Hair Art and Frolicking Kittens

So pretty much every time I’m in the shower, I lose half of my hair.   David says I’m exaggerating. But it’s not like he can feel the ever-widening bits of scalp on his head.  Okay, I might be exaggerating… The math wouldn’t work. If it were true, I’d be completely bald by now.   It seems like I lose half my hair.

But, when we’re showering together (you know,  to “conserve water”), David says,  “My God, that’s a lot of hair!”  And he’s not talking about the hair that’s in the drain, because I learned from past experience that you can’t just let hair go down the drain when you AND your daughter both have shoulder-length hair.  When you do that, you end up clogging the drain, and then having to take pliers to grab what basically looks like something your cat either killed or threw up. Just be glad I’m not posting pictures of that.  In place of drain hair, I will post pictures of delightful kittens frolicking.

Imagine if you dare, something THIS size in your shower drain.

After having dealt with the pleasure of drain de-cloggage a few times, I then got into the habit of taking whatever hair that comes off in my hands as I shower, and putting it on the shower wall.  You know, for safe-keeping. Yes… it’s disgusting, I would be the first to admit it.  But better that, than clogging the drain with my masses of auburn curly tresses.  Sometimes, the subway-tiled wall becomes a perfect canvas for hair art.  I want to call it hair origami, but it isn’t really 3-D like that, it’s more like… string art from the 70s (which I just googled and discovered it’s also called symmography – fancy, no?)  We had some hanging in our house – I think my dad did them – one looked like this:

Alec Jopling original, circa 1970  You can’t see the nails around which the string is wrapped, but they are there!

We also had this ‘painting’ which my father still threatens to give to me… it’s now at the back of the guest bedroom closet…

I think they got it to celebrate my mother’s Viking heritage.  She’s Danish.

And they had these lovely pieces as well…

Wait!  I figured it out!  They were decorating with a ‘global’  theme before it was hip.

Sorry, I got distracted in my old photos folder.  Really, none of those pieces has anything much to do with the sort of art which I create from my apparently superfluous hair on the shower wall.  Frankly, they’re too… constrained by limits.  Mine is way more free-form.  Looser.  You know, more ‘arty.’  What’s funny (not ha-ha, but peculiar) is that no matter how I put the hair on the wall, it either ends up being in the shape of an elephant or an eagle.  What does that say about me? I’m sure that maybe there’s some sort of new-agey explanation for that.  Like my totem is an eagle but I have the wisdom of an elephant?  I shriek like an eagle and plod like an elephant?  I’ll soon be bald like an eagle and wrinkly like an elephant?  Whatever it is, it keeps me occupied and the drain clear.