, face damp - but by golly, that hair is unbeatable.

So, I've been putting off that cut I so badly need.  My hair stays balled up and I self-consciously tuck my perma-greasy forehead swatch behind my ears. Yesterday, the weight of the hair wad became too much so I let my hair down. I had a family come in to apply at work and no sooner had I sat down with them than their middle school daughter coos, "Ooooh! I like your hair - it's so pretty!" This is so nice to hear.  I mean, she looked to be in about 8th grade, which for me was the absolute height of awareness about fashion and looking cool. (This is probably not a ringing endorsement of my sense of style, as I thought Girbaud jeans, Nike Airs, and No Fear shirts were IT.)

Her compliment sends a warm feeling to encompass my normally crusty heart. Not 4 seconds later, I pick up an ordinary, cheap, plastic Bic pen and she instantly coos, "Ooooh - that pen is so pretty!"

It is then that I realize it is utter vanity to take a compliment from a middle school girl to heart.
And maybe she hasn't quite reached the zenith of her fashion sense.