If I know one thing about myself, then it is that I do NOT have a lot of follow-through. I get interested in new things quickly, may even get good (or at least promising) at them fairly soon, and then I promptly get bored and stop.
Take my hair, for example. Until a few weeks ago, I have been interested in my hair only in so far as that I liked the way it felt. Soft and tickly and, well, long. I brushed it and sometimes put it in a pony tail, sometimes I even did some updo-like twisting and fixing, even used a hair pin once in a blue moon. But it was only two months or so ago that I started to take an interest in consciously growing it long(er) and keeping it healthy in the process. I couldn’t even really french braid up until then. I knew how, in theory, but hadn’t done it successfully even once. I quickly started spending a LOT of time on YouTube, perusing all kinds of different channels about hair care and styles. I bought a boar bristle brush and spent a considerable amount of time every day just brushing my hair. I tried massaging different oils into my tresses and began to put my hair up in a (usually braided) new ‘do each day.
Until today.
This morning, I spent some time before work on re-designing this blog, an activity I had taken up the previous night and pursued into the early morning hours (easily enthused, anyone?), and when it was time to leave for work, I was too rushed to put my hair up. So I left it down. Didn’t style it, didn’t braid it, didn’t even put it in a pony tail. LEFT IT DOWN! You don’t do that if you want to grow out your hair. You just don’t. You see, the tips rub against your clothes and get smushed under the strap of your purse and frightful stuff like that! They break off, and they split, and you can never repair them again! But apparently I didn’t care. It didn’t affect my new hobby of re-designing my blog, so I just didn’t care anymore.
No follow-through, whatsoever!
But by the time I got off work and onto the train to meet my friend in town, I had become a little upset with myself for treating my faithful, innocent, and relatively shiny hair this way. So I dutch braided it. On the train. And when I saw the tips rubbing violently against my shirt (they really just lay there, but I also obsess quite easily), I decided to put my hair up and out of danger. So, still on the train, I weaved the braid through the dutch braided part of my hair (up and down again) and tucked the tips under after the last weave.
…
I’m going to let this sink in for a minute.
…
I didn’t have a mirror or anything. Or hair pins. Just a bad conscience and a new-found ability to french/dutch braid.
And, apparently, a sudden burst of follow-through!!
If you’re wondering why this should be kind of a big deal to me, you probably don’t have long hair. Or you have never tried to dutch braid. In public! Or you’ve been braiding your own hair (in public) since you were a little kid. Well, I never did. Actually, when I was a kid, I didn’t even comb my hair with any regularity. I’d just sort of leave it down all the time, let it tangle real good (and, oh, it tangles), and go to bed/school/parties/family get-togethers with the resulting white-girl rastas. My parents were not happy about that. We even got in a little bit of a fight once when they were beaming with admiration for a friend of mine who brushed her hair about forty-seven times a day. I testily suggested they adopt her if they thought she was so swell. And they haven’t praised my friend in my presence ever since. For anything. And I think, but I might be mistaken, that I started brushing my hair a bit more often after that.
Anywho, here’s what my train-‘do looks like now, three hours later:
I would like to draw your attention away from the fact that I seem to be going bald at the front. So I’m not even gonna mention it.
I particularly like the look from the left side.
From this side you can see where I tucked the tips under. You can see the elastic, but I don’t mind this very much, since, you know, I didn’t even have a freaking mirror!
It’s pretty crooked from the back. But I think that, all in all, this ‘do is promising, and I’m going to call it Shirley. I mean, Dutch Weave.
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