I don’t know how girls wear headbands all the time. My headband today has irritated my forehead and given me a headache. Besides, the headband makes my head itch, too. My hair is really too flat to wear a headband for too long anyway. I need some kind of hair accessory that fluffs my hair instead of flattens it. I remember when I was in high school, big hair was all the rage. Girls spent nearly $100 on spiral perms so their long locks would stay frozen in ringlets all day, and then, they would tease their bangs for additional height. I never did the bang teasing, but I did try a spiral perm or two. I never could find a hair dresser who wrapped hair in those long, stick-like pink rollers; every hair dresser I knew always curled hair with the pink foam rollers my grandma used. So, my perms never looked like the perms other girls had. And it didn’t really matter anyway. I couldn’t get the curls to last long even with a perm, and when I hot-rolled the permed hair, it fell flat again by the end of the day. I fell hopelessly short when it came to 80s hair fashion. Then, all of a sudden, flat was hip in the late 90s. Some time between high school and my adult years, I had learned to fix my hair to suit my straight, flat locks. Now, I always still longed for big poofy hair, but the Lord did not see fit to bless me with thick, curly locks. So, instead, I found the bob, or an angled cut with long, layered bangs. And then one day, something amazing happened. I was sitting in a graduate class with fellow teachers, and a younger woman sitting beside me turned toward me and touched the ends of my hair. “Is your hair naturally straight?” she asked. I pulled back. Naturally straight? Is that a real concept? How many times had I asked someone if her hair was naturally curly? And now someone wanted to know if I had naturally straight hair? Who did that? When I managed to answer, I said something to the effect of “Yes, but no one has ever asked me that before.”
“Really?” she replied. “You have no idea how long I spend straightening my hair every morning.”

**I wrote this in one of my classes as an example of how to blog in October, 2015.