by Abby McMoon

Created on: December 04, 2008

When I put energy into my appearance and want to be noticed, my hair is my primary medium - but its also my biggest enemy. My long mane can look so good in the bathroom mirror! Then, an hour later, my locks tangle wildly for all the world to see. Not drawn to products that render my hair motionless, I've learned to accept my shepherdess appearance. I often chalk it up to the (hopefully) wild nature of the evening. Reliving the evening in question through pictures, I laugh off those in which I resemble Ophelia after drowning, or a water buffalo. I catch myself punctuating a dance move with a flip of my hair. Meaning to be seductive, I actually tangle an innocent bystander in a hairy splash zone. Later, at the sushi table, the toss of my bangless hair from the rightside to the left was meant to cast me as a devil-may-care vixen. But the camera reveals to me that the gargantuan side part says more, "80s music video."

Long hair on a short girl is a statement. It can look girlish, provincial, or, as a friend once warned, "religiously zealous." But one thing that you cannot deny is that long, unruly hair is timeless. Where "bubble hair" says 1960s, and face-framing ringlets say mid 1800s, a person with long wild unruly hair can only be classified as lazy. Laziness knows no time period; it spans millenia. Eve is always pictured with long wild locks, and surely she new boundless laz-a-thons. Venus sports long unruly hair at her birth, and she probably never did a thing for herself. Men in battle on tapestries, preoccupied with planning strategies and testing testosterone limits, have no time for grooming and so let it all hang out. Old women let their buns down before bed in a brief return to girlhood. And the connotations of long, unruly hair always correspond to the differences between this hairstyle and the popular grooming of the time. She does not where her hair in a bun, she must be a witch, or a whore, or unmarried, or a hippie. Just because I may be all of these things does not allow the world to type-cast me based on my locks!

Even though long unruly hair is clearly the most timeless of hairstyles, as old as the phrase "I don't feel like it," I am wary of the word timeless itself. A timeless person sounds, to me, like a spectator of their own time. The word, "time -LESS" implies that the person is without a time of their own and exists in some proud, undefine-able, lonely space. Strangely, those hairstyles often called timeless - buns, braids, twists, - are actually very time-specific, and would more accuarately be called "nostalgic." So, as a person fully alive in her own time, I suggest that long, unruly hair is representative of the laziness which binds us all across the time-space continuum.

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