I have a beard now. There, I got it out of the way. If you know me, I wanted to save you the shock for the next time we meet in person. If you don’t know me, well, I have a beard now.
The facial hair was an experiment. The middle school era, Justin Bieber-esque ‘do was not. I held out as long as I could and I’m proud of my streak. I think I got a haircut in early March and lasted through quarantine all the way to mid-July. But it was getting too unmanageable and unseemly. So I ordered a razor and watched many, many YouTube tutorials. In any other circumstance, I would be absolutely terrified of being my own barber, but like the punchline of the comic, I was pretty at ease knowing no one was going to see it. If you give yourself a bad haircut, but no one’s around to see it, is it even a bad haircut? If you prefer quantum mechanics for your quarantine analogies, there was a 50/50 chance I gave myself a bad haircut. But until someone else sees it, my head exists in a quantum superposition of having both a good haircut and a bad haircut. I wonder if Schrödinger ever had to cut his own hair.
The title of D&A 10 is a reference to the barber paradox. If the barber only shaves people who don’t shave themselves, who shaves the barber? Good question. I wonder if hairdressers cut their own hair during quarantine. Though they have the training and likely the proper equipment, applying their skills on themselves is a different beast entirely. For one, you have to do everything in reverse since you’re almost always relying on mirrors. Ideally, you would have a three-way mirror during this task; at the very least, a handheld mirror to complement your primary one. Me? I had neither. I had my completely standard size mirror above my bathroom sink and that was it. But that didn’t stop me. Ingenuity is borne out of desperation and I came up with an incredibly silly solution. I mounted my phone on a tripod and used the front-facing camera as my mirror. And it worked! Kind of… Your vision is limited by a roughly 5-inch screen, but it’s better than nothing. Conveniently, it also allowed me to capture pictures and videos of my ordeal for posterity - and for any budding comic artists who may want to recreate this event in illustrated form.
The moral of the story: try cutting your own hair. This is the one time you can fail and get away with it (mostly). Learn a new skill, do something wacky. This year sucks, so if your hair turns out horrifically, at least it fits with the theme.