A few months back, I changed up my hairstyle a bit: while leaving the top the same floppy length I’ve stuck with for most of my life, I now started fading the sides and back.  It’s a more modern look, and one that gives me pleasingly precise instructions; ask a barber to fade the sides from a 1.5 to a 3, and the results are reliably perfect.  The top, however, remains a bit more subjective.  So when I got a haircut three weeks ago, while the fade was indeed excellent, once I headed home and took a shower, I quickly realized the top had been left annoyingly long and over-floppy.  In the hopes of getting a full month out of the haircut, I therefore headed back a couple of days later, and asked that my barber trim the top a bit further, too.

Turns out, I should have been more specific about how much I meant by ‘a bit,’ as I left that afternoon with an inadvertent buzz.  Now, even three weeks later, it’s still one of the shortest haircuts I’ve had in my entire life.  And, as I recalled from a year ago, when I also ended up with an even shorter unintentional buzz, once my hair is below a certain length, it all just kind of sticks straight up, in a look I’d refer to as ‘plucked chicken.’

But what I’d forgotten from a year ago is, it then takes a surprisingly long time to get past that plucked length, to where my hair regains its normal appearance: a part on the side, with some going to the right and more going to the left, rather than all of it just sticking out in prickly uniformity.

Still, I’m hoping that, in another week or two, I’ll again reach the point of directionality – basically, that I’ll have a very short normal haircut, rather than a lengthy buzz.  After which, I should still have a month or two until I need to get the top trimmed again.  Which is good, as that should give me time to come up with more precise instructions, and to save myself from again getting wildly over-sheared another year hence.