I like my hair quite a bit, and I find myself staring at its ends more and more the crazier work gets.

When I was younger (like baby to age 3), I had actual golden ringlets, big sausage curls that took care of themself. Unfortunately, they disappeared after my first haircut, leaving me with pin-straight hair for the next decade or so. Meanwhile my mother wrapped my curls in tissue paper and tucked them away in a drawer. Or maybe I am thinking of Tacy's mother. I'm sure my mom kept at least one, though.

I used to play with my hair a lot during class. Not braiding and pony tailing it, but taking one strand of it and seeing how many knots I could tie in it, or fanning a section of it out on my hand and seeing how many different colors I could find.

That is what I love about red hair: it is all colors at once (ok, except for the darkest brown or black ones). I have strands that are very fine and almost gilt-colored, then I have a mass of ones that are sort of mid-gold, and then I have these really thick ones scattered here and there that are copper or garnet.

It is darker now than it has been for awhile, because I have been inside so much for the past year. When I came back from my semester abroad, it was very close to being blonde from all the sun. Not that I noticed until people greeting me after not seeing me for four months kept asking me if I had dyed it.

It photographs much redder than it is in real life (at least so far as I can tell). I have all these pictures where my hair is basically glowing, whereas when I look at it in the mirror, it just seems normal.

If I cut the front strands too short, I can get a Farrah Fawcett flip going without even trying. Sometimes I think that if I cut it all very short, it would grow back curly. It certainly started waving again towards the end of my teens.

When I get bored or need to think, I'll run my fingers through it looking for split ends. Then I trim them off with scissors. I don't usually do this outside of home, but this past week (all three days of it) has been sort of hectic at work and I need to do something to calm myself down.

One of my favorite things to do when I was little was to have my mother put my hair in two braids so I could then sleep on them and in the morning could loose my hair and have it fall in kinky waves.

Several of my friends in college used to tease me about studying and always knowing the right answer. They would call me 'golden child' and sit near me during tests so that they could reach out and yank locks of my hair if they felt the need for some of my luck to rub off on them.

My graduate school department is having a big costume party next weekend. We're all supposed to come as literary characters. I'm sure they are expecting us all to dress as Walter Benjamin (holding cardboard arcades over our heads) or maybe even one of the Bront�s as a stretch. I'm thinking of going as Pippi Longstocking. How funny would that be?