People Used To Trust Me

People used to trust me. They would call me on the phone or barge into my room and say: Esther, cut my hair; do you have a scissor?

With hair. People used to trust me with hair. It could have just been that I was the only paranoid person in college and Uni who had a scissor because I like sharp objects. I also collected knives. At the time, I bought cheap SAKs because I had no money but they kept breaking or rusting or I lost them and didn’t feel the pain of losing them because they weren’t treasures. Until one day I decided to save up and buy a Victorinox SAK. I have never looked back. Victorinox has the best SAKs. Unbeatable. I have also never lost a Victorinox SAK even after I buy more because to me, they’re precious.

This is an economic topic, for the interested. It’s called the Boot Theory. Sam Vines came up with this socio-economic unfairness comparison, which is really worth thinking about. If you could afford a $50 pair of boots, it would keep your feet warm for 10 years and you could spend those years being dry and comfortable, and not having to worry about feet at least. But if you could not afford the $50 boots, you keep buying cheap boots and in ten years, you would have spent $100 on multiple boots because they kept wearing out. And the kicker? You’d still have wet, cold feet. 

And none of my Victorinox SAKs have even gotten blunt or rusted in all these years.

It's really not fair. Because a lot of what you can achieve in life is determined by your (mis)fortune to be born where you were born and to whom. Paris Hilton hit this on the nail on her book Confessions of an Heiress: be born into the right family. It can’t solve all your problems. Nothing can. But it does make your Personal SWOT Analysis not quite so depressing. 

Hair! I was talking about hair. So! In college and Uni, I did cut a lot of my friends’ and sisters’/brothers’ hairs. No one had a lot of money. And we didn’t want to spend what little pocket money we had on hair. Girl’s got to eat! And read comics. So people tended to turn to the person who had steady hands. Which was me. I had steady hands. I even painted at the time. I never nurtured this skill beyond college so the last pot I painted was a picture of a white horse and my mum still keeps it and it amazes me that I did that at one point because these days, I don’t even doodle. That’s really sad. I hadn’t thought about it like that ever.

But hair was something I just had so much confidence of in cutting. I even cut my own. I did all sorts. 

Tenzin, for example, had curly hair so even if I cut it wrong, it didn’t show. And she would buy me lunch for it. Which was cheaper than a parlour and she fed a friend. Everyone wins. 

Mamu, for another, wanted to go bald and no parlour wanted to do that because they thought they’d get blamed for it if something went wrong. So we bought a razor and I shaved it all off for her. I didn’t nick the skin on her skull so I think that was a job well done. She might have paid me in momos. I don’t quite remember. 

Feli and the boys had wavy, thick hair and I was never very good at those, especially when it involved battery operated razors. But the style at the time was emo and no one our age had hair that was cut straight so even if I went a little rogue here and there, everyone’s hairs at the time were spiky and uneven so we were all good. I don’t remember if any of these paid me, not even in food.

People don’t trust me with hair anymore. I haven’t touched hair in a long time. We make our own money now though so that might be a factor. I don’t miss our collective broke ass days when I turned into a barber out of necessity. But it’s nice to have done that. Because it’s a good story. 

People did used to trust me with hair.