the underwear drawer

snip

It was easy to trim Cal's hair back when he didn't really have any, but now that he has a full mop which keeps GROWING at an alarming rate (one inch per week, by my estimates), I have to decide if I want to keep cutting it myself or if I should take him to A Place. There are, apparently, these Places where they will cut your kid's hair, only to keep them from screeching and flailing and ramming their heads right into the scissors, there are amusements. Amusements like chairs in the shape of cars, and TV screens with "The Backyardigans" shrilling alarmingly in the background, and lollipops that you can cram into their gaping maws, momentarily incapacitating them senseless with a payload of sweet sweet sugar for enough time to trim their bangs. I don't know if I'm going to take Cal to A Place (for one, it sounds like it could be a rip-off, and for two, who knows if they'll even do a good job?) but the fact remains that THE HAIR MUST BE CUT. He's starting to look like one of the Beatles in their "Beatles For Sale" era, which, while less disheveled than the Beatles in their rather more hirsute White Album era, is still a little more unruly than I would like.

I don't think I do a bad job of cutting his hair overall. Here's a picture of his hair shortly after I trimmed it the last time, right before Thanksgiving:



You know, nothing fancy or anything, but at least it doesn't look terrible. That's what I'm aiming for: not terrible.

[Edited to add: I ended up cutting it myself again. First I cut a little bit, and it looked pretty good. Then I cut a little bit more, and it looked even better. So then I thought to myself SURELY if I cut it a little bit MORE, if will look EVEN BETTER than better! Q.E.D.! Shockingly, this was not the case. His bangs are now a little too short and somewhat too even, as opposed to the choppy LAYERED look that I was originally attempting. Look at me, all Vidal Sassoon, with the layering and the texturizing creme. But still, it looks not terrible, so I'm going to lock up the scissors now and try to ignore any urges I might have to "fix" the "mistakes," because you know the next stop after that is a bald child, or possibly one with words shaved into his head.]

Currently reading: "Lisey's Story," the new Stephen King cinderblock. It was pretty well reviewed, but...I don't know. I'm having a hard time getting into this whole Stephen-King-writing-as-a-woman thing that he's been doing for the past decade and a half. I can tell he's trying to get away from familiar territory, but I feel like Stephen King's career arc is a little something like the Woody Allen phenomenon, where both men did some of their best work in the 1980's, and with some exception, much of their newer stuff is just a flourish of redundancy or exercising their stylistic tics (Woody Allen: stammering, intellectual neuroticism; Stephen King: unbearable folksiness).