For days I've been picking up the scissors, putting them down, picking them up again. I haven't had a haircut in four months.

A salon is a kind of confessional for me: Bless me, Stylist, it's been four months since my last haircut. Or five, or seven. The stylist gets wary, suspicious. I explain myself, show pictures, and she looks perplexed but confident.

I am nervous. Wait, I want to say. This isn't how I usually dress. I don't usually wear eyeliner. Don't try to get a sense of who I am by how I look today. Please.

She cuts. I weep. Losing hair, the familiar strands and shape of it, no matter how uneven or how many split ends, is hard for me. Harder still is the stylist's interpretation of my inarticulate descriptions, my bumbled struggle for the words to describe the hair that will finally be right. As penance, she sends me off with hair that's unfamiliar, shorter, and a little weird. It will grow back.

I don't come from a background of hair maintenance. My parents were terrible role models for effortlessly good-looking hair. My mother, who refused to let her dark Sicilian hair dry into its tight curls, set her hair in rollers and sat under a hood dryer. When she went for a cut, she asked us ceaselessly what she should do with it and then would just get a trim. She does not take risks, and her hair looked the same for years. For a time, she'd just grab the front hunk and pull it back, securing it carelessly on top of her head. It wasn't a hairstyle so much as a means of coping.

My father, for his part, had his own barber woes. His hair is thick and straight and grows in its own willful pattern. For a few years he had an adversarial relationship with a barber named Harold. My father finally came to realize that his cowlicks and Harold were in an unwinnable war. He tried barber after barber. All he wanted was a standard short haircut, but he complained that no one could handle his hair. Eight or so years ago he found Diane, stylist to the Pennsylvania state legislators and lobbyists. Diane and my father hit it off. She has been cutting his hair ever since.

Early on, my brothers and I learned that hair was an unavoidable struggle. Furthermore, if hair looks good it is not because of the wearer's skill or haircut: it's pure fate.

I tried this excuse in high school, when I was frequently sent to the dean's office because of my spiky hair. "Magnusson, you need to modify that hair," Mr. McGovern would say. He was also my English teacher. Wry, remote, and funny, his sense of justice was terribly fair, and while he took his deanship mostly seriously he was also very flexible. We sensed that he found the other faculty in the Catholic high school, as well as the rules, absurd and not conducive to the student's growing sense of selfhood. He took his deanship with a good dose of humor.

"I can't," I'd plead. "It's not up to me." It was true. No matter what I did to it in the hour I spent on it each morning, my hair never turned out the same from one day to the next. I had nothing to do with how it looked.

The spikes grew out, and my hair grew long in time for the prom. Eventually I tired of its feminine entanglements and had a cheap salon cut it short. Thus began the years of bad hair. It was granola hair, forgettable hair. I was afraid of losing my punk image just because of my hair. To my relief, my freshman roommate had a similarly bad haircut. Em and I would borrow our friend's clippers and shave each other's heads, bolstered by cheap beer. I left the top longish, a flopping red mop over bare scalp. Strands stuck like Velcro to the fuzz. Em wore more of a crew cut.

For a few years, clippers were our answer to a haircut.

In times of stress, I turned to my hair. Rather, I turned on my hair. This was an unfortunate habit. Halfway through my senior thesis, I dyed my hair jet black. Nirvana groupie black. Black like Goth lipstick. On top of this, I took scissors to it. I am no stylist. With my fair skin and light red eyebrows, my hair looked like a cheap wig. It looked even worse as it grew back; the red roots enhanced nothing. There was only one solution.

I was not expecting so many people to touch my head after I shaved it. Many didn't ask first if they could. My head was suddenly public property. It was nice to touch. My scalp felt peach-like, soft and fuzzy. November is a bad time to shave your head in rural New York, though. It's cold. My mother subtly but determinedly kept me out of all the holiday pictures that year.

The growing-out phase of a shaved head has some very awkward months. I wasn't alone in having really ungainly hair. Bard College isn't known for its well-groomed, looks-oriented students. Many wore shaggy, grown-out versions of some kind of dark-room, dull-scissors styling.

My hair grew long, long, longer. I twisted it into a bun. The hair got heavy. It grew long enough to tie itself into a bun. My boyfriend liked my long hair. The bun got heavier. My head ached from the weight of it.

I cut it. Shoulder length. I tried to keep it even, checking the back in the mirror as I went. The hair didn't look too bad from the front, except now I had a dopey bob that I liked for about a day. I went to a stylist to even it up. She asked if I'd cut it myself.

The bob lasted for a few weeks. My boyfriend and I started breaking up. I cut my hair short. My boyfriend told me that he liked it, but if we were going to be together for life I'd have to have long hair again at some point. I moved out of state.

Every stylist I've gone to since high school--there haven't been many--has said either, "You haven't had your hair cut in months, have you?" or, "You got a really bad haircut last time, didn't you?" Often they said both. This didn't make me any more comfortable in the salon chair. But soon after moving to Cambridge I stopped in a mall salon (that should have been a clue) and had a long discussion with the stylist. I showed her picture after picture. She may not have understood what I wanted, but with an air of strong-jawed determination, she took a razor to it. The hair looked good and spiky for about two days, then it changed drastically. Every day it was very different.

When it had grown back in for a few months, I went to get it cut again. I found a low-priced but decent-looking salon in Harvard Square. I explained myself fully: keep as much length as possible, don't touch the top, you can cut the back. The "stylist" was about 19, a skinny speed freak from Somerville who'd never left eastern Massachusetts, ever. She seemed to understand.

Having the further disadvantage of myopia, I can never see what's happening until it is too late. When I put my glasses back on, I cried. My hair was short. Everywhere. Not funky short, not cute dyke short. It was just bad. The girl got a little upset. I paid and tipped her anyway; she didn't know any better.

I might add here that I didn't always go to the "$10 Cuts" kind of places. Four years ago--the first time I lived here--during a brief stint in an office job in Boston, where I desperately tried to pretend that I had the wherewithal to wear a girly suit, some chic stylist became very popular among the other secretaries. Expensive, they said, but worth it. I finally called Fabio or whoever and scheduled an appointment.

It was a glorious and posh salon. Stylish clients with good shoes wandered about in salmon kimonos. I wondered if they were there for more than a cut: what exactly is a salon treatment, anyway? No one offered me a kimono or spoke to me. I awkwardly flipped through magazines until Fabio beckoned.

He knew how to turn on the charm. He was pleasant and flirtatious, with a remote, distracted air. Insincere flirtation irritates me, but I needed his help. He did what he thought was best for my hair; I let him. He sent me off with soft edges, shiny strands, and a sense that he really didn't care. I never went back.

My hair finally grew to a bearable length after the Harvard Square fiasco. However, like a dental phobic, whose dentistry experiences compound into a deep and irrational fear, I was further scarred. See? I told myself. Haircuts are meant for other people. You'll never have good hair. My refusal to use products or a blow dryer doesn't help. No stylist likes the "make it beautiful and self-styling" challenge.

Now that I'm in Cambridge, I'm surrounded by people with well-kept hair. My friend Kari appears every month or so, fresh from the salon, with her hair beautiful and fabulous. She looks unstressed about it. She is so up on her hair maintenance that there is no discernable difference before and after her cuts. She smiles calmly and has nothing to say about it. It's just getting her hair done, after all. Kari is from rural Texas. I cannot fathom how keeping her hair tended and stylish comes so naturally to her. She couldn't have learned at home, but somewhere this mystery was revealed to her. I am jealous, not of her hair but of her effortlessness with it.

A sympathetic friend, probably embarrassed to be seen with someone so unkempt, offered to take me to Newbury Street. Everyone knows that if you want good shoes or good hair, that's the place to go. She even offered to pay for it. Unfortunately, her schedule is very busy and we haven't been able to go.

This might be the place to add that one Saturday night at the Lava Lounge, a woman who was trying to pick me up told me that I needed to lose the glasses but, more important, to get the damn barrette out of my hair and wear it down. The barrette was a recent addition, partly a weak attempt to imitate the girl rock-band look of the late nineties and partly a way to keep the longish bangs out of my face. She then tried to get my phone number, but I don't like people who can't accept my hair.

The hair lasted through the holidays, through the millennial transition, through the end of the semester. I was starting to eye the scissors more and more often. A friend told me my hair was pretty bad and really needed to be cut. He was casual enough about it, and it didn't bother me. He was right.

One night over dinner, though, a guy I was dating told me that he'd been thinking about the Lava Lounge story.

"You know," he said, "I pretty much agree with that woman. The barrette really doesn't work for you."

I stared at him. He was surprised that I didn't thank him for his input; he said he understood, but really, she was right. And I should do something with it.

Toward the end of the meal, I told him there was no chance for us.

I gave up waiting for my Newbury Street friend. Venturing there alone was not an option; I wanted an escort, a tour guide to the modern salon experience, the sister I'd never had, to say, "Let's get our hair done." Is this the same discomfort a guy feels buying lingerie? I mean, I just don't know how to do it. The whole experience of good hair is a mystery to me. Maybe there's nothing to it, but until a concerned friend, well-versed in modern hair terms, takes me by the hand to a skilled stylist on Newbury, where the three of us can discuss my hair, I can get a good cut, and I can develop a relationship with my stylist, I am mystified.

It could be the stylists I choose. Somehow "shaggy," "fringy," and "tousled" don't give them any idea of how I want my hair to look when they are done. And I have had to define "disheveled" (as a desired end result) more times than I would like.

Relationship might be a key word in this whole discussion. People form relationships with their stylists. They follow them throughout their career moves, as the stylist goes to work in a different salon or opens his or her own salon. Clients develop fierce loyalty to the person who keeps their hair looking good. This is no fluke. You'd be an idiot not to. My roommate has followed her stylist, Melissa, through two salons and into Melissa's own new salon, even as her rates rise. My father would probably marry Diane if he could. As it is, they do lunch occasionally.

Perhaps other people also fail to find a stylist who cuts their hair well or at least to their liking. When you find such a stylist, you don't let him go. You return to him. He gets to know your hair, your preferences. He understands what you want, how far you're willing to go, what will look good on you. How your hair grows out, and how fast. How often you'll come in, and how high-maintenance or not you want your hair to be. This doesn't happen in the first conversation.

I would love to develop a meaningful relationship with a stylist. I want him or her to know my hair, to make it look good, to help me make it look good. I want my hair to be easy, its upkeep a minor source of pleasure instead of a major source of stress. I want to take "getting a haircut" in stride. I want to see someone on a regular basis, someone who makes my hair look good.

I just want good hair.

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