“Always Your Way” by My Vitriol… “A little time ago I didn�t want to see us falling out, but everything has gone. I wish I could, sometimes I wish I would. Always Your Way. You want it all, did everything I could. Always Your Way…”

The eternal debate: short hair or long hair? Every summer I always find myself thinking if I should go a short “number 3″ or go shock horror “number 2″ short. Most of the time I’d ask the barber to just trim the front and the top, leaving it generally longish. Everytime I asked for this from every different barber, the resulting haircut would be the same: the typical short men’s haircut you see on the other clones in the street. The bit where I was going wrong was asking the barber what I wanted when I really should have been asking a hairdresser what I wanted. Yesterday, I decided to try out a local hairdresser that I always walk past every time I go to the train station. The hairdressers inside always seemed cheerful when I’d walk past and look in. The bonus was that they’re Asian, so would presumably have experience in cutting thicker-than-thou Asian hair.

I’ve been in quite a few barber shops and I get a similar vibe when seated in any of them. It’s a sort of slightly uncomfortable feeling sitting there, almost like I am out of place there. I don’t get this feeling because I think they might have an illegal card game going on in the backroom with some gangsters. It’s probably more to do with the fact that they all seem to know how to cut only one hairstyle: short. I’d sit down and watch as the so called barbershop artisans went at work on peoples’ hair. Each person leaving the chair would have the same haircut as the previous person: short. We may as well have been sitting on a conveyor belt because it seemed like some sort of automated production line. The barbers may as well have been marionettes, programmed to carve up all types of long hair into the same standardised style: short. More than anything, every barber I’ve met looked miserable. They probably were all dreaming of that life where they’d be singing for a living instead (in a barber shop quartet, naturally).

So I went into this new hair salon and what shocked me immediately was the pricing, which meant that it would cost about the same as an Italian job. The scond shock came upon being greeted with a full-on unadulterated smile and asked if I’d kindly like to take a seat. Wha? I almost had to rub my eyes and pinch myself because upon entering similar establishments I’m used to being stared at and possibly grunted at. Before, there was never ever any need for the barbers to utter words besides asking what kind of hairstyle I wanted and asking me to cough up the dough at the end. Actually, there was never any need for barbers to ask what kind of hairstyle I wanted because I wouldn’t get it. It was almost like they were asking out of spite.

I am always afraid of getting my haircut at any place. No disrespect to the Italians, but I’ve never been to one that knew how to cut my thick Asian locks. I think it’s to do with their affinity for electric clippers. Once I am in that chair and hear that vibrating sound of the clippers, I start to worry. Does the barber not realise that I’m not joining the army? Don’t they realise that I destest short hair on my head? This is when it dawns on me again that the guy cutting my hair probably has more experience making spaghetti sauce than cutting Asian hair. A few months ago, I decided enough was enough and took a spontaneous chance with a hairdresser in Chinatown. If this hairdresser that I saw yesterday would take the same amount of effort into my hair as she did to her own, recognition would be due. If the work is good, then there’s a little extra in it for her. After all, “Tipping” is not a town in China, though I could have asked. They might have looked at me and told me they wouldn’t know, especially because they’re not from there. I’m not quite sure where these hairdressers are from because only one of the hairdressers seemed to be doing the talking, and in a fairly high excitable voice at that.

I think I’m fairly good at working out where a person is from in Asia, especially if I hear them speaking in their native tongue. But yesterday I was stumped because one hairdresser looked Chinese and the other looked Korean. They conversed with each other in the same language, which sounded Korean, but at the same time didn’t sound Korean because of the way it was inflected. I’ll ask the next time I go there.

On the science front, they’ve recently sequenced the Y chromosome. This would be significant to male geeks in the field because it’s the chromosome that makes men men. It is also the chromosome that would make women men too. Furthermore, they’ve found that the genes on the Y chromosome have a neat mechanism of self-repair, meaning that contrary to what was previously thought, it will not disappear over time. This trick it uses to repair itself means that it would not accumulate genetic defects to the point where it becomes completely mutated and dysfunctional and lost with evolutionary distance. Which means that men will be around for a long time, much to the chagrin of feminists the world over because this means that it’s possible in the future for men to rule the Earth. ^_^