I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

"WHAT A NIGHTMARE, CHARLIE BROWN STEVE BRANDON!"

I'm not a prime specimen of the human species by any stretch of the imagination, but I did beat the odds, with the genetic dice stacked against me, and inherited my maternal grandfather's hair traits, meaning I'm past 30 and I'm not balding in any way, and I don't think my hair is going anywhere anytime soon either.

I have pretty much the same hair as a 31-year old that I had as a 14-year old (yes, I'm a bit tubbier now, but the haircut is very similar).

Last "night" (meaning, considering my skewed insomniac sleeping hours, probably corresponds to "around 11 a.m. this morning"), I had an odd dream about my hair, almost a nightmare. I dreamt that I woke up, and, I wasn't balding, but I had suddenly become prematurely grey. Just like CNN's Anderson Cooper, whom I was suprised to find out, when I first looked up information on him during CNN's round-the-clock coverage of the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster in December 2004, is only seven years my senior.



I checked the mirror this afternoon, and, while my hair in general is still the same dark chestnut brown that it's been since I was a toddler, there are a few hairs on my temples that, while they aren't quite grey yet, do seem lighter than the others, and reflect a lot more light, even when I block the direct light sources off with my hand.

I probably shouldn't worry. Anderson Cooper himself says that he started going gray at age twenty, if you can believe that, so, if I was a freak of nature like he is (in a good way, Anderson Cooper looks great gray) and was going to go grey prematurely, it probably would have happened by now. (Interestingly enough, Anderson Cooper prefers to use the term "salt-and-pepper" for his "distinguished" coiffure. You can almost say that Anderson Cooper doesn't like to admit publicly that he's a gray man.)

Though Steve Martin didn't go prematurely gray until he was 30, so it doesn't always have to happen as young as it did with Anderson Cooper for it to be considered "premature".

I know it's inevitable, unless I die young, and some grey hairs will almost certainly sprout up within the next few years, but I hope that I have another decade or more where my hair is still predominantly brown.

And, yes, I did intentionally use the British/Canadian spelling ("grey") and the American spelling ("gray") interchangeably. I just feel like spelling it "gray" when I was talking about the Americans Anderson Cooper and Steve Martin, but, since I'm not American (at least not yet), I'll use the International English "e" spelling.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 8:24 PM