Acting April Foolish (#1036)

Topics/tags: Autobiographical, postscripted

Is it live, or is it Memorex®?

Is it real, or is it Clairol®?

Those are questions from the past. Some of you may still remember them.

These days, there’s a new question.

It is real, or is it Photoshopped®?

Here’s one example.

Why? you may ask. Well, once in a while, I think about shaving my head just to see what it would look like. I always decide not to. The closest I ever came was when I tried to give myself a short haircut with my razor and did such a crappy job that the barber needed to cut my hair down to 1/8".

But today I felt like a change. It’s April Fools’ Day, and I think the Tigger suit is quarantined in my lab [1]. I wanted to do so something. And it’s not like I’m interacting with a lot of people these days. That is, it doesn’t really matter what I look like [2].

After Michelle came home and saw the result, I posted the before and after photos to Facebook and asked people to weigh in on the Photoshopping® [3]. I particularly enjoyed the If it’s Photoshopped®, the razor stubble is a great touch. And, given my offsprings’ talents on the computer, it was reasonable to guess that Photoshop® was at work. But it’s real. Here’s the hair to prove it [4].

It’s not that I was bored. As someone suggested, I have enough board games to prevent boredom. Rather, I did feel like I need to jumpstart some changes. So the hair is my first change [5]. Let’s hope that it leads to a few more. Daily walks. Daily musing. Straightening my home office. Making book boxes. Cleaning the house. More reading. More writing. Things like that. We shall see.

Postscript: It was harder to shave my head than I thought. It’s partially that I don’t seem to have any single-blade razors and the double-blade razors clogged too easy. And that’s after I used scissors and an electric razor! Now I have a scraped-up head. I’m hoping it heals in a few days.

Postscript: Which look do I prefer? I don’t particularly like my face shaven, even though I tend to look younger without a beard. I like having long hair, but I don’t mind the no-hair look. For the next few weeks, I think I’ll try to keep my head shaven but allow the facial hair to regrow.

Postscript: You know how I thought to myself that I wouldn’t be seeing people much for the next month? I forgot about the class I’m taking this semester that has synchronous videochat. I hope that my classmates aren’t freaked out. I wonder if they will take my new hairstyle as a tribute to the teacher.

[1] It’s more that I’m prevented from visiting my lab than that the suit is quarantined.

[2] Or so I thought.

[3] More precisely, I wrote Is it real or is it Photoshopped®?, but primarily as a joke. I thought people would realize that it was real.

[4] Yes, I realize that this could be a bag of hair from a previous time I cut my own hair. You’ll just have to take my word that it’s not.

[5] Or zeroth change, for those who count like computer scientists.

Version 1.0 of 2020-04-01.