Trust Exercises

What counts as a ‘bonding’ exercise? How about taking the afternoon to cut one another’s hair instead of paying $10 for a 10 minute trim?

While I hesitate to say that I would recommend this highly as an option, it is quite a thrilling — hair raising, even — way to spend an afternoon.

In all honesty, E wasn’t too thrilled about the results of my barbering. It was actually going ok for most part — I was able to thin down the hair fairly evenly — and then I made a boo-boo over his left ear.

His ear is still attached, of course. It just looks very … naked.

We decided to try to even it out — we both tried — and the result is that both his ears are now looking like nude sunbathers at a dress-code-required beach.

To his credit, E said that he did anticipate that something might go wrong, and that he decided to follow through anyway with the adventure because it was an adventure that we both would share.

That just made me feel worse for the boo-boo.

He also had his turn to chop my locks. He said that he had the easier time of it, though, because all he had to do was to cut under the top long layer of my hair since all I wanted was for the hair to be layered thinner, and if it looks funny, no one can tell. The amount of hair we collected from my chop-chop did surprise me quite a bit though.

Then again, I’m always surprised by how much hair there is on the floor whenever I go to the hairdressers for a ‘trim’.

Speaking of which, I’m kind of anticipating my next visit to the hairdressers. Not because I think that E did a bad job — quite the contrary, which makes me feel even worse about my boo-boo — but because I wonder what the professionals will have to say about my hidden random chop-chop hairstyle.

The last time I got lambasted for having meddled terribly with my hair was when I was fifteen, I think. I had got my hairbrush tangled in my hair so badly that I had no choice but to cut it off where it hung over my left ear (why’s it always the left ear??).

My family found out what I had done because I had failed to clear the evidence of my misadventure sufficiently to escape notice, and I was dragged to the hairdresser who spent ten minutes exclaiming in horror at the carnage, ten minutes more saying that it couldn’t possibly be fixed short of shaving me bald and another forty minutes complaining about how tiring it was to chop through the rest of my thick hair, before taking a last painful ten minutes to make sure I swore on a stack of fashion magazine never ever to bring a pair of scissors anywhere near my hair by myself ever again.

Technically, today doesn’t count towards breaking the promise: it wasn’t me holding the scissors.

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