I'm not here. This isn't happening.

I have a third year elective class that I see once a week. It's made up of eight girls and one guy, and I get to try lessons that wouldn't fly with, say, thirty first years. This past week I split them into two groups and had them write a story in twenty-six sentences. The first sentence had to begin with A, the second one with B, and so on and so on. I did this myself back in the seventh grade, and our group's story involved Jack (of Jack and the Beanstalk fame) escaping the giant's grasps while golden toilet paper spindled from the roll.

On Wednesday, this was the sentence when we reached the letter K:
"Kevin is crazy."

This was followed by:
"Look at his hair!"

As a pair, the sentences are funny. Coupled with events that occurred just the previous week, well, you decide.

As a primer, here is some personal information about my grooming habits. Sometimes I shower at night and sometimes I shower in the morning. If I shower at night, I spend the next morning trying to flatten my Van de Graff-ed hair. If I shower in the morning, I spend the post-shower period trying to, umm, volumize? But on this one particular day a week before the A-B-C stories, I had clearly failed to flatten.

A co-teacher greeted me in the morning with a smile. She then made a "pointy" motion with both her hands and said, "Your hair!"

In first period, I tried to make small talk with a student who had shaved his head since last I saw him. He misunderstood my comments and thought I was talking about my own hair. He spoke Japanese to my co-teacher, who then looked at me and said, "He wants to know what happened to your hair." Now, let's pause to think about how insane I must have looked to these people in a country where this is normal. And now we continue. For the rest of the class, something was different. I may not understand Japanese, but I understand students 1) pointing at me, 2) waving their hands above their heads, 3) looking around at other students, 4) laughing, 5) trying to cover their laughter with the hands that were just above their heads.

I had a break in second period, so I went to the bathroom. After a few minutes of dousing my head with water, I remembered another thing about Japan. There are no paper towels/napkins here. So, like any normal human, I scurried to a place where I could hide while my hair dried without the aid of processed trees. The only place with privacy happened to be the copy machine room, so I stood around dripping wet pretending to copy the invisible papers in my hands. A few awkward minutes later, I was home free.

But gossip spreads.

In third period, two girls in the back of the room were play-fighting before the bell rang. This actually happens quite frequently, but I walked to the back to see what was going on. I regret doing that. The two girls were fighting over something in one of the girl's hands. She stopped as I got closer and presented the object to me with two hands. "Present!" she said, as a plastic headband appeared before my eyes. I wish I could make this stuff up.

So how did the A-B-C story end a week later?

Apparently I use "expensive conditioner," but it's all a lie because I'm bald and wear a wig. And how can you tell?

"Zoom in."