15. Hair

I don't have a lot to talk about this week. Things seem to be holding their breath for the coming week. There's Christmas, which seems to be a much more understated deal here than in the US. Can I say much more understated? Should I just say less stated? Hmm. Nope. That must be one of those words where we've lost the positive. Nobody's plussed anymore, and maybe it's because we use sequiturs all the time that we don't talk about them.

Oh wait. The opposite of understate is overstate. Which are extremes of simply stating something. Hmm again. See, if I was going to be really, like, high-quality about this post, I would delete all this since I'm not drawing attention to something interesting. You know, stuff like pointing out that scientists do in fact know how bumblebees fly. See, Antoine Magnan, a French entemologist in the 1930s, after doing research and calculations and stuff, said that bumblebees shouldn't be able to fly and put it in a book. Then he checked his math, realized that he'd goofed, reworked the...things, and figured out that it made perfect sense for bumblebees to be able to fly.

Wrong Bumblebee. And he couldn't fly.

But...Christmas is coming. A friend of ours is leaving town for a week or so and we'll be keeping his place just south of Paris, out in the woods somewhere, safe and warm. That should be fun. Then Megan's parents are coming for about a week over New Year's, during which time we're going to freaking Marrakesh. Yeah. In Morocco. That'll keep me in blog material for a while. But for now...nothing. So let's talk about my hair.

Another thing. I think the ads that you see on the sidebars are determined, in some way, by what I'm talking about. Now, when I set this thing up, I expected 1: that maybe I would make money at it. It turns out to be more complicated than that, and involves me needing to have an American phone number...never mind. But 2: I wanted it to be full of cool ads that you guys would like, like Star Wars t-shirts or places to buy chain mail. You know, useful things. Not asphalt sales (to name one). You may have noticed that I use lots of images about those kinds of things, but I don't say, “Here's a picture of Darth Vader.” Because everyone knows who Darth Vader is. And I guess that the disembodied cyborg brains in jars that Google uses to sift through my blog to decide what ads are most relevant may be awful in aspect and staggering in power, but they can't tell that pictures of spaceships means they should put up ads that entice you to buy the Battlestar Galactica DVD set. So from time to time in this entry I'm going to say something like, “The Empire Strikes Back may be the best of the Star Wars films, but that lightsaber fight at the end of Revenge of the Sith was pretty cool, too.”

By the way. This is the singlemost bestest Star Wars trailer. Ever.

Your job, my dear ones, is to see if the ads are affected and are, in fact, cool. Feel free to tell me in the comments section or on my Facebook page what they were. I'm intrigued to see if I can control my ad content. Now. Back to the hair.

Somewhen this past Spring I didn't go get my hair cut when it was due. It wasn't a conscious decision; there was a lot of laziness involved. And then I ran into one of the teachers I work with at Emerson junior high whom I had not seen in a while, and she oohed and ahhed about how long my hair was. In a favorable way. Someone else told me I looked a bit like George Gordon, Lord Byron, which I took to be awesome at the time (as it was intended) although now as I look at pictures of him online he doesn't look like nearly the wild-man hearthrob I'd always heard him to be.

"Let's see...'She walks in beauty, like the night...' What? Again? Damn, woman!
 I just gave you sweet loving five minutes ago! Very well. Damn this sexy hair!"

Hmm. Plus Megan, ultimately the person whose approval I need the most, said she liked it. So I continued to keep my hairs safe from the blade. By blade I am not, by the by, referring to Narsil. Narsil, of course, was the sword of Dunedain kings, and was wielded by Elendil and then his son Isildur when they fought alongside the elves at the end of the Second Age against Sauron. It was shattered , and the pieces lay in state at Rivendell until they were reforged into Anduril so that Aragorn might wield it and claim his right to the throne of Gondor. Silmarillion. Lord of the Rings. J.R. R. Tokien.

See, this is where Melkor and Ungoliant are destroying Telperion and  Laurelin,
the Two Trees of Valinor.  Their dying fruit and flower were turned into the
 sun and the moon.  Of the trees, not the meanies. They have other stories.

By the time Summer was in full swing and we were desultorily preparing to leave for France, the jokes about my hair being very French had convinced me to let it just keep growing. I say desultorily because we didn't want to have to pack our entire place in the last week, but we didn't want to pack things we wanted/needed too early, so our packing went in fits and starts as we would pack books into boxes, then eventually cull the clothes we wanted to bring from those we would leave behind, and so on. Once we got sick of living with stacks of boxes I got around to renting a storage space. Not too early, because again we weren't moving until September and didn't want to pay for the thing any longer than necessary. The heat in Davis in late summer almost convinced me several times to go get shorn. Hair is a very good insulator. But I didn't. By this point it had been growing for almost five months, and it was longer than it had been since before I moved out west.

Those of you who knew me in college remember when my hair was long. I'd started growing it out when I was fifteen. I wish I still had the picture of me with a mullet on my annual pass to Disneyland. It's terrible. By the time I was in college the front had caught up with the back and I looked more hippie than redneck.

Oh. Just so you know, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was, in my opinion, the best of the Star Trek series. I just thought I'd mention that. Now, my hair wasn't the longest you've seen, nor was it the most luxurious, but it got me the role of Gandalf in UNCA's musical version of the Hobbit and I loved it very much.

The beard was accomplished through special barber steroids.

I cut it off the summer after I graduated. Seemed the thing to do. With a couple exceptions of laziness early on, it's been short since 1998.

In 2006 I was teaching at Wooster high school in Reno, Nevada. I went a couple weeks without shaving, decided I liked it, and have had a beard since then. I tend to keep it pretty short with a set of clippers. They've got lots of different guard lengths, and for a while I was using that to cut my hair, too. Even though a trip to Supercuts only cost me $12, it was free to put the purple guard on and just buzz around on my head for a while, then ask Megan to come and touch it up. There were some mishaps. See, there are two purple guards, one dark and one light. The light purple one is 1/4” and the dark one is 3/4”. I use the 3/4”. But once, when Megan came in to touch up my work on my head, I just said, “Use the purple guard.” She grabbed the purple guard, put it on, and started running it through my hair. I saw a big clump of hair fall into the tub, much more than should have fallen. The wrong purple guard was on. But the damage was done; we had to even it all out. So I had a really short haircut for a while.

That's my nephew, Eian. It's amazing how he can pick me up like that.

When we moved to France my hair was already kind of long, and looking shaggy. My passport picture (I had to renew it this summer before we left) really looks scruffy. And it just keeps growing. But I can't get it cut because I don't know what to say to a barber. I mean, I can say, “Bonjour monsieur. Je voudrais une coupe des cheveux.” That would set up the premise upon which our meeting would be based. But then he'd ask me questions like, “How short would you like this? Over the ear or below the ear? Do you want me to shave your neck?” Or other things. I could just get a picture of myself (or someone prettier off the internet, like Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips. Booyah! Music reference!) and show it to him and just trust that things will work out. But in truth, I kind of like my hair. It could maybe use a bit of a trim, snip off the split ends, that kind of thing, but for the most part I'm down with it.

Firefly was an excellent television show, and it's very sad that it was canceled.

Aw, I love those kids. 'Specially the one in the Hawaiian shirt. 

But the beard, dearies. It's out of control. I get beard when I take a bite of something. I've constantly got bits of mustache sticking in my mouth. And it's just unruly. Now, granted, parts of it are pretty neat. I like the little stripes of grey that have appeared. I have long held that my hair can go as grey as it wants, as long as it sticks around. But this beard thing has become more of a bother than a coolness.

It keeps telling me to yell at those kids about my lawn.

I suppose I could go to that barber and ask for a shave. Barbers do that, right? This is still a fictional barber; I haven't found a barber shop that calls out to me yet. And the cheapest I've seen for a men's haircut is 30 Euros which is more than I want to try to fit into our budget. Hopefully a shave would be much less.

But I've got this mountain man thing going on pretty well right now. What would I look like with a behaving beard but long raggedy locks? I worry that I'll look lame.

Hunh. All right, then, let's see...”J'ai besoin de ma barbe taillee.” If I cut my beard, do I get my own Anduril immediately, or do I have to escort a hobbit to Rivendell first?