A strange observation I've made over the course of the past 7.5632 years: in the States, when I get a haircut everyone mentions it, usually in a friendly, neutral way, just commenting on the fact of me having gotten sheared. "You got a haircut!", for example, or the ever popular, "I see you got your ears lowered." (And may the person who came up with that second bit of hilarity be condemned to spending eternity listening to third-rate imitations of the 'Who's on first' routine, performed by depressed, shitfaced, slurry-voiced Shecky Green clones.) Here nobody says a thing. And I mean that literally: no one. says. a freakin'. thing. Which seems mighty interesting to me given how ubiquitous hair joints are in this part of the world. They are, and I am not exaggerating, everywhere, at least here in the capital. And my tendency to go from fairly long, abundant to drastically short hair makes the silence even more interesting to me.
I mentioned all that (minus the Shecky Green bit) to a Spanish friend this morning. She couldn't, she said in response, speak for the male half of the city's population, but when it comes to the female side haircuts are a delicate issue. Meaning, she continued, cuts dished out at local joints often turn out either extremely well or extremely, extremely not so very well. And there is no telling how a given individual might feel about what she wound up with, so that mentioning it might produce any number of possible volcanic reactions.
All of which I can understand, given my experience here when it comes to the realm of clip jobs. The word I would pick to describe the overall sitch: checkered. Some cuts have been okay, far too many others have veered off in disastrous directions. In every case, I've had to return directly home, glom onto a pair of hair scissors and repair/modify the top of my adorable head. These last few months, I've had the good fortune of finding a woman at a shop right here in the barrio who has done a pretty decent job. A nice person who takes her time, does the work with care, then washes my hair afterward, giving me a head massage in the process that is just about worth the price of admission all by itself.
The most recent cut? Last Saturday morning, me trading a head of abundant hair (just getting long enough to develop a rebellious, uncooperative mind of its own) for a shockingly short cut. A cut I made even shorter when adjusting it at home afterward, me still in an alpha state from the head massage, so that I didn't really get how radically truncated my hair had become in the space of 30 fleeting minutes. Until the next morning when I shuffled blearily into the bathroom, flicked on the light and nearly screamed at what I saw in the mirror. (Not that it's a horror show -- it turned out pretty darned well, I say in all feigned modesty. It's just a massive change.) And despite all that, despite the jarring contrast in my look from one day to the next, no one here has said a thing about the change. Not a peep, not one errant syllable. Everyone has maintained a level of discretion that is kind of mind-boggling in its relentless politeness. A discretion continued in this morning's conversation about all this, even after I gave my friend the opening of bringing the topic up and commenting on it myself.
[continued in next entry]
España, te quiero
rws 12:01 PM [+]
Comments:
Cutting one's own hair can never turn out well? I do it all the time, from repairing cuts performed by others to giving myself an overall trim -- they almost always turn out well. The cardiac exercise this time was stricly a matter of contrast shock. (And how! Yowza!)
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