Long, short or shorter

I got my hair cut today. Sadly, my stylist lady is quitting. Sniffle. A good stylist is hard to find when you have Asian hair.

Well, there was that one place where the Vietnamese lady cut my Vietnamese hair. That was good.

I needed a haircut. I was having a bad hair day. Week. Life.

See, as you know, I'm Asian.

And Asian hair isn't like white people hair. Or black people hair for that matter.

Asian hair basically has three styles. Long, short or shorter.

It's black, it's straight. It's stiff and it's oily. (That doesn't sound like I'm talking about my hair. More like... well, nevermind.)

Anyway, I've lived most of my life surrounded by white people and therefore surrounded by white people hair.

And I'm jealous.

Most of my childhood, I had that Asian bowl cut all small Asian children have once they grow hair. (When I was a baby, I had a little bit of hair on top of my head that stuck straight up. After that, bowl cut.)

So in junior high school, at some point, my Mom let me get my hair cut more or less like my friends, or as close an approximation thereof as her stylist - a very good, wonderfuly but star-crossed woman - could do.

Basically, I wound up with the closest thing to an Asian mullet possible. At least it wasn't feathered. I don't think you CAN feather Asian hair.

A mullet is basically short in front and on the top and long in the back. You know what this looks like on rednecks and hockey players. Well, it doesn't look the same on Asians.

But that's about what I had. Short on top - now, after much combing and gelling, parted down the middle - and long in the back. Hey, it was the '80s.

That's pretty much what I wore through high school. At some points the back (the long part) was down over my collar.

The day before I graduated, I cut the back and buzzed the sides. I put my graduation cap on when I arrived at practice that day and my friends thought I'd shaved my head because all they could see was the buzzed sides and back.

But I had hair on top, parted and slicked.

And that's how I arrived at college. Where I kept buzzing the back and sides, but grew the top increasingly longer. At one point, I could tie it up in this little samurai-looking topknot, like one of my fraternity brothers.

And that's pretty much how it stayed for years. One summer, I got the whole thing buzzed. When I grew it back out for the fall, I spent about three months looking like a small porcupine had taken up residence on my head - hair straight, stiff and sticking straight up.

Anyway, I kept up this sort of pseudo-skater-cut of varying lengths all through the rest of the '90s - gel and all.

A couple of years ago, when I turned 29, I decided to spend my last year of my 20s living it up - so among other things, I did something I've always wanted to do - I got my hair colored.

I had my stylist - Sharon, the one who's leaving - cut it short on top (as well as buzzing it all around the back and sides like usual) and spike it up, then bleach/color it blond. (blonde = female; blond = male.)

I thought it would be funny.

Everyone at the office loved it. Especially the women.

(One of my co-workers called me "Spike," after some character on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." I still haven't watched my Big Box o' Buffy yet, so I still have no idea who she means.)

So the haircut stayed. I even experimented with color. One month I tried red and blond. One month (at the recommendation of one of the office hotties) blue. But mostly I've stuck with a blond, spiky buzz cut.

But I think I'm going to stop the blond, and only a year late (I was going to stop the craziness when I turned 30, that was sort of the point, but I liked the hair... well, the ladies liked it).

It's just too short to justify the expense. I don't get much blond, and the coloring costs three times the regular cut. Plus I'm not sure I'm prepared to get colored without Sharon, even though the other stylists at the place are good (I've used some in the past).

Ah, the curse of Asian hair. And just when I got comfortable, too.

Links:
• Asian hair: "Thick, black and perfectly straight"
• Asian hairstyles - as with clothes, the women get all the cool stuff
• How hair coloring works
• Spike, fanlisting-style

Watch for a post about my holidays coming up. I'm just not prepared to do it now. Happy Hanukkah to my fellow members of the Tribe. After all, Christmas is over, but we've got six crazy nights left!