Why I Don't Like Haircuts

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?

Don’t get me wrong. I love having nice hair!  I can’t stress that enough!  However, I hate taking care of it.  I should be thrilled to have such lovely hair at my age, but I just can’t figure out how to make it look good.  I’ve tried everything, but I’m hopelessly bad at styling it, and usually just end up having to take a second shower just to wash out any gel I may have tried to use.  It is especially difficult for me here in Hong Kong.  My bathroom was designed for somebody at least a foot shorter than me, and to even see my hair in my mirror I have to bend down uncomfortably far.  I guess it has become an “out of sight out of mind” situation, and I sometimes just forget that it is there.  

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.