To The Contrary

Like many of us, I have a touch of the cantankerous.

You know how sometimes, when everyone thinks you should do something, you sort of don't do it on purpose just to be ornery? Even if it might be a perfectly reasonable thing to do?

Well, I used to have this super long hair, which everyone would always notice (it was pretty noticeable--I mean, most people don't have a red braid three feet long, and I recognize that). Then I cut my hair, and pretty much everyone who'd ever seen me before noticed the change (it was a marked change in appearance, and I also recognize that).

The thing I found, though, is that about half the people who've said anything about it have asked "did you donate it?"

Which, fine, it's a fair question. You're always hearing about people with long hair cutting it off and donating it to some worthy cause. It's this thing that people do.

It has a special social resonance, maybe, because girls and women especially tend to do it, and we still have a bit of this idea of hair as a woman's 'crowning glory,' and so there's a sense that you're really making a personal sacrifice, you're surrendering part of your own beauty (which, for a woman, is obviously among your most precious assets!) to help someone who doesn't have that beauty.

Regardless of the reasoning, it remains this thing that people do, and based on the number of times I've been asked, it's this thing that people are expected to do, if they have long hair and happen to get it cut.

But no, I didn't. And at this point, if only because so many people have asked me that question, I totally never will.

The contrariness kicks in!

So I say "no, I didn't," and more than once people have said, in a kind of 'tut tut' tone, something like "you could make a lot of wigs for children with that much hair."

Then, despite general stubborn orneriness, I admit to beginning to wonder whether I'm a horrible person for not sending my severed braid to charity.

Does growing long hair confer an obligation to give it away if you ever cut it? What if you just kind of wanted to keep it as a souvenir?

Selfish and wrong?

I guess I have to say no. Otherwise, the ability to grow long hair would logically confer an obligation to actually do so, and to then cut it and give it away. Because you could be giving someone the gift of beauty, so why aren't you?

And then, logically, we reach the conclusion that if

you are capable of aiding someone in some way 

+ 

you don't do it 

= 

you're a bad person

then almost everyone is probably evil.

Certainly everyone who hangs out on the internet a lot is probably evil, but we already knew that.

Finally I decided this train of thought was getting way too much like a Seinfeld episode, where someone spends days worrying and fretting and chewing over some real or imagined slight or moral failing or character flaw until you realize once again how shallow and self-obsessed everyone involved is. The end.

I should just move on from the hunk of hair already and do something useful with my time, is what I concluded.

Something like cataloging! Which, I believe, is precious work that is very well served by cantankerousness.

.