Hairy schadenfreude

Apparently, you’re supposed to loose your hair when middle age sets in. It’s a very obvious sign that you’re no longer in the first flush of youth. It’s also an external sign that you’re more mature and wiser too.

So explain the fact that while 40 is fast approaching (359 days to go), I still have a full set of hair?

The vast majority of my friends are loosing their hair as if baldness really is a fashion statement and yet mine still seems to be very firmly rooted to the spot, so to speak. In fact, not only is it not falling out, some of it seems to have taken root in other areas of my anatomy. My back seems to have become something akin to a bear rug, while my ears have started looking ridiculous with hair all over the place. So bad is the sprouting in my ears that when I get my hair cut, they even run the razor over them to get rid of the fluff.

Pah!

Still, I suppose I shouldn’t complain. At least with a full set of hair, I don’t have to worry unduly about a balding head in the sun, nor do I have to worry about loosing even more heat through my head than usual. But what does concern me is my Dad. He’s been bald or nearly bald ever since I can remember and yet has the hairiest ears and back I’ve ever seen. It’s like he’s got the Amazon rainforest tucked into his shirt with a mini-Black Forest emerging from his ears. Is that going to be my fate? Surely no woman on earth will really fancy someone looking like that?

At least for him, he gets to make jokes about how his hair is migrating south. I can only stare at the mirror each morning and wonder how I can trim the hair in my ear without taking yet another lump out of it. (By the way, I don’t recommend nail scissors. When you miss, as inevitably you do at some point, it’s really, really painful and the blood keeps pouring).

Whilst at the mirror, I also stare for minutes at a time at the hair sprouting from my ears. It’s a time when I contemplate whether it would be too vain, too painful and too expensive to get the thing waxed. Thoughts of electrolysis also come to my mind during these mirror-staring moments but that really is way too weird, surely?

So for now, I’m left to contemplate the excess hair with which my body seems to be tormenting me. Is it a sign of things to come? Is it revenge for the past nearly-40 years? Or is your body having the biggest laugh possible at your expense? It seems to me the latter because at a point when finances are a little easier, you are wiser and more mature (in theory at least) and therefore perhaps of greater interest to the opposite sex, your body decides it should do something that will make you as repulsive as possible.

And if that’s not a case of schadefreude, I don’t know what is.