Chia Pet

Just a warning...after reading this post, you will be singing the "ch-ch-ch-chia" jingle ALL DAY LONG! Don't hate me cuz I'm beautiful.

My hair has been the bane of my existence. I was born with natural curly hair (and I swear I'll growl at the first one who tells me how "lucky" I am). My mother loved the curls and wanted it even curlier...so I remember her putting my hair up in bobby pin curls at night...tight little curls, bobby pins criss-crossed and stuck into my poor, tender scalp I would wake up with scabs where the pins actually stuck in my head...(ok, don't call DCFS...I may be stretching it a little, the bobby pins usually had little rubber tips so that they didn't really stick into my head). She also used rag curls...actual pieces of cloth wrapped up and tied in my hair. Untying them invariably meant pulling out a lot of hair. And of course, I ALWAYS had to eat the crust of my bread because someone told my mom that crust makes your hair curlier. (My mother also thought you could get VD from door knobs.)

As I grew older it got worse for me...I grew up in the 60's and 70's...long, straight, parted in the middle, hair was what ALL the girls wore...well, obviously not all the girls. While most of my friends had hair like Cher, I looked more like Angela Davis (an African American militant). Oh, I tried...juice cans as rollers (which, by the way, was MUCH more uncomfortable than the bobby pins), Dippity-Doo slathered onto my head and my hair wrapped very tightly around my head and taped or pinned down...of course, then I had to sleep with my head actually hanging off of the side of the bed so as not to mess up the "doo" job. I would wake up to straight hair. That would last all of about 30 seconds once I walked outside...maybe if I had grown up close to a very dry desert.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, it's not just curly...right above my temples is what I call my "birthmark"...surely somewhere in my family tree, there actually is some type of ethnic blood...tight, frizzy, coarse hair...different in texture than the rest of my head.

And now, I have the head of a Chia pet. My hair doesn't grow longer, it just grows bushier. When I get hot and actually sweat (as I did while moving this weekend), you can actually see it shrinking up off of my collar and growing rounder and rounder.

I am a walking, breathing, Chia pet...ch-ch-ch-chia!