HAIR

I could be embarrassed. Should I be embarrassed?

Is hair THAT important? Just how superficial am I?

What’s the big deal?

The deal is… I’m not certain I’ve hit puberty yet. There are some clear signs I’m told.

When I listen to my voice on tape… or CD, or mp3, or whatever format is today’s current and oh-so-temporary waste of my $… *where can I play my extensive library of America and Carly Simon 8-tracks huh?*

Where was I? Oh yeah… my voice… my voice sounds like my sister’s lovely higher-pitched vocals… except I don’t want her voice (no offence Sis).

I want a manly, mellifluous, FM DJ’s baritone timbre. I’d even settle for a decent tenor.

Not only that, but looking back on my early high school days I remember pining for the day when I would have hair.. you know… down there…

And I did get it – temporarily – in spades eventually, but before that …

Changing in gym class was a torture as I squirrelled away in the back corner while all the hirsute gorilla-boys with curly black wads all over their groins and pits snapped towels at each other… many even adorned already with moustaches and beards…

… I peeked down and viewed my Brazilian “do”… no fair!

I couldn’t complain to anyone… there were no FB chatrooms or support groups for woebegone juveniles who were slow to physically mature.

And even if I did want to complain I’d have had to walk uphill for hours and hours through 4 foot-high snowdrifts just to get to my friend Renato’s house. Those were the times my friend!

I wasn’t totally overlooked by pubertal change I suppose… I did have a pimply chin and nose… lucky me.

So let’s recount here… Girl’s voice, check. No body hair, check. Acne, check.

I was living the life of Danny Zuko – cool dude, cool car, cool chicks – in GREASE… HA! only in my mind! My Greased Lightning manliness was a Two-Wheeled Tricycle.

Just so you know I’m not an inveterate complainer, a few years later I did hit a sweet spot in life where hair was abundantly flourishing everywhere…

So much so that while living in William’s Lake BC in my early 20’s, one of the female doctors in the hospital where I worked even joked that perhaps I was the Missing Link because of the fluffy dark tufts of hair poking above the top of the collar of my scrubs… I was living the Latino dream… so I guess I did find my delayed puberty after all.

I sat in that sweet spot for about 20 years… sadly, my voice never dropped, but I did sport the thick, dark hair and clear skin that gave me that “Saturday Night Fever” style.

Until… *mic drop*… one day in the lab where I worked in Penticton. One of my so-called “lab friends” giggled about the bald spot on the back of my head. I laughed right along because it was just a joke and who doesn’t like a good joke, right?

Later that day – my co-worker’s voice and laughter tracking in my head – I checked in my bathroom 3-way mirror for reassurance, akin to you looking at a new mole carefully to reassure yourself that it isn’t a deadly cancer growth.

WTF!!!! Seriously? The laugh track stopped and the BeeGees began singing I Started A Joke in my head… yes, there was a small hole in the ozone layer in the back of my head. Noooooo.

My Everest-like hairy peak had been summited and I was now tumbling and sliding on the downslope of manhood… I had male pattern baldness … I felt myself cowering back in that gym class corner.

Another cruel ironic appendage to this furry tumble has been the unexpected sprouting of hair on the rims of my ears and from my nostrils… perhaps you can attribute these indignities to my atheistic perspective: either God is truly non-existent (surely no loving God would do this to me)…or… this same God is making me pay the price for dissing his/her/their existence. But that’s another blog post, right?

Life is about perpetual flexibility and accommodation… we hang on and survive through the embarrassments and lean times, and thrive through the buoyant patches. C’est la vie.

I’ve decided that puberty is truly a moot point so long as I stay immature for life!

Na-na na-na boo-boo… stick your head in doo-doo…