Ryan's Hair... THIS IS YOUR LIFE!

(A special thanks to everyone who submitted photos for this!)

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, since I was in 8th grade, I have always put some sort of time, effort, and product into my hair. In eighth grade, this is the beautiful finished product that I was going for...

No one has yet found a picture of me with shoulder length hair. KEEP LOOKING. Or, perhaps its best that we not re-live that. Anyway, by the middle of high school, I had gotten to a conventional, non-attention grabbing, though heavily gelled and hairsprayed, style.

For the first year and a half of college, the hair was still pretty conventional

With the exception of the blue tinted gel and glitter from Pippin (this is the best photo I could find. I feel super old thinking about how no one had a digital camera in 2002)

Then came the haircut that changed my life (along with the advent of digital photography). The infamous Korean makeover from April 2003!

Try as i might, I never seemed to get it exactly the same again. Instead, over the next year, it just got...

bigger (note: Tanya Chavez is the only person I know who has had more hair colors and styles than me. The extensions she has here are wonderful)

and shapelier (notice how i actually have created a diamond here)

and weirder (not that the brown western influenced leisure suit helps this picture any)

oh wait... and even weirder (GO 1980s FLOCK OF SEAGULLS)

By my senior year, it just got longer in a much more controlled, yet hippie way...

Even after I graduated and got a job, it still stayed long. I think this photo from Winter 2005-2006 was my rock bottom moment. Worst dye job ever, on top of the most razor-hacked, over textured cut ever. Was I trying to match my hair with the pattern on my scarf???

I know I cut my hair by summer 2006 for my brother's wedding. I didn't want to mess up his wedding photos with a crazy hairstyle (ahem... your welcome).

I remember thinking it was ridiculously short, and didn't know how to style it. Somehow, as it grew back in, I fell into the faux-hawk... a hairstyle that I loathed in college. (Then again, did you see my hairstyles in college? Who was I to talk?)

Then there were big bangs cemented up (almost Jersey Shore-ish)

And then I had this weird square topped thing with bangs down

Then I went back to the faux hawk look for a while, before having the brilliant idea that I should combine the bangs down approach with the faux hawk! I think I wanted to be David Cook by this point)

Apparently by May 2009 I thought that if I moved the faux hawk off center, it some how made it acceptable.

By this fall, I'd tamed it down. After all, I was a working professional with a graduate degree.

And then in January, I started a new phase. Many people have complimented it, and I've vowed to keep it this way until at least September, regardless of how long my treatments take me. Who knows, maybe I'll keep it, and this will be the end of my varying crazy hairstyles? Cancer does open your eyes to a lot of new things... maybe even a new image!