I have this thing about hair. Great hair, I mean.

Granted, it seems like almost everybody does. I've got a lot of friends with really great hair. I envy them. Tangled masses falling in curls or waves or straight down over their shoulders, great for making dramatic motions, a real pain in the ass to have to comb.

My hair grows very fast, at about an inch a month. I could have great hair, probably, in relatively short time.

Unfortunately, I have this other little problem. I think I'm a reincarnated human being from several dozen, maybe hundred, centuries in the future. I'm pretty sure I didn't have any hair then.

I know that's unusual. Most reincarnates are famous people from the past. But no, I'm reasonably certain I'm from the future, and I can't imagine why I'd be famous. No, the important thing is the hair.

I mean, look. They're pretty sure that humans used to be an awful lot hairier than they are now, right? Right. We've gotten less hairy. I'm relatively certain that another several thousand years down the line, we'll be even less hairy. Having lived in this time at some point, I'm accustomed to having no hair.

It's the only reasonable explanation I can think of. I'm suffering from future trauma, here.

See, every few years, I decide I'd really like to have long hair, and so I start growing it out. It zips along at an impressive pace, and after not terribly long, overall, I have shoulder-length or bra-strap-length hair. The last two times I've tried this, I've left it straight, rather than perming it. That seems to work fine.

Except all of a sudden, I can't stand it any more. It always bothers me a little, but I tell myself it's because I have no skill with my hair, and if I'd bother to learn, I'd really like long hair.

But I have no interest what-so-ever in learning to Do Things with my hair. I can barely even braid it, when it's long enough to be braided. I'm good at putting it up in ponytails. And after a while of doing that, I think, why the hell am I bothering to put it in a ponytail? It'd be a lot faster to cut it off and not have to worry about the ponytail.

So I do. The most memorable time I did this was when I was around, oh, eighteen? Nineteen? I had bra-length hair, and I went in with a picture of somebody with hair about the length of Winona Ryder's in Aliens 4: Resurrection. (Don't worry. It's not out yet. You haven't missed it.)

The hairdresser looked at it and stared at me in horror. "Are you sure?" she asked.

"Yep," I said.

"Have you had a fight with your boyfriend?" she asked.

"Nope," I said.

"Are you sure?" she demanded.

"Yep," I said, and she said, "Ooooookay," and chopped it all off.

I loved it. My boyfriend didn't, but I didn't expect him to.

I was trying again, to grow it, this year, because I was getting married (got married, actually) in May, and I wanted long hair for the wedding. Well, I made it not only through the wedding, but a whole two months after it before I went in to get cropped again.

It's not as short as I want it. I'm pretty sure there's this part of me that's just waiting to build up the nerve to shave it entirely. I think it'd be pretty cool, but I'm not quite brave enough.

The thing is, hardly anybody seems to suffer from this affliction. That's why I suspect I belonged to a time period in which humans had virtually no hair. Everybody else is out there with their past-life reincarnations, and here I am on the wrong end of the spectrum.

There must be others like me out there. Unfortunately, the first one that comes to mind is Sinead O'Connor, and while I could be convinced she's not from the same planet the rest of us are, I'm somewhat reluctant to share the indeterminant future with her.

I wouldn't mind hair particularly if it would behave like movie-star hair, or even comic-book hair. People in movies and comics almost invariably have Incredibly Good Hair, and even if it's not Classically Good, it's that sort of roughed up, sexy, Oh-I-didn't-do-a-thing-to-it sort of hair that real hair simply can't attain. Or mine can't, anyway.

I haven't, though, got that sort of patience, and I certainly haven't got half a dozen hair dressers or an artist around to fix my hair Just So. It makes sense that I come from a time where people didn't have hair: ninety percent of the women I know seem to have the time and patience to grow out gobs of Great Hair, and I haven't. I'm missing an essential gene.

Or maybe I just think I look better with short hair.