Bad Hair Days and Halloween

I called up the hair styling salon where I go to get my haircut and asked if my hair stylist barber was present. She wasn't. She is on leave and won't be back for a week. Aagh.

Yes, I have a favourite hair stylist. It's someone I have found who will cut my hair just the way I want it. Good barbers are like good mechanics, reliable, cheap and hard to find.

It was different when I was a student on a budget. Then it was straight to the $5 Chinese hair cutting place where a bunch of fellow desis used to line up outside on Friday.

No wonder no one returned my calls.

You see my hair has this weird habit. It will co-operate with me until suddenly, one day, it decides you know what, from now on every day will be a bad hair day unless you get a haircut. So my options are limited to either going for a shower and then slapping a lot of gel, backbrushing and then looking like something out of Grease, or go out wearing a crow's nest on my head, or wearing a cap.

This is where this Indian lady steps in. I found her when I was looking to get a quick haircut at our local mall. And voila - she has never disappointed since. Yes, she does talk about her son and her new born grandson and the latest cute thing the little bugger did but at the end of 15 minutes you walk out looking ready to hit the party. She's great. And now she's AWOL.

It's not that no one else knows to cut hair. I am a guy after all. However, I don't want to entrust this particular aspect of my social life to someone and then having to hide from the world for the 2 weeks if it's a bad cut.

I never understood the concept of going to a particular barber / hair stylist before. In my final year of university I was TAing an intro computer course and the students were asked to draw a flowchart of the sequence of operations for booking a hair appointment. All the students in that class of mine were girls.

So the girls wrote:

1. Call hair salon.
2. See if favourite stylist is present.
3. If not, book appointment on another day ->Call (Appointment).
4. If yes ....

And there was I, looking at the answers with a puzzled frown. Then I turned to the girls.

"Now why would you care if this particular stylist was present or not? Just get someone in the store to do your hair for you."

And 20 girls looked at me as if I had grown a horn.
* * *
I am a Halloween Grinch. I do not like this time of the year.

The nice part of Fall is over. It's dark when I leave for work and dark when I get home. A long six month winter lies ahead. And on the top of that, it's Halloween.

Halloween sucks. I never liked the holiday much, nor cared for it a lot. You don't get a holiday off work, you get no gifts and it's not even a religious thing.

What turns me off about Halloween is the carving up of a perfectly good fruit. Why can't they use plastic pumpkins each year? No, while thousands of kids in Africa can't get one meal a day, thousands and thousands of pumpkins will be spoilt (just literally destroyed) all in the name of fun.

Maybe I should just leave my crow's nest as it is as part of a Halloween costume of Crazy blogger and try to scar(e) the kids for life when they ring the doorbell.

Current mood: *foul*

Tags: Halloween Bad Hair Day