If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my daily commute to our nation’s capitol it is that young Chinese men possess the most amazing haircuts currently active in this country. As I wait for the mechanical snake to take me home in it’s belly (also known as “the bus”) I sometimes see a group of Chinese men standing in groups outside Paddy Powers, looking vacantly into the middle distance and smoking cigarettes. And atop many of these men’s heads sit the most wonderful constructions, like hairy squids had descended from the sky and landed there. Some spread upwards, mocking gravity with their vertical tenacity. Others slyly make there way across their owners heads before outrageously flowing down their necks like a greasy waterfall creating a haircut that says “business at the front, party at the back”. I don’t know what’s going on over in China, but if a nations hairstyles are any indication of their cultural advancements then they are probably already living inside the Moon.
I myself until recently was a possesser of a fairly ragged mop-top. As I tend to do, I let my barnet grow over the winter months so as to provide much needed insolation from the elements. This year was no exception. My flowing locks, known in the Parisian social circuits as “the Fizzy Gorilla”, flourished over the Christmas period. But as they say, what goes up, must come down and whilst for a period of about 4 seconds on the 14th of December my hair looked OK, it quickly began a descent into a long, messy debacle. Yet still I wore it much like a Lego man wears his plastic helmet of hair so as to keep Mother Nature from freezing my brain-blob.
But the age old battle between style and function came to a head this week when I was forced to make that most painful of decisions; look like more of nerd than I already do and continue with this wildly unkempt hairdo; the type of which is only maintained by people more interested in codifiying the interweb or man up and sculpt this unwieldy beast into something more respectable. I chose the latter, in spite of our continuing freezing weather systems, and got the chop. Now, I experience an acute feeling akin to daggers of ice being driven into my skull while I march down O’Connell Street with the added bonus that I look like someone who has been forced to join the army because every other solider has been killed.
Still though, with the weight lost and the aerodynamicy offered by the shedding of my excess locks, I can now navigate the streets with increased velocity and efficiency. The result being that I have shed 10.3 seconds off my walk to the bus, and if I continue at this rate, by the end of next year I will have saved enough time to learn how to cook pancakes.
