Reflections on Dreadlocks

I had my hair dreaded a few days ago. When people saw me, after voicing whatever their opinion was, one of their first questions was 'Why?' To tell the truth, I don't have a good answer to that. The idea first took root maybe two years ago. It wasn't like some flash of insight. I didn's see some super exemplary guy with dreadlocks and tell myself 'I have to be just like him in everyway.' I imagine I just liked how they looked. Anyways, two years ago was when I first started talking about it. Then, while researching a story about some classmates who were entering a pageant, I learned about a local hair design school, called them up and had an appointment. Let me tell you something right now if you're considering dreadlocks for yourself. They hurt a bleeding lot and took a bleeding long time. There were two people working on my head constantly for around three hours and a third even stepped in for a little while. For that whole time, they would pull tight on small patches of my hair and backbrush for a few minutes. Imagine some jerk kid throwing small rocks at your head and you'll have some conception of how much it hurt. Now realize that you're paying for this to happen, and it all gets a whole lot worse. In the end, I was charged sixty dollars for the hair, which was generous since the lady knocked it down from eighty. I don't know, maybe my stylists screwed up, or she knew how much it hurt. Very quickly I realized that I could no longer wear my bike helmet. My hair was too big, which sucks when the city you live in has a helmet law, and your picture already ended up in the school newspaper as an example of a person breaking it.

I guess another thing that attracted me to dreadlocks, after doing a little research, was that they weren't supposed to require much maintenance. After a little while, the hair is supposed to start growing into dreads naturally and never need to be combed or anything ever again. What I missed was the amount of work that needed to be put in in the first place. For the first four months, before your hair 'matures,' you need to spend a lot of time twisting the invidual dreads and waxing them, so they hold their position. The past few days, I've dedicated forty minutes to working on my hair. This is a big change since I put up with my hair covering my eyes because I was too lazy and cheap to get a haircut and hadn't combed my hair for the past month.

Already I find myself at a crossroads of sorts. Basically, the dreads are taking too well, and I don't want to continue putting in the time to maintain them. Still, I put a rather extensive amount of time and money into this and don't want to give up so early on. I guess my plan now is to use up the sixteen dollars worth of wax I bought and wait to see what happens. What makes this interesting is that a friend doesn't like my new look and is drumming up investors to buy my wax and force me to comb the dreads out. She already has two other people willing to put their money in. Another friend has been maintaing that if I like my hair the way it is, I shouldn't allow her to do this. My response, "It's just hair. I really don't care," which is more than a little contradicted by my decision to get it done this way. I do feel this way though.

You know, I think is actually one of those situations that I can find meaning in. To an extent, I'm glad I tried something different and exorcised the demon that has driven me to do this, but it remains a very superficial and expensive way to demonstrate individuality. Kind of makes me feel selfish, and I want to donate an equal amount of money to charity now. On the upside, people remembered my name when they had something so obvious to remind them of who I am.

Now to send my family and other school friends pictures.