The Great and Dreadless Day

I did it.  I took the dreads out.  I took them out all by myself.  It was a sort of penance.  After so much build-up to getting them, mooching off of so many friends to get and maintain them, after telling everyone who would listen about my dreads, I felt like taking them out all alone, with my own two hands and draining only my own time, was almost a sort of penance for my arrogance and selfishness.  And it was pretty dang effective penance.  I don't have internet in my apartment yet, so I did the 18 HOURS of undreading without Netflix, Hulu, or Youtube.  I had only the dozen or so movies I own and a lot of pre-downloaded podcasts.  I don't have a TV, so any movies I did watch would be watched on my labtop.

18 hours.  8 hours on Sunday, 10 or so more Monday night.  I took the last dread out at 4:15 Tuesday morning, collapsed on my futon, and then woke up at 5:30 to go teach a full day.  A day without dreads.

The undreading began with a shower that included deep conditioner.  Then I spread out a sheet.   According to the internet, we all lose around 20-50 hairs a day, more if we're under stress, etc.  Usually those hairs drop out and end up on the carpet or in the drain or on your roommate's shirt that you borrowed.  When you have dreads, a hair will fall out, but stay in the dread it's woven into.  So, for the past four months I have shed only about ten hairs.  The rest were still in my dreads.  That means that I had an awful lot of hair to be combed out.  A disgusting amount.  A repugnant, repulsive, vomitous amount that made me glad that no one was there to see it.  So I spread out an old sheet on my living floor, crossed my legs, and armed myself with a wide-toothed comb.

My workstation

You see this pile?  This terribly disgusting pile?  It's the hair from about four dreads.  I had between 80-100.  I was going to keep it all in a pile to do one master awful shot in the end of all the hair, but it was just too gross to handle.

Each dread required between 5 and 15 minutes of intense personal attention.  I would dip my fingers into olive oil, and work large quantities into the dread.  Then I would begin at the tip, and slowly pull the knots out, bit by bit.  If I took too much, the comb wouldn't slide through and pull out the knot.  But I wanted to take as large of a bite as possible with the comb to get that dread done as quickly as possible.  I pulled out handfuls of olive-oiled hair.  I gave myself a headache.  I watched Longitude, a fantastic film about the carpenter who invented the first clock that could keep time at sea.  I watched the first half of Romeo and Juliet, I watched all of Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. I watched the first 50 Strong Bad emails. I listened to 3 episodes of This American Life and I listened to 2-3 episodes of Mormon Stories.  And I took out my dreads.  And then I washed my hair with dish soap to get the oil all the way out.

Sunday night, the front comes out in an 8 hour process. 

If I could give you advice about dreads, it would be don't use wax.  I don't know whether wax does or does not help your dreads dread faster.  I know it made mine look better in the beginning.  But I also know that although I stopped waxing my dreads in early July, there was still wax in the core of my dreads.  Wax, and bits of rubber band glue from the bands.  It was gross; I pulled out wads of hair glumped with old wax and bits of sticky black goo, knotted, and slimed with olive oil.  Seriously, if I'd let myself think about it, it would have made my stomach turn.

Undreading in two days meant that I had to go teach school in between. 

If there's one thing having dreads has taught me, it's to love headbands.  I think I own about 20 now.

And now they are gone, and now I don't recognize myself in the mirror.

Don't let that smile fool you, I'm in a daze.
One hour of sleep and hours of teaching later, and I'm a hopeless wreck.

Didn't put a whole lot of effort into day one.
One hour of sleep doesn't motivate me to play with my hair very much.

But, as if rewarding me for finally letting it do what it wanted to do all along, my hair as been fantastic.  It's happy, healthy, and, somehow, it's cute.  I don't understand that.  It wasn't a cute cut when I put it into the dreads, why would it be when I took them out?  But although I miss my dreads like crazy, and I'm trying to adjust to not having people able to guess my personality in one glance or less, I'm very grateful that my hair is giving me this gift of being cute.  I was worried it't be damaged, straggly, and in some awful shape that I'd need to panic and go fix.

Whoah!  It doesn't look awful!  

I had to go to the store, and buy a brush, and hairspray, and normal shampoo and conditioner.

I dug my curling iron out from under the sink.  I hadn't used it in nearly three years.

But this gives me a few days to figure out what hairstyle I want.  Which brings me to the next question...what hairstyle do I want?  I'm thinking maybe a longer bob or something.