Item: 1 brown barrette

I forgot to put anything (meaning conditioning, de-frizzing, or other products) in my hair this morning, but surprisingly, it wound up looking all right by the end of the day.  I might take a cue from this except that my hair can never be relied upon to respond the same way to the same treatment twice in a row.  Normally, forgetting to use anything to weigh it down is preparation for disaster.

It is hard to convey to those who don't happen to be curly-haired the perpetual struggle that my hair and I are engaged in.  It's the problem that never goes away.  It turns sullen just when I especially need it to look good; it ties itself up into fearsome knots even if I haven't touched it, and perversely, it turns gorgeous once in great awhile, but only at times like early morning when I've just gotten up and no one is around.

Sometimes, if I put all the right things in it in exactly the right order, spaced exactly the right amount of time apart, and then don't move until it's dry 7 hours later, it might look almost okay.  But not every time.  Every day it's got some new unknown whim that it is my job to figure out.

I get tired sometimes of being a slave to my hair, having to work so hard to please something so capricious with so little result.  I hate that something that should be simple (wash, blow-dry, brush) is so, so complicated.  I have my own moods where I'm sick of trying to fight it, and say all right, fine, do whatever you want.  It doesn't look that different at those times than it does at any other time, which means why am I expending such frustration on this?  Just plain spitefulness, maybe.  Just once I want it to have to adjust to what I want, not the other way around.