A Lot of Huffing and Puffing (and Blowing)

A common urban legend has it that men think about sex every seven seconds. And if that statistic were actually true, one might reasonably argue that all men are sex addicts. Although that myth has been debunked, it brought to mind a college literature professor I once had.

A friend had warned me about this particular professor, saying, “The man makes everything about sex.”

Given that much of literature does actually have sexual overtones (and undertones, highlights, lowlights, and the occasional weave), I assumed that the professor was merely pointing out the obvious sexual references in modern literature and that my friend, a biology major, simply didn’t understand how prevalent it was.

I was wrong.

The professor really did make everything about sex. I mean, in the space of two minutes, the man could turn “Mary Had a Little Lamb” into graphic porn. His lectures made it sound like sex makes the world go ‘round. Sadly, from the looks of him, it was a slow rotation.

One day, we were reading T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in class. Not surprisingly, he began by talking about the sensuality of the poem, quoting the line, “Do I dare to eat a peach?” This is what he said: “Can you just see and feel and taste the sensuousness of the peach? The juice dripping down your chin and running down your arm after you bite into the flesh of the peach?”

There was a collective gulp in the room. Thirty sets of eyes widened, and then we all ducked our heads in embarrassment.

Then we came to this part of the poem:

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.


“What is the word picture here?” he asked the class. Duh. It’s a cat. But a big dumb jock in the back of class said, “Sex?”

So I can see where the “experts” might come to the conclusion that men think about sex every seven seconds. It’s not a big stretch to guess what topic is most on their minds.

But what about women? What do we think about when we’re not cutting gum out of a toddler’s hair or teaching a maniacal teenage girl to drive?

For me, it’s hair.

I swear I was a woolly mammoth in a previous life. The time I met Jon Bon Jovi and he came out of his dressing room with a pissed-off look on his face? It wasn’t because someone woke him up to go meet a fan. No, he took one look at me and my daughter and saw two chicks with more hair than he has, and it rocked his world.

Now, I’m not complaining about how much hair is on my head. I’m grateful, actually. But the fact that I blow out a hairdryer every six months plus the Great Hairdryer Debacle of 1979 and the Wedding Cake Disaster of 1984 means I have hair nightmares.

In the summer of 1979, I was at a teenage camp in Hollywood, Florida. The building was a former luxury hotel that had been built in the 1930s, and I’m pretty sure the wiring had never been updated. I was innocently drying my hair when the lights went dim. There was a pop and a flash, and my hair dryer started smoking. Then the lights went out completely. I set the hairdryer down and walked out of the bathroom. The hotel room was dark. And so was the hallway.

Basically, I knocked out power to three floors of that ancient hotel because my hairdryer overheated. And for the rest of the week, no one -- not one of my so-called friends – would lend me a hairdryer.

The Wedding Cake incident was worse. I was serving cake at a teacher’s wedding reception the summer after I graduated from high school. When I bent over to slice into the Groom’s Cake, my hair fell into a burning candle and caught on fire. I wasn’t hurt, but the scent of burning hair can actually ruin a wedding reception.

Much of my thoughts are about keeping my hair out of my eyes (and away from burning things) and how long I can go without washing it. And when I do wash it, I must schedule enough time to dry it, including several rest periods for the dryer during the process so that I don’t set off the eleven smoke alarms that were installed in my home by the paranoid previous owners.

And the problem is only getting worse the older I get. Josh, my hairdresser of fifteen years, said to me the other day while he was drying my hair, “You know, I think you have more hair now than you did when I met you.”

He’s right. I have more hair on my head AND on my entire body. In fact, my face is now covered with a fine blonde peach fuzz that makes it nearly impossible to wear makeup. I complained about it to the girl who does my facials.

“Why don’t you just shave it?” Chris asked.

Huh? Girls don’t shave their faces. I don’t need a five-o’clock shadow. Now that would really piss off Jon Bon Jovi.

“No, girls don’t have the hormones that would make it look like they had a beard,” Chris insisted. “A lot of my clients do it.”

I'm thinking about it – every seven seconds, in fact. But I'm afraid people will see me walking around with tiny toilet paper booboo blotters stuck to my face. If I decide to do it, will I ever actually admit to shaving my face?

Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin.