a year with dreadlocks
I was going to post this earlier today, but there was kind of a massive terrorist manhunt going on and it didn't feel right to put up pictures of my hair.
But now that everyone can go outside again, I guess it's okay to resume narcissistic blogging. Today marks the one-year anniversary of my dreadlocks. Here is what they looked like a year ago after a nice lady came to my house and back-combed all my hair in one-inch sections.
looking all demure for having a humongous head
And this is what it looks like now. (I just noticed that I'm not only wearing the same headwrap in this photo, I'm wearing the same sweater. You might thing that my new hippy hairstyle made me lazy about updating my wardrobe over the course of the year, but you're wrong; it's poverty.)
hippy egg hunt!
How do I feel about my dreadlocks after a year? Pretty good. I love not having to comb and style my hair every day. I love the volume on top of my head when I pull them back with a wrap. I love how they look when I pull them into a ponytail, like my hair always used to look before when I pulled it back into a ponytail except without the gel-and-let-it-curl step first.
No one has excluded me from society or even been rude to me in a store. Mostly people are friendly when you smile at them. Whatever your hair looks like.
Here's what my hair looks like without a headwrap. I asked Dan to take a photo of me while I was mucking out the chicken coop.
dirty hair for a dirty job
There are individual dreads that I wish hung straigher or more cylindrical, or without a stupid loopy kink somewhere in the middle. Pretty much each dread has something "wrong" with it. But one can either roll dreads all day or pursue a real hippy lifestyle. With the kinks and bumps I can say I have truly hippy hair.
What do I do for maintenance? I wash my hair whenever it starts to feel itchy, which is about once a week. I put rubberbands in the top by the roots when it feels like the flyaways are getting too crazy. That's pretty much it.
I had more I wanted to say when I was thinking up this post, like how I stopped worrying so much about my weight as soon as I got dreads (part of it was the freeing nature of refusing to conform to traditional beauty standards, part of it is that big volume on my head distracts from my stomach) but I am a little bored already. How can I write about my hair on a day when BIG THINGS are going on in our city? Big things require big thoughts, though to me no bigger things happened than mucking out a chicken coop.
Oh well, anniversary marked. Let's see what another year brings us.