Now I know. It's a little creepy, actually. I pat my head and there's no sproing, just this weird odd sleekness that my hair normally can't achieve, even when wet.

It's already disturbed two co-workers and one friend. It also took a LOT of work, so I doubt that I will buy the equipment to make it work, but it was an interesting experiment and an unusual change.

After verifying that my unexpected Sunday morning skidoo had not managed to permanently realign any bones, I tried to figure out what in the world had caused me to slip on an otherwise fairly-trusty bathroom floor. It only took me four days to spot the mess.

Ever heard of silicone serum? To those of you with short, fine, straight, or otherwise manageable hair, it's a foreign and vaguely disgusting concept. (I cannot begin to count the number of times I've been asked "You put what on your hair?") For those of us who fall - multiple times - into the latter category (known to stylists as "Oh God" hair or, more simply, as "A Challenge"), silicone serum is revered, worshiped, and hoarded.

You know the type of hair. It's on the type of woman you love to hate - the woman who has obnoxiously thick hair strands, all of which are individually wavy or curly, and a great abundance of them.

Yeah. Hi. Don't hate me because I have a hair explosion. Trust me, it's not quite so cool as you think. Ask anyone who has ever tried to braid my hair.

My hair wasn't always like this. Nobody knows what actually happened to me in the sixth grade, but I have pictures to prove it. In the fifth grade, I decided that I didn't like my stringy, dullish, stare-at-the-ceiling-and-think-of-England hair, so I got a perm.

I spent two years waiting with bated breath, wondering when the perm would go away and when my real hair would start growing back. But the straight roots never came. Eventually, I cut off what had to be the last of the permed hair, and made the only possible assumption: the chemicals in my hair had prompted a mass follicular breakdown. My hair follicles had been converted to the way of the S-shaped wiggle.

I became Triangle Head. (For the first two years after a haircut, my hair grows out, not down. Eventually it becomes so heavy that it falls down in spite of itself, and proceeds to do the S-shaped backstroke all over my head.)

Hair like mine (heavy, dense, strongly wavy, really long, and a lot of it) has two cardinal rules.

1. If you put anything in it, it will look like crap the next day.
2. If you do not put anything in it, you will not be able to brush it the next day.

Sure, you've all played with gel and mousse. It's fun, it works great, and the next day, your hair resembles a child's glue-and-sticks project. Now imagine this situation multiplied: someone with a lot of unruly hair. They require even more gel or mousse to receive the same effect that mortals get with just a dime- or quarter-sized dollop of styling goo.

The next-day results are magnified. You no longer have individual hair strands. You have hermetically-sealed hair clumps which cannot be broken without a) showering or b) jackhammers.

So, you say, fine. I don't want to glue all my hair strands together. I'll just wash it, condition it well†, and toss it in a ponytail tomorrow instead of washing it.

Then, on morning #2 without hair-taming potions, you realize that your hair has no intention of allowing itself to be brushed. If you're lucky, you realize the gravity of the situation before your hair actually eats your brush, (I've seen many a brush meet brutal and untimely ends this way) you jump in the shower so that you can wet your hair down, condition it yet again, apologize profusely and beg forgiveness.

Then get out of the shower and try to style your hair.

A while back, Monica reminded me of the goodness of silicone. I tried it, and - wondrous to behold - not only could I brush my hair, but I could do it without pain. Better yet, my hair settled down from S-Shaped Thermonuclear Blast to ... S-Shaped Firecracker Wiggles. It's now easier to braid, stays more neatly braided when I do braid it, and best of all, I have contiguous, separable hair strands for more than twelve hours.

The bad news: guess what happens when this stuff spills on the floor. Think oil slick. Think of the disasters that would happen if you took a bottle of spray silicone and sprayed it all over your tile floor. Now imagine that this slippery stuff was completely clear, and practically invisible to the human eye.

Perhaps I should have thought about this before I left the bottle so close to the edge of the vanity. I should have had a toxic-waste cleanup plan in place before one of the cats knocked the bottle (of a clear viscous fluid that might as well be marked "Slip And Fall With Ease!") of silicone serum onto the (white) tile floor.

I had lots and lots of time to think about this between slip and thud, and even more to think about it while I tried to mop up the mess with toilet paper.

Which, I might add, does nothing but disperse the slick stuff everywhere, removing 95% of the evidence while leaving 95% of the slickness. Now, granted, the foot that stepped into the goop stayed disturbingly soft and slick for the next few hours, but that's a rather grotesque memory that I'd prefer not to revisit.

I lost the last third of my bottle to the floor, so I went out and bought another. Haven't figured out yet where I'm going to keep this one, but it'll definitely be in a place that won't turn my bathroom into a no-wheels-needed skating rink anytime soon. I've broken bones by trying to fly a kite and by falling out of bed, and just this week I managed to slice my thumb open with a butter knife. I absolutely refuse to add "broken bones caused by hair care products" to the list.

Even I have to have a little dignity.

† Speaking of conditioning it well. You know the recommendation "a quarter-sized dollop of conditioner to cover all your hair"? I always find that excruciatingly funny - after I use up the quarter-sized dollop, what am I supposed to use on the other side of my head? I won't even go into the uselessness of most conditioners. I learned in college that if I wanted to be able to brush my hair at all, I had to use the heavy-duty 'ultra' conditioners on almost a daily basis, or I could just give up on ever being able to brush my hair.

I think I was bored with short hair. I didn't have anything to complain about.

I was seventeen, and absolutely certain. "Cut it.""But it's…beautiful. You're absolutely certain you want me to do this? It will take you years to grow this back."

As she spoke, I took my glasses off and tucked them under the plastic robelike drape they make you wear (to protect your clothes from rogue hairs) while sitting in the cutting chairs. Without my glasses, I was blind—and had to trust. Trust felt sticky and warm, like the back of my neck, which was rapidly beginning to adhere to the nonporous plastic drape.

I had threatened to do this for many, many years, and today was going to be the day. I was, after all, seventeen, and absolutely certain. "I have the fastest-growing hair you've ever seen. Between a half-inch and an inch every month. Don't worry; if I hate it, I'll just grow it back."

The blurry outline in the mirror, the one that vaguely resembled my hairdresser, gestured wildly in the mirror to her co-workers. "Can you believe this? She wants to cut all this off! Where in the world do I start?"

Someone from the back yelled, "Pin the top two-thirds up on the top of her head, and cut it just a bit longer than what she wants. Then start letting the rest of her hair down, a chunk at a time, and cut it that way. By the time you even it all up, it'll be where she wants it."

She leaned in closer to me and said, sotto voce, "How short?" as she cleaned her scissors.

I raised my right arm to my neck and mimicked a beheading motion, level with my chin. "Right to the chin."

As over a foot of hair came off, I could literally feel my head gradually unbalancing and then righting itself as the weight of my hair changed. Then, with a whisk of the drape and a quick brush-down of my neck, the deed was done. By most standards of the Western world, I still had very long hair; for me, though, it was extremely short.

I loved it. Until I realized I couldn't pin it up in a ponytail, that is.

Thus began the cycle. My hair would grow, and grow, until I finally got tired of its heft and length, and then, a year or so later, I would have it all chopped off. It would then be another year before I saw another hairstylist, who would then perform the same radical surgery upon my hair.

As of this summer, it will have been two years since my last shearing. The last one was shorter than usual. As I stood in the shower tonight I realized that my hair is now a hand's-span away from my waist.

Another two or three months, and it—that strange combination of not-red and not-blond, as well as not-spiral-curls but not-straight—will be the longest it's ever been.

I looked in the mirror tonight, while combing it out, and wondered how long I'm going to let it get this time. It's not bothering me now, but I know that there will come a day, as those days have come in the past, where I look in the mirror, nod, and say, "It's time."

On those days I announce to no one what I'm planning on doing. I just swoop into a hair salon, unclip my hair, no longer seventeen but still absolutely certain, and say,

"Cut it."