Today

Hello everyone,

Today has been a pretty productive day. I woke up and began my day by studying the GRE. I have a GRE study book and I went through the verbal section today. The vocabulary section is so much fun.

After studying I went to get a haircut. I haven't had one in a while and my hair was getting pretty long. Some people said they preferred it long, but it's not very comfortable....so now it's comfortable.

Actually, I haven't seen a lot of the people who read this blog in a long time and I haven't taken a picture of myself in a long time.... so I'll include a picture at the end of this post that I took right before I went to get my haircut (the smirk was accidental....and I realize my hair still wasn't very long, but it was very long for someone who usually takes clippers to their head every 2 weeks).

Anyway, I had a sorta funny experience while getting my haircut.

This is what happened:

The lady who cut my hair was the same ladywho cut my hair last time. My first and only haircut at her salon was 4 months ago and she didn't remember me. As she put that plastic hair sheet thingy around my neck she started her smalltalk.

Now, I don't know if all hair stylists have a small-talk course as part of their beauty school training, but it would make sense if they did cause they all say the same things. And the funny thing is no matter how you respond they seem to go to the next already memorized question without addressing your response. I guess this is for the best cause I'd much rather have them focusing on their job rather than entertaining me with their facility at spinning an interesting web of dialogue.

Anyway, after a minute or so of having the exact same conversation as last time I started playing around a bit. Cause, you see, every question was the same as last time, and last time after I'd answered a question I'd always ended my response with, "well, that's me, how about you?" I guess people often do that cause she had memorized answers for those questions too (you can tell they were memorized cause they were too concise and she said them with no expression...like someone does when they're reciting).

Well, my memory for dialogue is pretty good when I want it to be, and I had even more incentive to remember what she'd said because I thought it was odd that she'd memorized her answers... I tend to remember odd things.

So, I decided to have some fun with this and see if I could re-create our last conversation. I just needed to play my part the same as last time.

She was, of course, on top of her game and she started our conversation the same way she did 4 months ago. She said, "So, what do you do for fun?"

I responded as before, "Well, for fun I study, and for work I go on long bike rides."

So far so good, that was exactly what I'd said last time. She continued on with her memorized questioning and said "oh that's nice so are you in school?"

Now, at this point I knew we were doing pretty well and that our conversation has been almost word for word identical with our last one. I was pretty excited at how well we were doing and I kept it going. I responded as before and said I was about to graduate (not true anymore, but necessary to duplicate our last conversation). She said the same thing as before once again "oh, that's nice, so what do you study?"

She's good! I responded the same as before and told her I study Philosophy.

At this point I got sorta bored of the game and decided to try branching out. Instead of recreating our old conversation I decided it would be better to try predicting the conversation. As I mentioned earlier I had responded to all her questions with questions...and I still remembered her answers....so our conversation went like this:

(me to her) "so what do you do for fun?"
She started to answer but I said, "No let me guess, you like to hike, go for bike rides with your husband, and on Wednesdays you go dancing at the place down on the corner."

She took a step back and looked at me shocked. I not only said what her answer was last time, but I did it in the same order. She knew I had had this conversation with her before and she laughed. That was the first genuine thing she'd done the entire time.... the first action that wasn't scripted. Now we were finally getting somewhere. She said, "We've had this conversation before?"

I told her we had. She said "well, what else do you remember?"

I might have sounded creepy, but I just spewed all the details I could remember. I told her she had 4 kids....that as of 4 months ago the oldest was 7, that she had been cutting hair for 14 years, and that her favorite musician was Bryan Adams, and that the rest of our conversation 4 months ago was her telling me about a Bryan Adams concert she'd gone to when she was younger.

(the whole scene was very much like a scene from one of my favorite movies: Groundhog Day...I guess it's the closest I'll ever get).

It's a good thing she was an older lady because I think that freed me from her suspecting me of hitting on her.

After I responded I noticed that I had pretty much gone through all the questions on her smalltalk list. So, she just got quiet and finished cutting my hair. The whole thing was pretty strange.

I guess I'm just bad at first impressions.

I guess I'm even worse at second first impressions.

Anyway, that's my haircut story. She'll probably remember me next time.

Hope you all have a great day.

P.S. Oh, and here's the pre-haircut almost hippie picture: