red hair (idea)

Women with red hair are generally assumed to have some kind of exotic quality or fiery character, and this makes them appealing. Women by the busload dye their hair red, often (at least in my opinion) choosing truly garish shades. But if it works for them, well then who am I to complain?

I am a man with red hair. I therefore live in a completely different universe, one wherein boys with red hair are taunted throughout childhood and adolescence. My only consolation growing up was that my face was not covered in freckles, with which my redheaded brethren are too often doomed.

I'm going to beat you like a redheaded stepchild

Ever heard that expression? It just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

I offer, for your consideration, a brief biographical retrospective from my formative years (excluding, for space reasons, the 8-9 million times I was called "red"):

• As a very young child, strange women in supermarkets would come up to me and tousle my hair, exclaiming various things bout how "pretty" my red hair was. This has left me with a deep-seated fear of strange women in supermarkets, presumably to my loss.
• In the third grade, a good friend of mine named Doug Wick told me that my hair was red because I had rusty brains. It really got to me at the time, but the truth is that that was by far the most clever of any of the slings and arrows.
• In the seventh grade, I alienated--for five years--a very nice girl named Betsy because I exploded when she called me "Red." In truth, she was asking me if I wanted "Bread?" but the damage was done.
• After my confirmation, a woman from our church (which was a congregation composed largely of Slovak immigrants) told me that redheads in Slovakia have historically been considered outcasts.

The list could go on and on. Eventually, people stopped harping on it, instead musing about whether my hair would turn pink as I go gray. Ha ha ha. Fuck you.

For the record, I now consider myself to have quite a nice head of hair. And I take comfort in the fact that, genetically speaking, I will likely not go bald. So, to my onetime detractors and their soon to be shiny heads: Ha ha ha. Fuck you.