Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

This post is nothing more than a testament to my own insecurity and fear. No, not the blogging/belonging fear I talked about a couple of posts ago, but an even more crippling fear...the Fear of Looking Like a Man. Whenever I get my hair chopped off, I feel like I should change my name to Bart and start hanging out down at the local pool hall (they do still have those, don't they?). I see women all the time who are just as cute as they can be with short hair. Cute, cute, cute. Oooohh, just makes me want to be as cute. as. them. Uh-huh. I convince myself it's possible, too. And there I go...off to the beauty salon, lookin' for some outer beauty to perk up my inner beauty (good grief - that's stretching it, even for me, but what do you want me to say? "I'm going to the beauty salon hoping for a miracle transformation"? What - you want me to sound delusional?). Anywho, back to the problem of the day. I've once again come to that time in my life where I feel the need to get cute. Experience has taught me to not do this. But here I sit. On the Eve of Disaster. I have an appointment to get my hair cut tomorrow. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I have great hair now. It's not that I've ever really had great hair. I've got okay hair - especially compared to the rest of my family. We females on my mom's side of the family tree generally have thick, thick hair. Even mine is thick. But compared to others in the family, not so much. I was in my 20's before I realized that my hair actually really is thick. Most of the family kind of pitied me when I was a kid. "Poor thing...got the stringiest hair of all of us, didn't she?". Yeah, well, come to find out, I'm the normal one. The rest of them had freakishly thick hair. But I digress. Once again, back to the point at hand. Where was I? Oh yeah, it's not that I have great hair. It's not that I even like how my hair looks when it's long. It's more a deep-seated fear of not looking feminine. I don't want to be mistaken for a...man! This is fairly ironic when you consider that my entire beauty routine these days consists of brushing my teeth, scraping my hair back into a ponytail and giving my face a good scrubbing. I'm almost positive I still have some make-up laying around somewhere and I know for a fact that I have a set or two of hot rollers and a really awesome straightener, but to get to them, I have to bend over and dig underneath the bathroom sink and well, most of the time, that effort doesn't really seem worth the results I'd end up with. So I've been practicing my "Mother Earth" look (no offense to any actual Mother Earths out there - I'm basing my version of "Mother Earth Style" on a totally uninformed and almost certainly biased opinion as to what a Mother Earth would look like. And I'll just leave it at that). But the "cute" people have been out and about again. I've spotted them. They're luring me back into thinking I, too, can be c-u-t-e. Tomorrow, after my appointment, I'll know the truth. Again. Some people never learn.