Haircuts

My hair's getting fairly long at this point, and the Queen is beyond hinting at me needing a cut. That's not a trim; that's a cut. It is cold, so maybe I can use that as an excuse. One part of me likes the hair cut because I do have a smidge of vanity about me, but another part doesn't really care and would rather do something more beneficial with my time. I thought back to my history of haircuts (yeah, what a boring topic, right?), and while my overall hair cropping hasn't varied that much, I have had some interesting cuts in the past. 

Growing up, my mother always cut mine and my brother's hair. She just used your basic electric clippers with an attachment for what amounts to a buzz cut over the summer. During the winter, she would use scissors and cut my bangs and over the ears and up to the hairline in the back with no layering action at all. It looked like your basic bowl cut, though no bowl was involved. When I got older, I continued with that same basic cut, but in a barber shop where they layered it, but I still combed my hair straight down all over (as evidenced by my senior picture with holds to the same basic haircut I had in my kindergarden picture). 

Now, there was one time when I was in those 'tween years where a stylist got a little adventurous on my hair and thought it would be cool to really style me up good. She trimmed it up about the same way they always did, but then proceeded to style it up and gel it into place so it looked like a Disney teeny bopper. How long did this style last? We went grocery shopping right after this cut, and outside the store, I did my best to mess my hair up real good, since I preferred it that way (if I remembered the comb my hair before school, that was a good day -- actually I'm still that way, though I remember more consistently now). I spent quite a bit of time that night washing all the goop out of my hair.

Naturally, I can't go through this without mentioning the Army cut. Yeah, I've seen myself completely bald. It's not a pretty sight. A lot of people out there have a nice dome to their head. It's perfectly round and you could chop them at the neck, and use them for a bowling ball. Those are the people who shave their heads and take a razor to them to keep them short and shiny. My noggin is not so nice.

I will be the first to admit that I've bumped my head a few times in my life. I clearly remember falling backward off a ledge about three and a half to four feet off the ground and landing on my head. I was subsequently yelled at by the bus driver who saw it happen for holding up his route when I did jump right up and run to the bus which was pulling up. But I landed right on my head and had a pretty good knot for awhile.

Anyway, it's kind of hard to explain what the deal is with my head. I have what amounts to a dent across the forward center of the top of my head, so from front to back, my head come up over the forehead, it dips down, goes back up to the crown, the crown of my head has a bit of a crater to it, and then it comes back out of the crater and down the back. It's not as extreme as it sounds, but that's how it looks to me. Makes me wonder sometimes how I managed to get a non-dome-shaped dome.

While I was in the military, I got what's referred to as a "high and tight" during my time in AIT. This is basically a short cut across the top of the head (covering my deformed brain cavity, restoring my head to a normal look), but almost no hair on the sides. In the latter days of AIT, and onto Fort Carson, I changed it to a "low and tight" which is the same basic idea as the high, but you have more hair on the sides that fades quickly as it moves down. It is a military cut that stays within the 2 inch rule of Army haircuts. My hair grows really quickly, and I did not get it cut weekly, so it grew long enough fairly often for me to do something with it, and I started combing it to the side to keep it out of my eyes (as 2 inches shouldn't go into your eyes, right?). Ok, so the band was a tad lenient on hair cuts, but they still required it cut.

I kept the side look for awhile once I left the military, but I got a little weary of trying to control it. I dislike dealing with any kind of styling, since I have better things to do (in my own little world). When I did go in for a haircut, I told them (and I still do) "about a quarter of the way down the forehead, off the ears, up to the hairline in the back, and even it out all over." This description has yielded a world of difference between hair cutters.

I say hair cutters because it's hard to classify these people as they all want to be something different, and that's the most general term I have. I have had barbers, hair stylists, cosmotologists, and hair professionals on my knot, so they all get lumped into "hair cutter." Teach them to not settle on one standard name.

Well, it was within a year of being out of the Army that I found the hair style that I maintain to this day. I use the word style very loosely because I really don't do anything to it but comb it back and then let it dry. My hair appears to have a natural part to it...right down the middle. I mean, perfectly down the middle. So my hair parts itself without any help from me, and my overgrown bangs fall to either side of my face allowing me to go even longer without a haircut than I could in high school. Haha!

Now, I will admit that this does make the Queen crazy. You see, my hair continues to grow very full and it does this quickly, so when I don't cut it for awhile, I have one thick head of hair that gets harder and harder to control, and while to an extent, I don't care, I do have to maintain the status quo of the business world meaning I can't look like a total hobo. However, I think I've got more hair than most of my office does, and I suspect that's not entirely their choices, if you follow me.

Anyway, I'll probably end up chopping my hair off again sometime soon, but I figured I'd share a little hair history for the sake of sharing. Now you know that when it comes to styling my head, I do as little work as possible.

Blind As Bats?

It's really cold here. Normally, our temperatures in the winter will dip below freezing, but it doesn't usually get colder than in the twenties for long. This morning, we're sitting in the lower teens with a wind chill that dips into the single digits. Add to that on the way to work this morning, it was snowing, but given just how cold it is, it's basically snow dust that blows around out there. This, however, does not stop people from being crazy. In fact, the sub freezing temps plus snow makes them worse.

Now, if you re-read that, you'll see that by sub-freezing, we're just talking about cold, and by snow, we're just talking flurries that aren't sticking at this point. Basically, the situation wasn't all that serious as I was driving in. Oh, but apparently it was for some. My drive was almost uneventful but for one intersection, and what occurred there continues to amuse me.

In Tulsa, there are some hills. Now, nothing that compares to, say, Colorado Springs, but there are some hills that are not to be reckoned with on icy days, and 61st and Sheridan possesses two of these hills. Coming from the South and East, you can overlook the intersection below to kind of get an idea of what's going on down there before you actually reach it. This morning, I noticed the traffic was a little backed up coming up to 61st and Sheridan on Sheridan from the South. It was nothing serious, mind you, but more than normal for the time of morning I was driving in.

As I passed over the hill, I surveyed the intersection, and sure enough, there was a car with its hazard lights on sitting in the left turn lane to get onto 61st going West. Naturally, this was the precise direction I needed to go, but I found the cause of the backup was that I am not alone in this need to head West and those left-turners were simply going around this car and turning left the best they could. Ok, none too serious. I can live with that.

Here's the funny part. From the hill to the intersection isn't that far, but I saw no less than three people pull into the turn lane behind this stalled car, at least one pulling right up to the car's bumper before realizing he wasn't moving and needing to get back out of that lane. They had exactly the same vantage point I did, and I recognized the peril from the top of the hill, a good 5 minutes before I reached the point where I could even consider turning.

It just continues to prove this point: People don't pay attention while driving.

The iPod Plays Favorites

You know, gadgets develop personalities. They do. You get used to the little quirks that your computer, dvd player, TV, or iPod tends to do, and you just say "that's the way it is." Not only are there quirks, sometimes, but at least with my iPod, there are songs it likes to play and songs that it doesn't. This little phenomenon was firmly established and proven in my James Bond song list.

I'm an avid James Bond fan, and as such, I have the title music for every movie (right up to the current one) as well as some extra tunes from the movies loaded into a playlist of about 30 songs that I play when I drive to work. The Queen just prefers it over anything else I could play. So when I first created the list, I just played it on full shuffle, and it picked whatever song out of the 30 it wanted to play, and played it. After awhile, I noticed that some songs got more airplay than others, and we got to the point where there were tunes, such as Nobody Does It Better, that had racked up over twenty plays while others had barely gotten over ten.

My response to this was to even the odds and set up a second smart playlist that sorted the songs into a 30 minute list that took the least often played songs and played them. This snagged all the low play songs and played them first, and on that setting, we never heard the 20+ play songs. Well, I was getting weary of hearing the same songs over and over every morning, so I cleared the play counts on that entire playlist, and set it to play the least recently played songs, and since we were back to zero for them all, this will keep them all fairly even. After all, my drive to work is about 30 minutes, so it generally played the whole list minus one or two.

Well, over the last few days, I noticed there is a song that my iPod doesn't like. It seems to have an aversion to From Russia With Love. Why do I believe something from an inanimate object? Because since late last week, that song has been in the 30 minute drive list, but it always plays dead last. This means it kicks off as I'm arriving at work or doesn't play at all. It's been passed up for probably every other song in the master list because my iPod continually places it last in the list. Weird, huh?

This isn't the only list it does this with either. I have a ton of playlists setup, and I'd gone to restricting many of them down because my iPod has overplayed one particular song when they run. For instance, in my 80's list, Addicted To Love comes up almost every time unless I use the least played list. A review of play counts on my iPod (if you discount the obvious multiple plays of single albums) shows several songs with inordinately large play counts from when I would shuffle everything. My iPod just pulls them in more often, I guess, because it likes those songs.

Now, I can't look into least plays on anything because of the way I'm running my iPod at this point. I am currently running a playlist to play every song that hasn't been played in 2009. I've listened to about 800 out of the 6000+ songs so far, and I'm running them by album so I can hear all (or most of) an album that I might not have listened to in awhile. I know there are several songs that haven't played since last May, so I'm just trying to get a listen to everything on my iPod coming into the new year. I figure it'll take me a few months to do it, but hey, I put the music on there, I probably like it.

Right now, I'm running the Beatles' album Help! Been a little while since I've heard it.