Update From The Depths

My personal life has been even more stagnant than usual (and it’s usually a snoozefest at best.) Lemme tell you, it’s pretty wild never having had one relationship last more than two months in over 34 years of being alive. That’s 18 years of dating.

But once you get yourself into a position like this, and I do blame myself almost entirely, you find yourself wearing your Difficult Match team jersey proudly. Counterintuitively, you actually end up getting pickier and pickier over the years. It’s hard not to thrill at the fact that you’re 100% sure you avoided some unbelievably toxic relationships. And frankly, when you revisit each individual moment that could maybe have led you out of this valley of singleness, which your brain does every time you get too happy, if you’re being honest you would probably go back and make the same decisions. At least when it comes to relationships after 25. You had a real asshole phase from the moment you graduated* until then. It took you a while you understand that multiple people think you’re a fox and during the extended journey to enlightenment you figured, naively, that no one could possibly care enough about you that they’d get materially hurt when you were fully careless with their feelings. Oops.

*from elementary school.

I’m currently doing a kind of a flaccid Eat Pray Love, a mishmash of fleeting moments of inward reflection and cacio e pepe.

One of the things that brought this on was dating a guy (I KNOW ugh puke) who was very careful to say that isn’t SURE 9/11 was an inside job but that there were a lot of fishy things about the whole thing. He had some things going for him (cute, nice, freakishly punctual) but when it started to fizzle I sure did let it. I mean 9/11 was a terrorist attack.

Per the above ever increasing stringent-ness, I’m realizing that I need to be even firmer with my dealbreakers. It’s not that I feel like there’s a ticking clock but I just don’t have the spark it in me that it takes to humor the mediocre anymore, waiting patiently for them to bloom into something that doesn’t want to talk about the temperature at which steel melts. Up until now my age range on Hinge has been more or less wide open. There have been very few immovable dealbreakers. but I clearly need to start drawing some lines. I’ll keep the existing nos - I’d never date a conservative, or someone who considers themselves “moderate” for example (because there are two sides rn and I’m gonna need you to pick one) but there are other things at this level of importance that I need to start taking stock of with potential boyfs. I need to consider some of the other larger life choices that may be incongruous with how I see myself living my own live. Like I don’t think I’m going to want kids but I’m not sure I want to date someone who’s not even open to the idea. I don’t know what I think is going to happen, that I’ll wake up one day and suddenly feel like I needed to procreate, but I’m not ready to shut that door. Although ugh kids.

Anyway, so I’ve been feeling a certain way, sort of tentatively powerful, ready to start a new phase BUT I'm not rich and I can’t fuck off to Italy so I made the most drastic statement I could without putting my ability to feed myself at risk. It just made sense to cut all of my hair off. It was time. I always come back to a pixie cut, even after 2-3 year stretches of pretending that a standard issue haircut is ever gonna work for me. My bone structure is just too damn good. I always know it’s time when I start having dreams of Summer from The OC and Zoe Kravitz and Natalie Portman. Zack Braff usually makes an appearance. “Get this haircut… it’ll change your life.”

And it does. Every time I get it, it does change my life. Or more accurately, it changes it back, back to the most untainted edition of me. I tend to feel like I’m hiding behind my hair whenever I can actually see even a few hairs in my periphery. There’s just something a little homeschooled about how longer hair looks on me. I’ll admit that my loyalty to short hair is definitely bolstered by a bit of run-of-the-mill rebellion, nothing out of the ordinary amongst those raised in the suburbs of <insert big city name here>. It just makes sense for me. My mom had short, dark hair when she was younger. Hers was gorgeous, black, curled. My hair is always fine but usually needs a little extra help to get where you want it to go. I had a bobby pin fall out of my pant leg at the office last week.

I always thought it was so pretty, short hair. Like really short hair. The bob really doesn’t do a ton for me, it never has. I’ve suffered not insignificant trauma from 14 years of cuts at the Hair Cuttery, the Flourtown, Pennsylvania chain that specialized in (read: could only manage) a bob that made even the smallest child look like a middle-aged divorcée tryna get her groove back. You’d clinge to even the smallest hope, that maybe this was the year they were going to give you hair that even just looked like everyone else’s. Your bar was so not that high. But you also knew in your heart it would never happen. You knew going into it that you were never going to actually get what you asked for, so you’d cross your fingers and try not to cry before it was time. There was no quality assurance happening at the Hair Cuttery. No one ever seemed to be in charge. I guess it could have been that they were a hair collective, a little slice of cosmetic socialism in the strip mall, but that feels unlikely. I still feel like some of them got off on making children realize for the first time how unattractive their physical body could be. You’d look at yourself in the mirror as soon as you sat in the chair and bid your current self goodbye, because whatever they did end up doing you knew you wouldn’t even resemble you.

To be fair, the first time I chopped it all off was a similar experience, that feeling of not recognizing myself. I cut it short for the first time at age 16. Fresh off an eyebrow piercing. I had some momentum going and it just felt like a logical next step. When I did see the results, I remember my heart stopping for a second. Not because I didn’t like it, but because it was a completely different person looking back at me. It didn’t take me very long to realize that I was actually seeing myself for the first time.

I think of myself as a pretty decent person, at least outwardly, but when I’m asked if I think someone could “pull off a pixie cut” I refuse to lie. No. You can’t. Sorry Jen this is something just for me for once.

Hope you’re all stayin’ cool and healthy and liberal out there.

PS: I had the most magical experience I’ve had, if not in my life then in a long while a couple of weeks ago. There was this bake sale for reproductive rights on the most beautiful street in the West Village. They got big chef names from the city to contribute one kind of baked good each. It was exactly 72 degrees out, the sun was peeking through the canopy of trees across the whole block. I had bought 10 tickets the moment they went on sale (I am committed to my love of baked goods.) We wandered around with a pink cardboard box for our loot, sitting on a curb halfway through to make some more room in the cardboard box. It wasn’t too crowded, everyone was extremely friendly. It was what I can only hope heaven is like. So I guess there’s the eat.