I got a haircut today and as always it was a weird experience. I’d rather go to the dentist than a hairdresser, because at the dentist you get your own room and you just lie back and let them go to work. But at the hairdresser there are all these people around you and you have to participate with instructions about how you want your hair, the length, style, colour, which kind of hair wax, and so on and so forth. There are the obligatory questions about this haircut compared to the last one you got (should it be longer or shorter than last time?), but if you’re anything like me you have no clue what your hair looked like two months ago, so you just say that whatever she thinks would be nice is fine with you and then hope she doesn’t get too fresh with the electrical shaver. And at the end she shows you the back of your head in a mirror and asks if you like it. What are you supposed to say to that? It’s not like you can ask for a do-over. So you just nod in acceptance and wonder if she really is able to remember how much she cut off the last time or if she just saying that it's shorter this time to mess with you.

The conversation during the actual cutting process is also a strange affair. Usually, I try not to say anything, because I feel weird making small-talk with someone I don’t really know, who’s basically getting paid to be there. But it depends on who is cutting my hair how uncomfortable I am and the girl who cuts it now is pretty nice, so I usually make a little small-talk with her. I’ve been going to this place for less than a year and the reason I changed salons (I wish there was a more masculine word, but I can’t think of one) was that they kept changing their staff at the last place I went to. I went through three different people there and the second one was a real piece of work (I really liked the first one, but finally gave up on the place, because I couldn't understand a word the third one was saying). She was nice enough, but she wasn’t exactly shy, so she’d just burst out with really personal information that you honestly don’t want to hear in a situation where you can’t get up and leave. It got really embarrassing the time she told me about this birth control device she’d gotten inserted into her arm (I’m not making this up), and since at this point she’d only cut the hair on one side of my head I had to stick around to hear her bang on about it for another twenty minutes. Maybe I’m repressed or something, but I can live without hearing about strange women’s choice of birth control.

Maybe the reason I think going to the hairdresser is a strange experience is because for a long time I didn’t cut my hair. From 1990 to 1998 scissors did not touch my hair, which meant that for a long time my hair went down to my waist and not surprisingly it didn’t look so great. But the theory was that if you wanted long hair you shouldn’t cut it (or as Alice in Chains said at the Metallica unplugged show: “Friends don’t let friends cut their hair”), so I didn’t cut it. But eventually the grunge look got boring (I got rid of the Doc Martens, the ripped jeans, and the flannel long before the hair), so I cut it and the funny thing was that the hairdresser was more hesitant about cutting it than I was ("Are you sure you want me to do this?" she kept saying). So it’s only in the last couple of years I’ve gone to a hairdresser on a regular basis, so maybe in a year or two I’ll enjoy it as much as going to the dentist.