Behold the Long:
19 and living out of a bag
From the archives: May 1992
Standing on a termite mound somewhere along the coast between Melbourne and Sydney, Australia. I’d been on the road for about six months by then, and was travelling with a Scottish guy and a Dutch guy in a combi van. Crazy times.
Obviously, I was too poor for a haircut…
Not the longest I’ve grown it, but pretty close.
Behold the Short:
glassy-eyed thinking about all the money I’m saving with this Young Persons Rail Card
From the archives: February 1994 (age 21)
British Rail ID card so I could get discounted train fares. My hair had grown out a lot by this point — I had it razored down to less than an inch in Los Angeles a month or so before. A Cuban stylist used a straight blade instead of scissors, and I loved what he did with it but it only lasted a couple of weeks.
David said the haircut was very “Mary Lou Retton”. Argh.
Right now my hair length is medium length and quite wavy because I stopped blowdrying the heck out of it in the mornings. I had quite a bit cut off a week before Iceland, and the new ‘do is lower-maintenance. Now I just dry the top to get the cowlicks down and just enough on the rest of it so I don’t look like a drowned rat upon arrival at work. I used to have straw-straight hair as a kid and my mother permed it, permanently sealing my fate as the gradeschooler who looked and dressed like a senior citizen ready for her weekly bingo outing.
Strangely, my hair started curling as I was finishing high school and by the time I was living in Australia it was such a bird’s nest I was even considering dreadlocks to neaten it up a bit. The thing about dreadlocks is that when you’re tired of them, you have to cut all your hair off and by the time I wanted to try it I was getting ready to head from the tropics to damp, cold London in February. No thanks, I needed to keep my neck warm somehow.
In the past year I’ve suddenly grown thatches of white hair but I’m not colouring it out — no, I’ve earned them! Every single one!
