People complain about the ads and featured posts that pop up as they tour the internet, but if they’re truthful, they’d have to admit it’s all stuff they kind of like. Those pop-ups should make us feel “seen,” because we the hell are being seen. Lately what I’ve been seeing is lot of photographs of mummies. Some of them were freeze-dried. Some were embalmed. Some were embogged. I get a huge kick out of them all, as the tracking pixels in charge of me can attest. A lot of the preserved bodies are super old. Like, maybe five thousand years older than me.
But they all look better than I do.
It isn’t just the prominent cheekbones and taut skin. They even have better hair. Or, to put it another way, they have hair.
I still have hair. Not everywhere I used to. That’s mostly okay, but I was sort of attached to the batch on top, and now I’m not. My draperies are turning into sheers. Next summer I’ll probably have to sunscreen my head. I had assumed it was just falling out, bailing on the job without training a replacement first. I sit in my comfy chair doing nothing more strenuous than tapping a keyboard, and then notice hairs stranded on my sweater. I pluck them off. But ten sedentary minutes later, I’ll glance down and find even more hairs. That weren’t there earlier. My hair isn’t falling out. It’s jumping.
My hair is receding faster than a Florida coastline in the Anthropocene. The hairs on my head have been apathetic at best and I couldn’t comprehend how any of them had the gumption to launch themselves into the air. And that’s when I realized. They’re not jumping. They’re being pushed.
It’s an inside job.
It came to me when I tried to make a recipe calling for three cups of cooked rice. No instruction about how you acquire that. I looked it up. Two cups water to one cup rice; one cup uncooked rice makes three cups cooked. The recipe didn’t come out quite right.
Somewhere between figuring out I needed two cups of uncooked rice and four cups of water, and walking five feet to a counter to measure, I’d turned it into three cups uncooked rice and 4.5 cups water. Not that anyone at NASA is thinking of hiring me anyway, but how does that happen?
I’ll tell you how it happens. The ability to remember two single-digit numbers for ten seconds has leapt straight out of my brain pan, just for the sheer hell of it. Whee! Also my Apple ID. Whee! Also the name of the guy in that movie, the one with the bloodhound, he’s married to, you know, her father was in that movie with Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe?
Cannonbaa-aaaall!
All that, and much, much more. Completely out of my brain now, and every one of them strips a hair follicle on its way out. Wheee! Poink!
I swear I could hear them wheeing if it weren’t for my tinnitus.
It’s either that or Elon Musk and his band of bro-brats have broken into my store of knowledge. It’s super efficient in there now, but damned echoey.
I had a full head of hair up until Covid in 2022. Started noticing the shower drain had a lot more hair in it than usual. And then noticed I could see scalp through the hair in front. Oh.
The reason given was reduced oxygen from the Covid congestion meant the body was getting rid of nonessentials. Like hair. Don’t worry, it’ll grow back, they said. Maybe.
The wads of hair in the drain aren’t so thick these days. But my scalp isn’t getting any more foliated.
Well we don’t got hair but at least we gots air!
I noticed that after menopause, on the back of my head there is a patch of thinning hair on either side. It’s especially noticeable when I let my hair go unwashed an extra day, as it gets oily. (I usually wash it every other day.) On the alternate days, I use a dry shampoo that I make myself from natural kitchen ingredients. Also, I have my hair cut in long layers, as I love having long hair, but need layers on top and to the sides to give it height and thereby conceal the thinning spots. (It would be called a “Rachel” if a hair stylist blew it dry. I’m not nearly talented enough for that, but it works for me.)
Also, I’m calling Elon Musk’s teenage bros “Musk-rats.” Hopefully, it will catch on.
I love it! I am going to the barber soon and I’m just going to tell her to do whatever she wants. I have nothing in mind. Could be really short. My hair grows fast…WHERE it grows at all.
Ooooo! Show us the results! You may need it cut more often if she does layers, but I love my layers and think it’s worth it to be able to keep my hair long. And barbers are cheaper than “stylists.”
Well, you know–you always get to see results when I’m trying to come up with a photo for this here blog, but I’ve had to give up a lot of unearned vanity to do it.
I was 27 when the top of my head got sunburned. It was a surprise, but now I’m used to those kind of surprises as they happen with some regularity. Maybe I’ll grow my beard out and do a combover of presidential porportions.
Do you intend to do the combover FROM the beard hair? That would be… interesting.
He didn’t say what he was combing over, or how long it would be.
I have a scary story about hair loss. My co-gramma kept getting more skin and less hair on top and her doctor referred her to the dermatologist for those hair-growing miracle drugs. She was having some piddly heart issues and went for a stress test. Luckiest of luck, her heart went crazy while she was checking in and they put her in ICU. The culprit? Those hair-growing drugs can’t be taken with the blood pressure stuff she takes. Personally – I am thinking she should go with a hat.
Good to know! I go to a hair stylist because the barbers around here are butchers. The lady who does my hair was recommending various hair restorer meds. I wasn’t thinking about doing it, but now definitely not thinking about it!
I don’t/won’t do any meds. At the end, Paul was taking dozens of meds, and was no longer the same person… probably because of the meds. I see ads on my eye doctor’s wall for meds you can take to not have eyelids drooping over your eyes. Yeah, I have an easier solution for that: eyeshadow. You just have to know how to apply it, and i do. And the hair restorers you mentioned. I didn’t go into the logistics of it, but it’s basically oil-based. For someone with oily hair, that would not work for me. Worst comes to worst, I’ll just do what a neighbor/friend does and wear a hat all the time. Or maybe learn to tie on a turban.
Man, I see bald people, men and women, on TV who look great. (Joy Reid, a bald woman who looks fine.) But they are younger. When you have facial sagging, fine lines, and a turkey neck, you need HAIR to cover that up, baby.
I used to think I needed long hair to hide my neck but unless I tied it in a bow in front it wouldn’t help. And alcohol is a med. And the people who need surgery or drugs to keep their eyelids from drooping over their eyes have a condition that actually blocks their vision.
Looks to me like you still have plenty of hair. The mummies might look better, but they don’t have life, so there’s that, and reputedly they all died quite young, and who know what they might have looked like if they’d lived as long as us?
Well you make a good point. They might have been really shitty looking mummies.
I remember one time my mother asked me to apply a Lilt home permanent to her hair. Probably in the 1980’s? I wasn’t aware that I ever had any home permanent application skills. But there was the kit, and the rollers, and the instructions, and it was a rare day that my mother and I had such personal contact. So we did it, and her hair turned out as you would expect.
I still shudder at every aspect of the Toni my mom gave me when I was about eight.
We want pictures!
Hilarious post! I am in the same boat, make a conscious effort to remember something until I can get to a pen/paper, then whoosh, it’s gone. You had me laughing out loud.
And that is all I can give the world. Thank you.