Hair Fail

I had a brunch meeting with a colleague in Rondebosch today, and since I was already there, I thought I'd look for bookstores around UCT, and then I thought maybe I'd grab lunch, and then I decided to stock up on toiletries, and then I realized I should probably go grocery shopping, and then I saw a haircut place and was like, "well, my hair is getting shaggy, and I might as well get it cut since I'm out and about." (If you give a mouse a cookie, etc., etc.)

I'm usually not at all uptight about my hair. My hair has been the color of a fire truck, it's had blond highlights that made me look like a sick leopard, and once, I insisted that if I was going to go as Batman for Halloween, I had to dye my hair black so I would look like Bruce Wayne when out of costume. (I was a little Type A, even as a child.) Generally, I can cut my hair really short or let it grow freakishly long and out of control, as David somehow tricked me into doing last year by telling me how great it was that I looked like a lion. It looks fine at pretty much every stage in between. I'm not that picky about these things.

HOWEVER.

Until today, I just assumed that haircuts done entirely with clippers only existed in prisons, the military, and Britney Spears' home when she's going through a rough patch. I was like, "I just want like a half inch off the top, and to get rid of the shaggy parts around my sideburns." And then the guy nodded thoughtfully, pulled out the clippers, and shaved a giant stripe down the side of my scalp. After three or four of these, he was like, "does that look okay?" and I looked up and thought, no, no, that most certainly does not, but you can't really ask him to paste your hair back on your head at that point. You're basically in it to win it, and I decided that whatever lofty and opaque vision he had for my head would probably be better than whatever bastardized compromise he'd have to make if I flipped out. So I was like, yeah, fine, but that's about as short as I want it.

And then he proceeded to shave off pretty much all of my hair - which, when you think about it, is probably about all you can do when you cut hair by running a clipper over someone's head. As Anna put it, the upside is that I probably won't need another haircut this year. The downside is that the gel I bought beforehand is probably the worst $10 I've ever spent in my life.