"my life's work"

every morning i perform my life's work while i'm still safe + warm in the cocoon of my bed. i often repeat it at night before i turn off the light to go to sleep.

my life's work consists of me putting my nose a couple inches away from my sleeping bag and the sheets underneath and scanning for errant strands of hair. upon finding one, i pinch it securely between two fingers and continue my search. this process takes at most one minute- then i throw out the 6-10 hairs i've collected and climb back into bed.

my permanent roommate, jvz, who thinks this routine is crazy and bewildering, is the one who dubbed this daily activity "my life's work". he'll find me staring at the sheets and say, "are you doing your life's work again?"

i am quite proud of my life's work. during a period of 12 years, i had the privilege of living with several fabulous long-haired people whom i continue to consider my 'friends' in the very purest, non-facebook definition of the word. as much as i enjoyed their company, i despised the way their loose hairs clumped in corners of the carpet and clustered around the shower drain, through entirely no fault of my friends except that they chose to not be bald. to this day, i continue to find hairs shed from the heads of previous roommates laced through my blankets.

hence, my life's work. one would think jvz would respond with gratitude to my conscientious efforts to control my own loose hairs. surprisingly, he has yet to thank me for my work. nonetheless, i persevere.

my life, as i currently understand it, is not so different from harvesting wayward hairs every morning and night. i set small, attainable goals for myself (pick up hairs). i am reasonably successful in achieving these goals (i remove the hairs i find). yet regardless of how hard i work the day before, hairs fall out of my head while i sleep, and i start the whole process over again.

when i was a kid, i thought life was a series of pursuing one goal after another, each more challenging than the previous one, until i eventually became a highly evolved, successful, and wise human being. i would have been horrified to know that my life would instead turn out to follow a very non-linear path, where the most concrete successes i have involve harvesting hairs from my sheets.