A recession in the barbershop is not about hair

"So, anything fun planned?" asked the barber. 

A woman, yes, but if they call it a barbershop then she is a barber.

Thanks to my former employer forcing me off my tenured full-professor job, a small-talk question about the weekend or the summer is now easy to handle.

"Every day is fun now that I am retired."

"Oh, you are already retired ..."

Source

For once, somebody did not think that I was a retired old fart.

"Some day soon I hope to be retired."

"What do you want to do in retirement?"

I am still the old academic who loved asking questions for students to respond.  People usually run away from professors--especially the retired kind--because the stereotype that they love to pontificate is true.  Early on in my teaching career I understood that teaching is not about me droning on and on but is all about providing opportunities for students to understand and demonstrate what they figured out on their own.  In the barbershop chair, I was more interested in what she had to say.

"I want to travel ... go to a remote island.  Like the Maldives."

"Oh yeah?  You might want to do that sooner than later.  Those islands will soon be underwater because of climate change."

I continue to be true my true General Malaise persona wherever I go, even in the barbershop.  The fact that she had dangerous weapons in her hand made no difference to this battle-tested general.

"Really? ..."

"Yep.  In fact, a few years ago, the Maldives government held an underwater cabinet meeting in order to get the world's attention about how climate change will affect them."

There was a pause in the conversation.  I feared that General Malaise had nuked the life out of her.

But after a few seconds she said, "with gas prices going so high, I doubt if I can even travel to the next town over.  I think we are in a recession."

Now, this is not something that Professor Khé would have allowed.  It is one thing for students to express their opinions.  But, it is another if they are not clear about the concept.  A recession is not what she thinks it is.  The inflation that we experience is not recession.

"Well ... we are not in any recession.  The economy is growing.  Unemployment is low.  But, yes, prices are high.  A major factor is the war in Ukraine.  Even if the war ends tomorrow, it will be a while before gas and food prices come down."

I now wondered if she was already asleep from my lecture, like how most students were in my classes.  But, what if she is an influencer among her friends and spreads the correct information to her Facebook friends based on what I told her.  I had to lecture dammit, and I am glad I did.

"Oh, you mean like when all those containers were stuck in ports all over during the pandemic and there was a shortage?"

Now, she is an A+ student!

"Yes.  This is the downside to living in a highly interconnected world.  Something happens somewhere and we all experience it."

"Which is how it should be so that we can all work together.  But, people are so ready to fight over nothing."

I hope that President Joe "hair plug" Biden and the Democratic Party will talk to people like her and gear up for the upcoming elections.  If not, they will end up laying a red carpet for this guy to become the next President and his party to control all the branches of the federal government! 

It's what it is

There wasn't a man waiting for a haircut and all the three barber chairs were vacant.  If only the cosmos always worked in my favor.

It is a women-owned business that is an old style barbershop serving only men.  I would never have imagined such a business venture.  Perhaps because haircuts for most men are incredibly simpler than for women, and this way they don't have to deal with the complications of women's hair. 

(But then do African-American men go to this barbershop?  Do these white women know how to deal with an Afro?)

When I lived in California, the state passed a law against discrimination in pricing for haircuts, and it became illegal to charge different prices for men and women.  I thought it was ridiculous that my simple haircut for which they mostly used the buzzing trimmer would cost the same as laborious scissor-snipping for a woman's lengthy ringlets.  So, I moved to Oregon ;)

I walked over to the chair that one of the women pointed to. 

"How do you want your hair cut?"

"A trim all around."

"Do you want me to leave the hair on top or cut that too?"

"Yes, trim that too.  I don't ever try to use that for any comb over."

She laughed but only slightly.  I suppose she imagined a few customers and their efforts to hide their bald domes.

Years ago, when John McCain was running against George Bush in the Republican primaries, I wanted to write to his campaign staff that McCain could get even my vote if only he stopped combing hair over in that awful manner that he did.

That was the time I was beginning to see and feel the male pattern baldness developing on my head. 

A course that I taught had students in the same classroom and students at another off-campus site. The class was held at a television studio-classroom, and images and sounds from the studio were sent in real time to the off campus site, and the video and audio from there were beamed back as well.  The classroom had a camera turned towards the instructor (me) and another from behind me to capture the students. In the monitors in front of me, I could see the images from all the cameras.  And that is when I caught the image from the camera that was behind my back--it showed the back of my head with the (then) thinning hair where the scalp was beginning to shine through.

I knew then that I would face up to it rather than cover it up.  If people were so desperate to hide their baldness, to what extent would they go to cover up far more important things in life?

"It's what it is" I told her.

She nodded in agreement.

As she picked up the tools of her trade, she said after a few seconds "yes, it's what it is."

She repeated those words with such relish that I suspect she will use that line for a long time.

We humans are not always ready to embrace it's what it is.  We are not wired that way.  We almost always want something different from what it is.  The Buddha advised that such a want for things big or small means there will be suffering.  The path forward, to peace and happiness, is not to want but to humbly accept what is in the here and the now.

Though I intellectually and emotionally understand it, it is not easy for me to think about the big hair that I once had, and the full head of grey hair that I would like to have as an old man.  What does the Buddha know about hair anyway?  In all the images as an enlightened soul he is a completely bald man! 

While I fail to practice the Buddha's advice, at least I don't do a comb over!

My hairy self more than 30 years ago!

Frayed and Fulfilled

"There is a tiny bug on your tshirt near the neck" she said.

My finger felt a tiny hole.  A hole in the tshirt that looked like a bug from a distance.

"It is a hole.  Another well-worn and frayed tshirt."

We laughed.

A few days ago, I noticed that a pair of shorts had a huge gaping hole.  The threads had just given up.  Over the decades, I have worn plenty of upper and lower garments to the very end of their lives.  Especially shorts and pants.  I am always reminded of my grandmother joking: "துணிய கிழிக்க சந்துல ஆணி இருக்கா?" (Do you have nails in your butt to tear the cloth?)

I haven't outgrown the habits formed from growing up in a time and place that now come across practically as an alien planet.  It was a time when new clothes were not purchased on whim, but only for special occasions like birthdays and Deepavali.  And for the weddings of very close relatives.  

Those were also the days when shirts and pants were not bought "ready-made" but were custom made every single time.  We bought the cloth and took it to the tailor.  He--Shanmugam in Neyveli, and Aadhi in Sengottai--took the needed measurements and then told us when it would be ready. 

My parents and the tailor went through the same routine every time:

Parent: "We need it by that date.  It is very important."

Tailor: "Of course.  You don't worry."

But, my parents and I knew that it wouldn't be ready by the promised date.  The tailor too, I am sure, knew that he couldn't deliver.  Yet, people said their respective dialogues and carried on.  Now when I visit the old country, because I have gotten used to the American way of deadlines in any kind of a transaction, I end up being fooled over and over when it turns out that deadlines are merely theatrical devices in negotiations.  My father laughs at my gullibility.

The day would finally arrive well after the negotiated deadline.  In Sengottai the clothes were delivered to grandma's home, and in Neyveli we picked them up from Shanmugam.  It was magical to smell and feel the new clothes.

We couldn't wear the new clothes without getting blessed by the gods.  A parent, invariably my mother, would apply a little bit of kungumam to the shirt collar or the waist of the pant, and then we could wear them.

Clothes were precious.  Well, everything was precious back then.  In the contemporary life, if blue is the new red, then we get the blue by simply clicking a button at a favorite online store.  We know the price of clothes and things but we have no idea about their value.  We simply do not care.

We do not care because billions of us now live in a world of plenty, in contrast to life a mere couple of decades ago.  Walk-in closets are the pride and joy of many.  Wardrobe closets are a lot more spacious than even many kitchens are, and are perhaps bigger than the square footage that hundreds of millions around the world claim as their sleeping space. 

However, choosing from plenty is a problem to most humans because we have not been wired for that.  The tyranny of choice leads to decision fatigue, and we end up using a few clothes over and over again, while condemning a bunch of clothes to being locked up in the closet forever.

Meanwhile, the world of fashion demands that we put aside clothes from two years ago lest we come across as fuddy-duddy.

There are many questions that we can raise about the long-term impacts of such a consumer behavior.  And, many questions like the following two about the changes that we need to initiate:

How can consumers be persuaded to slow down—to purchase fewer clothes of more enduring quality? And what measures can be taken to encourage the industry to favor quality over quantity?

I used to engage students and compel them to think through such issues.  I don't imagine that I made any difference in their thinking and behavior.  At the very least, I can rest assured that I tried.

I don't pretend that this blog-post will make any difference either.  But, the fact that this post or I don't make any difference to this world does not make the problem disappear.  The elephant is still there in the middle of the room, and the elephant is clearly unhappy.