Procrastination and Hair-Cutting

So, being on E.I. and all, I have a lot of free time.  I've been spending whole days where I stay inside, doing pretty much nothing but watching movies or TV shows on DVD.  I've been composing an opera in my head about a guy that has so much free time that he does silly little things, like composing operas in his head.  I think I have it pretty well planned out... I just need a fat guy to play "Fat Guy that sings opera" - the lead part. 

Of course, I've also been hitting the streets, dropping off resumes... but there are days where that's just not possible.  And there are only so many office jobs to apply to - I'll be damned if I'm going to apply to a place that pays less than I'd make on E.I.  That seems, um, ass backwards. 

In an effort to keep myself from going crazy, I've been giving myself chores.  Tasks.  Little jobs like "get some exercise", "kill the president", or "do some grocery shopping".  Nothing major, mind.  Just little tasks to keep my body busy.

Unfortunately, little jobs that would seem like nothing if you were at work become much larger in scope when you're a lazy little shit lounging about your apartment.  My three tasks for today?  Write an e-mail to a friend, make a cheer up e-mail for Kittens, and work on my Office Resume.  Perhaps an hour of work, at most.

Were I at the office, I would tackle this, no problem, while multi-tasking and tackling a bazillion other chores.  But, at home, it becomes a dilemna.  Do I watch some lame movie on DVD... or get some work done?  And so, I put it off.  And off.

Procrastination.  Gotta love it.  I should teach a class on it, really.  Except, of course, I wouldn't show up.  Neither would much of the class.  On the plus side, I imagine I wouldn't have many papers to mark.  Not that I'd mark them.

A while back, I had to go to the interior to see Kittens for a couple of days.  One thing I knew I wanted to do was cut my hair - it had been getting long and shaggy, and I wanted a nice clean hair cut before I went to make a good impression on her friends.  After all, who wants to see a ginger with a fro? However, I kept putting it off.  And off...

...Until the night before I got on the plane, at around 1 am in the morning (I had to be at the airport for sevenish).  I finally decided to buzz off my hair.  As soon as I started, my hair trimmer started acting funny - it wasn't really cutting, just sort of sawing into my hair, and making this low griding noise, sort of like the death rattle of R2D2.  Needless to say, it was painful - imagine getting your hair cut by having your angry little sister trying to pull it out in clumps.  So, I took off the guard (the plastic threads that regulate the length of your haircut;  I had the 3/8" guard set in), and started cleaning the blades, pulling out chunks of ginger hair in the process.  But the trimmer was still making bad noises.  So, I oiled it, and it suddenly started working like a charm.

Being a little tired, and not really thinking, I decided to check to see if it worked by running the buzzer through my hair. 

Yeah, it worked. 

Of course, I had forgotten to put the guard back on, so I now had a streak of bald skin, right down the centre of my head.  It was a like a highway through a dense forest of red shrubbery.  I stared at myself in the mirror, a thick head of hair cleanly bisected down the middle by a shiny, nearly-bald scalp that was surprisingly wrinkled.  For a while, my mouth just kind of opened and closed, before I finally managed a quiet, "....fuck." 

I wound up having to shave off all my hair - and bald gingers are not a sight to see.  Needless to say, I looked like a total ass in front of Kittens' friends, and it caused her all sorts of stress.  I think she told most of her friends that I had just escaped from a cult of some sort.  It was not a good weekend.  Especially because it was remarked to me several times that my story didn't really fit - my running shoes just weren't up to cult snuff. 

The point of this story is that, had I not waited until the last possible moment, I could have at least had the opportunity for my hair to grow out a bit after the disaster, so I wouldn't have been completely bald in front of Kittens.

Geez.  You'd think I'd learned from my mistake, eh?  But here I am.  Updating my blog instead of, you know, getting work done. 

In short, I'm awesome.