Teeth, Love, and Growing Up

TITLE?  Hair Matters? The Barber of Ankara?  ???      What happened to the Hair? “Teeth and Hair and Love and Other Matters” was the title of the Google doc collection of your final essays in our class, the title of the pioneering first issue—the pre-first? the beta?—of the EN 502 magazine! Remind me to tell you about the second another time. Right now I want to talk about “hair” loss. I couldn’t help but notice that that word does not appear in the title of this here glorious class blog, and I want to talk about it, more specifically about the cutting of it, even though, as time goes by, I have fewer and fewer hairs to cut. What might make my taking on the topic funnier still (or is it not funny at all? am I trying too hard?) is that I want to write about my haircut experience in Türkiye (formerly known as Turkey), a country known for (among many other things) hair transplants. In Departures at the Istanbul airport you always see men with bandaged heads heading...

     Despite my frequent moisturizing, the skin on my hands is peeling away in small, fine flakes, giving the tips of my fingers a faintly fuzzy feeling and making the webbing between my fingers feel scaly and dry. It’s driving me crazy. In response to my complaints, my coworkers have assured me that, for climbers, peeling skin is normal. “You’re putting your hands in chalk – an extremely dehydrating environment – then climbing plastic rocks that have the texture of sandpaper,” they say. “What do you expect?”      If I climb regularly, the skin on my fingers and palms stays relatively intact. The kicker is when I take a break from climbing – at that point, my calluses, much like an appendix, are no longer useful. The most recent instance was when I caught Covid while visiting Boston this month; during quarantine, I watched in dismay as my calluses sloughed off my hands in droves.      Other than Covid cutting my social plans short, I had a lo...

The realization was slow. There was a tarp fluttering on the chimney of the house diagonal from mine. My first thought was, “oh that tarp is new.”  My second was “wait, I don’t think I’ve ever been able to see that chimney before.”  My third was “no. the tree is gone.”  I began to cry. A horrible sob that filled my whole body. I could not think straight, my brain short circuiting in grief. I could not find any distraction from the anger that filled me. I was home alone and alone with my sorrow. The tree was hundreds of years old, a huge oak that lived many lives inside my daydreams. As a kid, I sat on the swings in my backyard and sang to the tree. In my little head it embodied all of the magic of whimsical fantasy stories. A family of raccoons lived in the tree for years. I saw so many generations of baby raccoons from the windows of my house. Suddenly I could not bare to look out any windows at all. It must have been cut down while I was at work, a small mercy, because ...

If I could choose only one descriptor for the way I feel, it would be overwhelmed. Overwhelmed with stress because of the work deliverables and other tasks I have procrastinated, overwhelmed with confusion over the law school (and thus life) decisions I need to make, overwhelmed with gratitude for being in the position to make such decisions, overwhelmed with uncertainty over whether I have really properly thought through anything I am doing in my life.  This blog brings me so much comfort because when I see people I admire so much feeling the same way, I know I must not only be in good company but that I must be doing something right. It's an honor to be growing alongside all of you and to get a look into your own personal journeys with your new jobs, cities, and other big life changes. I may be overwhelmed, but I haven't felt lonely, and that's been huge. Earlier this week, I cried trying to figure out law school financial aid forms. I spent several working hours on the ...

On February 21st, a cold and bitter Wednesday, I was standing on the shuttle bus (damn you, T construction) as I rode from Brookline to Copley with my fellow, mildly depressed commuters. I didn’t feel well – but fear not, for I did not throw up, yet wouldn’t that have been brilliant foreshadowing in my last blog post? I almost wish I did for the sake of the narrative. But instead, my head was drumming with a persistent ache, and my wool sweater under my winter coat threatened the potential for heat exhaustion as I stood in misery under the bus’s heater.  All I really wanted, in that moment, was to throw a temper tantrum. I wanted to scream like kids do in the grocery store, kicking and protesting the responsibilities of life and the confines of society. I don’t want to go to work! I don’t want to go to the grocery store after work! I don’t want to cook myself dinner after I go to the grocery store! Gah! By the grace of self-regulation, I instead opted to stare out the window while ...