Eva Jaber ’28 (she/her) is a prospective English or international relations major. She is a member of the Cleftomaniacs, an a cappella group, an ESL tutor and hopes to encourage peace-minded advocacy on campus. Contact her at ehjaber@wm.edu.
The views expressed in the article are the author’s own.
Seeing as this is the 12th issue of my advice column, I thought I’d usher in our question of the week with a quote from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”: “O time, thou must untangle this, not I. / It is too hard a knot for me t’untie.”
I actually have no idea what the context of this quote is because I haven’t read “Twelfth Night” and don’t care to check right now. But, as someone who the genetic lottery both cursed and blessed with a sentient head of wavy/curly/frizzy hair, what I do know is the feeling of a knot too hard to untie. Although, unlike this Shakespeare quote, leaving my hair’s tangles to time doesn’t really fix anything; it kinda just makes it worse. So, with that, I give you the question of the week:
“What hair care products do you care to share?”
Something truly refreshing about this question-asker is that they took my own positionality as a writer with complex biases and lived experience into account, asking me to only share advice that I feel compelled to broadcast to my readers. How thoughtful. I don’t feel like answering your question. I use the Suave kids 3-in-1 shampoo, conditioner and body wash, except I use it as an 8-in-1. I also use it to dress my salads, brush my teeth, shine my shoes, make the floor all slippery so I can skate around the dorm in my socks and waterlog the string instruments of my enemies.
Still, I know some of you readers won’t stand for me expressing my agency through art. I don’t understand why you can’t handle my lack of interest in engaging with your questions. You ask too much of me. Aren’t two masterpieces a month enough for you? You know what they say, I guess … if you give a mouse a cookie, it’ll ransack your pantry and then eat through your plastic tupperwares that hold your Trader Joe’s peanut butter cups like a little racoon until you call animal control on them, but then, when the animal control guys get there, they accidentally take you instead because you were trying out a new hairstyle and they confused you for a larger-than-average Yorkshire Terrier with human-like tendencies. I really can’t win.
Anyway, back to the task at hand. I’ve decided to leave the decision between writing a boring answer to your question or pouring my heart out on this page up to chance. If I get heads, I’m writing about my hair care routine. If I get tails, I’m writing a smear piece about someone in my a cappella group. I can’t say the name of my group or else our PR chair will frame me for a serious white-collar crime, but it starts with a W and ends with “illiam and Mary Cleftomaniacs.” Alright; time to flip this coin. I got heads. Rules are a construct, though, and I’d rather write the smear piece.
My a cappella group is a circus, and two members of the executive board, 6ndrew and 7aty (I’ve unrecognizably altered their names to preserve their privacy.), are the ringmasters. But, anyone familiar with circuses knows that the person who actually has the most power isn’t the figurehead; it’s always the contortionist. If the apocalypse came around, the person who can fold themselves into a cabinet is gonna fare a whole lot better than some guy in a tailcoat and a dumb hat.
But who, you ask, is the figurative contortionist in your favorite satire advice columnist’s a cappella group? Well, there’s someone in this group who has been stretching the rules of the hair care game for far too long. Whenever I’m like, “Hey, [redacted], your hair looks really wonderful today; I was wondering if you could tell me what products you use,” he’s always like “No, Eva, I actually cannot divulge that information, and also even if I wanted to, there would be no information to divulge because I was just blessed with hair that air dries like this and also I hate you.” I might be paraphrasing a little, but you get the idea.
Here are real quotes that were actually said to me about this guy. If The Flat Hat ethics people ask me for the interview transcripts, please say I lost them.
“People think that when [redacted] says he likes to beatbox he means vocal percussion, but he actually means ‘beetbox,’ which is his hobby of emptying boxes of germinated weedy beet seeds into other people’s gardens to replace their plant diversity with homogenous rows of beetroot. It needs to stop.”
“[Redacted] once told me he was passionate about conservation and, when I said that I was too, he asked if I could prove it by conserving my vocal energy for someone who actually cares.”
“[Redacted] has been lip-synching this whole time.”
My advice to my readers is that hair care is self care, and the best way to take care of you is to vanquish your enemies. I am using my platform to form a legion that will work to make my hair look better in comparison by straightening the curls of this evil person, whom I will cryptically refer to as 6ack 7yles.
What’s one way that people get straighter hair? They get keratin treatments. We need to manufacture circumstances for this guy that are identical to a keratin treatment to flatten his wavy locks. Here’s the plan: everyone on this campus needs to pitch in to sneak 6ack 7yles as much biotin-rich food as possible in order to promote keratin synthesis. If we take down this giant in the William and Mary hair game, there’ll be so much more room for the rest of us to thrive.
I have it on good authority that he shops for groceries at one of the Williamsburg supermarkets, though I’m not sure which one. We have to replace all the food on all the shelves of the local stores with pre-cooked salmon (very rich in biotin). It really, truly is the only way to protect our peace from this monster.
There’s more to life than being consumed by complete hatred toward someone whom you pretend to be friends with. I want to live, learn and love. I want the editor-in-chief of The Flat Hat, Ethan Qin, to make an exception to the style guide and let me leave my Oxford commas in these articles. I want the William and Mary community to stand behind me in making life harder for a guy named Jack who has been nothing but nice to me. Is that too much to ask? If you can’t give me all three, I want the second demand the most. I clearly don’t give much thought to 6ack 7yles anyway.
See you in two weeks.
