Hair, coats, babbling.

I chopped all of my hair off the other day, Mia Farrow style, and now I have a hankering for Peter Pan collars. Peter Pan collars on shift dresses, Peter Pan collars on blouses with little cap sleeves. Specifically, I would like a winter-weight midnight blue coat with - you guessed it - a Peter Pan collar, princess sleeves and a slight tulip shape. Mid-thigh to knee will do. Single- or double-breasted, I don't mind. Does such a coat exist? I feel it must, and yet after scouring countless boutiques I am still to find it. My trusty black coat is getting so threadbare that the pockets are holes, so if anyone has a lead on this particular coat (which must exist, right?), drop me a line. If you fall in love with it and buy it for yourself instead, I will probably understand. That said, my feelings will be hurt.

(That's [imaginary] coats out of the way. Let's talk about hair!)

I don't know. Is hair such an important signifier for other people? (I know Cosmo would have us believe that a woman's sense of identity is intrinsically caught up in her glossy, luxurious mane, but apart from the occasional quiz where you learn that your short crop means you are "quirky" and "adventurous" it pretty much always perpetuates the Maxim/FHM coding of "long shiny hair" = "traditional/subservient sex goddess". You rarely, rarely see models in the women's blowjob mags [Cosmo, Cleo and the like - sex tips and retrograde gender politics] with anything else, but I digress.) I guess, loosely, there are a set of inferences you can make about a person based on their aesthetic choices, and that's the thing that's bothering me a little at the moment - I am still the same person I was a week ago, but my outward appearance now highlights a quite different aspect of my sum total of aesthetic inclinations/vaguely corrolating quirks and tics, and presents it up to the world - "interpret me!". There's a weird cognitive dissonance also, when I catch sight of myself in a shop window and don't recognise myself, or hear myself described now as 'elfin'. This haircut is a bit like a costume, or a charade. Or else it's like a goddamn haircut and I am investing far too much significance in the few inches left around my now-exposed ears.

This cropping of the hair has also prompted a barrage of comments and compliments, and there's nothing like a sudden surge of interest in your pyhysical form to make you (okay, me) feel suddenly self-conscious and start tripping over ideas of embodiment and identity and apologising for going on about your goddamn appearance on your sad little undernourished blog, even though you know that post-feminism lets you feel okay about believing the presentation of your physical self to the world is somewhat important, because you suddenly feel very vapid and girlie to think that your hair of all things is somehow worth priviliging above all the other things you could theoretically be writing about even though if you were writing an essay about gender and aethetics and identity construction you wouldn't feel that way at all, you would feel that what you were writing was important but then again you would craft a much better, more coherent exploration of the issue than above if that were the case.

Sorry, I am quite clearly feeling much too parenthetical to be of any use tonight. Thankfully, I already did some useful things in the real world, like make minestrone and do yoga and poach pears in red wine and make banana bread, so it doesn't matter here in cyberspace, if anyone even calls it that anymore, that my slightly tired and droopy musings are the literary equivalent of a Mobius strip, two-dimensional and eternally looping in upon themselves.

In short - I am tired, my hair is short, I feel the need to justify and then justify justifying my own temporary interest in my physical appearence to an uncaring yet all-judging internet, and I bake a kick-arse banana loaf.

The end.