Snip of Theseus
by Brian Hioe
The other day, my partner wanted to cut my hair. “Well, what could go wrong?” I thought. The worst that could happen was that I’d have a bad hairdo for a while. It seemed like a cute couple thing to do.
The answer is that, well, many things could go wrong. Perhaps there’s a reason why we entrust trained and licensed professionals with our hair. About five minutes later, they had accidentally snipped off a piece of my earlobe.
The strange thing is, I didn’t feel anything at all. Suddenly my partner was panicking, and there was blood everywhere. But it didn’t initially seem like enough blood that I felt I needed to go to the hospital. I only became convinced that it was serious when, after applying pressure to my wounded ear for twenty minutes, it didn’t stop bleeding.
I wasn’t even sure that a part of my earlobe had, in fact, been cut off, and that it hadn’t been just a cut, but my partner kept insisting that there had been a piece of flesh on the scissors. As for this piece of flesh, they had already knocked it aside in a panic and it wasn’t on the scissors anymore. We still don’t know where that nub of earlobe is.
Keep us breathing fire!
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