On hands

Sometimes I look at my hands and see stunting. I see my dad’s hands, my brothers’ hands. I see their statures. Their hands are broader and digits longer, their bodies taller. I see my hands covered and made diminutive, they shrink in comparison, and I shrink with them. I see what could have been, me standing statuesque and grand, hands like hams dangling on orangutan arms.

Sometimes I look at my hands and see my hands. I see scaly dermis, dessicated webbing, bashed fingernails. I see the index shake. I see where in high school I tried my resolve with a lit cigarette. I see drums in abductioned thumbs. I see rough rocks and vibrating roundwounds in pocked callous coverings. In gathered palm, I see vessels of water uplifted, morning ablutions, satiating slurping. I see aqueducts flushing blood from shirtsleeve to wrist to digit entwining. I see handshakes. I see lines that lead to fortuitous futures. I see myself grasp a pencil, pack a snowball, knead thighs, juggle pins, pledge allegiance.

For a time, I saw hands everywhere. I saw club thumbs, stunted and decapitated digits, scars, tattoos, bitten nails, sinews. I saw hands in all manner of shape and size, all manner of human hue: roasted coffee, clotted cream, cedar, humus, ivory, butterscotch. I saw potent hands, penitent hands, dry hands, turgid veins, parchment skin. I saw all species of adornment: tiny spoons wrapped 'round thumbs, gigantic runner’s watches on wrists, fingernail paints and patinations, wedding bands on ring fingers, multi-finger rings, not to mention gloves of all sorts, which hide hands. Beneath these and other burdens and beauties and buffers, hands abide. I saw hands that had performed baptisms, held guns, hefted beams to scrape skies, hands that painted hands, absent hands, tiny hands, ancient hands.

I suggest you see hands, not the least your own. Hands may be dumb instruments but they work wonders, tell stories, and hold the weight of the world.

Neptune is naked

The fragrance of chlorine pervades the hall, reaching the front desk where you acquire the key to your second-floor "cabin." You're handed a towel, robe, some inexplicable variety of place-mat. And then you enter the hall. From above, one's tempted upon first impression to be reminded of a Sultan's harem: blue ceramic tiles, imperious pillars, small cafe tables, and naked bodies frolicking about in a large pool on the ground-floor. But there's no odalisque here, just naked men in the lanes, swimming vigorously one-after-the-other around in circles, like ducklings, pale asses cresting.

I'm at Yrjönkadun uimahallii, Helsinki, Finland, apparently the oldest swimming hall in the Nordic region. Built in 1928 in the classicism style (whatever that means), it was renovated in 1997-9 to retain its original appearance. In late 2001, bathing trunks became optional.
Nonetheless, what the deuce? Well, first of all, the exquisite classicist architecture is something in which to revel. Second, visiting the hall is about getting in touch with (figuratively speaking, c'mon now!) one's natural nude male species being. Third, there are off-the-chain saunas: steam, electric, and, best of all, wood-heated. And all for 6€ (student price), it cannot be beat!

The first surprise was that the female assistant led me to my "cabin," on the second floor, past naked or toweled men, overlooking the pool. It turns out mostly ladies, but some men, meander about cleaning, organizing, and serving beer and food to the patrons. It makes sense: the pool switches between male and female days, evincing something of a femme or feminist bias in that there are four of the latter to three of the former. I wonder if the male workers are here on lady days?

The "cabin" itself was like a curtained off corner in a hospital room, a curtained cubicle along the wall. It was outfitted with bed, locking drawer, and clothes hooks and coat-hanger. The second surprise was that the front-facing curtain was gossamer. In fact, this surprise was not a surprise, because the hall is or has been known for its gay activity. By publicizing the private, the see-through curtain maneuver stamps down on covert sex. All for the best, all for the best.

Naturally, the first thing was to take advantage of the sauna - steam then wood - and only after that, to go for a swim, and finally to repeat the double sauna in the same order to finish off. This procedure is time-tested and mother-approved. The steam sauna was crowded in the cheek-to-cheek kind of way where buns are not exactly touching, but a quantized distance is achieved in which an undeniable magnetic or gravitational sensation is palpable. The steam soothes the throat and relaxes the body but is not quite hot enough to bring about the indispensable sauna cook. Wood-heated wins the cake as my favored sauna because it gets maximally hot without what can be the harshness, or singing touch, of the regular electric.

After the initial steam soak and burn, I hit the pool. Finding myself stranded directly behind an exceptionally slow fellow, and therefore his buttocks and free-floating private bits, I deduced that I was in the turtle-speed lane and decided to hitch myself to the hare line. I found that more agreeable but slightly too fast, like a race, the Goldilocks just-rightness eluding me. But alas, beggars can't be choosers, and I settled in for a hard swim in order to earn my final steam and roast in the saunas.

All in all, it was an experience in the same way eating lutefisk is an experience (somebody make sure I do this before I leave the Nordic north). I do not risk controversy in proposing that Americans are more naked-averse than Finns (or Europeans more generally). I believe this is slightly unfortunate. At the same time, the Yrjönkadun uimahalli experience is foreign and slightly out-there even for most Finns. Nonetheless, it is a traditional, relaxing, social, and idiosyncratic past-time with a lot going for it only limited by vague awkwardness and Puritan prejudice.

Reflections on being a longhair

Shearing time = crying time. I'm like an infant at circumcision. Or now I know what it feels like to become a eunuch. Except in this case it's voluntary amputation, and its womanhood (of the strictly and crassly superficial variety), not manhood, to which I bid adieu.

In fact, I'm saying peace to nigh two years of identity formation. How important has this longhair aberration been? And why did I pursue this path, persist, and then finally decide to give it up? These answers are not altogether clear. They're bound up with my contested and mercurial self-appraisal. Allow me to explore some thoughts in somewhat-candor.

Social influence has been instrumental on my hair habits. I am rather impressionable. Consider this sequence of events: Between January and May 2009, three long-haired men entered and exerted considerable influence on my social reality. I respected and emulated all of them in various ways. All were longhairs. After getting a haircut in February, 2009, I wouldn't trim for another 14 months. Coincidence? I think not.

I have since fallen out of contact with these gentleman. I am in Chicago. Nobody I know has long hair; some people have come out in opposition to the institution. In fact, short hair is hegemonic among men in this professionalized, rigorous academic atmosphere. This has sown doubt where secure ambivalence reigned before. Even if people like it, the bureaucracy's impersonal regulations squash atypical expression. And I fear failure. Worse, I have not done superlatively on midterm examinations and feel tenuous.

Sometimes I think that abnormality and anti-conformist expression are normatively praiseworthy. I get worked up about aesthetics, art, and all forms of cultural and personal production. Hair and fashion, in this view, are modes of public art. Even the fruits of egotism can have positive externalities.

Sometimes I eschew ostentation, superficiality, and the hubris of special-feeling. I condemn myself. Special? Like I'm superior 'cause I have a freaking weird, pac-man pufftastic frizzle fro? Oh, man! What arrogance, what overlyanalyzed hogwash. I'm an unremarkable insect.

Cutting is part of my yearning for an elusive austerity. There was a time when I thought I should enter the army (Thank you, Robert A. Heinlein, yet again, for fueling this obsession which, like so many of other social and intellectual preoccupations, never became anything other than hypothetical idealism). Inculcate in me diligence and mental power, army, society, cryptic authority. Self-help-me. I am a lemming, leaderless. A sheep without shepherd.

Baaaaaaaah, shear me!

Of course, the hair was anti-sheep. But it is no surprise that social pressure operates even among the most marginal. Social norms, fads, and fashions exert and represent power ubiquitously. Thus the bumper-stickers disclaiming "you are so alike in your nonconformity" or "nonconformity is the new conformity."

Despite the somber tone of the text, I do sincerely feel that my hair exploration has been overwhelmingly gratifying. It was a means of personal exploration and innovation. I think I know me now better for the manifold experiences it impressed on me. Cornrows cannot exist independent of long hair. Nor can the endearing acts of the strangers who found the fro inspiring enough to comment upon or poke. Most nearly everybody was positive about it. If I want to be really optimistic, I could go as far as to say that I did my part to rescue male longhairism from social denigration, just by being a model citizen in action.

But what about the stereotypes? The drug-connotation, the inherent sloppiness, the air of oddity, the look of the 'douchebag snowboarder,' skater, or young punk. I was certainly ambivalent to this kind of short-sighted idiocy most of the time, but that still left space for me to be sensitive about it some of the time.

The internal debate ranged constantly: to cut or not to cut.

Then there were the prosaic considerations: the requisite level of long-hair-care and the fact that it was always getting into my eyes, invading the screen of my camera, falling into my food, and other annoyances. These things became severe only during periods of extreme length. They also appear to exacerbate my habitual scalp scratching.

Allow me to argue something of which I am not wholly convinced: it just doesn't matter much. Hair styling is a superficial and trivial variable. Furthermore, it is not overly determinant of physical attractiveness. It makes a difference, of course, and there is some favorable person-hairstyling matchmaking, which is valuable. But even exclusively in terms of sexiness, hair is just one of a dozen important variables. And when it comes to the symbiotics analysis, what the hair 'says,' recall that I'm still floating about in academia. I could have been successful here with the hair helmet.

Nevertheless, in terms of existential and material conditions, hair has become more of a distraction than a determinant of happiness.

I need to abstract away from irrelevancies. I need an influx of confidence. I yearn for an enlightened ascetism I do not have faith I will ever achieve. At least for now, I can stop worrying about the travails and dilemmas of hair, and focus on other forms of self-improvement.