Oh, If You Want to Talk SENSE...

I've long aspired to be crotchety and cantankerous, which largely involves complaining about kids these days with their weird hairstyles and their terrible music, but an annoyingly sensible post on no cookies for me points out that this is not a very good attitude to take for most people, considering most people were themselves kids with weird hairstyles and terrible music not so long ago.

Not me, of course. My hair was always perfectly practical, and the music I liked was only the best music ever. But the rest of you should cut kids these days some slack.

Sigh...OK, I admit it, my hair was weird. The truth is, there were no glorious olden days, good people. 

Our ancestors did their best, no doubt, but they weren't in possession of some special ancient wisdom that has since been lost (they produced us, after all, presumably by doing the best they could).

The olden days were just days. For many reasons, we're glad they're gone.

So why do we think kids those days were in possession of some special ancient good-kidness that kids these days are lacking? I suppose it's just crotchety cantankerousness.

Boy Howdy

My hair was quite short for a while, and lately it's been growing out. Not quite shoulder length, but it's getting there. So a couple of people lately have said "I didn't recognize you with long hair" or "did you used to have short hair?"

I am not used to being a person who used to have short hair.

I used to have looooooooooong hair. It's still short now! But these are students who never saw it when it was really long, so of course they just remember that it used to be even shorter.

You go and do something radically different, and it shakes everything up, until it becomes normal. That's my "yup" of the day.

Bad Idea! Let's Do It!

You can't always go around thinking it's a bad idea to do something, just because it's not a very good idea.

Also, procrastination is a wonderful way to come up with interesting ideas for things that you could be doing besides writing a novel.

For example, I decided I should probably cut my hair. With sewing scissors. Without getting the hair wet first. In the bedroom, over the carpeted floor. Without a towel over my shoulders or anything. 

Are you aware that hair clippings are really itchy when they get inside your clothes? Are you perhaps familiar with the term "hair shirt" in the context of a somewhat uncomfortable garment? Me too! 

Oh well.

I just wanted to trim the back a bit, it's not like a major style shift, so no biggie. It was starting to look a little mullet-y, because the back was getting quite a bit longer than the sides, and I decided the back should come off. Immediately. Just to about the same length as the sides, you know. Again, no biggie. 

I've never cut hair before, and don't have any hair-cutting scissors, but whatever. My hair is only really thick and slightly wavy, so it's not as if there's anything to throw off the cutting line of an inexperienced hand using sewing scissors and no mirror.

And you know what, it turned out OK. 

I mean, no one would think I went to a professional, but I don't think anyone's going to notice that I just horribly mangled my own head, either. I think it made a not-big-enough difference that anyone else will even notice, but got rid of the shaggy-looking tail that was starting to bug me.

Win!

So remember, just because it's not a good idea, doesn't mean you shouldn't do something. 

Actually it does mean that, but it doesn't mean you won't get lucky and have it turn out OK after all. 

Perhaps this is a good lesson for writing.

Novelty! Again

I've never dyed my hair, but reading this Slate piece about the repeated surging and fading of pink as a popular hair color, suddenly I'm tempted.

The common wisdom is (or at least it was when I was young) that redheads shouldn't wear pink, but I think that's supposed to be because it clashes with the shade of the hair. Surely if you just turn the hair itself pink, there's no concern.

Redheads tend to be pale and pinkish of skin tone anyway, so pinkness of hair should go very nicely. As long as it doesn't all blur together. Flesh-colored hair, on a pinkish-fleshed person, isn't an especially pretty mental picture. A sort of interesting one, I guess.

But the right shade of pink...that could really liven things up at work. Finally cement my reputation as someone on the cutting edge of style.

In which case I'd better not do it, that would just be disorienting.

To The Contrary

Like many of us, I have a touch of the cantankerous.

You know how sometimes, when everyone thinks you should do something, you sort of don't do it on purpose just to be ornery? Even if it might be a perfectly reasonable thing to do?

Well, I used to have this super long hair, which everyone would always notice (it was pretty noticeable--I mean, most people don't have a red braid three feet long, and I recognize that). Then I cut my hair, and pretty much everyone who'd ever seen me before noticed the change (it was a marked change in appearance, and I also recognize that).

The thing I found, though, is that about half the people who've said anything about it have asked "did you donate it?"

Which, fine, it's a fair question. You're always hearing about people with long hair cutting it off and donating it to some worthy cause. It's this thing that people do.

It has a special social resonance, maybe, because girls and women especially tend to do it, and we still have a bit of this idea of hair as a woman's 'crowning glory,' and so there's a sense that you're really making a personal sacrifice, you're surrendering part of your own beauty (which, for a woman, is obviously among your most precious assets!) to help someone who doesn't have that beauty.

Regardless of the reasoning, it remains this thing that people do, and based on the number of times I've been asked, it's this thing that people are expected to do, if they have long hair and happen to get it cut.

But no, I didn't. And at this point, if only because so many people have asked me that question, I totally never will.

The contrariness kicks in!

So I say "no, I didn't," and more than once people have said, in a kind of 'tut tut' tone, something like "you could make a lot of wigs for children with that much hair."

Then, despite general stubborn orneriness, I admit to beginning to wonder whether I'm a horrible person for not sending my severed braid to charity.

Does growing long hair confer an obligation to give it away if you ever cut it? What if you just kind of wanted to keep it as a souvenir?

Selfish and wrong?

I guess I have to say no. Otherwise, the ability to grow long hair would logically confer an obligation to actually do so, and to then cut it and give it away. Because you could be giving someone the gift of beauty, so why aren't you?

And then, logically, we reach the conclusion that if

you are capable of aiding someone in some way 

+ 

you don't do it 

= 

you're a bad person

then almost everyone is probably evil.

Certainly everyone who hangs out on the internet a lot is probably evil, but we already knew that.

Finally I decided this train of thought was getting way too much like a Seinfeld episode, where someone spends days worrying and fretting and chewing over some real or imagined slight or moral failing or character flaw until you realize once again how shallow and self-obsessed everyone involved is. The end.

I should just move on from the hunk of hair already and do something useful with my time, is what I concluded.

Something like cataloging! Which, I believe, is precious work that is very well served by cantankerousness.

.

Go Ahead, Shave Those Eyebrows

GruntDoc asks a question that will surely be of deep interest to all eyebrow-possessing persons: is it true that if you shave off an eyebrow, it will never grow back?

Or is that an Emergency Medicine myth?

Commenters seem to concur that it's mostly a myth, pointing out that lots of people pluck their eyebrows on a regular basis and wouldn't need to do so if hair, once removed, never grew back.

I have no input into emergency medicine, but do recall being told, as a child, that if you plucked your eyebrows they would eventually not grow back. This was given as the explanation of why some of my great aunts had to draw theirs on with pencil.

So maybe eyebrow removal can become permanent after long periods of time, as you get older and hair gets thinner anyway. But apparently we need not worry about shaving them off occasionally.

Good thing, because that was at the top of my weekend to-do list. Shave them off, and draw them back on really close to my eyes, so I look stern and forbidding.

That'll cut down on the questions at the reference desk and leave me more time to assign call numbers.

.

Ooog...Full of Ice Cream...

Sometimes, of a slow evening, it is important to watch Futurama* DVDs and attempt to eat one's weight in ice cream. I'm pretty sure Ben and Jerry's is health food.

Then later, one must brush one's hair.

Yeah, I got nothin.' I'm still trying to get caught up on blogs, and work, and email.

*Tonight's quote: "I'm saving my neck for a rich, handsome Dracula!"

Why It's Not Enough to Just Suck

With a title like that, a post could be about many things. What it is actually about is vacuums. Vacuums, and hair.

Here's the thing. I am a long-haired person, and, much like any long-haired animal, I tend to shed. (Short-haired ones shed too, but they don't get as much grief for it because it's not as noticeable. Life is cruel.) If there is ever a question about whether I actually lived in this apartment, rather than simply signing my name to the lease for 7 years, a discerning person will brush the carpet and find that yes, I dwelt here, and, judging from the quantity of my hair on the floor, possibly also went bald here. (Not yet--but who knows?)

My vacuum is a suction-only model: it does not have those little spinning brushes to scrub up the carpet. It sucks very well: every time I vacuum, I empty an impressive quantity of general fine-particle dirt from the canister. It's a good little vacuum. But it does not touch the hair.

A long hair, twisted into the carpet, is immune to suction. This is a wad of hair I collected from the carpet after a thorough vacuuming this afternoon.


The Wad o' Hair is shown next to my feet for scale. And I have large feet. Yes, I'm a rapidly-shedding long-haired weirdo with giant feet who posts photographic evidence of my untidy home on the internet. This is the brave new world, baby.

Anyway, as you can see, merely sucking just doesn't do it. The thing is, merely sucking is actually an improvement over the last vacuum we had, which was equipped with those aforementioned little roller brushes. Those touched the hair, all right, but they were no match for it.

Hair would wind up wrapped around those brushes thickly enough to immobilize them, which not only prevented them from effectively stirring up things for the suction to draw into the bag, but which also produced a strong smell of burning rubber. We burnt through a couple of belts on those things, trying to vacuum up my hair.

You pretty much had to stop the motor every few seconds to cut coils of hair off the roller brushes. And it still smelt like burning rubber every time we vacuumed. (Now there's an incentive to tidy up. It'll take an hour per room and stink up the place! I can't wait!)

So suction-only, even though it isn't enough to pick up the hair, is in fact a better approach. It's not really any less effective at dealing with hair, and it doesn't take as long, because you don't have to carry a pair of scissors while you vacuum and pause every few feet.

In closing, the hair has pretty much won on this.

I'm thinking the best option will be to make sure our next place has hardwood floors throughout. It's all about the terrain: hair can't beat a good broom on a smooth surface!