Objectify This!

Curious. I spent fifty years of my life with auburn hair...okay, brunette led to auburn. They were in the same general field of the spectrum.
After I passed the half-decade mark I felt that it was time to stop exposing my scalp (and therefore my entire ecosystem) to the extreme toxicity of hair color every six weeks.
So I surrendered to my dominant color: white. But while white is the mode 'o day on the first half of my head, the rest of the follicles did not get the memo. A lot of those guys are still living in the land of the lost. Which means I still have to add some color now and then....and while I'd love to possess the beautiful white mane sported by Emmy Lou Harris, I am forced to live out these days of my life a blonder shade of pale.
It is odd.
Blond jokes just don't register.
I hear them through brunette ears. It takes a minute to realize they are at my expense.
And just recently I was at an event at which a man, a big fat bossy man....made a comment about me via my hair. He had met me before and apparently the meeting was fresher in his mind than mine. And when I asked his name (for the second time...ouch!) he snidely eluded to me as an emissary of my unforgettable ash-blond apogee.
Excuse me!
Remember me for my brains.
Remember me for my wit.
Remember me for my amazing ability to communicate.
But do not objectify me.
I'm not a square on the palette. I'm an amazing human evolving from giddy girl to grounded grandma and I am not going to be put into your tiny mind's pigeon hole labeled women with blond hair.
If I have but one life to live, let me live it as a...woman with her own sense of self. Not as one you have created via your limited ability to grow.
I took feminist studies and thought those girls were a bit radical. But guess what! You, sir, have tilted the scale to their favor
So objectify that, buddy boy. . I am more than the sum of my beautician's ventures into creativity.
I am my own woman.
And you are a jerk.
Oh, and God bless you, Mr. Jerk. I am a pastor, after all.