May 2, 2020 3 min read

This is far down the list of things I should be worried about, but let’s get to the furry elephant in the room.

My hair, yikes.

This lockdown that’s kept me away from my salon has run off with any last smidgen of being well-groomed my vanity had been harboring. I recorded a Zoom interview for work this week. When I played it back, I was horrified to see the unfortunate combination of my high forehead and untrimmed bangs made it appear as though I was wearing a dark mask on the top of my head, but tilted sideways like a jaunty French beret.

Also, I was wearing glasses for the interview, and with the screen reflected in each lens, I looked like the cartoon character Jimmy Neutron.

“Avoid showing me, as much as possible,” I told the video editor.

How vain of me.

Such is our plight during this house arrest. Lots of my friends, male and female, are kvetching about their hair. With nowhere to go and few people to see – and wanting to avoid our reflections in the mirror – we are turning our attentions to the mundane.

Our vistas are confined to the interior landscape of our homes. By the 50th time I walked through the kitchen, wiping down surfaces with disinfectant, I decided to count. Twenty-two steps and 15 squirts of spray. The next night, I counted again and it was the same. I’ve become a sanitizing robot.

With nothing much new to look at, I’m hyper aware of details. There’s one spoon I prefer for my breakfast cereal now, and I’ll dig through the dishwasher to find it. Ditto the coffee mug. Every morning, I put on black yoga pants and either the orange or the yellow sweatshirt, a preference for citrus-hued garments I hadn’t noticed before. The farmer must think he’s living with a bee.

The nightly walk around the neighborhood takes 1,850 steps, give or take, and exactly 28 minutes. I was so bored with my own thoughts that I counted steps. Maybe it’s time to map out a different route.

I’m hyper aware of my ears now, and for the first time in my life am happy they are large – the better to hold the face mask. Oh, how the small-eared among us must be struggling.

On this new face mask planet, we all look like we’re up to no good.

And although my diminished world has sharpened my focus, it has probably not made me smarter. I’m still stalled at 53 words in two minutes on my Ruzzle game app. Yesterday, I played against a cyber-space opponent who found 68 words. And I’m not writing any more quickly – this column will take me the usual three hours.

A yoga instructor once told our class our shoulders will curl permanently forward as we age, because everything we see is right in front of us. His point was yoga helps us stretch in the other direction, but also that we should look around more. That’s hard to do when there’s not much to look at. It’s likely that after the lockdown, we’ll all be fluffier and also have poor posture.

I know for sure that my hair will continue its slide toward stringy gray, and it’s not even a nice gray. The two months of new growth have revealed my gray is not the shiny, bright kind, but the ugly steely kind.

Just something else I’ve learned.