the underwear drawer

the enemy of good is perfect




I gave Cal a haircut last night. Joe and I have been cutting Cal's hair since the fall, because he hated--HATED! NOW WITH MORE EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!--getting his hair cut by a stranger at a salon (albeit a kiddie salon, with the TVs and the toys and the chair shaped like a boat) but somehow didn't mind getting his hair cut at home by me and Joe. Which was fine by us, because, you know, FREE HAIRCUT. We haven't been doing such a bad of of it either, or at least I don't think it looks much worse than the pro jobs we'd paid for in the past. Apparently, the great equalizer of hairstyling is how much your client's head is moving around and what decibel level of protest is issuing from the mouth part of that head.

Cal's last haircut was a while ago, a day or two after Mack was born, which Joe heroically did pretty much all by himself using mostly the scissors, though he's the first one to admit he had some suboptimal results. (Weird ridges, strange sticking-out pieces at the crown, what have you.) But whatever, who cares, it grew out, and anyway, the kid is three, it's not like he's going to the Oscars or anything. However, two months have passed, and he was starting to look like a Monchichi, so yesterday I cued up an episode of "The Backyardigans" on my iTunes, busted out the clippers, and went to town.

The results are...OK. Somewhat oddly, he still looks like a Monchichi, but at least he's a Monchichi with shorter hair now, and we can see his ears again. I did have a strong inclination at the end to do some sort of shaping (taking it in closer along the neck and the sides? Doing a fade? I have no idea how to do these things, but it's not rocket science, now is it?) but I also strongly feel that the enemy of good is perfect* and given that his hair looked presentable, I decided to stop before I got too clipper happy and ended up accidentally giving him a bald spot that I would have had to turn into a word shaved into the back of his head. You know, to pretend like it was all on purpose.

* This, incidentally, is the same argument I gave a couple of weeks ago, when I was taking care of a patient who, during his last attempt at surgery at an outside hospital, had a respiratory arrest because they couldn't intubate him. After some struggle doing an away fiberoptic through a William's oral airway this time around, I finally got the damn tube in and taped the thing in place with the oral airway still in the patient's mouth. My anesthetist asked me if I wanted to slide the airway out over the tube, just to tidy up, but I told her (see, here's the point of the thing) that the enemy of good is perfect, and the last thing we needed now was to accidently pull out the tube just because we were trying to make everything all nice and neat. Leave well enough alone is what I say.