I’m Sm’all Ears

I have small ears.  Tiny ears.  Bat-sized ears.  No, fish size ears.  Have you ever seen a fish’s ears?  No, because they’re too small.  That’s how small my ears are.  In college, after a night of drunken revelry, my inebriated friends used to like to take out a ruler and measure my ears.  Boy howdy, what passed for fun in my Texas college town would fill a book, or at least a small Post-it note.  So here I am, many, many years later with my tiny ears.  To tell you the truth, until now these ears o’ mine have never been a problem.  However, lately, I’ve been cursing these tiny flaps of cartilage attached to the side of my head.  Wouldn’t it be great if we could exchange facial features like Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head?  Sometimes, just for kicks, I would put my eyes in the back of my head.

The problem I’ve encountered in the past few weeks is finding headphones that fit.  I’ve tried every size of earbuds imaginable but they always fall out of my tiny ears.  Well, they don’t actually fit inside my ears so I have to sort of wedge them along the outer ridges.  But I spend an unreasonable amount of time pushing my earphones back in while I’m running.  I am sure that people I pass think, “Why does she keep hitting herself in the side of her head like that?” No, you dumbasses, I am not a high-functioning autistic, I am just trying to keep my earphones from falling out of my eraser-sized ears.  On the other hand, I’ve also collected a lot of change from tourists who think I’m a street performer doing the Macarena.  That knowledge will come in handy when I’m in Europe and I’ve run out of coins for the public restrooms.  Anyway, I’ve looked for smaller ear buds but can’t find the right fit.  Probably because if I get them any smaller than the ones I have now, they’ll be the size of Tic-Tacs. 

Apparently my ears are so small that the woman who cut my hair this weekend decided that my ears should be liberated from the prison of my unruly locks.  For some reason the woman insisted on blow-drying my hair, although I never wear it straight, and then cutting it.  She said something about being able to see the lines and angles or whatever.  Um, I have curly hair.  No lines, no angles, just curls, waves, corkscrews, and general mayhem.  I should’ve stabbed her with her scissors and made a break for the door, but I didn’t.  I’m only big, bad, and confrontational in my head.  My big ol’ punkin head.  Yes, I have a big head.  Tiny ears.  Big head.  Sounds like a Discovery Health documentary, doesn’t it?  Something that’s aired right after the touching family saga about the midgets little people people shorter than everyone else.

Anyway, I told Sweeny Todd that if she insisted on cutting my hair while it was straight to remember that my hair shrinks up A LOT when it’s curly and dry.  She didn’t listen.  And so now everyone can see my tiny ears.  Oh, and the hair cut?  Yeah, it accentuates my ginormous punkin’ head.  It sticks out from my head like a nimbus, or rather, a giant dandelion puff.  I wish I could borrow Mr. Potato Head’s hat.  Hey, if the hat can fit Mr. Potato Head, it should be able to fit Ms. Dingo Punkin’ Head, right?  I bitched and moaned all day yesterday.  Mr. Dingo said that it wasn’t that bad but the sideways glances he kept taking at my noggin had me convinced that he was either looking at my tiny ears or trying to gauge how long it would take my hair to grow back so that he could be seen with me in public.  He kept saying that it wasn’t that bad but when I went to take Dingo Girl for her walk he urged me to wear my hat. 

So, I called the salon and bitched, bitched, bitched.  I’m supposed to go see the owner who will try to fix what can be fixed and maybe offer some consolation for the loss of almost four inches of hair — free coloring or deep conditioning would lessen the pain.  But you know what?  Life can be a sneaky bitch.  I washed my hair this morning and didn’t look at it again until later in the evening when I was on my way to meet a friend for drinks after class.  I was trying to decide whether to go with the baseball cap or the Jackie O type scarf when I looked in the mirror.  And holy hell y’all, my hair looked kinda cute.  Tiny ears n’ all. 

So what am I supposed to do?  I mean, my hair does not look like I expected or wanted it to, and yes, it does need to be evened out where Edward Scissorhands decided to use the back of my head as her fantasy playground, but it doesn’t look as bad as I made it out to be when I called them yesterday.  If I get out of the shower tomorrow morning and my hair looks even better than it did today, do not think that I am above saving face by having Mr. Dingo take a kitchen knife to my ‘do.  Oh yes, I’ll go there.

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