The last couple nights were pretty unbearable in the van. The weather took an early warm turn here and I am rather unprepared for the heat. I wasn’t expecting this degree of warmth for a at least a couple more weeks when, ideally, I’d be a bit further north in cooler climes.

The only windows I have that open are the ones in the front doors and I don’t want to open them too far. Doing so would just scream “come pilfer my goodies!” And especially as my whole world is in there plus me sleeping in back I don’t want to do that in urban areas. So they’re cracked, but not so much that someone could reach in and unlock the door.

I’ve already tinted the windows and I put Reflectix light shields on all but the open windows. Plus I insulated the van when I put the interior in. But none of that solves the air flow issues. It’s damn hot in there and the air is dead still. I need, need, need to get a vent in that roof pronto!

Last night, after two minimally restful night and steamy days I got really fed up and desperate. I hadn’t had a haircut in about nine months so it was good and long, down nearly to the end of my sternum. In my youth I had constant battles with my mother over hairstyles and it was always really traumatic for me. It wasn’t until a particularly huge blow out fight that at age seventeen I was allowed control over my own hair style. And now as an adult I’m funny about hair cuts. I don’t trust the cheap places as that’s what my cuts were back then but I haven’t been afford to readily afford a decent salon for some years now.

So the last nine months I’ve been putting off spending any money on my hair and it kept growing longer and longer. Plus, when I had to make rent every month I couldn’t afford all my medications and my endocrine system was getting wacked out and making my hair thin. I’d also been so broke the two years that I’d often have little money for food–or anything else for that matter. So between the frustration and sadness over being so broke and thus not eating plus only being able to afford poor quality food I’m sure I lost plenty of hair there too in quantity and quality. So everything about my hair was making me unhappy.

And then the heat hit.

Laying in the blast furnace van trying to sleep with long hair getting tangled up and stuck to my skin all over my face, arms, chest and back was driving me absolutely mad. As if sweating out quarts of liquid and breathing hot, stale air wasn’t bad enough, my hair was stuck everywhere and constantly getting pulled too.

So last night I was at the family homestead for an early Memorial Day BBQ and asked if there was a pair of scissors handy. When asked what I was going to do with them I calmly replied, “I’m going to go in the bathroom and give myself a hair cut.” The look I got back was probably no different than what I’d have seen if I said, “oh, I’d like the chain saw to go weed out the slower running neighbors.”

There was plenty of warnings and doomsday scenarios presented and there was even offers of setting me up with one of those dreaded eight buck hair cuts but I was fed up and desperate for relief. There was no AC and I had been damp with sweat for two solid days.

Off to the Bathroom

I got naked and stood at the mirror and my hair was wet from a quick jump in the shower. When I was debating about doing this I was already thinking through how it’d have to be cut. I’d obviously be limited in movement but I thought about how stylists have cut my hair and what I wanted it to look like. What I was shooting for was a cross between two hair style I had, one about five years ago and one nine years ago.

Because of not having enough money for my medications my hair had gotten really fine and thin plus it tangles easily. This made it really difficult to brush out and move around. Of course I had no comb to make this easier either. But I gathered up the first section and spent probably two minutes trying to get the scissors in the right place and chop through the mess of hair. When I was hacking away at that first cut I was laughing so hard. The scene was so preposterous!

How could this be me?! Cutting my own hair!? My childhood installed such a neurosis in me over my hair and here I was cutting willy nilly and barely even able to see what I was doing in the foggy mirror without my glasses and having great technical difficulty with the pseduo-yoga moves I was doing to get the cut done with the not especially sharp scissors. Then after another couple minutes I had the rest chopped in the second cut. And I started laughing again! In those two cuts I lost easily six to eight inches of length.

I took a look at the general effect and was actually quite pleased and laughed some more! It was looking good! I realized that I’d never do a decent job a the mirror for the fine tuning. My hair when damp is too hard to style these days and the reflection was throwing off my coordination. So I returned to the shower.

With water flowing through my hair moved around easily, the water was cold and refreshing and got me out of the heat and humidity for a while too and I trimmed bits here and there and finished the cut. I stood in the shower and did it all without looking, just going by feel and just visualizing what it looked like.

When I got out no one believed I actually did it, especially as it looked good. I didn’t even bother saying I hadn’t looked at while doing it and hadn’t seen it properly yet. My sister was shocked that I actually managed to do layers. I asked my niece what she thought of the job my new stylist did and she approved enthusiastically and then flipped when I said I was that stylist. My other niece looked at me like I was crazy but liked the results. And most importantly I was comfortable with my shoulder length hair. None of the guys said anything of course.

It was such a liberating experience to cut my own hair. To take that much control over it and also to accept that if I turned out badly that I could just get another, that there’d still be plenty of length to cut it back some more. And to really enrich the experience, the scissors that I used were the ones my father used to cut our hair as kids, back when I also had no control over style but didn’t mind too much.

Later in the evening I cut a couple missed spots but otherwise it was quite sound. I went to bed and baked in a 93 degree stale air van and woke early–about as soon as the sun hit the van and it started to warm. When I checked myself in the mirror this morning I was ever so pleased with myself. The haircut passed my true test–what it looks like after sleeping on it and it looked great. Not only was it cut well but it looked drastically better than the old broken end snarl hair.

I had half expected to have an emergency run to a stylist–any stylist–but instead I celebrated inside. I was looking cute, feeling good and didn’t spend a cent. And I might just have a new skill to perfect! Likely the skill building will start by playing with it a bit more in the next couple of days as I tweak out the cut a bit more. Though thus far I’m still happy.

Addendum

I actually had a really good relationship with my mother before and after my teen years. But while I was too young to be an adult and she was still treated me like a small child we butted heads regularly. From about 25 years old and on we were very close and had a great peer-like relationship.

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