Since I shaved it all off nine-odd weeks ago, my hair (well, “hair,” at times) has gone through various phases: the Boot Camp phase, the Chia Head phase, the Toilet Brush phase, and the Duckling phase, which I just completed recently.

I never know which phase is coming next, or how long it will last — Duckling went on for a while; Toilet Brush, mercifully, ended after only 48 hours — but I have two things working in my favor here. The first is that, with hair this short, it’s going to grow out of whatever stupid thing it’s doing by the time I get my next pedicure. Two pedis ago, the ladies at the salon gave it a tactfully encouraging, but poor, review: “Okay, growing out, you be patient.” But at my last pedi: “Awww, look how sweet now!”

The second thing working in my favor is that, even when my hair looks ridiculous, it…looks ridiculous. By which I mean “hilarious.” It has now entered with reckless abandon into the Charades phase, you see, during which it imitates various objects and concepts that have no earthly business on a woman’s head, and because there’s almost nothing I can do to influence my hair out of its chosen daily shape besides 1) shower and start over, hoping that the next shape is slightly less absurd than the last, or 2) go down to the gas station on Degraw and ask for some used motor oil with which to “style” it, I just have to enjoy its gymnastics.

And it is quite a talented mimic, my hair. Below, a list of things it has impersonated in the last couple of weeks:

1. A flare on the surface of the sun. It always happens in the same spot — on the back right-hand corner of my head — I think because the hair in that spot is juuuuuuust a little bit longer than the hair everywhere else. To call it a cowlick does not do it justice; “mooselick,” maybe, or “rhinolick.”

2. Tin-Tin.

3. A Whac-a-Mole game during a power surge. I go into every shower filled with hope — perhaps this is the one, at last, after which my hair will just lie down on my head. And immediately after I towel it off, it gratifies me by cleaving to my head pixieishly. Then, a few minutes later, [bink], the first little clump twangs up, followed by a couple more clumps, [bink bink], and then [bink b-b-bink bink bink!] it’s all on end. Ask my friends — I have been saying “I think it’s going to lie down in, like, three days or so” since, seriously, mid-April.

4. A cockatoo.

5. A dead cockatoo.

6. A prepubescent Elvis impersonator. Almost every hair sticks up, or out, except the ones next to my ears, which really like their new job as sideburnoids and stick determinedly straight down. I can’t decide whether to have them shaped, or to keep growing them until I can shape them into little Spocky points (see: #28).

7. A pile of sleeping gerbils.

8. A pile of gerbils in a touring production of Plato’s Retreat: The Musical.

9. A very subtle Nike product placement.

10. An unambitious crop circle, interrupted halfway through.

11. Burnt carpeting.

12. A lost Pollock masterwork.

13. A mushroom brush.

14. If Sid Vicious had lived long enough to experiment with a Flowbee.

15. A stepped-on thistle.

16. Timothy Olyphant’s Deadwood mustache.

17. A minor demon who has had one devil horn broken off.

18. A bed of nails.

19. What happens when you shake an Etch-a-Sketch too hard.

20. Nature. I didn’t think it looked like nature, but the ladybug that wafted into my coif and decided to hang out evidently disagreed. My friend’s daughter diplomatically liberated it from its lock/perch, and it was kind of a cute moment, but: no. No creatures in the hair. The real problem here is that most of my hair is not touching my head most of the time, so if an inchworm is…whatever, inching around up there, I seriously will not know about it for like ten minutes.

21. A vacuum. And speaking of things I didn’t know about for ten minutes…I spent part of the weekend rearranging furniture, which obviously means lots of previously sequestered dust and lint flying around, which, whatever, but at one point I walked past a mirror in the bedroom and noticed that a large dust bunny had nestled itself on my head like a spider-web in a hedge (or Adebisi’s little hat on Oz — pick your simile). Just to review: giant lint-ball, jauntily Velcroed onto the top of my head; me, completely oblivious. No idea it was there. Would have run across the street to buy more trash bags with a cathairmulke clinging to my crown and never known the difference; Swiffered my head to get it off. Swiffered my head! Awesome! You know that website where the woman used to balance all kinds of weird crap on her pet rabbit’s head, like tomatoes and pancakes and limited-edition Barbies and stuff? Maybe I should start a satellite version of that, starting with a teeny plastic figurine that I name “Jimmy Hoffa” and plant in my hair along the line where I used to part it. Although, of course, if I try to get stuff to stay in it, it totally won’t. …Maybe I should Roomba my head instead? …Look, people, I had a clot of previously owned fur on my noggin. I can make my own fun, or I can open a window and step out of it; these are the choices, so work with me here.

22. The kind of deeply amateurish clown painting you see at garage sales where the perspective is too poorly rendered and weird for the clown to even creep you out at all.

23. Your middle-school art teacher who wore lots of copper jewelry, always called you the wrong name, and got all weepy talking about Caravaggio.

24. “Hon, let’s make a note — next time we go on vacation, we clean out the fridge before we leave. …Were these…strawberries?”

25. Week Seven of sleep-away camp.

26. A hedgehog.

27. A rooster.

28. A Tribble. I’ll tell you “the trouble with” Tribbles. You can coat them in max-hold gel and it doesn’t do shit, is “the trouble with” Tribbles.

29. A beaver dam, moments before the spring flood wrecks it.

30. Clint Eastwood.

31. A horseshoe crab.

32. Relics from shipwrecks, filmed underwater, that have become part of the ocean floor’s ecosystem.

33. An ancient burial mound.

34. “…And Norman Rockwell never painted drunk again.”

35. Wallpaper flocking.

36. One of those posh $78 pillows from the West Elm catalog that’s too sequin-y for everyday use.

37. One rotation of a chocolate soft-serve ice-cream cone.

38. The “less than or equal to” sign.

39. The Badlands of South Dakota.

40. A wilted crown of laurels.

41. An anvil. Okay, when your hair is this length and you get hat head, you get all the hat head, so if it’s kind of rainy out and you put on a cute little bucket you bought in Toronto in an attempt to avoid looking like #43, just…leave the hat on. I don’t care how hot you get. Leave it on.

42. A bison hump.

43. Morning dew in the country. Normal rain is one thing; a London-y mist just settles, sparkly-like, on the crown.

44. Beaker. Sort of poetic, really, after a week when I looked like Bunsen Honeydew (including the skin tone, because I had that death flu). …Meep!

45. Bunched asparagus.

46. Those “draw a beard on this man” iron-filing toys from the dollar store.

47. An origami bird.

48. A fan. (Both kinds.)

49. The Doonesbury rendition of Dan Quayle.

50. The Indiana-Kentucky border. This is the latest incarnation, which is so sublimely stupid-looking that I really wish I could take a plaster cast of it, so I can look at it and giggle forever and ever. …Actually, I just checked it out in the mirror, and one side kind of got mooshed down a little, so now it’s really the entire northern border of Kentucky, Ohio included. Tremendous.

I had it in mind to get another pedi today, and I can’t wait to see what the ladies at the salon have to say. “Ooh, angry mug of root beer, not so good.”

June 5, 2006

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