This one's a pretty simple topic that people are already generally familiar with as a symbol, so I won't get too far into the general stuff. Instead I'll focus on how it impacts us collectively and individually, within the innerverse.
History
The body's hair is extremely dark brown, to the point of looking black until you see it in a certain light. It's also curly, but, "hilariously" enough, we didn't figure that out until our early twenties. Up until then, we just thought it was wavy and really frizzy. Basically, think Hermione Year 1 but frizzier. Yeah. That's what happens when you use a brush on curly hair instead of a wide-tooth comb. Wish we'd had that PSA growing up.
Why weren't we taught that as a kid, you hypothetically ask? The parental units didn't know either. The father unit is, shall we say, not the most in touch with his sensitive side, and the mother unit apparently just wasn't aware. She has very short hair now, but we've seen pictures from when she was younger, and though the image quality has been not-exactly-HD, she seems to have had a similar Hermione Year 1 thing going on.
But anyway, yeah. 20+ years of brush usage, plus years of only seeing girls with hair even remotely like ours in 80s movies (until Hermione), plus really despising the texture of wet hair outside of water, plus the parentals always keeping it long, equals a very irritable and resentful relationship with the body's hair for the majority of our collective life. (Which I'm sure contributed to our overall body dysphoria, but that's a topic for another post.)
Then CJ got frustrated and adventurous enough to start considering cutting some of it off and having short hair for the first time in our conscious history, but before doing so, she started researching hair care and how to manage short hair. Through that, she discovered the glory of wide-tooth combs and facepalmed pretty hard at how simple the answer was, when it came to taming the rabid frizzball that had been pissing us off all our lives.
We had just given up on doing anything with the hair beyond confining it to a ponytail since childhood, because we just figured we had ridiculous super-frizzy 80s hair and that was that. The mother unit didn't know either, and it hadn't occurred to us to look up anything about hair care ourselves before that point. By the time we had access to Google in 6th grade (#90sfeels), we had already gotten fed up with having stereotypically "girly" things shoved down our throats.
But, CJ was exploring femininity at the time, and was thus the one to discover that a wide-tooth comb and conditioner could transform our frizzpoof into very pretty curls. In fact, I can probably find some pictures.. Ah, yes.
Here's one of Zinnia that CJ did in 2012, when Zin's hair was the same as the body's. Before that, when the hair was a mass of frizz, we used to draw it as basically a spiky poof.
Damn, what an old selfie, heh, ten years this August.. But yeah, we had no idea how else to draw it, so when we translated our frizzness into our cartoony style, it generally ended up just looking spiky. (Deyva's hair is made of yarn so this doesn't apply there, btw.)
Then, a few months ago, when the hair started getting annoyingly long and we didn't need to keep it work-appropriate anymore, Sy, Renata, and I chopped off a bunch of it.
Originally Sy cut the body's hair shorter than I wanted. She and Renata kept theirs that way personally, but I don't have a picture of it so just imagine Zinnia's hair stopping closer to her chin and that's about it. Renata and I then cut the body's hair again, so it currently (March 10, 2015) has longer curls in front, and the back looks a lot like the top of Meenah's in Homestuck. Currently I think CJ and I are the only ones whose hairstyle matches the body, though hers is blonde.
Super-cartoony simplified art style in this pic because we haven't done a decent one yet, but you get the idea.
So.. Yeah, that's about where we are with hair right now.
"Haircut season" (aka the days or weeks we spend cutting off bits of the body's hair until we're satisfied with its shape), tends to be a time of change and such, big surprise. For us, it tends to occur around mid-June or late January, because shitty anniversary reasons.
I might get into more detail on that someday, but today is not that day.
We have very sensitive hearing - and we can also often end up using more volume than we realize.
This is because we pick up on very quiet background noise that many people aren't as sensitive to, and we try to adjust our speaking volume to compensate for the background noise. We're usually extremely quiet, so if we don't get louder when background noise is present, people end up asking us to repeat ourselves a lot, which gets annoying.
Because that background noise is louder to us than it is for most others [one of the reasons we have to wear our headphones on the rare occasion we make it out to Walmart], we can sometimes overcompensate when trying to be heard speaking over it. Because we can adjust very quickly to certain new states, and aren't very closely connected to the body overall, we often won't notice if our adjusted volume is more than necessary for other people to be able to hear us over the background noise in any given location.
This seems to happen especially often when air-conditioning or a ceiling fan is a factor, creating white noise; we tend to quickly adjust to it and tune out, then overcompensate for it when we try to speak over it, having grown accustomed to the new baseline volume of the environment.
It also occurs in relation to sinus issues, of which we have many. Depending on how congested we are and how the drainage stuff goes, that also impacts our overall volume. Occasionally our ears will suddenly pop and we’ll realize the world had sounded a bit more muffled before that point, without us noticing it, so we’d probably been louder than we realized while everything sounded muted to us. We’ve had chronic allergy shit going on since birth and nobody noticed until our twenties when the full-blown laryngopharyngeal reflux kicked in. (We spent four months bouncing between the ER and specialists, constantly nauseated and frequently puking up mucus, until the allergist lady was the one to figure out what was going on.) So yeah, I guess we just kind of got used to it from an early age.
On the other hand, when we're particularly depersonalized, derealized, and/or otherwise dissociated, we can barely hear anything at all from the outerverse, and if we do it's blurred and disjointed. We can rarely talk during those moments, but when we do, it tends to be extremely quiet.
