barber school

one of the reasons i love my job is that its not really a job, it’s a career.  this might be a subtle distinction for some, but for me it is a clarifying element to every day i spend working.  it helps me take the long view on the daily grind, and allows me to see that even when i am doing things i don’t enjoy, there is an upside.  that is, i can learn something from the experience, every experience even the ones that are no fun as they are happening.  as i continue to learn, i am better prepared for the next thing that comes down the pike.

but at moments, i do question the worth of it all.  when i was a developer i knew i could always go and find another job, or even another career.  it might not require the long days and nights, might not have as heavy stress and could allow me time to focus on life not work.  when i thought about this, i was normally under serious stress; deadlines looming with worried clients and code not working as expected.  in these moments, i had visions of goose, asking maverick for the number to that truck driving school, so they could drive the big rigs.  the idea of a less stressful life, one without a high speed pass on the tower just for the hell of it, was appealing.

but unlike goose, driving the big rigs was never for me.  driving would get me to work, not be work itself.  i always had monster drives, with clients who were 100 mi away from home, and who required serious face-time.  that meant long cycles of living in hotels and commuting in all weather.  NPR and mobile phones were the two saving graces of this, both allowing me to stay connected while mellowing on the move.  but driving eliminated the two things i wanted to be spending my personal time on, learning an instrument and reading.  i knew both where possible, i have a friend who kept a keyboard next to him as he commuted.  he could practice one handed scales while he drove.  i had other friends who listened to books on tape, but my books never seemed to be available.  there was never a large enough market for the books i read, to be able to pay someone to read them to me.

i now live 20 minutes from the office, with a mostly empty road that allows me to drive twice the posted speed limit.  this is my shortest commute since riding my bike to the beach, something i did because it gave me a total of 5 workouts a day.   but, there are downsides, first NPR takes longer than 20 minutes for a full summary of the news and worse there is no NPR to listen to in malaysia.  this is the country of no real news is the news; where a weather report is one worded as “hazy”.

other downsides are that i still don’t have time to learn an instrument or to read as much as i buy on frequent bookstore trips.  the office has a collection of wanna-be guitarists and a wanna-be instructor.  it also has very little time to move from talking about lessons to the actual lessons themselves.  we keep threatening each other that now is the time to begin, yet-another-deadline is the only thing stopping us. 

unfortunately, my reading habits are also still too eccentric for commercial recordings so i can read and drive at the same time.  with the exception of david sedaris’ “santaland diaries” that i drove through a few months ago.  they were the notebooks of a gay elf-with-attitude suffering through a holiday season in a department store.  i loved listening to them, i am sure you can see the commercial appeal they would have.  it was felt good to enjoy mainstream material.

there are moments when i think about doing other things.  as i was driving to work last week i considered all the skills i have mastered over the years and how they would serve me well if i did what i have always threatened to do.  as i said, i was never driven to drive the big rigs.  the school of choice for me was barber school, where i would learn to cut hair and give a shave.  barber school would allow me to run my own business, providing a service to customers, customers who continue to grow hair that needs to be cut.  the worst mistakes could be corrected by waiting 8 weeks to allow it grow out.  

other than the crying child, there for his first big boy haircut, there is little stress in the barber shop.  it’s a place for men to hang out, listen to the news on the radio or a game on a small tv in the corner.  it’s a place for men to socialize while waiting their turn for the chair; where everyone as equal as the egalitarian “regular boys haircut”.

it’s also a place where long gaps of time pass with little or nothing to do.  which sounds like a great retirement gig for me.  no nighttime conference calls, no stressful meetings where business people and lawyers discuss direction from 4 continents, no KPI for staff, no requirements harder than asking if it should be “tapered in back”.  barber school has always been something i would pull out of my pocket like a set of worry beads.  i would roll it around in my hand for a second, and realize that if i am too busy to read or pick up a guitar, then there is no way i have time for a two year training program that allows me to hang a red and white pole outside a storefront.

i love my job, there is still so much to do and learn.  barber school just needs to wait until i retire, which will could be sometime after i have read the books waiting on two continents.  besides, the days of the barber surgeon are sadly past. that was the job i would have enjoyed, it was when barbers were allowed to pull teeth and amputate body parts.  my day-and-night career allows me to symbolically do both of those. 

i already aggressively cut hair every day, what else could i want?  other than NPR during my drive.

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can you image a barbershop i designed?  pictures from around the world, bookshelves full of books to be shared, nice couches, good coffee and a wall mounted TV tuned to CNN or an EPL game.  we would have open wi-fi and a PC in the corner so people could google, wiki or imdb answers to debates between patrons.  clearly, the proprieties must be observed.

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masked man

i have been sick for two weeks. last week was a migraine that my doctor told me today was not a migraine, but was the first step of infection by a virus. the blood work has come back and for the 5th time in as many years i still am not a diabetic, and the current cold is not a cold but allergies or asthma brought on by the double whammy of the virus i appear to have conquered and the KL haze which has settled over the city just in time to irritate my weakened system.

all of this brings me back to the use of two different anti-histamines a-day. one for the lungs in the morning, the other for food irritants at night. i am also adding in a strong drag of steroids to start my day. smokers wake up and take a puff to start their day with the smoke they crave. i am puffing on a plastic tube filled with corticosteroids to manage my immune response, calming the bronchial irritation that flares because of simple dust. all of these meds do nothing more than allow me to catch a full breath, letting me walk around the office without needing to grab onto furniture to stop from falling over from the lack of oxygen. without the meds my lungs close and i struggle with limited lung capacity.

i almost hate this quality of life medical condition i have come to accept. auto-immune disease is in the family, a sister has lupis and a niece has alopecia universalis. so, on the scale of overactive immune responses, i think i have gotten off lucky. i have a system that reacts to dust and smoke, and considers consumption of carbohydrates as an invasion by foreign troops. it is not a surprise that a few beers in a bar with co-workers, one who was smoking, on a friday night tied in tightly with the latest burst of immune response. being run-down from the flu, sleeping in air-con and eating other carbs all at the same time appeared to be just too much, but the beers were the right choice at the wrong time.

so i have come to accept that i have to rely on self control, avoiding the things that i enjoy and crave and a healthy dose of meds to help lower the body’s response to simple things that most tolerate with ease. i don’t mind the inhaler, it’s simple to get up in the morning, open a cap and take a deep cleaning breath. i don’t mind the meds, although the ones that work for me are only sold in the US and i need to have them imported by traveling family and staff; smuggling over-the-counter drugs that allow me to breathe. these things are simple and invisible; no one notices what i am doing. it’s a quiet and personal battle.

it is visible, the steroids cause weight gain, but they also allow me to exercise, so if i can balance the breath-in and sweat-out, than even this can be hidden. laziness of not taking the meds or not exercising the weight off is the risk i am now facing. but it is not the most visible of the humiliations i am now faced with. my doctor has prescribed a new weapon in my arsenal of protection. she suggested i go to the pharmacy and ask for a filter to keep the dust of the hazy KL weather from entering my lungs and causing me to become irritated in the first place. 

i am now walking around town with a micro-pore filter mask, a respiratory valved face mask; it is white with a large 3M printed on the front. as i walked from the pharmacy to the car i received a new type of smile. the people of KL are now presented with a large, white, bald man in brightly colored shirts who appears to be over-reacting to h1n1, the halal name for swine flu, which was declared by the local newspapers this morning as a pandemic. how little they know that i am not worried about flu at all, i simply can’t breathe the hazy air in this city.

i am sure i look dumb, i am sure they have no idea why i am really wearing the mask, and i am sure i don’t care. taking a deep breath is much more important to me than how silly i look walking around town. following the lesson i learned from my 10th grade science teacher, while sitting in a lifeguard tower years later, “form follows function”. the odd haircut and the bright colors are choice, but breathing is a non-optional requirement. if the people think i am over-reacting, they at least have it half right. i have been told i need filters for years, i finally have one.

i am now a masked man; let the breathing return.