Allan's Photoblog
Webelos Campout
I went on a Cub Scout Webelos campout this weekend with J. This is significant for many reasons:
— J’s Cub Scout den has been horribly inactive this past year, to the extent that several parents are considering taking their boys out of scouting, and several parents are upset at our den leadership for the inactivity and for attempting to pile things into one campout after the school year.
— I have been to many Boy Scout campouts and activities with W, but given the inactivity above, I haven’t been on many similar activities solely with J. Non-scouting activities tend to be with both boys.
— Cub Scouts generally don’t camp out. Not really camp out. We’ve had the family campout which is really just on the lawn at the ranch of the host family, and we’ve had Camp Trask. We did have a campout at Camp Trask in May that I didn’t blog about, and J and I pitched our own tent, rather than use the camp’s tents. However, dinner and breakfast were catered, there were restrooms with real, flushing toilets, and there were tons of other people there. (There were also bears snooping in the camp around 4 AM, but I slept through the ruckus.)
— As noted above, the den leaders attempted to cram a lot of Webelos activities into this one campout, which they dubbed “Webelos boot camp.” The scouts did Readyman, Outdoorsman, and Citizenship activities. I didn’t lead any of the activities, but I helped in all.
Dude...
I used to have great hair.
Not that my hair isn’t nice now. I’ve grown it long since I was 30, and I take better care of it now. I just started using a spray-on, leave-in conditioner to try to reduce tangling and breakage.
But when I was a teenager, it was spectacular. I say this not as one who has that hair now but rather as an old man looking back on my much younger years. It was thick — not coarse, but dense. To put it numerically, I had a large number of hairs per square centimeter growing out of my scalp, noticeably more than I do now. It was also fine, not thin. Each hair strand was fine, the opposite of coarse, wire-like hair. Overall, when my hair grew, it was like waves of silk. My barber — and I used to have a real, old-fashioned barber, the kind with Life magazines strewn about his barbershop, and a barberpole outside — commented several times on how nice my hair was, and his wife was sometimes there to agree. It was so thick that he sometimes used thinning shears to thin it out on top in order to make trimming it easier, and being a teenager for whom mortality and hair loss were practically theoretical, or at least far in the future, I didn’t mind it. In fact, when I later moved to college and my hair was still thick on top, I’d sometimes request it be thinned out on top a bit to make it easier to comb.
Ha! I’d never make such a request now. It’s not so thick any more, and the silkiness is sometimes hidden by frizz that apparently increased as I got older.
In my mid-twenties, my hair grew noticeably thinner and the texture was no longer so fine. Given my starting point, it wasn’t so bad by most standards, but my hair was showing its age. Around 30, I started growing it long in large part to make up for the passing of youth. Vanity of vanities, thy name is haircare.
Anyway, I’ve had long hair for so many years — I had thought it would be limited to my 30’s — that it has become a signature part of my appearance. Of that, I have no doubt. While I have an embarrassing inability to remember names or faces, people of brief acquaintance often remember me, and I don’t doubt it’s in large part because I’m that guy with the ponytail.
Recently, I’ve been growing it extra-long, past shoulder-length, for no other reason than that I feel like it and that cutting it would mean a long time to return to its current length if I change my mind. I’m getting used to sleeping with it — long hair can induce some neck pain at night when lain upon — and generally moving with it. While I usually wear it in a ponytail, I’ve recently taken to untying it out of the office, to let it breathe a bit and to try to reduce tangling.
All of which is an introduction to a brief incident that happened late last week: I went to Starbucks a few blocks away from my office for a cappuccino or frappuccino. I have given up on the Red Door Cafe at Caltech for my cappuccinos, because I think they switched to soy milk some time ago. That’s a disgusting thing to put into a cappuccino. Either it was soy milk, or it was something else equally disgusting.
On the walk back to my office, I passed by the convenience store across the street. My hair had been untied and blowing a bit in the breeze, and I was sucking the straw in my caramel ribbon crunch frappuccino. As I strolled by, a guy walked out of the store on his way to his car. He had the look of a construction worker or contractor, like a plumber or a guy who puts up drywall. Work jeans, work boots, baseball cap.
He called to me and said, “Dude, I just gotta say, that is a glorious man-mane!”
I said, “Huh?”, and he repeated the last part of his sentence. We chatted as I continued walking, and he pulled off his cap to show me his own hair, grown a bit to collar-length. He indicated my “man-mane” and said, “That’s what I’m going for. I figure in another couple of years [I’ll be there].”
Man-mane. Not a mullet, which was the first thing I thought the guy said. A mane, like on a lion or a stallion. I’d never heard that name before, but for the first time since I first saw Braveheart, it felt to me like long hair could be really studly. I’ve had compliments from strangers or distant acquaintances on my hair before, usually women remarking on how healthy it looks. This is my first compliment that I can recall from a guy, and it felt awesome.
:-)