{"id":19556,"date":"2022-10-21T13:44:55","date_gmt":"2022-10-21T20:44:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=19556"},"modified":"2022-10-21T13:44:55","modified_gmt":"2022-10-21T20:44:55","slug":"on-shaving-my-head","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2022\/10\/21\/on-shaving-my-head\/","title":{"rendered":"On shaving my head"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

(This is a post about intentionally shaving my head. I know that a lot of people don\u2019t have a choice about not having hair; if reading about someone choosing to temporarily remove their hair will bother you, then you may want to skip this post.)<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

Many years ago, a friend and I discussed the possibility of shaving our heads. I don\u2019t remember what sparked the idea, but I was kind of curious about what I would look like, in much the same way that I\u2019ve sometimes gotten curious about what I would look like without my beard. (And once got curious about what I would look like with blond or red hair.)<\/p>\r\n

At any rate, I continued to be mildly curious over the years, but never followed through.<\/p>\r\n

Until now.<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

In spring of 2020, I had a haircut at my regular haircut place. I generally went for a haircut about once every six weeks.<\/p>\r\n

But when the pandemic hit, I stopped getting my hair cut.<\/p>\r\n

It had been a long time since I last grew my hair out. I decided I might as well grow it out and see what happened. I like long hair; I just don\u2019t like taking care of it.<\/p>\r\n

(On that last point, I recently figured out that I could go a few days without washing my hair, and still have it look OK; I think previously when I had had long hair, I had tried to wash it every day. So it was easier to maintain this time. It also helped that I wasn\u2019t seeing other people all that often, and when I did it was often on video calls, so just tying my hair back in a ponytail was often sufficient to make it look more or less presentable.)<\/p>\r\n

By mid-2021 or so, I think my hair was at least a little longer than it had ever been before. I started thinking about maybe cutting it off. And I thought that if I were going to cut it off, maybe I should consider completely shaving it off. And I thought maybe I could donate the cut-off hair to one of the hair-donation places.<\/p>\r\n

But a colleague recommended a particular hair-donation place that (iIrc) wanted hair that was a little longer than mine was at the time. So I figured I would keep going for a few more months. But then it was winter, or what passes for winter around here, and I figured I would wait for warmer weather. But then when warmer weather came, I thought I might get a nice fancy frock coat, and that that would go better with long hair than with short hair. And various other things came up, and what with one thing and another, I kept delaying, and kept growing my hair out.<\/p>\r\n

(Side note: When Kam took some photos of my long hair<\/a> in September, she mentioned that I had a bald spot. That really surprised me; I wasn\u2019t aware of it until then. There\u2019s nothing at all wrong with it; just didn\u2019t fit my self-image.)<\/p>\r\n

\r\n
\"Jed<\/a>
Jed with shaved head<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n

Anyway, I recently talked it over with KTO, and she agreed to do the cutting and shaving parts, and I decided it was finally time.<\/p>\r\n

So two weeks ago, Kat followed the instructions on the organization\u2019s hair-donation page, and cut off my hair. And then used a trimmer to cut the remaining hair down to just stubble. Unfortunately, I didn\u2019t have my razor with me, so she couldn\u2019t fully shave my head.<\/p>\r\n

I spent the next week that way, with stubble slowly growing out. Oddly, anytime when I wasn\u2019t touching my head with my hand, it still felt to me like I had hair. When I was outdoors, wind made it feel cold in almost exactly the way that it feels when wind blows through my hair when it\u2019s wet.<\/p>\r\n

\"Jed<\/a>
Jed with shaved head 2<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n

When I touched the stubble with my hand, it felt a little bristly. After a couple of days, I used shampoo and conditioner on it, and it felt a bit softer, at least when I moved my hand across it in one direction. (Still a little bristly in the other direction.)<\/p>\r\n

But I was still curious about what it would feel and look like to be completely bald, and it seemed like this was probably the best opportunity I would get anytime soon to find out. So a week after the hair cutting, we talked about it some more, and Kat completely shaved my head, with a safety razor.<\/p>\r\n

As happens with my facial hair, it\u2019s hard to remove enough of my head hair to make it look smooth and non-stubbly. Kat got it to the point where it felt<\/em> smooth when I ran my hand over it, which was an odd but neat and interesting feeling. But even then some parts looked a little stubbly.<\/p>\r\n

\"Stubble,<\/a>
Stubble, four days after shaving<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n

By a day later, of course, it was back to stubble length. This shouldn\u2019t have surprised me; the same is more or less true for my beard. But somehow I was thinking it would stay mostly-bald-feeling for longer.<\/p>\r\n

And though I thought the completely-bald feeling was kinda neat, I didn\u2019t like it enough to want to put in the work to maintain it. And I like how I look a little better with hair anyway. So now I\u2019m growing my hair back.<\/p>\r\n

\r\n
\"Stubble,<\/a>
Stubble, seven days after shaving<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n

Remains to be seen whether I\u2019ll grow it out long again (or just grow it to the length I used to keep it at, and then get it cut). I suspect that I will grow it long, because given the ongoing pandemic, I doubt that I\u2019ll be up for sitting in a hair salon yet (even masked) by the time my hair gets long enough to need cutting; but we\u2019ll see.<\/p>\r\n

The main thing that I observed during this experiment is that (to me) I still look like me when my head is shaved. When I shave off my beard, I look to me like another person; but apparently the beard defines my self-image of my face more than the top-of-head hair does.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-updates"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19556"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19562,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19556\/revisions\/19562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}