see the world, they say

my chatty barber (who still calls me 'boy', and who can never keep straight what exactly it is i'm doing at any given period of my life) took about 10 minutes of persuading today before he would believe that i am no longer in ns, was in fact done with that 3 years ago (or whole lifetimes if according to my internal measure of time). this is important because it means i'm constantly in danger of getting a buzz cut, though on a positive note it might also indicate that i'm going to look 18 for the rest of my life. i think i got stuck in this particular time warp some time in sec 4 - all strangers i have met over the past decade, when asked to guess my age, invariably come up with a number between 17 and 20, except for american gas station attendants selling me alcohol who think i am 12.

anyway, freshly tonsured and no longer hacking and sneezing, this monday is already an improvement upon the last. i'm not entirely sure how healthy (psychologically) the pendulum swings between hope and devastation are, but i have the feeling that i should be settling upon on or the other pretty soon. hope, after all, has its own demerits. one of the lessons of ns was that if one is going to process towards despair, one should at least do so consistently, with fortitude. after all, once set on that path, a person can be armed fully with the acrimony and cynicism necessary to survive it, and not waste time chasing fleeting palliation.

hope: buying $1 worth of toto every time the jackpot creeps above 1 million dollars. did you know that you're about six to seven hundred times more likely to die in a plane crash than win the lottery? hope: applying to the ywca on the off-chance that they want a neuroscientist to design curricula for 7-year old girls. it's amazing how you can spin a resume to fit any job if you really put your mind to it.

chatty barber's conclusion was that i look like i should be some sort of a military person. except...obviously not. anyway thanks for the hint, destiny, try harder next time, and do compensate ria's hair salon for the visit i will not be paying them whenever my hair next overgrows my ears.

Currently reading:
Howard's End - E.M. Forster