hair spew: the mane issue

every weekend i'd be home with my smiling scion of sweetness and my sweet spouse of smiles and there'd always be a moment where the latter would take notice of my hair and ask me to have it cut. and every time that happens, i always tell her i'd do it only when everyone ceases forcing me to suffer another monumental trimming of my life. and every time i say that, she points out that i'm just saying that and that i have actually no plans of getting a haircut.

partially, she is correct but from my standpoint of view, that's something you do not plan. right now, yes, i do not want to lose my locks. but that fateful time will arrive (maybe tomorrow, i don't know) that i'll wake up and the first thing in my head as agreed upon by all of my mental entities will be to get a haircut. and then i'll probably google the hairstyle i'll want to have, which of course, ought to be something i've never had before.

but let's cue the flashback blur effect and siphon some background on the topic at hand. (this might be long so if you're busy, uninterested or on the verge of death and would rather read something more thought-provoking, you are permitted to leave as the two previous paragraphs seem enough to fulfill the primary objective of this post)

when i was a kid, i had moptop beatles hair, probably because my dad was a big fab four fan. when i started going to school, it was trimmed in such a way that it looked like a bowl was placed on top of my head and the barber made cuts straight along the rim. i rocked those rulered bangs for many years with occasional gel-enabled rizalian pompadour days. as puberty took over, i gradually lost my maternal dependence and began to loathe my hair. i developed a habit of jerking my head upwards to get strands off my face. i had to carry a comb around in my pocket but for some inexplicable reason, i kept losing that beige-colored toothed piece of plastic.

and then came high school, which meant four years of bad hair days. looking back, i still cannot comprehend why we had to have haircuts with such specific dimensions, three fingers from the ear and two from the eyebrow, if im correct. for all of my adult life i have never been in any job or situation where that haircut was required. anyways, a centimeter longer and an administrator would chop a chunk off forcing you to have an even stupider haircut than the infamous keempee look. skinheadedness was frowned upon back then and i never intended to go bald because i was so skinny then and wore glasses half of high school that i thought i'd look like gandhi. i also got tired of buying new combs so around third year, i decided i wasn't going to be a slave to grooming. i stopped combing my hair. of course, i'd use my hand to run through it when needed but i eschewed combs completely.

college onward, i took the haircut liberty to new verticals. i wore caps in class. i got spikes. undercut? sure. one day i'd be long-haired and then the next day, everything's suddnely mowed down to baldness (i got sick the first time). i even had my hair dyed red and got called rodman or moffat by strangers. i had it braided but never got the chance to get dreads. i did all of these things to my hair just because i wanted to. never due to fads.

but of all the hair metamorphoses i went through, i felt most comfortable wearing my hair long. not because i like rock music. (the top two questions i always get asked because of my hair: are you in a band? do you have a lighter?) i just like it this way. when i was younger and making comic strips on old notebooks instead of playing outside, i created my imaginary adult persona and he had ponytailed long-hair all the time so i guess having hair like this was one of my childhood dreams. (that guy was also very muscular and always had a lit cigarette on his lips -- staples of a boy's concept of coolness, i think -- but i never had either ever) ive stuck to using a specific brand of shampoo believing it helps in the faster growth of my already fast-growing hair. i'd avoid shaving facial hair for a couple of months and people would start calling me jesus.

so yeah, this is the definitive jai hairdo. how long it will get depends on the time i get the urge to see the mirror image of scissors murdering my scalp grass or if circumstances call for it (like when i got married), whichever comes first.

what it all comes down to is this: people think men look better with short hair not because it's the truth but because that's they been programmed to believe. so, as with most things, no one should force anything upon anybody just because it's dictated by the norm. hair length shouldn't be an issue. that's the long and the short of it.


p.s. i just got promoted recently, which means my hard work paid off, which mean my salary will increase (by how much, i dont know) which does not mean im coming to work with a new haircut. hah!
p.p.s. im halfway watching the kids are all right and already there've been two scenes involving gay porn. wtf. i dont know if i should go on, afraid there'll be more. i want to vomit. and watch five hours of real 100% straight made-for-real-men porn just to unsee that crap.

be kind, remind

high school reunion's coming up and ive been forced asked to do the audiovisual presentation. i havent started on the actual slideshow of pictures yet due to image inadequacy but the intros, effects, music and transitions have all been dealt with. these elements i continue to tinker with every now and then as i wait for new digitized memories to arrive and all the cuttings and renderings have made me miss my video editing days.

and during a bathroom break, i looked back on those days and remembered the very first time i performed video editing. it happened long before i knew what final cut and adobe premiere were. all i had back then were a video8 camera, a tv, a vhs recorder, a cassette player and creative persistence (or persistent creativity?). cue flashback fx for 10 years ago...

it was for a class report in informatics. i didnt want to do the usual talking in front of the class. it was good to have luigi in the group because he understood and supported my ideas every time. luigi and i shot most of our scenes unscripted, except for the part where we had to read the textbook. when we had all the footage we wanted, luigi and i went downtown to find a place to have our video report edited. we found none. the report was to be presented the next day. i told my friend i'd take care of everything and we went our separate ways home.

with no previous experience in video editing, i attempted to do the whole thing on my own. i made title cards by drawing on bond papers and taping them on the wall. i recorded the footage from the video camera to the vhs, cutting them together by pausing, rewinding and playing the video. on sequences where a music track was needed, i pulled the audio rca plug off the camera and jacked it into the cassette player where a tape played. it was a painstaking task for one man to do and my numerous tries caused by errors resulted into some bad recording. those, i considered as effects. the closing credits i created by typing in microsoft word and shooting the monitor.

the following day, i carried the loaded vhs player to school and luigi brought a tv. we presented the report to our class's amusement. even students from the other classes watched and enjoyed. the end.

now where could that tape be...?