That's a Lot of Hair. She's Growing It Out

It is a dream of mine to have waist ling hair. I have had this dream ever since I was a little girl, but, although most people would say I usually have long hair, it has never grown as long as I would like, due to a series of hair disasters: my five year old older sister finding scissors and deciding to give me a hair cut, going swimming so often my hair turned green, dying my hair black several times for several months then trying to dye to brown, resulting in a clown-orange horror... All of this is not helped by the fact that my hair does not grow fast. I don't know the average speed of hair growth, but I'm sure my hair grows slower than most. I KNOW my hair grows slower than my amazing cousin, M. Rose, who has grown her hair out, cut it all off and donated it to Locks of Love SEVERAL times. Really, she is amazing.

Anyway, the point is I've been trying to grow my hair out. After a year and a half with no cuts or trims, my hair was looking... hirsute? Is that redundant? Fine, we'll say disheveled. So I asked my amazing sister-in-law if she would trim my hair. She did, and it looked great. She cut off around three inches, but my hair was still long and looked crisp and clean. That was last week. This morning as I was doing my hair, I looked at the length and thought "my hair looks great. It looks even and long. Hooray."

So you know disaster was about to strike.

For five weeks now, I have been doing the paper programs for my church. I am the person who collects announcements, the names of the speakers, the hymns we are going to sing, and then arranges them nicely on paper, makes a hundred copies, and hands them out before church. That is my calling. I love it.

One of the reasons I love my calling is my ability to implement change. instead of giving each family a full sheet of paper folded in half, I have rearranged the program to be a half-sheet of paper, thus reducing the amount of paper used and saving a few trees in the process. I'll save the details for another post. The point is, for five weeks now, I have printed off the copies and then used the church's huge paper cutter (those things were you lay the stack of papers down, and then pull the blade down, leaving a straight, clean cut through your stack of papers) to cut the papers in half.

Today I used that paper cutter again. It can't handle fifty papers at once, so I do five stacks of ten. While I was doing this, I moved the cut papers off the paper cutter and placed new papers on, when I noticed a lock of hair on the side. I thought "Huh. strange. I wonder who's hair that...oh no."

Somehow, a thick strand of my hair had managed to sneak under the blade without me realizing it. It cut off about four inches. Of my hair. MY HAIR. So now I have a chunk of hair missing. I can either try to hide it everyday, or cut the rest of my hair by four inches.

Not cool, paper cutter. Not cool.