hair's looking at you kid....

I lost my bangs.

'Lost' is a good word - it conveys an appropriate sense of accident, misfortune and despair. (Think I lost my camera... no, think I lost my only child). I lost my bangs at the salon. (Which is like saying I lost my only child outside the kindergarten... Dude! That's where children go to be groomed and educated, you lost your's there?!) Like I said, it was an accident.

I needed to have trimmed my long-preserved long hair. Well long is obviously relative, but shoulder length is plenty long by my conservative standards. Catholic school hadn't offered me the opportunity to try anything fancy, college hadn't given me the time, and grad school ... well, that just went by in a blur. So it was with much effort that I had cultivated the new 'look'. Some said I needed 'County Jail Inmate' t-shirt to complete the look, but I rather fancied the twisting cavorting wisps of luxurious dark hair framing my face. And it turned into a very respectable afro when dry and wind-blown.

A trim is all I needed. But in that salon overlooking (from the second floor) a busy section of Nathan Road, caught up in the excitement of the motley crowd and the arresting good looks of the girl washing my hair, something snapped and I decided ('decided' being a somewhat strong word for what really happened) to become adventurous. It obviously didn't help that her English was slightly dodgy and my Cantonese nonexistent. They say (those who are in the business of saying such things) that its a fine line that separates the brave from the foolish. I must not have noticed it for I was deep inside foolish-territory. Some might even say I was running for the mayor of foolishville.

Snip after resounding snip, and with flick upon flick of those delicate wrists, my fate lost many more inches than it should have. On hindsight I should have know that the poor girl probably hadn't cut curly hair before, and was hoping to wing it with her experience and skills with smooth straight hair. Here's the thing - when you take off an inch of my hair (wet and shampooed), you actually take off more than 2 inches of real length (dried and curled up). The mathematics of curly hair is not everyone's cup of tea.

Soon enough it became apparent that this was not working. No fault of the barberette of course, I just didn't know what I needed, and am guilty of misleading her more than once. So here we were with most everything gone from the back and still quite a lot left up front. That look, I imagined, could only be pulled off with red or green hair, and that would be too radical a change for one night. So the front had to be shortened too, to match everything else. At that point I had to close my eyes.

So now I'm back to square one (ah, so this is what 'square one' looks like). The nakedness of my ears is compensated only by the resumption of a wide-angle view of the world. My head feels lighter now (wow, that was metaphorical). Strangely, I feel almost as if I've let my country down or something. Oh, the shame of it. And the burning envy of all medium-length-haired men I see on the metro. No, this cannot be square one - it never felt like this before. I'm at a new square. I'm not giving up though. It's hereditary that I should lose my hair entirely in a few years' time. But there'll be time for one more attempt.

Meanwhile, I got the barberette's number :) Here's looking at you, kid.