dual personalities

I had a busy week. I tested negative for Covid (to no one’s surprise) and taught the first classes of the semester via Zoom. We start in-person next week. In preparation for the start of my semester, I decided to color my own hair. I’ve never done this before, but given its awful trend toward an unnatural red (presumably, the product of months of harsh shampoo and color-neglect due to Covid), I thought “why not?”

So, I trundled off to the local drug store, grabbed a box of medium brown Loréal hair color and high-tailed it home. It took me a few days to drum up the nerve to do the deed, but after loads of online tutorials, I felt ready. It is a messy, smelly job and the dye gets everywhere. Fortunately, I anticipated this and had plenty of towels and plastic sheeting available, so I did not ruin my white bathroom sink or dye my hands. Anyway, it worked, and although it turned out darker than what I would call ‘medium brown’, at least my hair matches my eyebrows now.

One day soon I’ll just go salt-and-pepper gray, because the hair-coloring thing makes me feel vain. There’s a fine line between wanting to look nice and spending too much time on appearances. Apparently, this vanity problem is universal and it doesn’t apply only to women. In ancient Rome even men obsessed about how they looked. In his essay “On the Shortness of Life”, Seneca described fops who spent all their time at the barber’s:

“Again, do you call those men leisured who spend many hours at the barber’s simply to cut whatever grew overnight, to have a serious debate about every separate hair, to tidy up disarranged locks or to train thinning ones from the sides to lie over the forehead? How angry they get if the barber has been a bit careless – as if he were trimming a real man! How they flare up if any of their mane is wrongly cut off, if any of it is badly arranged, or if it doesn’t fall into the right ringlets! Which of them would not rather have his country ruffled than his hair?”

There’s really nothing new under the sun, is there?

Now it’s Saturday, halfway through January and snowing big, wet, heavy flakes — the kind that will make great snowmen but be horrible to shovel.

I don’t have anywhere I need to be today, so I will just hunker down with a mug of cocoa, a good book and a blanket. What could be better?

Have a great weekend, and if you have to take personal grooming into your own hands due to Covid restrictions, just be sure to read the directions carefully!