No Respect

Hair: it is the ultimate example of disobedience.

You can train puppies to pee outside, to walk next to you, to sit, to shake, to do any number of fun and/or useful things. With cats, the job is much harder, but with some persistence (and a spray bottle) it is possible to enforce a few rules: you do not yowl in the middle of the night, you do not walk on the kitchen counter, you do not knock our decorative trinkets off the mantle as a game. Even a bonsai can be coaxed, over time, to grow a certain way.

But not hair. Nope, no matter how many times you comb, shave, style, epilate, and wax: it can just never take the fucking hint!

You know that person in your your life who’s like, “Hey, let’s do this dumb thing,” and you’re like, “hmm, maybe?” And you hope they’ll just drop it, but then a day later, they’re like, “Hey, let’s do this dumb thing,” and you’re like, “I don’t know if that dumb thing is really a good idea.” Which should be clear as hell, but they don’t want to listen, so they keep prodding and prodding until you’re like, “Look, I don’t want to do the dumb thing because it is dumb, and honestly, I’m worried you might be dumb for suggesting it, and I might be dumb for being the friend of such a dumb person.” And you feel terrible but they just smile and say, “C’mon! It’ll be great!”

That’s hair. No matter how many times you try to send the message that you don’t want it to come back there, it keeps coming back there. It is untrainable!

Or is that the wrong way to look at it? Could it be that we are the untrainable ones? That our hair is not being a stubborn learner but a tenacious teacher? That it wants to lead us to a better place? A place where we eschew the standards of beauty thrust upon us? Because isn’t it pretty arbitrary where we say there should be hair and where we say there should not? On the head is good, but not on the face? Except some faces capable of growing thick enough hair? On the chest is okay, but no, never on the back? Not on the legs, but okay on the arms, except in the armpits? Could it be that our hair’s persistence is its way of saying: you need to get the hell over it and just be who you are?

Uh, as a company trying to sell you a Panasonic Wet/Dry Shaver & Epilator, we’re gonna go with: no.