Long Gone

When I first visited Norway, I noticed that the overwhelming majority of women have long hair. I don't mean chin-length "long" hair; I mean past the shoulders, cascading layers of long hair long. After living here for a while, I realized that the reason for all of this long, long hair was in part due to cost of getting your hair cut. Your basic trim begins at kr450 ($72) and even at that, people ask you where you found such a good price. Once, and only once, did I pay a mere kr240 ($38.50) for a haircut. In addition to the haircut, I paid kr160 for the train tickets and spent close to two hours in transit. So for economic reasons, I let my hair grow long.

There are tricks to this, of course. Again, the majority of Norwegian ladies have thin hair, with a touch of curl. One or two layers, a li'l dab of mousse and voila! a bouncy, manageable hair style is born. My hair, however, is poker straight and thick. The hairstylists here had to add layer upon layer and then go back and thin out each layer to achieve a resemblance of said magic. Of course, there has been a bit of playing around with the combination of layers and thinning out and some visits to the hairdressers were better than others.

About a month ago, I went to the salon and described what I wanted. (layers, thinning, etc) What I got was a very feminine mullet. The top layer was about 3 inches long and the rest of my hair was about 10 inches long. I'd wake up every morning with a puffy bowl crowning the top of my head and no matter how I plastered it down, it would slowly puff up again during the day. The worst of it all was that the wreck of a hairstylist thinned out rest of my hair so that all of my hair could fit into ponytail holder no thicker than my forefinger. I was horrified since my hair is usually 3 times that thick.

I decided it was time to start over. Too many layers, too many attacks from the thinning shears and my hair was the worse for it. I took my Christmas money (thank you, Jorunn!) and got my hair chopped. It's short and it feels great! My hair is also uncharacteristically poofy at the moment. There's nothing to weigh it down and it's proudly defying gravity. Wax and heavy styling products help to control it, but artistically so. Ahhhh, freedom. The long hair experiment was fun, but this was long overdue.

To date, people's reactions have been fairly uniform: "Wow, that looks nice and how are you going to afford to keep your hair short?" Lord knows, but I'll figure all of that out later, yo.