String Theory

What is it with hair? Mine drives me crazy.

Consider:

Tiny little strings growing out of our heads. Sure, they grow in other places too, which is usually even more weird. But, these strings just squish out of our heads. Strings that, for many people, are wildly unpredictable. Who knows what they are doing at any given moment. How many times have you looked at an old photo of yourself and wondered what in the world was going on with those strings on your head?

And yet we use these strings to define ourselves in so many ways. We make jokes about people because they have odd strings or no strings or because of the color of their strings. So you get things like this Dolly Parton quote:

“I'm not offended by all the dumb-blonde jokes because I know that I'm not dumb. I also know I'm not blonde.”

My wife is a blonde, so I have very little room to work here. But what I do know is that when we have straight strings we want curly ones and when we have curly ones we want straight ones. People with dark strings dye them light and vice versa. People without head strings wish they had it and people with head strings shave it off because they don’t want to mess with it or they want to look like their favorite basketball player?

As I get older, these annoying little strings are spreading. They find new places to grow, like weeds. Even those people whose heads will not sprout the stuff find it cropping up in other odd places, not least of which: the nose and the ears.

I’m sorry but, for me, ear strings are just downright creepy. I don’t want ‘em. I worry sometimes that I’ll have a stroke and lay there for years with strings growing out of my ears.

Please God, no.

Who knows what to make of it all? It’s just another thing we want to control that we can’t. I do know that we spend a lot of valuable energy on these goofy strings. Perhaps, the dystopians of George Lucas’s THX 1138 had it right. Maybe the future needs bald heads.




Luke 12:6-7
Peace to you.

© LW Publishing 2010