the days are long, but the years are short

the title above is from gretchen rubin, of "the happiness project" fame. this is what i'm reading now, and shamelessly. if it's what it takes to get out of bed and out of the house on a long winter's day (dark around 6 pm!), then so be it.
so, it helps. it's helped me with the small things: motivation to tackle all sorts of tasks i'd kept postponing, from sorting clothes to throw away and donate, and buying a new blender to presumably make smoothies etc with (we'll see about that), to - oh well, the seasonal haircut.
and here we go again: the eternal problem of my hair. you guys thought it was going to be a post full of insights re: happiness. nope. it's a post about my hair. my hair is pretty horrible: thin and soft and shapeless and i play with it all the time and i've always always wanted to grow it long and it never gets there, because after a while it just hangs so lamely i feel like shaving it all off.
but also, i've never dyed it. and i've always liked how dark it is and how it goes with my skin tone. and i think very soon it will start going visibly white and i will have to make something that to me is a huge decision: cut it super-short or dye it. i don't want to dye it.
i don't want to cut it either, damn it.
i've had my shortest haircut ever in vancouver 2008, and while i tolerated it ok (i'd done it out of curiosity) and i got bunches of compliments on it, ...that is not how i see myself. i see myself more curly-haired than now, and with at least shoulder-length.
about the dye...i'm sure it's fine. i'm sure i could do it, but i would probably do a crappy job of maintaining it.

so i had my normal seasonal haircut today. then, for some reason, the whole day i fantasized about turquoise hair.

last night pre-haircut: longest this hair has been in a while.
(also: shovel . represent!)
then i remembered that back in vancouver, before my drastic haircut, i had written a hair poem, and i just had to look it up. found it, and laughed, because yes, it was clearly written by me

(Prologue to) Haircut - march 2008

The hairdresser is amused by my vehemence: I’ll just take a bit off the top, stop me when you think it’s enough. More, I say, please. Yes, I’m sure. It’s not a split-second decision, it grew through all these years – I know all the symbols, the fears. I know someone who had her head shaved after a bad breakup: she had grown it for her wedding day, right down to her waist. My friend whose hair fell off refused to wear a wig. Every time I look in a mirror, I remember these things.

My hair is my mother’s people’s: curly, thick*, unruly. In pictures at the same age (five or six) I am Mum’s twin, my cousins’ and my aunts’: shorn, boy-like. Grandma keeps a lock of mine, from that time, in her Bible. I remember plaiting her braid after she took a bath – thin, mousy grey – envying the casual way she tucked it then under a black scarf.

All princesses had tresses down to the ground. Even my favourite one, disguised as a boy: she pinned her curls under a hat, but never thought to have a haircut. Only in high school did my hair reach shoulder-length, but then the ends shriveled up, split, as if my own desire was forbidding it.

Mum wears hers short now, dyed a dull shade of red. Underneath it’s completely white, so will mine turn before I’m forty-five. When I found my first white hair, in a café bathroom mirror, I locked myself in and cried. A friend came to the door to ask what was wrong. Go away, I sobbed, I’m growing old.

I forget, and I’m reminded. My face shows suddenly too lined, too visible: my father’s eyes, my mother’s mouth, and still my people’s roots. Growing things – falling things we carry – make a halo round us – make us – make how we carry them – ourselves.

*look, y'all know about poetic license. my mother's hair is thick, let's leave it at that.