After a brief hiatus, the powers that be at The Flat Hat have bequeathed upon me the chance to write another column. As always, it’s an exciting opportunity. So I thought I should devote my words this week to a significant campus issue: hair.
As someone with a slowly receding hairline, I notice hairstyles more than your average Joe. The first thing I notice about people is what their hair looks like — how they part it, what color it is, how thick their follicles are and whether they, too, have a thinning coif. What a tiresome habit.
p. Unfortunately for me and my balding brethren, there’s a stigma attached to hairlessness. We balding men look sickly compared to our thick-haired acquaintances. Sure there might be exceptions to this rule (Vin Diesel being one), but as a whole, thinness up top implies incapacitation.
p. To me, the most quintessentially bald man is Professor Xavier. My fellow nerds and I know him as the cueballed paraplegic from the X-Men comic books. The wheelchair bound Xavier is one of the most powerful telepaths in the world. How’s that for irony? The guy can’t even walk, yet he can control other minds. Like any good baldie, Xavier can’t rely on his looks or physical ability to get by. Instead, he hones his intellect as one hell of a crutch.
p. Too bad no one ever told Professor Xavier that girls don’t dig nerds. Telepath or not, looks really do count for a lot. In everyday situations, people don’t take the time to judge you based only on the person you are inside. Snap judgments make all of life more manageable, albeit significantly more superficial. It’s a time issue.
Instead of trying to be better people on the inside, all the baldies out there better start worrying about how they look. There are three simple rules one must never break in managing thinning hair. Rule number one: don’t fashion a comb-over. Rule number two: don’t fashion a comb-over. Rule number three: don’t fashion a comb-over. I hope my recommendation sticks, because you’re only fooling yourself if you think combing your sideburns onto your forehead will convince anyone.
p. A comb-over will only draw more attention to your hairlessness. People will be drawn to the amalgamation of neck and back hair calling your head home. “Does that man have a dead rat on his head?” someone will say. “No, that’s a comb-over,” his friend will respond, implying that your head would, in fact, look better with a dead rat upon it.
p. Aside from avoiding a comb-over, everything else is fair game. Embrace your lack of hair anyway you see fit. If you have a nicely shaped dome, go bald. If your skull has an ape-like ridge, consider wearing a funny hat. Pretty soon you could be that guy who wears wacky hats. Baldness could be your ticket to campus fame. My favorite solution is to join the business school and get a job that will pay for hair replacement surgery.
p. Whichever way you cut it, we’re all going to lose our hair sometime. It’s part of getting older. Let’s all start embracing the baldies we’re becoming. Just make sure you look good doing it. For your sake, not mine.
__James Damon, a sophomore at the College, is a staff columnist. His columns appear on Tuesdays.__