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May 31, 2005
minors fee
One of the things that I find to be most interesting is people-watching. I can make up stories for people based on nothing but, well, what I assume about them based on about ten seconds of ogling. Watching people interact with each other is interesting took, but in a much different way. It's amazing how various attributes affect how people approach others. Attractiveness probably ranks up there as the most influential variable. I can try to deny superficiality, but I'd much rather embrace it and move on. In my experience, people treat people best if they feel they can empathize with them. Whether they actually can or not is almost impossible to tell and really is irrelevant. I see this as one of those things where the first impression is really important. I'm not talking at all about friends or even people that know each other at all. I mean that to total strangers, the perceived ability to empathize is an unreasonably significant factor in their interactions. The other big one is whether one individual wants to get into another's pants, but let's just let that sit in the corner by itself for a minute.
Whether a person empathizes with someone else, I think, is not a conscious decision. It seems almost instantaneous. No one can decide anything that quickly.
Based on this thinking I have erected a theory: Men with longer hair are considered approachable and easy to relate to. Here's the thing. I've been growing my hair out now for, well, about a year. Maybe a little longer. It's something I always wanted to do and have done a have-assed job of in the past. This time, I stuck with it. I started off with a variation of what I think is a fairly standard men's haircut. What I have now certainly doesn't qualify as that: it's down below my chin all the way around now. It's not a big floppy mess or anything and I think all the J. Crew that I wear negates any premonition that I might be a hippy-type. It took almost a whole year for it to get this long.
During the growing-out process, I didn't really take much note of how people interacted with me. About a week ago, I started to get the itch to cut it off. My goal was to get it so that it would stay in a pony tail. Not for any reason, mind you, other than to check it off my list, so to speak. What better time to grow locks than during graduate school? So now that I've started to think about cutting it, I think I might be able to conduct a marginally interesting sociological experiment with myself as the subject. With the longer hair, I've noticed that people I don't know talk to me a lot. That didn't happen to me much before, at least not that I remember. People seem to want to do me favors, too, which I find to be a bit odd. Like when I was renting a car a few weeks back, I had to pay an under-25 fee, which I might add made me feel like I was about 17 years old since they call it a "minors fee". Anyway, without any sort of prompting at all, the guy behind the counter decided to use my minors fee to upgrade my car. I paid for an economy-class Dodge Neon or whatever it is they give you, and I ended up with a full-size brand new Pontiac G6 with XM satellite radio and fully automatic everything. It was a bit of a head-scratcher. My sister thinks the guy had a crush on me. I highly doubt it. Maybe she's right. In order to have a good grasp on it, I'd have to fly out to Hartford again and get a car from the same guy after I get my hair cut. Not likely.
So, sometime in the next few weeks, I'm going to get it cut. We'll see if anything changes.
Posted by ben at May 31, 2005 3:44 PM