Windchimes

The Accidental Haircut

...and now, for a switch of subjects (about time, huh?)...

Final Exam Day Follies

I had a whole day between the due date of the final research paper and the final exam, so, of course, I waited till the evening to start studying for it. It was scheduled for mid-afternoon, so, to be extra-safe, I set my alarm clock for god-awful early o'clock. Rose and showered and shone, and put up my hair so I'd not be tempted to fool with it instead of studying. I used a little plastic contraption that resembles the outline of a hairband to make a neat bun. It's very simple to use, you just put your hair in a ponytail, then push the ponytail through the contraption, wrap it up and voilà! Simple in theory, I mean. In practice, I've never had totally uniform-length hair. Some are always a little shorter than others. I'd learned to compensate for that by using another ponytail holder nearer the end of the ponytail. Still, something usually happened while wrapping the hair around the bun contraption, and I'd be left with some loose strands or places in the bun that somehow didn't get wrapped as tight as the rest of it. So, that morning, I thought I'd come up with a creative solution.

You know those hair-comb hairbands? The ones that look like a neat row of pins when used correctly? That wrap all the way around your head? Well, I thought, wouldn't it be neat, or wouldn't it make it neat, to wrap the thing twice around my bun? No way I could miss any loose ends that way, and it should look very neat, shouldn't it? And it did. For a while.

I finished studying for the exam about 2 hours before time to drive to campus, so decided to redo my hair before going. If only I'd waited till afterwards. The haircomb/band, wrapped twice, engaged and entangled whole clumps of hair. I tugged, I yanked, I tried to unravel. I started to unravel. I started to cry, then started to laugh. I found the scissors and tried cutting through the plastic hair contraption. Most of my hair still hung in a clump from the ponytail, like a cascade of water at the bottom of a column. 2:00 o'clock came. The final was at 2:45. Calm and composure usually help out when taking a final, or any kind of test besides the kind that involve getting pricked with a needle or taking a plastic cup to the potty. Time was up. I hacked through the hair at the point closest to the gathered cascade. Of course, that left a mess of gaps and juts, so had to spend more precious time trying my best to even it out.

The long and short of it is, I now have shoulder-length hair. I went to take the final sans huge hair-engulfed bun contraption. When I got home, my oldest daughter acted shocked and shaken enough to make a person believe she'd witnessed some sort or tortuous inhumanity, but then she evened it out for me.

You know what? I like it.



J.H. Larrew
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