Listen to this creepy Wikipedia article's beginning: "Body hair, or androgenic hair, is the terminal hair that develops on the human body during & after puberty. It is differentiated from the head hair & less visible vellus hair, which are much finer & lighter in color."
There's a continuum, you see: head hair, body hair, vellus hair. As the article on vellus hair explains, "Vellus hair is sometimes colloquially referred to as peach fuzz, due to its resemblance to the downy epidermic growths on the peach fruit."
Have you ever heard the phrase "vellus hair"? Me neither. Why vellus? & how is it there's a word that rhymes with jealous that no one's told me about?
"Vellus" is apparently Latin for "fleece" or "wool." The wife is an anatomist, & she has been complaining recently about how complicated it can be to name different parts of the body (mostly interior). I'm not going to remember what particular part of the brain she was talking about, but it apparently looked like - if I remember correctly - a bridle. So instead of calling it "the bridle," they refer to it as the Latin word for "bridle." This smells like some elitist 17th century shit right here, doesn't it? I told her to just call it "the bridle." She will not take my advice.
It is fuzzy fun to imagine a more complicated spectrum of fuzziness, from bald to hirsute. I am a little sad about how the body gets so hairy in the weirdest of places (I'm calling you out, ears!). & then doesn't - like, what the fuck is happening on my head? Why does baldness happen? It won't even be fuzzy up there in a few years. Few years? A few months!
There's a memory I have - maybe I've shared it here before - when I was in ninth grade, I was bored in our house - the one we briefly shared with my mother's boyfriend Ed, in late 1982 - the only time, I think, after my mother left my father when I was four in which there was an adult male in the house - I saw his razor & shaving cream & decided to shave my face. I had a layer of peach fuzz on my mug & thought, hey, let's do this.
Of course I had no clue what I was doing - I sometimes think my own reticence to shave these days comes from the fact that there was no one to actually teach me how to do it - & I probably didn't use enough cream or scraped too hard or whatever - but in any event, my face burned after that experience.
& then - I didn't shave again for maybe two years. Maybe less than. I have a specific memory.
My friend Dale - who would leave Garland after our ninth grade year, but whom I would find again in my third year at the University of Texas - & hey, he's doing okay for himself - I had known Dale since the first grade, & for some weird reason in my freshman year, his locker was above mine - I have a memory of grabbing my books in between classes & saying hello to him & him saying to me, "You know, Dickerson" - he called me by my last name in those days, thanks to shared P.E. experiences - he said, "Dickerson, those sideburns aren't working for you."
The upshot of my pathetic shaving adventure was that I grew sideburns! I have no idea if I shaved them off - I don't remember shaving regularly until maybe eleventh grade - but who knows? I was pretty self-conscious then.
Seriously, I should've left my peach fuzz alone.
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