Emma la extranjera viaja a una peluquería (Emma the Foreigner Journeys to a Hair Salon)

Today I got my hair cut for the first time in 8 months. I normally only get my hair cut a few times a year, especially now that I am trying to grow it out to donate and I have a pretty long way to go. Anyway, I had been steadily noticing that my hair was getting rattier and rattier (no matter how much I brushed it), which was not good. I had been planning to go to a hair salon for several weeks now, but I never got around to it, which is very unlike me.

It took me some time, but I realized that I was nervous to get my hair cut here. Not for the vain reasons that most girls would have about them messing up my hair or putting the wrong gel in it or whatever -- to be honest, I could care less, and pretty much anything they did would most likely be an improvement (save the mullet, which is a style that has still not died here) -- but more just because going to a hair salon that operates in a foreign language is quite intimidating. I was in there thinking about it anthropologically and it makes total sense: it's a space outside of normal space, all women, all gossip, with very specific social codes that differ from the outside world. Me, being the oh-so-fantastic foreigner that I am, would be very clumsy in a situation like an intimate hair salon, which I inevitably was. Getting your hair cut is something that is so basic when you're in your own culture, but I don't think we realize what a weird, intimate experience it is.

Also, this opens up a whole different box of problems, but the vocabulary one uses to get a hair cut is absolutely not normal vocabulary that one would need to get by on any normal day. I studied the vocab before, though, so I was good. To be honest, I wasn't worried about communicating with the hairdressers (a great improvement; I probably would have peed in my pants if I had had to do this in the fall) so much as not making a total fool of myself. Everything went more or less ok, though, with the normal bumps in any new cultural experience (I'm kind of chuckling at myself for calling a hair cut a cultural experience, but whatever, it really is in its own way). I'm having trouble fully articulating this because I'm exhausted, but yes. Going to get my hair cut was intimidating. I went to Luisa's place and had her woman, who was very nice but treated me like I was Forrest Gump (also, that movie was on the tv a few nights ago, hilarious to hear in Spanish).

Austin encouraged me to mess around and take photos (and my dad, who wanted pictures) so we did... the lady took 15 min to blow dry my hair so today it was soft and luxurious, something that it will probably never be again. People were stroking me all day. Oh well, I'm certainly not complaining!

The genius of my over-excited, very hardworking father.

So that is the rough overall news of my hair. Very important, I know. But I did it, I braced my fear, I entered into a space with social standards that were odd and unknown to me, and now I have touchable hair. Overall, not too shabby!

I will end with a quote of the day: we were talking about something in Historia of Iberoamerica -- I can't remember what -- and the professor was trying to give an example of when countries can be absurd, so naturally he went to the presidents of the US and started talking about Bush. There was a pause, and then he said "yeah, Bush... hmm, I bet he has never read any constitution from the other countries in the Americas, let alone his own!" It was hilarious. Ok, maybe you had to be there.

I am deteriorating quickly. In mind, not in body. And in an impermanent, I-need-sleep kind of way. No te preocupes!