on the visual emergence of the elusive "head pore"

I'm going to get a haircut today from my friend Rudy, who is a hairdresser --- so that seems like a good start, getting a haircut from a hairdresser as opposed to, say, myself. Since I'm losing my hair, I wonder whether I should just cut it all off, the way other women and sick people do when they are losing their hair. When they do it, they always look all militant and fuck-you and whatnot, but I know I would not look that way. Gigantic face + short hair = not a particularly good look. I would look like a festival balloon about to take flight. I know this because when I was eleven, I tried this combination, complete with Farrah Fawcett wings and a butt-part down the middle, and persons (albeit eleven-year-old persons) threw acorns at me and called me "Kara the chipmunk." Sure, that was mean, but let's be honest here: They were not wrong.

My other concern is that in the course of cutting it, pulling and blow-drying, Rudy will inadvertently just coax all the rest of the hair out of my head, and at the end will try to convince me that I am a fabulous bald person, which would also be, just objectively, incorrect. It stands to follow that not being fabulous with hair, I would certainly not be fabulous without. I imagine myself with a rhinestone-embellished skull and feel sad.

When I was in college I wrote a short-stort story about a woman losing her hair. It was a terrible, simply awful story, so of course I submitted it as part of my MFA application portfolio. Former self, did you really do that? (Former self: "Yes, I did. Sorry. I was a terrible writer. Eat me.") When I went up to Columbia to discuss my application with a professor there, a great person and talented poet who I will call Z, he smiled kindly and just sort of shunted that story off to the side.
"Let's discuss the other story," he said.
"You don't want to discuss both of them?" I asked.
"Let's just forget about that story," he said frankly. And then, to soften the blow, "For right now."

Upon finding the story some six years later, I was appalled that I had even been allowed to go to the MFA program at all. The story comes up with all the worst overdone images of hair loss: Drains are clogged! Palms are massaged, woefully, over barren scalps! Memories of sunshine! Jumping on the bed! Birds tweeting! Pores --- head pores! The worst part about the story was that it wasn't true --- it didn't ring true at all --- it just felt like someone who'd seen the movie Annie, inspired by the stylin' styles of Daddy Warbucks, had written three pages of whoozie-whatsit and then lain down for an energizing nap. If I were to rewrite the story now, I'd make it boring, and lame, because that's what losing one's hair seems to really be like. Don't worry: I won't rewrite it.