On the Sampson Complex.

I first cut all my hair of when I was ten or eleven. I can't quite remember. We went to the local beauty salon and I got this awful bob thing with bangs and looked a lot like a pudgy medieval pageboy.

Much better rendition than what I had.

Then when it was getting caught in my belt at sixteen I had my best friend cut it into something similar, but better. 

Not a bad selfie, but I'm not sure why I decided to add the wings...

Then, again, let that grow out,

I look like my mother in gesture and expression here... 

 and out, 

Girlfriend wants Mango.... NAO >:U  

and out. Fall quarter of freshman year at College I was told I had "Hammerspace Hair" when I pulled  it out of the collar of my jacket. 

"Where did that come from?"

..... And then by spring I had cut it all off again into something radically new and shorter!

With my Roomie. Because the baristas at our coffee shop apparently thought so...

But that was again let to grow out again. 

The Donegal sky...

until I felt the need to get it off me again, and clipped it back to something resembling order by then end of that summer. 

It stayed sort of shaggy for the remainder of college, and then somewhere after the bleach job I did for my father's funeral was shorn away, I started experimenting with Even Shorter things.

 These fluctuated from short and (almost) manly

to "kind of dyke-y" in the words of my girlfriend (though that might have been the turtleneck...). Then I grew it out a little, into something longer and shaggier, and then about a year ago I just sort of stopped cutting it. It's now past my shoulders again, gets tangled if I don't brush it every day, and eats metal brushpins. Why metal, you ask? Because my hair is ridiculous enough that anything short of metal pinned hairbrushes just won't work. 

I get my hair from both sides of the family, I suppose. I have my maternal grandfather's hairline, and my father's hair, minus the bright auburn. Thick and strong (I used to pick a friend's little sister up and tote her around the house by letting her grab my braid...) and prone to unmanageability and tangling. Mine also grows stupidly quickly, as pointed out above. 

I think I have a Sampson complex. The longer my hair, the stronger I feel that I am. I know this is fallacious, that really there is no corollary, and that all I am doing is projecting an outward societal marker of "Lady", but I cannot help but feel that Long Haired Men have an important and vital place in our culture. I feel that long hair conveys a certain strength and a certain set of values, and can serve as an indicator thereof. There is a certain conviction of place and presence to be found in a man with long hair, an indicator that he is secure enough in himself to take the comments inevitably made to men with long hair. I find a man with long hair to be manlier, in fact, than a man with a buzz cut. Long hair says that a man is unafraid to embrace his own beauty and softness and vulnerability. A man with long hair is unafraid to be fabulous. Because what could be sexier than a man in a musketeer goatee and prom hair? 

With Baby's Breath!

  

Actually all of these are wonderful Here Have a Link...

Mind you, I do feel the need to cut it off when it's getting in my eyes, or in my mouth, or caught in my collar or belt. And sometimes I do. 

I've been having the urge to cut it off again for some time. I'm not quite ready to (I need to do a few things first that involve long hair) but it is tempting. 

For now, my Sampson Complex reigns. At least until I can get a few costumes together.... Then it's off to the land of Shaved Head! :D ... and then the inevitable outgrow again...