duck-shaped pain

I have too much hair.

I've been thinking about my hair, [1] because I got a haircut today, the first one since February or so. I hate getting haircuts, but the only thing I hate more than that is having a lot of hair, so sometimes I have to bite down and get the job done.

I have an enormous amount of hair. It's very very thick and very very straight and when it gets long, it weighs a ton, leading to headaches and lots of furrowed brow. I have the sort of hair that astonishes hairstylists. One of the main reasons I hate getting my haircut is that every time I go to someone new, there is this obligatory ritual where the new stylist has to go and round up all the other stylists so they can all come over and look at my hair. then they touch it and feel it and go ooooh! over it. It always makes me self-conscious and I swear I'm going to learn to cut my own hair.

Then again, I could be my mom. My mom has even thicker hair than me, with the special added bonus that her hair is very coarse and wiry. It sort of stands up on its own, and she's given up on trying to do anything with it.

Since my hair is so plentiful and heavy, I have about half of it shaved off regularly. The fact that you can barely notice that it's been shaved most of the time is testament to the kind of hair I have. I've thought about just shaving it all off at times, but I'm afraid that my head might turn out to be misshapen from the weight of all my hair.

Most stylists are aghast at the idea that I shave off so much of my hair, and complain about doing it ("If I had this kind of hair bla bla bla bla bla bla" -- you get the picture). So I always have to surprise them with it. After the usual description of what I want, then there's "Oh by the way, can you shave off the back of my head? I would be ever so grateful to you." Sometimes sweetening it up and just slipping it in works, sometimes it doesn't.

The next shock always comes when I tell them they need to use a No. 1 guard on their clippers (which is the next-to-shortest setting). They always have to ask me if I know what I'm doing. I've been doing this to my hair since the eighth grade, and I've been fielding this question nearly as long. The older I get, the more protests I get from stylists -- apparently, it's more acceptable to shave off half your hair when you're 16 than when you're 26.

Once they finish the shaving (one woman I got years ago cried when she did it), the rest goes pretty smoothly. I have a pretty basic haircut, and most people manage to do a decent job with it.

Anyway, today I got this guy who was incredibly quiet. He moved his lips when he talked, but nothing seemed to come out. I still managed to get my wishes across, and incredibly, he did not flinch or scream very silently when I told him about the shaving. He just did it, no questions asked.

He shampooed me, even though I didn't ask for it. Quite the scalp massager, I must say. I was more or less paralyzed after that. Maybe that was part of the strategy -- get customers so wiped out through agressive scalp massages that they are unable to complain or even speak about the rest of the haircut.

He did a good job, though my hair is shorter than I thought it would be. Usually, I tell stylists that I'd like my hair cut to where the bottom of my ears are. They pretend to listen, and then do whatever the hell they want. So I was unprepared at how short hair cut to that length would be, because this guy actually listened to my instructions. I'm not used to being listened to, and I'm not sure if I like it!

At least it will be awhile before I have to get another haircut. I might try to get this guy again, but I always live in fear of having some sort of regular relationship with a hairstylist. I've only had two that I've been to more than once. One was someone I went to because she was sort of a friend of a friend, not because she were any good. The other was this extremely chatty Irish gay man who was very good, who I went to because he was the only decent stylist at the salon located on the campus at the college I went to in Denver. I remember him mainly because he got very excited over one of my names, which just happens to be the "poetic" name for Ireland,[2] and because he always tried to force my hair into an insane flip.

I felt about 30 pounds lighter after my haircut.

Obligatory What I Made For Dinner Section: I had eggplant in coconut sauce, which was excellent. I checked out a book from our library the other day called Uncommon Fruits and Vegetables: A Commonsense Guide, which is where the recipe came from (although I don't know if I would refer to eggplant as "uncommon" or write "commonsense" as one word). Eggplant is cut into little cubes, then cooked in a sauce made out of coconut milk, lime juice, lime zest, garlic, jalapeno, sugar, cayenne and cilantro. I ate it over rice, and it was superb.

Whoever checked out the book before me must have loved it, because there were whole sections torn out of it. The whole entry for calabaza was gone, which doesn't make any damn sense.

[1] This is not something I normally think about, I assure you.