The pros and cons of hair

As I prepare for Semester in the West, there are a lot of questions swirling through my head. Will two pairs of pants be enough? Should I get a second journal that I don't have to turn in so I can write about how annoying everyone is? Do I really want to spend most of my semester wearing a shirt that says Beer Mile on it in large yellow letters? But nothing has come close to the debate I'm having about hair.

There are two schools of thought on wilderness hairstyling. Option one: cut it all off. No hair, no worry. Just wake up and go. Option two: grow it long enough to put up and out of the way.

I really like the idea of running around barefoot in the desert right before sunset, when the sun's rays are at a low enough angle that they don't burn your eyes. It's that time of day when everything takes on a golden halo that makes you think you've left reality and wandered into a cowgirl themed fashion spread in Seventeen. And long hair is an absolute prerequisite for pulling this off. No advertisement in any medium has ever featured someone with short hair wearing a brown dress and staring suggestively off into the distance at a barren, rocky landscape. So for the aesthetic value of windswept desert beauty--advantage: long hair.

However, there's also reality. My hair is longer now than it's ever been, and while that's not saying much, I don't have a ton of experience managing this many dead cells at a time. My hair is quite like me, in that it thinks it's awesome and refuses to listen to anyone else's instructions unless it feels like it, which means that while I respect my hair immensely, sometimes I don't like it. So I'm worried that if I let this go on for another four months, I'm going to come home with accidental dreds and an entire nest of desert creatures lurking somewhere in its recesses. For hygienic pragmatism, then--advantage: short hair.

I think I'm going to leave it where it is, because I'll be able to french braid it most of the time, and anything short will grow out enough to be a pain by the end of the semester. Anyway, if I change my mind mid-semester, I can always go for the hacked-off-with-a-Swiss-Army-knife look.