— पांच हजार दो सौ अठ्ठावन्न —
I got my twice-yearly haircut after work yesterday, walking direct from work to Rudy's Barbershop on Pine Street. I had a 5:40 appointment, and just as happened back in May, the cut was done in surprisingly short time. The guy who cut my hair even revisited the back to make it a bit shorter; I always ask for the back to be much shorter so that it doesn't grow into any kind of mullet over the next six months. Otherwise I tell them I simply want half the length cut back so basically it looks the same again in six months.
I couldn't decide whether to wear a face mask during the appointment. I know some people for whom this would never be a question. I even went back to my blog post in which I mentioned having my last appointment, which wound up being
largely dominated by an account of a very strange man who had gotten in ahead of me and wound up asking for all his cut hair to be swept up off the floor and given back to him in a plastic sack. But, nowhere in there did I mention whether I had worn a mask.
I'm thinking I didn't, actually, probably feeling "safer" due to being both vaccinated and boosted
plus having recovered from my first (and, so far, only) bout of covid just the week prior. I do mention a mask once elsewhere in the post, noting that I wore one inside an essential oils store in downtown Renton mostly just because it cut down on the awfully strong odor.
Not to say that I should always just follow what everyone else is doing, but not a single other person in Rudy's was wearing a mask yesterday. (Ironically, on my walk home, I did pass one other salon with just two people in it, a hairdresser and a client, and the hairdresser wore a mask but the client didn't.) Rationalizing, for no objectively good reason, that I spend more time maskless inside a restaurant these days than I would inside Rudy's—which only had a handful of people inside—I didn't put it on. I know it made cutting my hair easier. Of course I also know it wouldn't have made cutting my hair especially difficult to have it on either. Whatever. I'm also feeling more protected, with admittedly only minimal evidence, due to having gotten the Omicron booster shot about five weeks ago. Who knows how long its efficacy will remain adequate, though.
I'm still strict about mask wearing on public transit and in places like grocery stores. If you said I was being inconsistent here, I suppose I would have no basis on which to argue. I've also been working in the office maskless all along, ever since finally ending work-from-home and returning the office at the end of June last year (with the exception of when I worked from home through January). The office remains far less populated than pre-pandemic, but there are people here. What kind of further caution or mitigation I might adopt in the near future and over the holidays will depend on what kinds of numbers we see. Of course, a ton of cases now go unreported since we have endless supplies of home tests.
Well, anyway. I got my haircut, no one in there had a mask on. That's what it was. I was in there for maybe twenty minutes. So far as I can tell, the guy did a very good job. I would fucking hope so; it cost me nearly $60. Still, as always, I won't know for sure exactly how good a cut it was until the hair is growing again, and how the curls grow out with it. I wasn't as satisfied with it this past time, too much of the hair from the very top of my head not falling in a way that blended very well with the hairs further down my head. Time will tell, but if this grows out well, I will book my next appointment with this same guy again. I'll make a note of his name in my Outlook calendar for reference next April. Or maybe February, if I get the cut early in time for the trip to Australia, which was what I did in 2020—a big reason my hair was so much longer after the pandemic stretch, unable to cut it again until April 2021. My hair grew way longer that year than I ever would have intended otherwise.
The guy who cut my hair was bald and stocky, kind of looking intimidating by sight alone, until he moved and spoke, which made me suspect he was queer. The hairdresser to our left definitely was. Judging by the conversation he had with the woman whose hair that guy was doing, even the woman was a hairdresser there, just getting her hair done in a down period. They all spoke briefly about "corporate" and how they didn't used to allow getting haircuts on the clock, but now they do, apparently because they never have the time for it otherwise? I don't quite get that, except for the idea that naturally they don't want to come back to their own workplace outside work hours to get their hair done.
I usually take a picture of my hair right after haircuts, but decided to wait a day today, so it would be after my normal hair prep after my shower. If I remember I'll take a selfie tonight. I should have taken one right before the appointment and I spaced it. There are plenty of other recent photos of me anyway.
— पांच हजार दो सौ अठ्ठावन्न —
— पांच हजार दो सौ अठ्ठावन्न —
I didn't do much of note after getting home. I made myself a grilled cheese sandwich and hot chocolate for dinner. I thought about watching a movie and never got around to it.
Shobhit sent me some fascinating photos, and especially video clips—he's never sent me video of it—of his family engaged in Diwali ritual at home in Delhi. This is their biggest Hindu holiday, for our point of reference like a cross between Christmas and the Fourth of July, it being a "festival of lights": the decorate their houses with lights, and they also use fireworks.
This video, the longest of the ones he sent me, was genuinely heartwarming and charming to watch. Shobhit's brother was there (I sent the video to some friends and Gabriel said the man was "Shobhit's twin, just with gray hair"—he's also thinner), as was Shobhit's sister-in-law and one of his nieces. You can hear Shobhit singing along with his mother at the end of the clip. Then there is
this video, at the end of which Shashi Ji is flinging drops of water onto the others, apparently cleansing them of sins. There's a bit of giggling at that point, which Shobhit said was due to his niece making a joke about Shashi Ji claiming she's never sinned, or something to that effect. They're all speaking Hindi so I don't understand it.
There's a lot more to say about some of the other things Shobhit texted, not least of which is that I learned, somehow for the first time after 18 years with a man who grew up Hindu, that cows are so sacred to Hindus that every part of them are sacred—
even their shit. As in, that photo features several offerings to Hindu gods (specifically three of them represented in that photo; hover over the image on a desktop computer to get them identified in Flickr notes), including both puris with sugar,
and dried cow dung lit on fire. Shobhit mentioned "cow shit" as though it wouldn't even occur to him that I might find this strange. In fact, I was bowled over by it: what the fuck?
I had a
lot of questions. How fresh is it? Where do you get it? Do you just go outside and pick it up from the street?
Shobhit said you can buy it, or family or friends will give you some. This wad of cow dung, apparently, could be anywhere from several days to several weeks old. He said it's dried cow dung; I have no idea whether that makes it any more sanitary than if it had just been, uh, freshly manufactured. I suppose it probably does, but still.
Turns out, this is
very common practice, in some communities—not Shobhit's mom's, thank god—
taken to extremes. I mean, I guess I should be grateful Shobhit and his mom aren't smearing cow shit all over themselves. Also, I made a mental note to be mindful of certain bias in all media (even Reuters), and to keep in mind the people featured in that news article are not represented of all the Indian people, or even all poor or uneducated poor people. That said, it still says something that there was literally flaming shit on the kitchen counter at Shobhit's mom's house.
Shobhit illustrated how widely used and versatile cow shit is in their culture and history, though. Some people use it for fuel, burning it in stoves the way do firewood. I found these details kind of jaw dropping. It's not often anymore than I learn something about India that is wildly alien to me, after so much time with Shobhit, but it certainly happened yesterday. I learned from that Reuters article that some people have even used it as soap.
Soap? To be fair, the article also notes how doctors were sending out notices to make sure people understood smearing themselves with cow shit would
not boost their immunity, as believed by some, in a way so as to protect from covid-19. So it should be also noted that plenty of actually clinically trained doctors do exist in India. It's not just a country of a billion people smearing themselves with cow shit. I would guess the cow shit smearers are more like, I don't know? A few thousand? Tens of thousands? Actually I have no idea. Even a small percentage of a billion people is a large number.
— पांच हजार दो सौ अठ्ठावन्न —
[posted 12:36 pm]
