banging my head against a wall

I need the advice of you, my three (four?) loyal readers. I have to figure out what to do with my hair. It is short now, but I want it to be long. The problem is the prolonged icky-gross stage it has to go through in order to BECOME long. And then there is the question of the bangs. My whole head is one giant clusterfuck.

In the beginning, Cameron had nice long hair that she had been growing all her life:



Let's ignore the fact that I looked better when I had long hair by default, because I was not yet horrendously fat as I am now. Wasn't my hair pretty?

Then, junior year at Northwestern, I did the unthinkable and cut it:



From there it went through many iterations, including Horrifically Short (when I was in Tennessee and Europe),



Getting Too Long,



and Just Right:


(may be hard to tell with the hat on, but the length was perfect)

I've done middle parts and side parts, and I think the side part is better in general, but then that gets complicated when I have bangs, because my bangs don't look all nice and dramatic like most people's bangs, they look short and dweeby unless they are cut JUST SO and have grown out to JUST THE RIGHT LENGTH. It's nice when they look good:


(and even here i'm not sure if they look good)

But usually they end up looking like this, apparently unsure what side of my head they belong to:



And no one wants bangs that look like that! Ugh! So I think I should get rid of the bangs, because I'm not one to get my hair cut enough to keep them up... but as for growing my hair out, what do you guys think? Should I resign myself to being in the Getting Too Long stage for the next 6 months or so until it actually becomes legitimately Longish?

For the record, this is a pretty acurate representation of where it is now:



HELP! It is a daily source of annoyance.