Ahhh the Mullet

This week I decided to get my hair cut. It was long, shaggy, and just plain disrespectful. And, as my best friend Michelle would say, "Buddy, have some self respect!" That means, "Nicole, get your hair cut... now."

So, I decided to ask an adult student of mine where she gets her hair cut because she's just about the cutest thing ever. Toshiko told me all of the information, got me an appointment and I was set to go.

The appointment started off not so good... I was all by myself with a bunch of Japanese people that spoke only Japanese... and they all had scissors in their hands. Not so scary if you have confidence that they know what you want, but scary as heck when all of the hair magazines showed the fancy MULLET. I kid you not, its an epidemic here. Mullets galore. Scary mullets and fancy mullets, but they are all still... mullets.

So I pick out a picture that I like (which isn't a mullet), and I gave it to him, but he kept pointing to another picture that had a mullet. I put my arms up like an "X" and said "NO". I even gave a buzzer sound like on a game show, and he giggled. I wanted to make it clear that I didn't want a mullet or anything close to that. We finally agreed on the picture that I wanted and he sat me down to cut my hair.

The adventure begins.

He started hacking away the back, which I couldn't see while he was cutting it, so I couldn't really say anything. He then turned me around, gave me a hand held mirror and showed me the back... which was a full on mullet. Short, layered top and long on the bottom. My eyes proceeded to bulge out of my head. But, then I remembered that I needed to be polite, so I placed my eyeballs back to normal position and said, "ummm, can you cut the bottom a little bit more, please?" He took an inch off of the bottom, which just made it a shorter mullet.

He then decided it was time to focus on the front. So, he showed me the picture of the mullet he had picked out earlier and started in Japanese hair terms about the front of my hair. I put up my arms "X" style again and said "boo boo" (Japanese game show buzzer), and he giggled again. So, I said, "I do not want the sides or top too short." He decided to barely cut the sides in the front. Which meant that I had a mullet in back and no layers in the front.

Party in back, business in the front... that is the philosophy of the mullet. And that is exactly what I had.

After I went home and got to play with it a little, I decided that you can't really restyle a mullet to look like anything other than a mullet, so I made another appointment. This time I was going to insist on a picture that I liked and that was it...

Two hours later after chopping and conversing in more Japanese hair cutting technical terms, I left with a rather short bob. He cut my hair up to the top layer. The good news is... no more mullet. The bad news is... with my wavy hair, it looks like a globe on the top of my body. A lollypop if you will. A pumpkin on a toothpick. Whatever it is, I rode my bicycle home crying the whole way. As I was riding (and crying), old people kept staring at me.

I was thinking in my head, "Yes I have mascara running down my face. Yes I'm weeping out loud. And, Yes I'm a foreigner. Oh, and I know that my hair looks silly too. But must you stare?" They must have thought that something really tragic must have happened for me to be crying the way that I was. Then I realized, "you know what Nicole, there are children and families dying from war and hunger, and you are crying because you look like a lollypop?"

And that's when my tears of sadness turned to gratitude for what I have. I realized that my heart needs to care for the real problems in the world.

I still look like a lollypop though.