Awkward Phase

I'm now living on Hawaii Standard Time. While that may be awkward for everyone else around here, it's working for me.

Speaking of awkward, I thought I'd share a photo.

My profile floats, eerily transparent, behind my mulleted head.

A mullet! At one agonizing period, I had a mullet! I know it wasn't a hairstyle that I asked for. My mom let one of the neighbor ladies cut my hair, and this was the result.

I was twelve in this photo--all gangly and shooting up so fast I remember that I couldn't do a headstand in gymnastics for a while until I got used to my height and figured out my balance. An awkward phase.

It could have been worse: it was the early 80s (the above was taken in early 1984), and the mullet was pretty common, so it's not like I was out of place. In Northern Minnesota, however, we didn't use the word "mullet." We just called it "hockey hair." The shorter hair in front hid conveniently under a hockey helmet and stayed out of the player's eyes, and the longer hair at the back curled fetchingly out from under the helmet at the nape of the neck. When I got a little older, I really appreciated that little curling bit on the neck of the cute male hockey players.

Here's that same mullet grown out in the summer of that year:

Yes, it was an awkward phase both physically and stylistically. Don't worry, twelve-year-old Eva. It gets better in a few years.