Covid Questions

Covid, the Great Disruptor, is helping us ask questions we didn’t ask before. For example, we could ask “Wait, I keep craving a return to my old life, but how did I feel about it at the time? Did I feel eager and enthused? Did I have a good work/life balance, feel well rested, and believe I was taking good care of my relationships with loved ones and with myself? How about my place in the planet and its trajectory? What exactly am I trying to get back to, and what would I rather move forward to instead?”

I’m not asking that today. I have more important things on my…mind.

It all started yesterday, when I realized, all of a sudden, that my hair was too long again. This happens periodically. I don’t really have a mirror in my apartment. I mean, I do, two built-ins and one in the otherwise-dark entry cubicle, but none of them are really in places I actually look at. Consequently I have a habit of suddenly realizing I have long hair and a beard, in direct contravention of how I think I look. Yesterday was one of those days.

My local barbershop emailed a couple weeks ago to say they were open, so I made an appointment for today. None of the familiar faces were there. A guy who looked to be about 16 showed up (late) and cut my hair, and I wondered what effect all of this is having on the cosmetologists among us. But that’s not the question I’m asking right now either.

Back home, I continued my appearance restoration by buzzing my face fuzz off, returning me to the stubble that my self-perception insists is the norm. And why not, let’s go for it, so I trimmed the thicket of ear hair whose increased opulence is my primary manifestation of productivity this year. Things were going so swimmingly well, I decided to trim their cousins too, the caterpillarly eyebrows that loom above my oculi.

I’ve done all of this before, but there’s just something magic this year that leads us to new interrogatives. Like how come using a clipper with a guard doesn’t produce a uniform result? Having some hairs longer would make sense, but how is it that a 3/16 inch guard can somehow allow the clippers to come within a grasshopper’s shoelace of the skin? Which is very nearly the question I’m asking.

Because, as you may have guessed, today, after my bonanza of self maintenance, my gala of grooming, I find myself with fully 1.5 eyebrows. Leading to the newest question in my covid experience.

How fast do eyebrows grow?