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 2002.11.17 EPISODE 10, in which your privacy is guaranteed
et's be honest, hair's kind of a pain in the ass. You have to wash it, you have to gussy it up, you have to pay somebody to cut it. If you put a hat on it, it gets all screwed up. Reasonably, evolution should've gotten rid of it by now. On Monday, I one-upped evolution. I got a $10 clipper from Shopko and sheered all but a strip from the top of my head. What was left I cut down to about half an inch. When I got some time the next day I shaved down the sheered area. It's a pretty radical shift. Not only have I never had such short hair before, I've never had particularly stylized hair before. Even when I had hair down to the middle of my back I wasn't somebody that would illicit "Hey, look at that guy's hair" from passers-by. Response has been uniformly complimentary, though. Even my Social Networks professor is enamored of it, going so far as to point out his youthful desire for a mohawk. I'd actually thought he might express some concern about me conducting interviews in such a state but Lew seems to think I'm the shit in general. I am going to shave it all down tomorrow -- one way or the other, I really don't want to contaminate the interviews -- but it's been an interesting experiment that may be worth revisiting someday. The first person to see the new look commented that this isn't really the right time of year to shave a head and I guess that's true. It was snowing when I came home last night and I actually had to wear a winter hat, which I hate doing unless it's an ironic Santa Claus hat. The snow didn't last but the cold will. Winter is here. Over in 658 project-land, we've finished the cold calling. We didn't wind up with as big a sample size as we would've liked, which means we're going to be calling people back who don't follow through on completing the survey. That's sure to be fun: "Hey, remember that person you gave your e-mail address to just to get them the hell off the phone?" We're also prepping for our big group presentations, half-hour exercises in which we use the survey data to test research hypotheses of our choice and then present the results to the class, just like grown-up researchers! As a wannabe media analyst, I'm in the group looking at how news and entertainment media consumption will effect subjects' feelings towards groups in a mock news piece. It's really incredible to think about how far into the year we already are. Next week is the 12th of the semester. Week 13 is mostly chewed up by Thanksgiving and then it's a shotgun ride through to finals week and the end of the calendar year. It's almost 2003. And after that I'm almost 25. And then I'm almost 40. And then I'm dead. And it's all happening next week. I guess I've got a lot to get done before then. Aaron Veenstra is the managing editor of Etc. House Productions and a Master's student in Journalism at the University of Wisconsin. |
