This month so far has mainly involved adventures in hair. Andrew is progressing from reaching for his missing moustache or ponytail to rubbing the top of his head vigorously when he needs to think. For several days last week he assured me that that day had to be the pinnacle of softness, and every time he was wrong. We interrupted the discovery process this morning because I shaved it all off again so that he could inflict maximum astonishment on his colleagues at their meeting in San Francisco this week. This will be accomplished during the brief moments when he's not wearing a beanie; apparently having a naked head is very cold. My mother was dubious about this whole amateur haircut process and advising consulting a professional. But the haircut was originally for a punk outfit, and I figured that a homegrown wobbly mohawk was more authentic. And it didn't turn out so badly in the end, so we didn't consult anyone about the final shave either. If he was going to keep it shaved I'd suggest it, since it turns out that I intensely dislike both the sound and sensation of shaving a head. In the abstract they aren't so bad; it sounds rather like sanding something with coarse sandpaper. But in the context of sliding a sharp blade over someone's head I'd really rather that the normal slices be silent and only the bloody cuts noisy. I have not, in fact, cut his head at all yet, but it would be nice to know that there was an early warning system. It sounds like I'm ripping his scalp off at every moment. However, fortunately this won't be a problem very often, since some plan is slowly forming; and I'm told it involves him having some hair. Andrew's sisters very much wanted him to keep the mohawk until they could see it, but Andrew has a finely calibrated sense of how much time should be put into haircare, and it apparently should be about a second a week. Shaving the sides of his head every other day for a week to avoid the fauxhawk effect was too much bother even for family fun. We had brunch with them last Sunday and all he had to show for his efforts was stubble. I attend a regular Tuesday evening paper reading group for university; in some ways it's more cult than reading group, because it's been going for several years with an almost complete turnover of participants but has still retained some interesting mythology from the good old days. Since most of the members are international students we have a long running tradition of occasionally cooking international treats for each other. A few years ago I had to borrow Andrew, who is only second generation on his mother's side and therefore really ought to be in this group instead of me, and have him make pīrāgi for them. It's not that I don't have cultural foods, it's that they find Vegemite unimpressive. Poffertjes were a few months ago now, and last week Elena had a new flat to show off, so she made us some stew, big potato wedges and beetroot, which is apparently so Russian that she claims they invented it. I try not to define myself by stubbornly clinging to things that I don't know, am not good at, or don't like, because I find this trait irritating in other people. Of course, it's also a nicely universal trait; good for despising other people and myself at will. It's also a deeply ingrained one. When Jono was in Sydney a month or so ago he talked about how strange it was to no longer automatically be the youngest person in the room. I intensely dislike not being the tallest woman in the room. (I only found this out recently, as it happens.) But it's even worse to discover that I now like things I didn't like before. I hated beetroot as a child. I regarded it as a pollutant. Put it in a salad or a burger (true blue Aussie burgers have beetroot in them, oh yes), and the whole thing is stained purple and tastes of beetroot. The purple stain was a useful guide to the infection. Unchallenged personal facts about me: I am the tallest woman in the room, and I hate beetroot. Until we went down to the snow, that is. On the way down, we stopped at a tiny little roadhouse near Goulburn, and I ordered a burger. I eat roadhouse burgers only once in a blue moon and consequently forgot to ask them to leave the beetroot out. So it arrived and I was hungry and curious, and it turns out that beetroot is now kind of OK. I won't be seeking it out, but it's OK. What a personal tragedy. Likewise, late in the afternoon at my uncle's birthday party a month or so before that, aniseed jelly beans were passed around for some reason. Now, I'd never liked these, but again, I was curious, so I tried them and in fact did rather like them. Even more irritatingly, at some point after that everyone was asked to poke out their tongues and all the people with discoloured purple tongues turned out to be members of my family. I was genetically programmed to convert. Anyway, I quietly sulked a little at Elena's house about my lost youth and polished off a few beetroots. Elena and I then puzzled over being each other's antithesis: we tend to like what the other hates. In a polite way. Except for beetroots, obviously. Haven't checked on the black jelly beans. Wednesday was really, truly, the end of my how to do research course. It's marked satisfactory or unsatisfactory for research students; apparently we were all satisfactory, excellent. Now to do some research. Other than that, up until today, which was a blur of packing, our life has been a blur of House episodes, since Season 2 just came out on DVD. While sometimes I think it would be nice to go back to sharehousing it is clear that we never could, because only someone who loves me can watch TV with me. Andrew is content to snort triumphantly when House makes a particularly witty comment, I insist on holding the remote throughout any viewing of anything and pausing at least once every half hour to add commentary, especially yesterday when we saw All In and histiocytosis came up as a possible diagnosis for the first time. Andrew claims to not find this incredibly irritating, and even if he does find it incredibly irritating, which is, face it, very likely, I've been putting up with him leaning over during the crucial emotional moment between two leads and whispering he's in! for years now. No one else has that history. Original entry: http://puzzling.org/logs/diary/2006/November/13/20061113