SPITE

This post was originally a part of the now defunct Somnaplegic blog.

I was a pretty fussy child when it came to cleanliness. I hated sharing water glasses (no one carried water bottles when I was a kid) or letting people take bites from my food. My mom tells a story from when I was two years old. I was running around in the yard in my new little sandals. “Be careful, you could trip on the uneven ground,” my mom called out. I continued tearing around, and of course, tripped and flopped right down on my face. I returned crying with blood streaming down my face and scraped knees. “Why didn’t you put your hands out?” she asked cleaning up the mess on my face. I responded as seemed quite reasonable to me. “The ground is dirty. I don’t like dirty hands.”

Still fussy. Still not a fan of sharing water bottles or glasses [1]. As fussy as I am though there are two things about me that trump fussiness: spite and contrariness.

One time in high school, a friend was visiting my house. I was eating a bowl of cereal and my pet rat was perched delicately on the edge of the bowl. She like to take a piece of the crunch cereal, delicately dip it in the milk and munch away. She was very fastidious and never double dipped. Decades later she’s still on my top 10 list of favorite eating buddies in terms of both manners and conversation.

“That’s gross,” my friend said recoiling at the tiny rodent on the table.

“Really?” I said scratching my head. I casually grabbed a green apple from the counter [2] took a bite to get it started, and bent down to offer a bite to my Lhasa Apso, who was nuts for apples. Once he’d done his Donald Duck and Mickey eating corn on the cob routineI stood up took another bite of it myself. “Never thought of it that way.”

 I never make kissy faces with my pets and I do not tolerate licking. It’s gross, but for a good bit of random spite, I can eat after a dog, no problem.

I don’t know how it is in other places, but Pacific Northwest Drivers think that turning right on red light is not just allowable, but required and despite our tradition of “Oregon Nice” will often get highly agitated if you don’t turn as quickly as possible. If a driver starts gesticulating or honking at me while I’m preparing to turn I will pivot in my seat, smile huge, wave and proceed to sit through the entire light even if there’s not a car in sight.

I once drove 15 miles beside an RV doing 50 on the freeway because a guy flashed his lights at me from behind instead of waiting the literal 30 seconds it would take me to finish passing. When he was finally able to pass after I decided it would be unfair to hold up the person coming up behind both of us, I winked and saluted him as he went by.

Yes, I’m that asshole.  

Spite is my OS and power supply.

Of course the most frequent subject of my spite is me. 

Between the ages of 7-17 I had long hair. I mean LONG hair, not just a little past shoulder length. I mean down the back, past the butt, once even all the way to the bloody knees, hair. It was awful. It killed hair dryers and vacuum cleaners and got into everything. It didn’t look good, it caused me physical pain and cost me social status [3]. And yet . . . 

The insanity persisted for years after I had ceased to gain any joy from my exceptionally long and lustrous mass of extruded dead skin. Why? Spite. That hair was NOT going to beat me. I would master it and make it my willing servant. F@#$ you, HAIR!

I didn’t say that spite is a good way to live. But it is MY way to live.

After several attempts with several hair dressers I finally found one willing to lop the whole bloody mess off and never looked back. Well sort of. Mostly, my hair got shorter and shorter over the years. I love a good sub 1” spikey cut with a little styling wax. It’s easy and fun and you can dye it any stupid color you like without being stuck with it for long [4]. 

There’s just one thing. I have these dreams. I dream my hair is long again but free of all the problems that plagued me as a girl. It behaves, it dries quickly, it goes into ponytails oh-so-nicely and I can flip it. Oh my sweet left toe, how I can flip my dream hair. To and fro like a centrifugal whirling pinwheel of awesome hairy-hair hairiness. Dream hair doesn’t give me headaches or rat up into knots. It’s not excessively hot and it never has split ends. The scalp that goes with dream hair isn’t constantly dry from the weight of the hair and the styling products and the hair dryers. Dream hair is right out of a mother f@!#ing Pantene commercial.  

F!@# you dream hair! Just leave me alone! I love my short hair. I’m happy <sobbing> just <sob> the way <sniffle> I am <wheezing sob>.

So about every 4-5 years I say, “Screw it. OK dream hair, let’s do this thing.” Thus starts the growing. Let me tell you, my hair grows. The average hair growth of a human being is about 0.5 inches a month. My hair easily grows 0.75 inches or more. It grows like Audrey 2 in Little shop of Horrors, just grows and grows and grows. And it’s shiny and there’s a crap-ton of it. I shed enough hairs in the bath each day that I took to sculpting them into small scenes on the shower wall. My favorite was a rendition of mini-moose from Invander Zim. 

Image Credit: the somnaplegic

This doesn’t mean I don’t go through horrible, awful grow out phases. I absolutely do. In fact, I make it worse than it has to be by refusing to go in and get cuts to keep it looking nice. Remember, I’m in this for spite. Balls to the wall, grow or go home. Does it end up looking like some sort of tribble scrum, Cousin It [5] mullet, yes it does.

I start growing it out and co-workers who weren’t around [6] during the last round of stupid say things like, “Oh! It’s so hard to stick with it. Good luck! I always cave and cut it back short [7].” 

“What made you want to grow it out?” 

“Spite.”

 “What does that mean?”

 “It means spite.”

“But who are you spiting?”

“My hair or maybe myself, not sure.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Yeah,” I shrug, “But that’s the answer.”

 “Well, how long do you plan to grow it.” 

 “Until I run out of spite.”

 “How long do you expect that to be?” 

 “Probably until it’s long enough that all the hard part is done.”

 “But then won’t you want to keep it?”

 “Nah, I hate long hair.”

 “The why are you growing it out?”

 “I told you spite.”

 They usually walk away shaking their heads at that point.

 It’s been 5 years since I threw a bundle of hair on the desk and claimed my job was making it all fall out to really mess with someone the last time I cut it all off.  I’m seven inches in now. Spite ought to hold me at least through the spring.

 ***

[1] Of course that hasn’t stopped my asymptomatic strep throat-carrying offspring from getting me sick repeatedly stealing drinks from my cup.

[2] I hate green apples.

[3] Hair play is a fundamental part of the little white girl code. If you have long hair and refuse to let other girls play with it you will be punished. No matter how rational your arguments for not letting people put tiny knots and braids in your hair, you have broken THE CODE and your suffering will be assured. For all my efforts to try and keep the follicular nest in line through polite refusal, I might as well have been spitting into the wind. You may not remember it now, but elementary school kids spend a stupid amount of time standing in lines. Standing in lines waiting and twitching and fidgeting. Turns out, when you’ve got three foot of hair, it’s pretty easy for someone behind you to sneak in a tiny braid, or a twig, or once, and no, I didn’t make this up, a bloody micro troll doll from one of those bubble gum vending machines. 

[4] Though it has resulted in more than a few of my mentees exclaiming their disappointment when they found out I’m super straight and married to a man nearly has hairy in body and not in head as I. Sorry my sweet queer gals, but some of us straighties like the short-short hair to.

[5] I used to push my long hair forward and pretend to be Cousin It in grade school. My friends called it, “Super creepy, stop doing that!”

[6] Co-workers who were around last time avert their eyes and walk rapidly away. 

[7] I sneer at their “short.” Chin length is NOT short. 

*This post was originally a part of the now defunct Somnaplegic blog.