One of the many fun things about rewatching old Vlogbrothers videos has been finding the seemingly unimportant videos that actually serve as key entires into Nerdfighter lore. Today's video introduces The Puff for the first time, something the ever-growing online community has come to use to determine how stressed John Green is at any given moment just by looking at his hair.
Welcome back to Vlogbrothers Rewatch! This is an ongoing series of articles in which I document my journey through rewatching every Vlogbrothers video on their YouTube channel and provide my commentary and make connections between the early and modern social internet. Using this playlist, I'm rewatching everything in chronological order, one video at a time, starting from the very beginning.
According to this video -- the official origin story of The Puff and its levels -- the more stressed John is, the more he unintentionally puffs up his hair in response. Therefore, when he's under a lot of stress -- such as he was while house hunting, which I can certainly relate to -- his hair appears much puffier. Or, in his words, the puff levels significantly increase.
A similar thing happens to me, for the record -- except when I'm stressed, I don't always take the time to fully condition my curly hair and it sort of just looks like I walked through a tornado, but of course John doesn't get judged for his puff like some of us (me) might.
You, too, would likely be experiencing high levels of stress if you found yourself trapped in an airport, on a (video uploading) deadline, and forced to shop for a house at such a rapid pace that you feel you might almost rather just live in a box. (Totally not speaking from experience here.)
Thankfully a house does eventually get found, because they're still living somewhere in the same city today, all these years later.