1994.

I recently got my hair chopped off — long locks on the salon floor and a new pixie cut affixed quite firmly to my head.  I’m pretty fond of it, though I have moments where I find myself reaching behind my head for a phantom ponytail.  It made me think back to the first time I’d done this: July, 1994.  It was the summer after my sophomore year in college, and I’d just broken up with my boyfriend of two years.  The desire for a post-breakup haircut was as cliched as these sorts of things come.  It was, unfortunately, a terrible haircut; the fellow I went to was someone I’d been to my entire life, which in hindsight probably meant that he had no idea how to do anything to my hair other than to trim it back into a neat little, shoulder-length Asian bob: feminine but not particularly memorable.  My shorn hair made me look like an androgynous Maoist.   Perhaps more memorable than before, but not in any way remotely flattering.  It would be another year before I discovered the palliative wonders of whiskey.

MZ, with whom I had been friends for a few years, was living in LA that summer.  I was back home as well, staying with my parents and not doing much of anything at all.  We started dating, and took a roadtrip up to the Pacific Northwest, mostly along the coast, and then back down Interstate 5 in California, where it seemed like the mountains stretched on for days.  I remembering driving through Yreka, CA, and stopping at the Yreka Bakery.  Palindrome!   And then, maybe on the same day, we stopped again, this time for a wee hike, where I took the photograph above.  I love the picture for many reasons, but it’s his wonderful, scruffy, non-Maoist hair that kills me the most.