Having spent the majority of my younger years futzing with single-processing out of a bottle, I grew weary of the chore that was coloring my hair at home. Plus, I owned the shower curtains now and there is no better way to break a person of a destructive habit than to watch her destroy her own things and have to spend the money to replace them out of her own pocket. When the choice is between $20 for a new shower curtain or $20 for alcohol, booze wins every time.

So since the late 90s, I've paid good money to have a professional color my hair, which has been a much more successful endeavor than my precious DIY attempts. The color, while not always a favorite, at least looked a little better and left my hair in decent condition. During the course of the past year, I've gone with honey colored highlights, and I've found the decision one that works best on me. Plus, everyone likes them.

But they're expensive. Like, really expensive. Highlighting and cutting my hair every six to eight weeks drains my pocket to the tune of nearly $200 each go round and seriously? I can't take it anymore. I like my hair, and I'm as vain as they come, but I can't continue to justify the expense when I know I have a perfectly good hair color of my own that costs me nothing to produce.

At least I did.

I don't know how long they've been there, how long they've been manifesting themselves inside my hair follicles, waiting for their chance to escape, but my hair has been overrun by an army of mean, wiry, bitchy gray hair. And it's not like I have just a strand peeking up, but enough that Kate leaned over me in church last month and said, "You DO have gray hair!" I think she even let out a little chuckle upon conclusion of the sentence.

I'm not so much bothered by it as I am shocked. I mean, it's just hair and it's just a color and I've never seen myself as someone who bought into the whole "Signs Of Aging" thing and internalized such signs to a ridiculous degree, but I keep staring at these ownry litttle suckers, all unruly and clearly full of contempt for any hair product I attempt to use on them for control, and it's as though I've finally gotten positive proof that I've lived long enough to say, "Well, 20 years ago ..." and actually remember what was going on in my life back that far.

(I was riding my bike to the pool, not slaving for The Man but whatever. Still. Twenty years.)

I am actually a person who is old enough to produce gray hair. And though I know that there are some who started sprouting gray hairs prematurely, in my heart I recognize that 30 isn't so young not to start seeing some of them dancing about on one's head. It makes sense in theory, but in practice it's an entirely different proposition. My girlfriend and I were talking today about something she was afraid to tell her parents about. Nothing catastrophic, but just something that we never thought a woman in her mid-30s would be fearful to tell her parents.

"When you were little, and thought about what you'd look like at 35, and the kind of person you'd be, it never included still being worried about what your parents thought, did it," I asked.

"No it did not," my friend exclaimed.

The person I thought I'd be when I was old enough to have gray hairs would not still wonder if her parents are going to criticize her latest hair color but OH MY GOD. That is so not the case. Many of the things that tripped me up as a kid continue to trip me up to this day and no one ever told me that for as much as life would constantly bring change, those things wouldn't be some of them.

The financial reasons for not coloring over the gray notwithstanding, I'm consciously leaving them be for now. I'm growing to like them. They aren't pretty, and they laugh in the face of hair gel, but they do at least remind me, as Kate and I pointed out to each other a few weekends ago, that while I may still worry about what my parents think, I am old enough to spend an entire Saturday afternoon on my ass, glued to the television, and no one can make me get up from the couch and go cut the yard.

Which rules.