The Pandemic Haircut That Never Really Ended

By August 2020, my wife had learned how to cut my hair.

The training process had been expensive in only one sense:

I had to wear the results.

The old entry describes it more honestly.

She learned by turning me into a monkey again and again.

That was the price of practical education.

No mannequin.

No professional course.

No patient volunteer whose appearance did not matter.

Me.

Hair grows back.

Apparently that made me suitable laboratory equipment.

By the time I wrote the entry, however, something had changed.

The joke was no longer only that my wife had learned to cut hair during the pandemic.

The joke was that professional haircut prices had changed too.

Before the pandemic, I wrote, a haircut had cost 25 lira.

Now it was 65.

My conclusion was immediate:

At this point, why would I ever go to a barber again?

This is a very small pandemic memory.

No statistics.

No case numbers.

No speeches.

No grand account of 2020.

Just hair.

That is exactly why I like it.

Large events enter personal history through small inconveniences.

A global pandemic becomes:

someone else cuts your hair.

The first attempt is bad.

Then another.

Then another.

Eventually it becomes normal.

Later, the old service is available again, but the household has already learned to replace it.

This is how temporary adaptations become permanent habits.

At the beginning, you do something because circumstances force you.

Later, you discover that you can.

Then the original service has to compete not only with price but with your new competence.

That is a much harder competitor.

Before 2020, a haircut probably belonged to the category of things done outside the home.

You went to the barber.

Sat down.

Someone else handled it.

Finished.

The pandemic disturbed thousands of these boundaries.

Work entered the house.

School entered the house.

Meetings entered the house.

Exercise entered the house.

Restaurants partially entered the house through delivery.

And, in my case, the barber entered the house through my wife holding whatever tools we had decided were sufficient.

The home expanded because the outside world contracted.

Not elegantly.

Necessity rarely waits for elegance.

At first, there is improvisation.

How hard can this be?

This sentence has caused many domestic disasters.

Haircutting looks simple from the customer side.

You sit.

Someone moves around you.

Hair falls.

Twenty or thirty minutes later, you leave with roughly the same head but improved.

Watching a skilled person perform a familiar service hides the knowledge inside the service.

The motions look ordinary because expertise makes them look ordinary.

Then an amateur tries.

Suddenly you discover how much information had been invisible.

Where to start.

How short is too short.

How to make both sides resemble each other.

What to do around the ears.

How to avoid creating a shape that requires several weeks of strategic hat use.

The source does not tell me which mistakes happened.

So I will not invent specific disasters.

“Turning me into a monkey” is enough.

The phrase tells us the early results were not exactly salon advertising material.

But repeated practice did what repeated practice usually does.

She learned.

That is the interesting part.

People often assume competence is a fixed property.

This person knows how to do this.

That person does not.

The pandemic forced people to discover how quickly that boundary can move when there is enough reason to cross it.

Cooking.

Bread making.

Home repairs.

Video conferencing.

Online teaching.

Haircuts.

Some skills were abandoned immediately when normal services returned.

Others stayed.

The difference often came down to three things:

Was the new method good enough?

Was it convenient?

Was the old method expensive enough to make us reconsider?

My haircut had all three conditions lined up by August 2020.

The home version had become possible.

The price outside had risen from 25 to 65 lira.

And, most importantly, the person cutting my hair no longer produced only experimental outcomes.

A temporary emergency solution had become a legitimate option.

That transition is easy to miss because there is rarely a ceremony.

Nobody announces:

Today, this improvisation has become a household skill.

It simply happens.

The first time is a crisis.

The fifth time is a routine.

Humans normalize astonishingly quickly.

This is one of the lessons 2020 taught repeatedly.

Things that would have sounded strange months earlier became ordinary.

Do the meeting from home.

Teach through a screen.

Avoid crowded places.

Cut your own hair.

Or persuade the person you live with to learn.

The extraordinary becomes boring.

Then boring becomes normal.

And once something becomes normal, reversing it can require justification.

That is what happened in the final sentence of the entry.

Why would I go back?

This is not the same as saying professional barbers had become unnecessary.

Of course not.

Professional skill still matters.

The source only records my own cost-benefit calculation.

My wife could now do the job.

The outside price had risen dramatically relative to the old price.

For me, the equation changed.

That is how consumer habits change.

Not necessarily because people discover a better product.

Sometimes because circumstances teach them an alternative.

A customer lost temporarily can become a customer lost permanently if the forced alternative proves acceptable.

Businesses learned this too during the pandemic.

Restaurants discovered delivery customers.

Offices discovered remote workers.

Customers discovered online shopping.

Employees discovered commuting was not a law of nature.

Families discovered services they could reproduce themselves.

Some discoveries disappeared after restrictions.

Others survived.

Haircuts are especially interesting because they involve trust.

You cannot easily inspect the back of your own head while the process is happening.

Even with mirrors, control is limited.

You hand over your appearance.

Professional barbers earn trust through skill.

Domestic haircuts replace professional trust with personal trust.

This is a very different transaction.

A bad barber is annoying.

A bad haircut from your spouse becomes family history.

You cannot even complain with full force because you agreed to the experiment.

Probably enthusiastically at first.

How difficult could it be?

Again, dangerous sentence.

But there is affection hidden inside the process too.

Someone learning a practical skill on you requires patience from both sides.

One person has to try.

The other has to accept that the learning curve may be visible on his head.

There is vulnerability in that.

Hair is not medically important.

But appearance matters.

Walking around with evidence of someone’s beginner phase requires a degree of surrender.

The source turns this into comedy rather than tenderness.

That is appropriate.

Not every caring act needs sentimental language.

Sometimes care looks like:

Sit still.

I think I can fix this side.

And love looks like:

Fine.

Hair grows back.

I should be careful not to romanticize pandemic conditions themselves.

The entry does not say that 2020 was secretly wonderful because we learned domestic skills.

That would be absurd.

The pandemic caused enormous loss and disruption.

This particular memory is simply one small domestic adaptation inside that larger period.

Personal history can hold both scales.

A terrible global event can still contain funny household scenes.

Humor does not deny seriousness.

It is one of the ways people live through serious periods.

If every memory of difficult years had to remain solemn, it would become inaccurate.

People still laughed.

Argued.

Watched television.

Made coffee.

Cut hair badly.

Then cut it better.

Life does not suspend its ordinary texture even during extraordinary events.

This is why I prefer the haircut entry to a generic statement such as:

The pandemic changed our habits.

Of course it did.

But that sentence has no body.

The haircut does.

Twenty-five lira.

Sixty-five lira.

My wife practicing on my head.

The decision not to return to the barber.

Now the change is visible.

Numbers help too.

25 to 65.

Without those figures, the conclusion might sound like simple preference.

With them, the economic pressure becomes part of the story.

The difference was not subtle.

The old price had become part of memory almost immediately.

This happens when inflation or crisis changes familiar prices quickly.

People do not experience inflation primarily as an abstract percentage.

They experience it through anchors.

Tea used to cost this.

Haircut used to cost that.

Fuel was this much.

A meal here used to be that.

The mind carries old prices long after the market has abandoned them.

Then every new purchase becomes a comparison with a ghost.

Sixty-five?

It used to be twenty-five.

The old number becomes emotionally correct even when economically obsolete.

This creates resistance.

Sometimes irrationally.

Sometimes enough to change behavior.

In my case, there was an obvious substitute sitting in the same house.

A substitute who had already survived the training period.

That made the decision easy.

There is another layer in the phrase “she learned by turning me into a monkey.”

Learning is often invisible because we only meet people after competence.

You go to a barber who already knows.

A mechanic who already knows.

A teacher who already knows enough to teach.

You rarely see the embarrassing attempts that came first.

Domestic learning removes that distance.

You see version one.

Version two.

Version three.

You become version one.

This can make skill feel more human.

Experts once made bad cuts too.

Programmers once wrote terrible code.

Teachers once gave awkward lectures.

Drivers once stalled cars.

Nobody begins polished.

We usually hide the beginner stage because adults dislike looking incompetent.

The pandemic forced many adults back into beginner roles.

That may have been one of its stranger psychological effects.

People who were fully competent in their professions suddenly had to learn basic skills in unfamiliar domains.

How to use a video platform.

How to teach remotely.

How to manage children at home while working.

How to cut hair.

How to recreate routines that used to depend on institutions outside the house.

Beginnerhood returned.

It is uncomfortable.

But also productive.

The old entry compresses this entire learning curve into one joke.

She turned me into a monkey until she learned.

Excellent summary.

The failures are implied.

The improvement is confirmed.

No need for a training montage.

By August, we had reached competence.

There is also a subtle shift in household roles here.

A service that used to be commercial becomes relational.

I no longer exchange money with a barber.

Instead, I ask someone close to me to do the work.

This has advantages.

No travel.

No waiting.

No price.

At least no listed price.

Domestic services are never truly free; they are embedded in reciprocal life.

You do things for each other.

Not because each act is invoiced.

Because that is how households function.

Cooking.

Cleaning.

Fixing.

Driving.

Watching a child.

Carrying something.

Cutting hair.

The economy inside a family is mostly invisible.

If every task received market pricing, ordinary family life would produce terrifying invoices.

Instead, labor circulates through care, obligation, habit, negotiation, and sometimes argument.

The haircut joined that hidden economy.

The barber lost a customer.

The household gained another task.

Whether that counts as savings depends on how you value time, skill, convenience, and domestic peace.

The entry did not perform this calculation.

It only saw 65 lira and declared victory.

Fair enough.

Sometimes economic analysis should remain simple.

Can this be done at home?

Yes.

Will it look acceptable?

Now, apparently, yes.

Does outside cost much more than before?

Yes.

Decision complete.

This is the sort of calculation people make thousands of times without calling it economics.

Repair or replace?

Cook or order?

Drive or take a taxi?

Do it yourself or pay someone?

Convenience has a price.

Skill has a price.

Time has a price.

But those prices change depending on context.

During a pandemic, avoiding an unnecessary trip may carry additional value.

The source does not explicitly discuss infection risk, so I will not assign that motive to the decision.

But historically, the haircut belongs to that period of altered behavior.

The date is enough.

25 August 2020.

The pandemic is already in the title of the original entry.

The context is not invented.

What I like most now is how permanent the final sentence sounds.

“From now on, would I go to a barber?”

It has the confidence of someone who has just discovered a loophole.

Maybe the decision lasted.

Maybe it did not.

The archive does not tell me.

I should not pretend to know.

People make permanent declarations casually.

I am never doing this again.

From now on I always do that.

This is the last time.

Then life changes.

Permanent is one of our favorite temporary words.

So the correct way to preserve the entry is not to claim that I never visited another barber.

It is to preserve the certainty of that day.

On 25 August 2020, the calculation felt finished.

We had solved haircuts.

Case closed.

That confidence is part of the memory.

And perhaps that is one of the pleasures of reading old entries.

You encounter earlier versions of yourself at moments when they thought a conclusion was final.

Sometimes they were right.

Sometimes not.

But the certainty is real.

Archives preserve not only what happened.

They preserve what seemed obvious then.

In this case:

Professional haircut: 65 lira.

Wife: now knows how.

Me: already survived the learning phase.

Why would I go anywhere?

The pandemic created many stories larger than this one.

Most deserve more attention.

But personal memory cannot live only at historical scale.

It also needs the bathroom mirror.

Hair on the floor.

Someone learning where to stop.

A joke about looking like a monkey.

A familiar price becoming unfamiliar.

A household discovering it can do one more thing for itself.

That is how history enters the home.

Not always through the front door.

Sometimes with clippers.