Great Moments in My Life, Part I

No matter how much you'd like to forget them, some things just stick with you.

Here's one of mine.

~~~

Fifth grade. Less than an hour before I was to represent my class in the school-wide (K through 8th) spelling bee.

I was good at spelling, but bad at remaining calm when faced with the prospect of public humiliation in front of my entire school. The number of butterflies in my stomach could have brought an endangered species back from the brink.

I was making small talk with the other contestants, laughing nervously, and watching the clock slowly tick its way toward the moment of my inevitable doom. It got closer and closer to the dreaded time—at any moment, I would have to leave the classroom to go to gymnasium for a pre-bee briefing of the rules.

My stomach churned. I bolted out the door and into the hallway, mistakenly thinking that I could make it to the girls' bathroom.

I was still running when I started to throw up. I fell to the ground (landing in puke, yay!) and continued to vomit. I remember seeing it hit the tiled floor and splashing back up onto my jeans.

When I stopped throwing up, I didn't know what to do. There was vomit everywhere, and it was my fault. I was sick, nervous, humiliated, covered in vomit, and crying. People were staring in shock and awe.

I made my way down the rest of the hallway to the office, darkening the receptionists' doorway like some vomit-covered demon from the depths of hell. Trying to downplay my complete humiliation, I made some sort of terribly understated comment like, "I think I need to go home."

My parents were soon on their way to pick me up. I stood in the office, unable or unwilling to sit down and dirty their furniture, staring down at my puke-speckled blue-and-white tennis shoes.

To complete my abject and public humiliation, the janitor stopped by the office, loudly congratulating me on my record-breaking "splash zone." Everyone else adored him, but oh, how I hated that man.

(Three years later, I won the damn spelling bee.)

On haircuts.

So today I gave myself a haircut.

Unlike a lot of people—apparently this is a pretty common experience?—I never, as a child, took a pair of scissors and tried to give myself a trim. I hypothesize that this was largely a result of my Lutheran upbringing—and the firm belief, instilled early in childhood, that Actions Have Consequences.

My parents never, to my memory, needed to perform Emergency Hair Surgery on an ill-planned self-styling. That's good, right? I'd say so (and my stylishly conservative younger self would fervently agree.)

Unfortunately this also means that, rendered unnecessary by my staunch childhood belief in Actions and Consequences, the portion of my conscience that deals with spontaneous self-applied haircuts has suffered a great deal of attrition. In fact, it is possible that—robbed of its usefulness early on!—this portion of my conscience no longer exists.

For example, this evening when I was gazing into the mirror, scissors in hand, there was no small voice urgently telling me, "Sara, you are a grown woman. There is no excuse for your showing up to work looking like the victim of a weed-whacker unless you have actually been attacked by violently rotating garden tool."*

And as far as my Actions Having Consequences mentality, well—after so many years of not Acting, one it's not unheard of than one might mentally downplay some imagined Consequences. I mean, hair grows back, right? No big deal!

I started out fairly sensibly. The hair I wanted to trim was left loose in front; the hair I wanted untouched was pulled back and out of the way. I grabbed my scissors from the kitchen (why it didn't occur to me to at least find my sewing scissors, I don't know) and started cutting.

But the tricky thing about giving oneself a haircut is that it's hard to keep things even.

The scissors slipped—oops!—and a thick lock of hair fell to the ground. No problem, I'll just trim the other side, t—oops.

Back and forth. Back and forth. Inch by inch, my hair became shorter. I had meant to gradually trim (layer? feather? modify-with-scissors?) my loose hair from bang (that's fringe for you foreigners) length to full length. Essentially, instead of Longhair!Bangs!Longhair, I wanted a gentler transition. (Imagine a bell curve, where the integral is my face.)

It soon became apparent that this was not going to happen—at least, not with the hair originally designated for the transition. Instead of a gently sloping transition from long hair to bangs and back, the end result of my first attempt was a gently sloping transition from actually-rather-short hair to bangs and back.

The hairband came out, my untouched locks spilling far past the longest strands of the "transition" hair.

I brandished a comb. New boundaries were drawn. The rest of my hair was pulled back again. The trimming—oh, shoot, oops!—began again. As lock after lock fell into the bathroom sink, I seriously began to question my sanity. I've never cut my hair before! No matter what I did, things only got shorter—and worse! What was I thinking?

Less of a perfectionist this time (having mostly resigned myself to failure and an upcoming visit to Great Clips), I was able to at least create the semblance of a gradual transition between the second trim section and the first. Deciding to leave well-enough alone, I set the scissors down.

My haircut-related conscience—apparently not dead after all!—piped up and belatedly began berating me about weed-whackers and Making Poor Life Choices.

I winced at my reflection, cleaned up my mess, and hopped in the shower.

. . . A new haircut always looks different after you wash it.

I look great.

*"And no, you cannot use this as your excuse. This is the Age of the Internet. If sentient weed-whackers were rampant and menacing your city, people would know."