The Daily Mufasa*

I am so coveting the long, wavy, fresh from the beach, hair look. There's just one problem. I don't have wavy hair and I don't frequently frequent the beach. Okay. So that's two problems. Two really big problems. The first is a problem because I have to figure out a way to make my hair wavy in order to satisfy these deep feelings of hair lust. The second is a problem because BEACH! I MISS YOU.

Everywhere I go I find someone who has mastered this gorgeous wavy hair look. That someone is not me. There is not a single lick of body in my hair. No volume. No nothing. This is fantastic when I want my hair to be straight. It's also great because I can take a shower two seconds before I go bed and all is not lost. I wake up in the morning and my hair is the very same way I left it. Except, no longer wet. It is, however, not great when I want waves.

So I started watching tutorials on the Internet.

I've yet to master any of them.

The other night I saw a video featuring a Victoria's Secret model (wearing actual clothing and not lingerie at that precise moment) giving a tutorial on a no-heat-but-still-arrive-at-your-wavy-hair-destination technique. It involved putting a twisty bun on the top of one's head and going to bed. In the morning, ta-da, my hair would look like I was ready for a photo shoot with Victoria's Secret except that I would not actually be ready because TOO SHORT! TOO NOT QUITE PERFECT LOOKING ENOUGH! TOO HANES-HER-WAY AND T-SHIRTS! Meh. No matter. I wouldn't know exactly how to pull off Victoria's Secret model by weekday, pastor's wife by Sunday anyway.

The model in the video showed me how to do it and there was proof, right there on YouTube, that it worked. Her hair fell into perfect waves.

So I tried it. On a Saturday night. Which was dumb. Because do you know what day comes after Saturday? I do because I spend a lot of my working days with kindergartners and first graders and there are songs, y'all. Oh are there ever songs. "THERE'S SUNDAY AND THERE'S MONDAY! THERE'S TUESDAY AND THERE'S WEDNESDAY! THERE'S THURSDAY AND THERE'S FRIDAY! AND THEN THERE'S SATURDAY! DAYS OF THE WEEK! DAYS OF THE WEEK!" So I woke up on Sunday and oh my goodness I looked like the walking, human form of Mufasa. It took a lot of work to get it looking acceptable.

Once I deemed it worthy of walking out of the house without a paper bag on my head, several people told me they liked it. (But, mind you, this was after A LOT of fixing up.) I told the story about how I'd awoken my inner lion and certain people started playing "The Circle of Life" when I walked by. On Facebook I explained that I looked like Mufasa and people wanted to see the proof. I had none because I'd already fixed it.

So, like a true friend, I did it AGAIN last night so that I could wake up, take a picture, and then spend the rest of the day sporting the enormous puffy, king of Pride Rock, look. I was not amused because my hair was sort of lumpy, sort of fuzzy, and NOT AT ALL BEACHY AND SMOOTHLY WAVY which is what I was going for.

                                                        

I don't want all that volume. I want chic and subtle and not HEY THERE, LET ME KAPOW YOU WITH MY CRAZY PUFF BALL. So I posted it to Facebook and do you know what happened? A ton of people started saying, "WHOA! Gorgeous!" "Check out all those waves!" "That looks great!" And sometimes you are posting a picture in the hopes that people will be like, "So great!" and validate what you might already suspect and then sometimes you are legitimately not thrilled with the misleading lingerie model. This was most definitely the latter.

People did NOT think I looked like Mufasa. But, do you know what? I simply could not look more like him. Except that, here, he is seen smiling whereas I am not.

It is THE VERY SAME HAIR, PEOPLE!

I'm not giving up on the subtle, sleek, sun-kissed, beachy waves. But my stick straight hair is going to have to find a different way of achieving them. Also, the bun was getting in the way of my beauty sleep. We cats need a lot of it and the bun kept hitting my headboard and waking me up.

*I have to thank one, Mr. Aaron G for the inspiration for the title of this post.