I'm abnormal. I didn't learn this through my friends, family or pet rock who know and love me and can accurately claim that I deviate from some bunch of norms somewhere. I learned this through my shampoo.

I have these thick, unruly, Eastern European, Jewish curls. For most of my life I settled for frizz, while hankering for straight hair. You curly comrades know what I'm talking about. We blow dried, straightened and stifled our wild strands in buns as tight as Usher's bum. Then, all the hair care whizzes of the world discovered those of us sick of bonding with our blow dryers. For the first time, we were allowed to embrace our curls. How special we felt with our hydra-proteins and minerals for silkiness and elasticity! Long live the curl!

While folks with normal hair get to use shampoos that maintain healthy shine and balance, we unconventional head-cases get to glop on serums that promise fortification and renewal.The products I revere so dearly happen to be for "curly" hair, but I've also noticed a recent surfeit of specialized lines for "thinning" and "greasy" and "dry" hair. Despite the fun of discovering that potent product that liberates me from the ubiquitous frizz-concealing ponytail, it irks me that there's some golden standard of "normal," which those of us with fluffy, oily, balding heads will never attain. The question remains: What is normal hair, and who really has it? It seems that a) it's straight, b) it's shiny and c) it's strong. Strong hair? Yeah. Makes no sense to me either. I'd even juncture to add that in our culture, normal hair is definitely d) blonde. Now let us address the foremost aspect of the normal hair equation -- straightness. Gee, who has straight hair? From looking around the Passover Seder table, I can tell you most Jews don't. Most African Americans don't either. Neither do most Chicanas or Latinos. I'd dare say that roughly 75 percent of the (naturally) straight haired people I know happen to own at least one Santa sweater and can trace their heritage to England or Ireland or some other Western European land. America, it seems, is a country of many types of hair, but still, the "normal" hair belongs to those who are white and European, which makes the rest of us "abnormal" or "ethnic."

What the hair product companies are forgetting is that there is no such thing as normal. You know that line in the trailer for the Harry Potter movie: "There's no such thing as magic"? It's like that. Obvious, yes, but I'm going to write it again and you're going to read it again: There is no such thing as normal. Normal in relation to what?

If someone wants to call me ethnic because I have a big nose and will be fasting come Yom Kippur tonight, fine. I am ethnic. Heck, we're all ethnic. Yes, "normal" hair is ethnic too. Newsflash: Being white is ethnic. Having straight blonde hair is having ethnic hair. If you come from an ethnicity -- any ethnicity -- you, my dear, are ethnic. Deal.

Really, I appreciate all these curl-specific products. They make me look better than if I rubbed a bar of Dial atop my head. It sucks to be exploited as a target consumer group, but at the same time, it's kind of nice to be recognized as existing. The solution isn't so complicated. It's that these same businesses marketing overpriced, kink-reducing remedies for "unmanageable hair" to me and my fellow curly guys and gals stop selling products for "normal" hair, and start labeling those goods: "For straight hair that's already so perfect it doesn't need enrichment or denigrating diction we use to deceive those people with curly hair that their heads are somehow inferior to your strangely straight (yet ethnic in your own special, culturally dominant way) head." Take a breather after that clunker. So, who's abnormal now? Well, all of us, I guess.