Hair today, gone tomorrow.

Seeing as how it’s such a pain to always eat well and exercise as much as I’m supposed to, it was great to discover two weeks ago that I had lost nine inches. Unfortunately, they weren’t from my butt or my hips, but from my head.

I have had a long and sometimes weird history with my hair, beginning from when I was a child with long, luxurious locks who spent about an hour after each bath crying her eyes out as her mom tried to untangle those locks. Up until my senior year of high school, my hair was down to my waist. I wore it in a braid most days and my soccer coach used to jokingly approach me with scissors and threaten to cut it off.

The day before the first game of my senior year, I snuck out to the salon and had them cut my hair from my waist up to my shoulders. We took the braid and presented it to the coach before the game as a joke. Well, being a pretty weird guy (he was also the school’s biology teacher and his running joke was to tie fishing line to one of the huge worms we were about to dissect and have it “jump” out of the bucket at the first student to approach), he declared that the braid would be the team mascot and every player had to touch it before every game for good luck.

I don’t know what happened to the braid. It could still be hanging in the biology classroom at my old high school. Since then, I have kept my hair at various lengths between my chin and shoulders. I’ve experimented with bangs versus no bangs, but it’s been pretty standard otherwise.

About two years ago, I was asked to be a bridesmaid in a friend’s wedding (that happens a lot!) and decided to grow my hair a bit so it would go into an updo. After that wedding, in anticipation of another wedding I was in the following year (told you!), I decided to keep growing it.

Then it got to the point where I either had to cut it or get off the pot (or however that saying goes). Still feeling a bit guilty that good Samaritans everywhere send their hair off to Locks of Love to be made into wigs for kids with cancer and I “donated” mine to the high school soccer team (but we did have an awesome season with the braid as the mascot!), I made it my goal to grow my hair until it was long enough to cut for a good cause.

The time was right two weeks ago and I chopped it all off. I’m mailing to ponytail, which was about nine inches long, to Pantene’s Beautiful Lengths, which makes wigs for women affected by cancer. Here’s a photo of my donation. Want to touch it for good luck?