The Haircut
My white whale: the perfect cut.
I get a haircut about every three months, or when it takes me too long to blow dry it. I always attempt to get it cut really short in the winter, but I can never seem to get that accomplished.
I should probably go more often, I know. I’ve been going there for about five years. Every other customer at the salon is greeted by name, asked how their children are doing, etc. The person at the desk then cheerfully looks at me and says, “Have you ever been here before?”
Also, when I walk in, I’m always astonished because no one else at the salon looks like they need a haircut. Their hair looks amazing, and they say “just a trim” and the stylist dutifully takes out a microscope or something and shaves off 1/100th of an inch.
Me? I unfurl my Rapunzel-length hair (it seems to grow about 1/2 an inch a week) and say I want it like the cooking show: Chopped.
“What length?”
“I want it shoulder-length,” I say, indicating with my hands where my shoulders are.
“OK,” says the stylist, and washes it, then goes around in a semicircle, trimming a tiny bit off the ends of my hair. “Like this?”
I see that it is not to my shoulders. “Uh … a little more?”
“Sure.” Another 1/100th of an inch clipped off.
I put on my glasses and look around the chair, but there isn’t any hair on the floor. Okay, maybe some tiny pieces of hair. If I want it to my shoulders, this is going to take all night. But my ends aren’t split anymore, they’re even, so I just accept it.
Sometimes I don’t get my hair dried there, because it costs extra. However, on this particular day, it was so cold that my car had started to ice over as soon as I turned off the engine — so I opted for it.
The stylist took a long time drying it. People came in, got a haircut, and left in the amount of time it took her to dry my hair. This was not boding well for my “I want it to dry sooner” mission, but at least my hair looked cute.
I paid and left. “I got my hair cut!” I declared. That’s what it’s really about: looking good, right?
Someone glanced at it and declared, “It looks the same. You should think about dying it blue next time.”
Another successful haircut.
