{"id":381,"date":"2011-10-06T07:33:46","date_gmt":"2011-10-06T05:33:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=381"},"modified":"2011-10-06T11:56:39","modified_gmt":"2011-10-06T09:56:39","slug":"a-siren-with-clippers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=381","title":{"rendered":"A Siren with Clippers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Execution\"<\/a>\u201cPosa\u010fte se,\u201d she says. Sit down. <\/em><\/p>\n

She\u2019s all of five feet tall with dark eyes. She points to the chair and I stare at it as though I am eyeing up a stocky Jedi nemesis. Noticing my gaze mixed of awe and consternation, she pats the seat with her fingers and smiles.<\/p>\n

I sit down and she pulls the smock over me, tucks in a towel and starts pulling at my hair in scientific inquiry oozing with imagined sexuality. \u201cCo to bude?\u201d She asks. What\u2019ll it be?<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cSkratit norm\u00e1ln\u00ed, ma\u0161ine v z\u00e1dech,\u201d I say. Normal trim, machine in the back \u2013 <\/em>in painfully bastardized Czech.<\/em> I show her that I want the clippers on the sides and back, not the top. This has happened once.<\/p>\n

\u201cA vousy tak\u00e9?\u201d And the beard too?<\/em><\/p>\n

I begin to sweat, don\u2019t let her do it, dammit, I swear to myself. I take a deep breath. My beard is full and thick and I don\u2019t want her to trim away my one and only lumberjack quality.<\/p>\n

\u201cNe, dekuju,\u201d I say, no thanks<\/em>, but it\u2019s clear that I haven’t convinced either of us.<\/p>\n

With an invisible click of her thumb she snaps on the clippers and presses them into the back of my neck, rendering me a melting block of Camembert. My eyes glaze over and where once there was a metro station barber shop, there is now a temple atop the Himalayas.<\/p>\n

Damn, it has begun again.<\/p>\n

As an expatriate, I have found that there are linguistic areas that have priority in terms of necessary language acquisition.<\/p>\n

The first is food. Learning how to feed myself and get someone in a restaurant to bring me sustenance was a major priority. This need was further prioritized the first time I ordered dr\u0161\u0165kov\u00e1 in a restaurant thinking it was chicken noodle soup. It is, in fact, stomach soup.<\/p>\n

The second is the ability to prove the extent of one\u2019s linguistic ignorance. Needed for telling someone just how useless you are in their language. This area helps relieve you of a great deal of responsibility. This aspect goes hand in hand with on the spot phrases that you\u2019ll use in an urgent need to protect yourself. My first such phrases were, \u201cI didn\u2019t know that it was your burrito!\u201d and \u201cThank you, but I am allergic to octopus.\u201d<\/p>\n

The last is haircut lexicon. In Prague you only have to glimpse one guy with a fauxhawk or permed mullet, a round-faced monchichi or a Canadian hockey player hairdo, to understand the importance of knowing how to handle yourself linguistically in the barber\u2019s chair.<\/p>\n

That being said, the problems I run into in the barber\u2019s chair are not linguistic. They are of a different ilk.<\/p>\n

It is said that the way to a man\u2019s heart is through his stomach. But this doesn\u2019t apply to me \u2013 contrary to physical evidence. I can cook, but I can\u2019t give myself a haircut while attaining the Zen-comfort medley that a female barber can.<\/p>\n

The way to my heart is through my scalp.<\/p>\n

The beautiful and miniature L clips away at my hair, revealing ever more of the skin beneath. Through a fog of extreme relaxation, I hear\u2014and react to\u2014questions concerning the length of my hair and the endangered existence of my sideburns. The problem is that for the twenty minutes I\u2019m in the chair I have a pretend relationship with the hairdresser. For this reason, I allow her full access to my head, surrendering all trust to the siren working her follicular magic.<\/p>\n

This is why I end up with very short hair cuts. The shorter the cut, the longer I’ve been able to stay under the nymph spell of the hairdresser and her magical hands. And it is why, during this haircut, I feel a devastating shift in the battle of my beard.<\/p>\n

L trims the hair on the sides of my head so that it looks like cut grass between the hedgerows of my hair and my beard. L asks me again if I\u2019d like a beard trim and, unable to resist her charms, nod and say, \u201cPro\u010d ne?\u201d Why not?<\/em><\/p>\n

My beard, my one and only lumberjack quality, is buzzed away from my face in a million little flecks. I hand L the money and step out into the metro station, feeling bald and a little ashamed, as if I\u2019ve just made an unsuccessful pass at a prostitute.<\/p>\n

Maybe I\u2019ll buy a flannel shirt.<\/p>\n

The way to your heart is through your…?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cPosa\u010fte se,\u201d she says. Sit down. She\u2019s all of five feet tall with dark eyes. She points to the chair and I stare at it as though I am eyeing up a stocky Jedi nemesis. Noticing my gaze mixed of awe and consternation, she pats the seat with her fingers and smiles. I sit down […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1EvEu-69","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=381"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":386,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions\/386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}