Freckles & Doubt

My lovely hairdresser would tear his own hair out regularly at the things I do to mine (have it cut approximately annually, refuse to blow-dry it, hack my own fringe short), except he's usefully and artfully bald (and highly polished) already. Occasionally I wander into the salon having neglected it for longer than usual and he runs his fingers through it despairingly and announces "That's not a haircut. That's just hair." There is, actually, a huge advantage to the "just hair" stage of coiffure. There are those odd days, usually produced by insomnia, during which I trundle somnambulistically into work and, somewhere around mid-morning, glance at myself in the mirror and have a moment's blank inability to remember if I actually brushed my hair before leaving the house. Fortunately, with "just hair", it's quite difficult to tell if that's the case or not, and I figure that if I can't tell the difference, probably no-one else can either. I clearly did want to be an eccentric and absent-minded professor when I grew up.

Presumably being an absent-minded professor would to some extent insulate me from the kind of phone call I've just had to endure, from a parent equally distressed and infuriated by her attempts to re-insert her son into the institution following academic exclusion. I understand her distress, this sort of thing is equally hard on kids and parents. But during the course of the conversation she did the following:

• Chewed me out because no-one else is answering their phone;
  
• Claimed that the online guidelines to readmission, carefully written by myself, didn't cover the information she needs (they really do);
  
• Accused me of gross insensitivity two sentences after commending the sensitivity of my language;
  
• Accused the institution of elitism because we require some evidence of improved circumstances before we re-admit excluded students;
  
• Accused the institution of elitism because we enforce the government-set restrictions on maximum number of years of study permitted without graduation;
  
• Did all of the above in tones of sweet, icy, implacable restraint which did their damnedest to present what was actually a self-indulgent vent at a hapless and largely uninvolved target as an exercise in dulcet and righteous reason.

I am extremely proud of the fact that I didn't lose my temper for an instant, remaining determinedly courteous and rational while she escalated the ice-salvos. Years of therapy are definitely worth something. But calls such as these leave me shaking and with my stomach in knots for hours, and are undoubtedly highly implicated in the increasing acreage of grey which characterises my not-a-hairstyle. I bring it on myself, of course, by being conscientious about answering my phone, in sharp contradistinction to many other corners of this institution. Fortunately the spanky new VOIP phone system has caller ID, and her name is emblazoned on my brain in letters of acidic ice. I see her name again, I'm going to let it ring. This resolution will be materially assisted by the fact that I'm going to be out of the office for a couple of days having the cobwebs surgically removed from various neglected reproductive portions of my anatomy. She may phone in vain with my blessing.

My subject line is the Very Secret Diary of Aragorn Son of Arathorn, who is the patron saint of bloggers. I seem to be blogging again. Go me!

It transpires that one of the side effects of Warfarin is that it renders your hair unfit for human consumption. My hair has taken grave exception to my current regimen, marking its displeasure by becoming straw-like and brittle, and in addition prone to oiling up in about twelve hours flat after being washed. Since I've been patiently growing it out for over a year and it was down to my shoulderblades, that's a fair amount of hair to be lank and unspeakable; it's been driving me bats for weeks.

It was thus strangely cathartic to be able to wander into the hairdresser's on Thursday and wail "it all has to go!" when having, for once, a cast-iron reason for the decision rather than the usual vague and formless angsts which tend to prompt a sudden change of image. My lovely hairdresser has been rescuing me at intervals from said angsts, as well as tangles with henna, a resolute refusal to blowdry, assaults on my own fringe whenever it got into my eyes, and that one time I had a late-night fit of self-loathing and hacked it all off myself, for about eight years now, and he agreed that the hair itself was in worse condition than he's ever seen it. ("That's quite an adult decision, to simply get rid of it like this.")

The weird bit, though, wasn't the sudden acquisition of a jaw-length bob. That was rather fun. The weird bit was having the hairdresser, informed of the whole DVT/pulmonary embolism/10 days in hospital/Warfarin debacle, calmly cap it by telling me all about the parallel experience he's just had in hospital after a heart attack, at approximately the same time. We spent a happy hour playing hospital odious comparisons while straw-like hair drifted in sheaves to the ground. Apart from the odd fact of the synchronicity it does seem a bit unfair, though. He's one of those slightly stereotypical gay hairdressers who's an ex-dancer, and is slim and gym-toned and health-conscious. I can quite firmly blame my own experience at least partially on my own current complete lack of fitness, but he really shouldn't be having heart attacks. It holds out so little hope for the rest of us.

Phooey. Epic struggle with my hairdresser, an otherwise lovely man who has slight hissy fits every time I go to see him after a six-month hiatus during which I have regularly and cheerfully hacked my own fringe short. He feels, reasonably enough, that this is an insult to his artistry. I feel that I'd rather not look like an Old English Sheepdog if I can possibly help it. Yesterday he retaliated by cutting said fringe extra short and slightly wider than usual, which is unfair as it's the fatal thing he's always cautioned me against doing in my fringe-hacks. Also, he's blow-dried my hair to within an inch of its life so it's completely flat, straight and lifeless. I now look like a cross between Bluebottle (pudding-basin haircut) and a Chinese schoolgirl. I console myself with the thought that hair is the most ephemeral of irritations - a wash and a few weeks of growing and it might actually feel as though it belongs to me again. Besides, consolatory bonus: the nice hair-washing lady gave me a random ten-minute head massage while she was washing it, which successfully beat the headache back to a dull throb.

Watched the weird Farscape episode with the virtual reality game last night. Yup, scriptwriters still on drugs. Good drugs. Also, scared self silly with X-Files before the Evil Landlord got home. Now in Season 5 - that freaky episode with the psychotic doll, which, cute Mulder/Scully interactions notwithstanding (I love it when they play against type), was distinctly creepy. I really enjoyed "The Postmodern Prometheus" - cleverly written and filmed, lovingly geeky, nicely tongue-in-cheek. The final Cher concert scene may actually have blown my brain, though.

Last Night I Dreamed: I carefully bought four extremely poisonous snakes for the rocky garden of my old house on a hill. Then I realised that they were extremely poisonous, and had to pay a nice snake-catcher lady to remove them. She found the small green one and the brown one and the sort of fat puff-addery one, but there's still a spitting cobra out there somewhere, lurking in the bushes. Then I was a somewhat powerful figure in a hugely complicated LARP/medieval court thingy in a castle, where all the factions wore colour-coded outfits and had scads of liveried guards. Someone, I think it might have been Adrianna, randomly gave me a crystal which could make gates to anywhere, and I started using it to buy favours from other factions by rescuing their sons from jail and what have you. Actually, I think both of these might have been career dreams. In a severely lateral sort of way.

Henry Jenkins (who is fast becoming my cultural guru) has an interesting discussion here of video games, and particularly open-ended narrative, as art. I don't know about you, but I kept thinking of LARPing, the definitive theoretical analysis of which I will one day write.

Yesterday's minor depression has had the usual effect, viz. to make me suddenly loathe my hair and want to cut it all off. What do you think?

[Poll #763266]

In other news, I have now finished watching the first season of Alias, and am shocked and horrified to report how badly I'm hooked. It's a bizarre, cheesily fantastic, completely unrealistic series, but it's got me, mostly because (a) it has gadgets, unlikely disguises and lots of stunts, so it's pleasingly like Mission Impossible without Tom Cruise, and (b) Michael Vartan, who I like enough to hold out real hope that my Bad Boy impulses are finally crushed. Shall now hunt down H, from whom I borrowed the first season, to get the next few, since the Vaughan-is-dead cliffhanger finale is causing me to gnaw my own elbows.