I was washing my hair a little while ago and remembered a moment from preschool. A few of my classmates were playing pretend and deciding upon the characters they would be embodying.
I, of course, insisted that I would be a knight. The girls had no problem with this - they liked being picked up and carried back and forth across puddles, which was my go-to chivalrous feat of strength whenever we played pretend games like that. More importantly, it meant less competition for the coveted role of princess.
They went back and forth arguing about who should be the princess during the game, each one making a case for why she deserved the gig. Somehow they decided that the princess must be the girl with the longest hair - infallible logic. They ended up deciding that the only fair way to judge hair length was by pulling out a single strand from each of their heads and comparing the length… which piqued the interest of another classmate, a little black girl with coily curls, whose single strand of hair turned out to be at least a third longer than anyone else’s straight hairs when she triumphantly stretched it out. This confused and enraged one of the white would-be princesses, but I had read enough fantasy to know that it was exactly the kind of unexpected hero sword-in-the-stone twist that should determine the One True Princess and the rightful heir to my knightly services.
I don’t remember how the game panned out, but at some point there were several princesses and someone decided to upgrade to queen.
i was the exact opposite bc I grew up in an old old house that always needed work and when I moved into my first apartment the landlord told me the bathroom still needed caulked and I didnt understand that meant she was sending someone to DO that so I caulked the entire bathroom and when the guy got there he went “did you……..Do This” and I was like “yes, and why, and who are you”
