I actually miss my Jew Fro. I used to have big frizzy curly hair. All I dreamed about was straight hair. My hair has straightened out over the years and now I want the curls back. Grass is always greener...
Agreed!
People with straight hair just do NOT understand. In junior high, some neighborhood boys decided to call me Lindsay Big Hair. Nice, huh?
I'm mostly ok about having curly hair these days. It makes me different. People notice me. And damn if I can't get the love and attention from the 80-year-old women set faster than anyone you've ever met (not sure what it is about old women that attracts them to my hair, but BOY it can be entertaining). 
I'm totally buying a tshirt. It fits right in with my week of spending money excessively. yay! 
When I was in high school, my friend Ben would sit behind me and shoot spitballs in my hair. Some friend, huh?
Straigt care ain't all its cracked up to be. Trust me i have had many spitballs shot into my hair. They liked to watch them bounce.
Yeah, but mine would hang there. It was gross.
The same exact rant can be said for straight hair. When I was a little girl I used to dream of having Afro-Pufs or big mop tops. I still wish for it as an adult, so badly that I sometimes cry in the mirror in frustration. Seriously, there is no magic hair type.
Straight hair has it's problems and frustrations too. Curling irons and perms work about as well as flat irons and chemical straightening.
And don't even get me started on those days when my hair is so flat and limp to my head that I look like I have been locked up in a mental ward for a decade.
I still curse my straight hair many days, but I know that curly hair has its glorious fun just as much as its painful drawbacks too. So on those days when my hair is stick straight, flat and lying close to my head, I just try to remind myself that someone out there dreams of having hair like this.
It's really not the same though. Curly hair is SO high maintenance.
Yeah, I TRY to feel sorry for people with stick straight hair. It just doesn't work though. I know everything has it's good/bad sides, but I'd win the "my hair is more annoying than your hair", NO CONTEST, against a straight haired girl.
Oh, and MY "friend" in high school liked to put pencils in my hair. It was his goal to see how many pencils could "disappear" into my hair. I'd let him get up to 4 or so before I got too annoyed...
I would not say that the fun to drawbacks ratio is equal for curly hair. Having had the chemical straightening, I know what it is like to live with straight hair, and relaxers actually work pretty well. My hair was shiny, manageable, easy to style in many cute ways, and got me lots and lots of attention in a way that my curly hair never has.
I only get attention from curly hair fetishists, and those are few and far between. And gross.
I used to bitch about my hair till i lost it.......now i dont care what kind it is, just give me hair. talk about grass being greener......really devastating for a female in this society.
I agree, and I'm no stranger to that issue either. But this post is about how annoying curly hair is, and that's still a fact.
I always wanted a Willie Aames-style perm.
I'm a dude, so I'm not supposed to talk about my hair, but I'm going to anyway. My hair is a mix of wavy and straight, so I have a bunch of cowlicks that make my head look funny if my hair is cut too short. I've always envied Japanese hair. It is so straight that you could assign each strand a serial number and never misplace a single one. It seems to have a sort of platonic order to it.
Sorry Jeff...I hate to burst your bubble, but there are tons of Japanese girls that have to straighten their hair to get that look that you love so much...They're actually the ones that invented the "Thermal Reconditioning" technique.
Having naturally straight hair isn't the same as having it chemically straightened - any more so than a perm is the same as naturally curly hair.
Seriously, the "you have it so easy" complaint is equally as annoying and unjustified to straight haired people as it is to the curly haired. We all need to stop feeling martyred for our hair type and just appreciate that we HAVE hair.
Well, that's debatable for some of us. But I was trying to get at some of the cultural drawbacks of having curly hair more than the convenience factor. And they are there, whether you have personally experienced them or not.
i have that inbetween hair - if left to its own devices it's very wavy and out of control.... somtimes downright curly if it's short enough. I wish it were either curlier or straighter, having hair that can't make up its mind is really annoying.
Maya, there are definite cultural/social perceptions about hair that you touched on in your post. And, I'm pretty sure we (as friends) will visit these issues over and over.
The whole point isn't only that curly hair takes some effort to maintain. It's the fact that there are many social pressures and perceptions that are wrapped up in what way you choose to style your hair! When I used to straighten my hair often, I'd have black people comment that I had "good" hair...read, "you're not black enough". When I don't straighten my hair, it doesn't look neat...read "unprofessional."
Before people jump down my throat, please remember that hair pre-occupies a large space in AfAm culture, and that this post isn't only a straight vs curly issue!
damn, I came to this too late. My hair is curly at the best of times, and a cut just turns it into waves on my scalp. Sometimes women love it, which I used to really enjoy, but most of the time it's ignored. Lots of people tell me to just let it get curly and fro out, but I hate spending more than 2 minutes on my hair in the morning.
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