Month: April 2022

Banishing My Hair Hate

Three months ago, I read the bell hooks book Communion: The Female Search for Love.

Though the copyright date is 2002 hooks’ theme is eternal. Everyone coming up in their life should read Communion.

Author bell hooks is the True Prophet of Passion.

While speed-reading through this riveting book I decided not to care about my disobedient hair. Finally, I could leave it alone to carry on wayward despite my best hand with the blow dryer.

April has heralded the start of my hair frizzing and curling up in rainy or humid weather.

To be proactive on these days I don’t dry my hair straight in the morning. I blow-dry my hair while scrunching the hair tight upside down.

Viewing old photos of when I was younger, I don’t like the tame ordinary haircuts I had. Nor do I like the androgynous haircuts I used to get with my former hair stylist.

I’m 57 years old. After turning another year older I’ve stopped caring to impress others. What I’ve learned I’m going to share in a coming blog entry.

One day a female customer raved about my “new haircut.”

What? In the morning I had woken up without shampooing and drying my hair. Only brushing my hair so that it wasn’t sticking up or out in a wild way.

She thought my hair was lovely!

Everyone else is too obsessed with agonizing over what they think their shortcomings are. This guarantees that they have no time to assail you.

The ones that care if you have wild woman hair–I wish I had the kind of time they do to waste on thinking ill of others.

If I had that extra time, I would be spending it writing blog entries to amuse readers. Given 15 minutes more every day I would plan a new outfit to wear that I hadn’t worn before. Or wash my face and apply moisturizer to it.

Today–and this might be imprudent–I revel in my wild hair.

We should all love our hair. Whether curly or straight coiled or kinky all hair is beautiful.

Fearing what other people think of our hair is a waste of our time and energy.

Yes–I understand the implication in going around sporting a hairstyle that does not conform to what others deem is acceptable grooming.

Only:

Liberating myself from hair hate I hope is the start of bigger and better things happening in my life.

Here’s to Hair Freedom leading to Hope for achieving what we want to get in life.

If I’m able to I might post a video here where I flash my wild tresses.

Keep wild and carry on.

Rules are designed to keep us in our place.

Fie conformity!

The Life and Death of a Garment

This book I read circa 5 months ago.

It’s a fascinating and compelling expose of the life cycle of clothing.

Maxine Bedat takes the reader on a trip from the cotton field to the manufacturing plant to the store shelves.

If you wondered like I did how a cotton ball becomes a pair of jeans or a shirt (or how fabric becomes an item of clothing like a coat) Bedat shows us with step-by-step photos of the production process.

This curious glimpse exposes the dirty truth about the toxic working conditions and filthy physical environments of overseas garment manufacturing.

60 women (all women!) sit in rows of tables at cramped sewing machines. One woman sews the jean hem. The next sews the leg. And the next sews the waistband. On down the line it goes.

Giving way to the term “deaths of despair” that occur when work is not meaningful and doesn’t give you a purpose for getting up out of bed.

The root lies in the neoliberal economic policies that offloaded clothing production to other countries.

In the guise of giving the residents a better life. When in fact it allowed American businesses to pay cut-rate wages in order to reap billions in sales.

My tactic is to rarely buy an item of clothing from Zara or H&M. Should I be shopping in those stores at all?

This spring and going into the summer I won’t be buying any new clothes.

On tap is a pair of blue fabric booties I would like to buy. That’s all.

In March I sent donation bags off to the Salvation Army.

In the coming blog entry, I would like to talk about how I finally made peace with my disobedient hair.