You know you’re getting old is when you have hair growing in—or out of—the weirdest places. Unless the hair in question is sticking out of my nose, unusual never bothered me—until I got my haircut today.
I went into my usual hair saloon to request my usual number two cut on the sides and back, a round cut on the neck, and a quarter-inch off the top. The Vietnamese woman cutting my hair asked about the half-inch scar on the back of my head. I was a five-year-old rocking back and forth while sitting on my father’s anvil when I fell backwards, hitting my head on the lawnmower blade, woke up entering the hospital with my parents, where a man in green scrubs lay me on the examination table to put me under, and I woke up in the recovery room with a Hell’s Angel biker handcuffed to the examination table, who look like he got into a knife fight and broke his arm.
The electric cutter suddenly took a dive into one ear and into the next ear, and the Yoda-like tuffs of ear hair vanished before I knew what was going on. When she asked if I wanted my eyebrows cut, I raised my eyebrows in surprise. No one has ever asked that question. My eyebrows weren’t hairy caterpillars that could jump off and attack someone. I’m not sure why she thought my eyebrows needed cutting since they looked fairly normal. I shook my head. She finished the cut.
I haven’t had this much fun since I got a haircut at San Jose City College cosmetology department when the student cutting my hair nicked the back of one ear that blood tickled down my neck and she almost fainted. Or when another student almost drown me while washing my hair, which was the closest I ever came to being waterboarded. When you’re a cash-strapped college student and haircuts cost $3.50 USD, you can’t complain too much. When you’re an adult paying $15 USD (including tip) for a haircut, things shouldn’t get too weird.