Adulthood – Somebodies

Hi, My name’s Sam.

I brought my hair, which is no longer attached to me.

I started growing it because I was into the heavy metal scene. I mean, if you don’t commit to having the long hair, then you’re not like metal enough. I had it for about ten years and I cut it a couple of years ago. It was down to my waist. It wasn’t a particular day when I decided to cut it off, I thought about it for months.

I just remember the funniest reaction I got was from my childhood friend, John, who when he saw me for the first time with short hair, didn’t say a damn thing. And I was like, you’re not going to say anything? He’s like – “I don’t know, I knew you before you even had the long hair so this just looks normal to me. So no big surprise, buddy!”

I kept the cut hair because it’s important for me to remember that everybody identified me by the long hair for basically as long as I had it—and I did as well. But when I felt ready to grow into somebody new I was sort of held back by it. So, when I cut it, It felt like a burden off, both figuratively and literally. That much hair weighs a lot!

It freed me up to grow into the person that I am today, to meet my wife and head on out to start a new life in California.

“Hi my name is Liz,

My object is a 1970’s New York Times cookbook. The reason I choose it is because in my family most things revolve around food. If we don’t remember something about a trip or we don’t remember what we did, we always remember the restaurants in which we ate and the food that we really liked and the food that we didn’t like.

When I turned twenty-one my mother gave me this cookbook. She learned to cook with this same book shortly after she married my father in 1975. It was helpful because it was not only a way for us to forge a relationship over something that was so important to the both of us but it was also saying something about independence. As you move on in your life and you graduate school, you should know how to take care of yourself, so you should know how to cook.

Someday no one will use cookbooks because so many recipes are online, but this book is my history, so I think I will use it forever. But I don’t think I will be as good a cook as she is!”