At least for now, I’ve given up on the idea of combing my hair the way I want it. On Monday of last week, I got a haircut which (as always) I thought was nearly perfect as I left the salon. And it did look good, until the next day, when I couldn’t make it do anything I wanted it to. Since then I’ve tried various combinations of gels without success. Yesterday was the worst hair day of my life. Of my life.

So now I’ve given up and let my hair do what it wants to do, which is flow forward from the back of my head and come to a point in the middle of my forehead. Okay, it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. Fortunately it’s very short at the moment, so the best thing I can do with it is keep it from looking totally freaky, the way it did yesterday.

So today, with a toga and a laurel wreath, I’d be looking a little like Julius Caesar (before, you know, that thing in the forum). I look in the mirror and I see a Republican staring back at me, and it’s not a pretty sight. But it’s a whole lot better than the something-about-Mary look I sported all day yesterday. I guess I just wasn’t meant to have hair that I could smooth back with one hand.

How did I get myself into this situation? Well, you see, the stylist had this soft, musical voice and that Filipino accent that sounds like silver chimes. I would pretty much have agreed with anything she wanted to do. For some reason she chose to talk to me while the clippers were buzzing in my ears, so I’m not exactly sure of everything she said. But it was worth an extra dollar in the tip.

Somehow I managed to spend ten days trying to live with something I knew the very next day wasn’t going to work out. So today I gave up my dream hair for something more practical. What will happen when it starts getting longer again I don’t know. I do have a discount card that my stylist gave me for my next haircut, but I’m actually thinking about going somewhere else.

In the time since we last met, I’ve managed to fulfill all of the work-related obligations that had a hard deadline of the end of January. Unfortunately, what I have to do in February (the annual Big Project) is just as demanding, but the deadline is softer. I should probably promise the Boss and our accountant that I’ll have it all done by the end of the month, but I doubt that even that would ensure that I’d make it on time. I’ll just have to muddle through and spend whatever extra time I can find putting it all together. I’m thinking a deadline might even make me go slower, and I could possibly have it all done well before the end of February. Not likely, but possible.