got a devil's haircut, in my mind

historically, haircuts and i do not get along.

if you were to look solely at childhood photographs, you would not think that this is the case. from birth to age 8, i had a wonderful, curly, girly head of hair.

after age 8, however, things do not look so wonderful. in fact, it’s not until age 18 that things even halfway begin to approach wonderful. even then, every picture belies the truth of my hair purgatory. i was always just one haircut away from getting lost forever.

when i graduated from university, i started working downtown. the office buildings in Toronto’s financial district are connected by an underground mall that is also connected to the subway and commuter rail systems. the major advantage of this layout was that you rarely had to step outside during the long, harsh Canadian winter. everything you could possibly want or need was in that underground mall, including hair salons.

and so, at 23, i started going to the hair salon in my building. it was reasonably priced and extremely convenient.

the stylist assigned to me for that first appointment was a young woman named Heather. she was junior stylist who cut the hair of finance professionals by day, studied pharmacology at the University of Toronto part-time, and was a hardcore punk at night. her father was a forensic scientist for the RCMP and her boyfriend was a drummer in a band and she liked to talk about both of them while she shampooed, conditioned, trimmed, and blow dried. needless to say we hit it off immediately.

Heather took a long time cutting my hair that first time, but for the $30 she charged, she did a bang-up job. i tipped her well since it was the first really good haircut i’d had for nearly 15 years and she took me on as a regular client. for almost five years, she would call me when it was haircut time. i’d pop downstairs, get caught up on her studies, her boyfriend’s new band, and her father’s latest cases, and walk out in 45 minutes with a much better looking head of hair.

for these five years, haircuts and i were good friends.

Heather even cut the gf’s hair once, which led to a bit of funny business that she and i still joke about. the gf can correct me on this, but at the time, she was pleasantly surprised by how well Heather had done at styling her usually hard-to-style hair.

when i left Toronto, i was sad about a lot of things. oddly enough, it didn’t occur to me to be sad about leaving Heather’s haircuts behind. haircuts in Chicago weren’t any more expensive than they were in Toronto, and i was lucky enough to find a decent salon that could fairly consistently deliver an approximation of The Heather, which rides that skinny edge between “modern finance professional’ and “myspace punk rawk”.

haircuts in New York have not been so kind. since living there, i’ve had bad haircut after bad haircut, made worse by the fact that i’ve paid through the nose for each one. somewhere between Chicago and New York, any remnants of The Heather faded entirely, and each stylist just replicated the bad cut that i’d been given the last time. it’s as though they were all incapable of seeing the true sculpture in the marble and settled for rendering a replica instead.

the past week has not been easy one for finance professionals. when i looked at myself in the mirror this morning, i looked tired. my hair looked tired. limp. beaten down.

“i need a haircut”, i thought.

so i headed out to a japanese hair salon that the gf recommended. she got her hair cut there when she was here in October and they did a pretty good job.

for a reasonable price, they gave me a decent cut. it’s more finance professional than myspace punk. but i felt a bit better stepping out of the salon. lighter. brighter. like i’d left some of this week’s tiredness behind on the salon floor.

this doesn’t mean that haircuts and i get along all of a sudden. but at least we’ve called off the fighting. it’s not The Heather. but it’ll do.

cross-posted from tumblr