The best thing I learned in recent months is that I look like Fonzie in drag if I have long hair. There is a website where you can upload a picture of your face and then put hairdos of celebrities on your head. I tried hairstyle after hairstyle, and in every one with long hair, I looked like Fonzie in drag. I also learned that I don't look even remotely like a celebrity. I was so relieved -- after years of futile attempts to grow out my hair -- to learn that I just shouldn't bother. My hair is like an African Violet -- a nice color but really hard to cultivate. Probably because of my CFIDS-related brain injury, I am just like the woman in the recent New Yorker article who could only identify objects by their shape, or certain hallmark visual characteristics. I am like that with hair. I can only identify people by the dead strands of waste floating on their heads. I watch people on TV waxing eloquently about bone structure, eye color, and lip shape, and when my lovers ask me "What color are my eyes?" and put both hands over their eyelids, I rely on probability.

So I cut my hair again the other day. And then I was talking to my brilliant poet friend on the phone. Recently, her favorite living American poet did a reading with her in NY, and he told her at the reading -- naturally -- that all of his friends think she is the most important young poet writing today. She IS the most important young poet writing today, and she deserves that kind of praise, so I couldn't really be bitchy about it even though it did cast a fading wan light on my own pathetic sinking non-career. Then we started -- like poets -- talking about death and the afterlife (I was secretly thinking of my pathetic non-career and wondering if I'd get another incarnation to be the most important young poet writing today) and I told her my Mom thinks I look like John Edward, the TV guy who talks to dead people (Mom used to say I looked like Sandra Bullock). And my friend said, "Oh my God, you look EXACTLY like John Edward" and I said "But isn't he butt ugly?" And she said, "You look like him, but you're not weird looking." Fabulous. What exactly do I look like? A Fonzie in drag talking to dead people? I am going to go sit on the toilet and read about the return of the flippy 'do in Shortcuts magazine, and ponder where genetics went wrong.