My hair kept sticking up in the back. It’s so not fair. I did more than smooth it this morning. Yet unruly it became.

There are many mornings when I wake up and am bed-head free. This occurs most mornings, as a matter of fact. On a rare morning that it folds funny on itself or presents as a fluff ball at the back of my head, it’s usually simply a brush or a dab of product away from being tamed.

When did we start calling hair stuff product, by the way? When did hairspray, hair cream, hair mousse, hair gel, hair oil or hair wax–for starters–become product? It’s one of those words that do not really add to the understanding of the thing.

Product. It used to be Dippity-do or Blue Magic or Brylcreem or Aquanet or Vitalis. It was sometime after those products morphed into Vidal Sassoon shampoos and styling products on the way to Paul Mitchell and now dozens and dozens of “salon” products. You know the ones, with the bottles printed with labels that say:

Guaranteed only when sold by a professional hairdresser, otherwise it may be counterfeit, black market, old or tampered with.

But you can buy the product at Target. Target seems pretty legit. I get that you might be worried at Marshall’s, but if the product is available at WalMart, just what do those warnings mean? I say, nothing.

Back to this morning.

I don’t wash my hair every day. It’s not that time consuming, but you are talking to a Doc who has argued with The Spouse over coffee beans. Spouse brings home whole beans, and I complain bitterly about having to grind them in the electronic grinder for fifteen seconds. Seriously, just get me to the Joe fast. I’ll scoop but not grind. The Spouse still tries to sneak beans in the house with the idea that I will grind. I see beans and go out to buy a bag of pre-ground at lunch.

Back to the hair.

I didn’t notice the hairs sticking out at the back of my head until I had already spread some Moroccan Oil through to the ends. You’d think that would have subdued any recalcitrant locks. But, when I moved my head to the left to check the time on the wall clock, I spied that wayward curl in the mirror.

I’m not an overly-groomed person, but the one portion of hair was sticking out from my head in a ninety-degree angle, AKA straight out. If it were just a few hairs, I could brush my teeth and move on. But it was ringlet sized plus pointing away from my head perpendicularly. Unavoidable to the eye. Unacceptable for the office.

I tried some product. The damn hairs bounced back up like a reflex.

I tried holding my hand over the product covered cowlick for a few minutes. BOING! Back up. Next up was some water. Since the hair was primed with various forms of product, the water must have activated some latent management properties. Sadly this reactivation only worked around my right ear. The sticking up part behind my head remained in that position.

Not to be defeated, I applied heat to the productized and wetted hair. Voila! Tame achieved.

In the office, I looked in the mirror in the restroom. I looked to the left and saw the hair sticking out, again! It was the damn wind. The damn wind that thinks it’s still winter and drives the windchill into the twenties. The damn wind that should be a welcome breeze but instead presents as a precursor to the nannies flying in on umbrellas from London. The damn wind that re-agitated my controlled hair and let that one piece go wild.

Wild.

I took my hand and placed it on the back of my head, over the sticking out part of my hair, and put my other hand on my hip and sashayed out of the toilet.

If you can’t beat ’em, act like you don’t care. “Fiddle-dee-dee!“