CXLIII. A Hairy Situation -

You’ve been here, I presume.

You’re situated in a spot that is without back support or does have some kind of hard material on which to lean your back but that is crafted in such a manner so as to have an edge jutting into the small of your back, seemingly in an effort to become yet another disc amongst the many already bisecting your spine.

You’re in a place where things are not fuzzy. All is clear. I would say crystal clear, but after studying chemistry in college, I realize just how complex crystals truly are.
Things are, as the crystal structure demonstrates, complex.
Allow me to explain:

If you eat, you gain weight.
If you don’t eat, you lose weight.
What if, in combination with not eating, you exercised? Well then, you would lose more weight. This is obviously a terrible self-hazardous act, however, what if you’re motivation to exercise is seeing yourself lean in the first place?
In that case, upon eating, presumably not remaining as lean as before, you’re not motivated to exercise?

Things are clear when it is one or the other. Things become unclear when combination is involved.

Combination skin, for example, is a costly attribute to possess - or so I can imagine. A dry-skinned, sometimes peeling person myself, I have only ever known that I need one product in my skin arsenal - moisturizer.

This position of immobility is equivalent to long hair. Leave your long locks out and they get caught on backpack buckles, the wooden grains on your bed frame, and become woven in the nooks and crannies of your apparel. Pull your hair into an up-do of some sort, bun, ponytail, or braid, and the strands rally against each other so that tangles ensue. Odds are the collection of hair caught in your elastic will qualify for the Locks for Love charity.

Successful people do not always thrive on lyrics, “Started from the bottom, now I’m here.” A subset of successful people, however, do. This particular population has their chins perpetually upturned at a slight angle, past all those unwilling to pronounce their name correctly.

This action can be mistaken for pretentiousness when in fact it is a necessary act to fend off vulnerability in the eyes of the other subset of successful people.

This makes for a hairy situation. On one hand you’re deserving of acknowledgement but in the midst of time passing whilst you’re working away at achieving that critically acclaimed status, you’re still regarded as an underling.
Of late I have had the same stanza repeated in my head from the melodic classic song Que sera.
Believe it or not, only recently did I come to understand that the song’s namesake were not just gibberish included for the sake of retaining rhythmic integrity. Que sera is Spanish and translates into “What/whatever will happen.” Que is the interrogative for “what” and sera is the future tense for the verb ser or “to be.”

Fittingly, the song is a dialogue between a daughter and her mother and I could very well hear my mother mixing her English and Spanish just as any other day.

When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother,
“What will I be?
Will I be pretty?
Will I be sweet?
Here’s what she said to me.”

                            “Que sera, sera!
                             Whatever will be, will be.
                             The future’s not ours to see.
                             Que sera, sera.
                             What will be, will be!”

As a girl I was far more independent than now. Overcome with worry and stress, I prefer the homeward bound path. While I prefer said path, I always end up going with what my mind beckons: top graduate school program, here I come.

Just now I consciously chose to punctuate the above declarative sentence with a period instead of an exclamation mark. It should have been an exclamation mark.

This is a hairy situation. It’s a good thing that hair can become untangled, and if cannot, at least it can be shortened only to grow back once more.