One of the bright spots of my daily Facebook feed is selfies featuring the new hairdos of friends and acquaintances.

I was showing Dan the new haircut of a friend this morning when Oliver entered the room and raised an eyebrow.

“One of our friends got a new hairdo,” I explained. “Whenever a woman gets a haircut, they usually post a photo.”

I’ve noticed this is much more of a trend among women than men. Sometimes the New-Do Selfie follows a crowd-sourcing question about what kind of new hairstyle to try.

I got a new haircut yesterday, but I am not planning to post a photo because I always look terrible in pictures unless my sister edits them. I can edit a word document, but not so much a selfie.

When I walked in the door last night with my new haircut, Dan said, “That’s some bullshit hair.”

Obviously, I was offended, although he says it was a joke – an allusion to a movie we saw in which a character criticizes a school administrator’s hair because it’s too structured. I recently became aware of a meme making fun of imperious-looking middle aged women with overly structured haircuts by calling them all “Karen.” Like many social media crazes, it’s actually kind of dumb.

One of my students explained the meme to me, showing me a photo of Jenny McCarthy wearing what I would describe as an angled bob.

“But her name’s not Karen,” I said. “Her name’s Jenny.”

It doesn’t matter, he explained. Calling someone “Karen” (if her name is Jenny) is just calling her a self-important middle-aged busy body, kind of like the way calling someone a “VSCO girl” is calling her a young and inexperienced woman without anything important to say. It’s a dis, but not much of one. Don’t even get me started on the stupidity of “OK, Boomer.”

Nonetheless, I was trying to avoid getting a “Karen” haircut. After studying several different Karen memes, I determined that the Karen haircut could be what I would describe as a wedge, but it could also be an angled bob, which is a softer version of the wedge, I guess.

Last weekend, our whole family was together eating at a restaurant, and we asked the waitress to take our picture. When I looked at the picture, I thought I looked like the most boring person in the world. I thought maybe if I got pink streaks, I would look less boring. But would that be juvenile?

I took one of my 10-year-old daughter’s pink hair crayons and drew a pink streak in my bangs before school on Thursday. One student said she liked it. I thought about posting a poll question in my Google classrooms asking if I should dye my hair pink, then doing it if the majority voted in favor, but I chickened out because I imagined an administrator asking me how the question related to a clear objective tied to the Virginia Standards of Learning.

How it relates is that some students think English is boring. They would rather play video games than read literature or write persuasive essays. It’s probably not so much about me as it is the subject I teach, which I enjoy, which is why I teach it. When I was in school, I hated gym. I hated balls flying at me, and I still don’t understand when kids throw things across the room to each other rather than just walking over and handing it to a classmate. I hated gym and it would not have mattered if the teacher had pink hair or mousy brown.

Anyway, I chickened out of crowd-sourcing hair advice from high school freshmen and I chickened out of pink hair, opting for what my hairstylist described as “rose gold” highlights. Very subtle. I could still look less boring, but even I had punk hair, I would still like reading and writing, and I would still insist that freshmen do it in English class instead of playing video games. I could get a nose ring and a face tattoo and I would still be a middle-aged woman who doesn’t think you should listen to gangsta rap or heavy metal or country music or text your mom or make a Tik Tok while your class is reviewing for a quiz.

I thought about doing a social experiment. I would get my hair cut short, stop wearing makeup and skirts, and see if I got more respect from everyone in the world, not just kids. Like, if I abandoned all obvious markers of femininity, would freshmen not stand up when I was talking and throw their empty water bottles into the trash can beside my desk? Because if I were more like a man, maybe they would assume I wouldn’t stand for that sort of behavior. It’s bad enough when people throw recyclables into the trash can. A trash can is not a basketball hoop, people!

You know that Billie Eilish song, “Bad Guy”? (Yes, it was high school students who introduced me to the Best New Artist). The problem is, I don’t want to be the bad guy. Nobody does. I don’t want to be the bad guy with pink hair or mousy brown. I don’t want to make your mama sad by calling her and telling her she needs to take your phone away. But I have to do it more than I like.

On a related note, I went to McDonald’s to get some cinnamon coffee after school yesterday. I got my coffee without much of a wait, and unlike the women in the Karen memes, I did not ask to speak to the manager. I did see some of my students leaving the restaurant as I pulled away. One of them was wearing shorts even though it was freezing out. He and his friends were running across the street with those heavy backpacks strapped to them, carrying ice cream cones. Kind of cute, but also precarious. It took all I had not to roll down the window and holler, “Y’all watch out so you don’t get hit. And put some clothes on before you freeze to death!”

I swear, I was never that young.