As I am prone to do, I experiment. By it’s very nature, experimentation will seem wasteful because it requires that limits be tested and quantities be consumed. Otherwise, results may indicate something that’s not true.
Happily, sometimes the results are enough to justify the expense.
Take my hair, for example. It grows, so it must be cut from time to time and short of befriending a compulsive hair cutter or training one of the kids it has to be done by someone I pay.
Signs indicate that the price varies as low as around $7. Most charge more with the average falling beneath $15. Women pay more, but it’s actually an anti-cry tax in their case because haircuts done wrong transform their appearance sufficiently as to undo their carefully arranged visual persona. Done right, a haircut either maintains the woman’s preferred image or enhances it for a time.
I’m vain enough that I got tired of going to get a haircut and not knowing if I would be recognized afterward. That’s not enough that you’ll mistake me for a woman, but it was enough to drive me to find a place that was consistent and fit my expectations.
For the record, I have tried the so called Free hair cut resources and found them lacking. A grandfather who had made a living as a barber early in the last century actually made me look like I stepped out of the 1930’s. It was amazing. I never went back.
My daughter provided a free cut. Before I left my seat to view it in the mirror, she appeared to be looking for an exit and pleaded, “don’t hate me”.
In the Air Force the commander of our little unit conducted inspections and stopped at me.
“Airman Fenimore. Who cuts your hair?”
“Me Sir. I do.”
pause
“Well, have someone else do the back!”
The last time I went to one of the franchises, the eccentric with a face full of piercings decided to be a commedienne. No one was presently getting mowed in the large multi-chair operation, so I thought I could get in and get out quickly.
The stylist jumped on me (not literally) as soon as I crossed the threshold and the sun glinted off one of her facial piercings that sported a little metal ball.
“I suppose you thought you were going to get a haircut!” she said, mocking disdain. I kept my same pace and reversed direction and went out. No haircut for me that day. She didn’t mean any harm, but I just wanted the deed off my bucket list and the faux-resistance routine ate into my limited time.
Then I tried a place that was on the way to the office. The owner was at the ready and did an excellent job for less money.
He spoke English to me and Russian to the rest of the people, to my amusement. The Russian inflections are much different and I enjoy how the women get all high pitched with their characteristic phonemic ebb and flow. This guy had the prototypical Russian man voice, deeper and anything but monotone. His haircuts were top notch every time.
My only complaint was that sometimes I’d have to wait. His price slowly climbed over the years and I can probably get a cut for less. Nevertheless, the day I realized that didn’t know his name and he didn’t know mine was the day I realized that I might be able to improve an already dependable haircut experience. I started tipping.
I paid cash and added three dollars. I learned his name.
Result? I’ve never had to wait for a chair since I started doing that. Last time, another guy got there just before I did but I was the one he waved into a chair and the other guy got to wait.
Words may convey information about many things, but actions talk also. I don’t think the extra consideration on his part is so much about the money as it is about the message it conveyes. The agreed price is less, so there is nothing requiring me to pay the difference. It’s a vote of appreciation and he repayed it with another form of consideration. This is a nice feature of humanity, that we can communicate with a language beyond words.
In fact, I don’t completely trust words. Much as I like them, I know that they’re often a cover or a dressing to convey something entirely different than what they purport to say.
Brainwashed people emerge from societal influence stained by the wiles of indoctrination and it’s obvious with a little testing that people don’t always know how great a distance has been drawn between their actual understanding and the picture they want painted of it.
Example: woman and I converse and I, being a visual sort of guy, describe someone by what I see. Once, it was “big lips and kinky hair”. Another time it was, “looks like a Phillipino”. Each time, the woman trips all over her teeth to get the word “racist” out before the opportunity passes. It’s very important these days to jump on that judgement at any opportunity so as to call people from their evil discrimminations and make peace for all humanity. The same nonsense happens with all the phobe talk. For some, phobe talk is a way of saying, “but I’m not that way!” For others, it’s just a cattle prod for social manupulation. If you want your special group to be treated special, you can whip strangers in line by calling them a your-group-phobe. Mark my word, one day there will be a push to end idiotphobia. If someone behaves moronically and you protest, then you’re an doltphobe, a hater. Don’t like cheese? Cheddarphobe. Don’t watch R rated movies? Raunchiphobe. Don’t drink? Boozephobe. And please, if you aren’t a drinker then don’t complain about drinkers or their mischief, you hater. Not unless you’ve been passed out and woke up with fetish drawings all over your face. Then, maybe you can talk.
Anyway, back to my experiment with the concerned citizen. Knowing that her claim is bogus and believing that she’s simply belching the fire of indoctrination, I decide to test her to see if she’s actually concerned about racist thinking or racist tendency.
For the next few weeks I make sure to have our conversation laden with descriptors that would fit white people. Cracker, ‘thin lips’, honky, redneck, etc..
When I described a person as having black kinky hair, “racist”. Another person described as having blonde straight hair, crickets.
“A black guy”, racist. “A white guy”, crickets.
“Big lips and a wide nose”, racist. “Skinny lips and pointy nose”, silence.
I spoke with an inner city black neighborhood accent. Racist.
I spoke with a redneck southern accent, as if to mock trailer dwelling blue collar folk. No response.
I never spoke any of the derogative language that’s said to apply to dark skinned people but dredged up as many as I knew about whitey. Nothing was sufficient to qualify as racist.
This same experiment has given the same unvarying results every time I’ve played through it with one of these characters. Do they really believe I’m a racist or that what I’ve said is malicious? I don’t know. But people have been trained to react and the training has stuck. They have their appropriate level of racial guilt and self loathing that they assuage by applying it whenever possible to the correction of other people.
As for me, it’s a disingenuous indulgence that’s beyond annoying. The same thing happens when smokers quit, the pious find their way, or the formerly porky reach slimdom. One of the first orders of business will be to malign those who haven’t made that change in their lives. Now, they’re less than you and you can point that out by identifying their badness and letting the world know that you are not that way. Nope.
But none of this is said. It’s simply the derivation of action, much like a reverse-tip. A little good will is taken out of the jar, but it’s payment for all the injustice.
Speaking of that, a gray man I once worked with used to say, “two hundred and fifty years of oppression, Dennis! It has to be made up!” To him I would always point out that he, in fact, has never been married. Then he’d correct me that the oppresson was at the hands of whitey. I call him gray because his dad was black, and his mom was white. Therefor he is gray. I doubt he’s really seen oppression any more or less than I have. After all, the government program called Affirmative Action is simply an anyone-but-white-people outreach that puts one race completely at the back, as if the others were somehow inferior and need the extra help. That program doesn’t actually say that it is for that purpose, but is set up so as to remove all doubt.
On the positive side of communicating clearly is the ritual of hand holding. Recently I was at the park with the grand children and their parents. My granddaughter reached out and held my hand as we walked to a trail and I can honestly say there is no word that says what that said. It’s unfathomably glorious to be loved and when you know that joy, it’s expressions are priceless.
I like words, I really do. But there are other excellent ways to say what you feel and sometimes they completely out do words.
: )
