Hit by a Pitch

I’ve had this bee in my bonnet about short hair ever since I posted that picture of Ben and me from 2002 the other day. Here’s another picture of me and my hair from sometime in 2002.

I cropped Ben out of this picture because I needed a picture of just me for something. How rude! And I can’t find the original version.

Anyway, look. I was quite a bit younger in 2002 than I am now (um, duh?) but aside from the bobby pin, this isn’t so bad? Sometimes I think I’m one of those women who kind of (maybe?) look better with short hair than long hair. Like Halle Berry? Only totally nothing like her.

And of course now I have, like, the longest hair ever because I’m a crazy mountain hippie, but whatever.

The problems I have with short hair (for myself) are numerous:

• In my experience, my hair needs a bit of “product” when it’s short, lest I look like a middle-school gym teacher (no offense to middle-school gym teachers, at all — you’re awesome and that’s a difficult age to work with), which is not really my jam. But I hate hair that feels like there’s product in it.
• You have to get trims all the freaking time.
• Sure, if you have a short enough pixie cut, you don’t have to do much to style your hair . . . but, I always found that I couldn’t just roll out of bed and look presentable (arguably, my default ponytails and side braids these days aren’t the height of presentable, but you know).
• Short hair and giant glasses might not be as good (“good” being a relative term here) a look as long hair and giant glasses.
• I don’t really wear eye makeup any more.
• I like my hair either very long or very short. I hate having mid-length hair. If I go very short, I’ll either have to stay that way forever or be miserable for years.
• Because the prevailing wisdom as I understand it has generally always been that as women get older, they “should” have shorter hair, I of course, as a tedious contrarian by nature, want to have longer hair as I get older.

But . . . but . . . but . . . (and, for the record, I had nothing to do with watching Oscars shit last night but I don’t make fun of it either, because if there’s anything more boring than people who get all bitchy on Twitter making fun of what other people do for entertainment I don’t know what it is, although now that I think about it, it might be sending your Foursquare or whatever updates directly to Twitter or being a professional athlete who tweets shit like “What up twitfam?” or “I just ate and now I’m watching tv”) then I see something like this and I’m all, oh, I should totally do that.

Getty Images North America

And I’m no Michelle Williams. And I totally shouldn’t do that, probably. But it is incredibly cute.