I got my hair cut today, which is something that I’ve always
been bad at doing. I am not talking
about cutting my own hair, which I’ve never tried to do. Perhaps I’d be brilliant at that, but what
I’m talking about is going to a salon and paying for a haircut. When they ask how I want my hair to be,
I never know what to say. They
don’t like it when I answer, “I would like you to cut it well”, but this is my
only preference. A stylist in the
US once scolded me when she asked if I wanted my sides to be a two or a three
and I couldn’t answer. She
expressed frustration and amazement that I had been getting my hair cut for my
entire life without actually understanding how it was being cut, but this is
exactly why I go to a salon. So I don’t
need to know these things! I
understand how the manual transmission in my car works, but don’t know what two
and three mean in relation to hair length. This seems right to me. When she gets her car fixed, I wonder if her mechanic yells
at her for not understanding how engines work.
 |
| Hair? What hair? |
Because of this, getting a haircut isn’t something that crosses
my mind until my girlfriend gets frustrated with it and orders me to have a
large portion of it removed, which usually happens about every 3-5 months. I am very thankful she does this,
because without her I’d probably look like a caveman, and after a few years be
crushed under the weight of my out of control and unkempt hair. After all, it is her that has to look
at my hair every day, not me. I
only ever see it on facebook and occasionally when I bend down in front of my
mirror to check if it is still there.
As my hair guardian, she informed me about a week ago that it was time
for me to get a haircut. She would
usually go with me, but was much too busy with her job and studies, and
suggested that I find somewhere near my house and go by myself.
I went to a nice looking salon, had my hair washed, and sat
down in one of the chairs. In
front of me was a stack of Japanese magazines filled with pictures of men with
Dragon Ball Z-esque hairstyles my flimsy pathetic western hair would never be
able to pull off. Eventually my
stylist walked over and we had a short and confusing conversation, which
concluded with us agreeing that my hair should be “shorter”. After a minute or so of thinking,
she started to clip away at the front.
Almost immediately small pieces of hair drifted through the air and
stuck themselves all over my face.
This day had been very humid and my skin must have been a
bit greasy, because in no time there were tiny hairs tickling every exposed skin
cell on my body. I tried to find a
way to get my hands to my face, but they were under two big robes, which I was
now sitting on. It would have been
impossible to get them out without some serious movement. With scissors violently massacring the
hair in front of my eyes I decided it would be a bad idea to move around too
much. I tried to think of how to
say my face itches in Cantonese, but don’t know how to say “itches” or
“face. I tried to curl my bottom
lip and blow up at cheeks, but as soon as I tried the stylist cut off a large
chunk of my hair, which I ended up blowing right up my nose. At this point my nerves exploded. It was too much! I started wiggling like a crazy person and
pulling at the sides of my robes until I managed to free an arm and send it
wiping frantically at my face.
It felt damn good to clear the hair from my nose, but as
soon as it was gone, I started to miss the itching. I had been sitting in this chair for much longer than I
would have liked, and it was my only form of entertainment. Without it I was left with only the
soft sound of clicking scissors and Cantonese pop music in the background to
keep me occupied. I was
bored. I couldn’t even look at
anything because my glasses had been removed. I spent a few minutes staring at an odd looking blur trying
to figure out what it was, when it suddenly moved. It must have been a person, confused about why I wouldn’t
stop looking at them. Quickly
looking away would be a nonverbal admission to staring, so I kept looking and
pretended like I was looking at something interesting behind them, which there
very well may have been.
Eventually I let my eyes drift up to the lights. After a few seconds I closed them and
watched the phosphenes where the lights had been dance around in my
retinas. I was so very bored.
I opened my eyes again and tried to focus on my blurry
reflection. My mind drifted, then
drifted away from where it had already drifted. I thought about how much of a problem it is that I let my
mind drift so far away when I’m bored. I reach a state of comatose, where my
eyes are open, but my mind is so distracted that I am no longer aware of my
reality. I thought about this so
deeply that I completely slipped out of reality. My haircut was now only a faint whisper in the back of my
mind, one that I could no longer connect with anything. Why was I thinking about haircuts? I hate haircuts. I decided to think about why I hated
haircuts.
I guess it all started when I was a baby and my father would
cut my hair. Very early in my life
I remember being terrified of electric clippers. It is hard to explain to a 3 year old why something that can
cut your hair won’t also cut your entire head off. At that age I saw no difference between hair clippers and
chainsaws. The few times that I
was calm enough for my father to actually use them, it would all quickly end
with tears the moment they touched the skin on my head. I still hate the vibration that runs
through my whole skull when clippers touch my head. I remember thinking it would liquefy my brain and shake my
teeth out. It was because of this
irrational fear that my father was forced to cut my hair with scissors.
The problem with this was that I was not a patient or
particularly well behaved child.
Even today, I’m often scolded for being unable to sit still. I should probably still be required to
use safety scissors, but I even cut myself with those once trying to see if
they were really safer than normal scissors. Anyway, I remember one haircut where I was being especially
fidgety. My father went to clip
some hairs on the side of my head just as I twisted around to look at something. He ended up chopping a bit of my right
ear off. At this exact moment I
traded my irrational fear of hair clippers for a perfectly rational fear of people
putting sharp objects near my face.
The memory of my ear being cut sent chills through my body and made me
literally jump back into reality, where the hairstylist almost cut my ear as a
result of my sudden twitch.
After a few more clips of her scissors she walked off to
grab a mirror and show me the final results. While she was gone I took out my phone and checked the
time. She had been cutting my hair
for an hour and a half! I reached
for my glasses and looked at myself in the mirror. My hair was more organized around me ears, but otherwise, looked
exactly the same! What the hell had
she been doing all of this time?
I thought about asking for it to be shorter, but at this rate it would
take days to get it to the length I wanted, and I would probably starve to
death or die of boredom before they finished. I decided that the best thing I could do was pay them to let
them release me from this chair so I could go home. It felt more like paying for my release than paying for a haircut. I hate this.
