corporate pattern baldness

there are days when everything changes in an instant.

i had one of those days yesterday.
i'm sort-of a professional at being drug tested. i've been through 10 pre-employment drug screens, and up until yesterday, all of them involved me awkwardly handing a nurse a cup of my warm urine and hoping that there wasn't anything dripping down the side of the container.

yesterday i went in for my FOURTH pre-employment drug screen with pee+gee since 2001, and apparently the company recently switched over from urine tests to hair tests. i thought i was going to get one...maybe two hairs pulled out of my head. i was even going to be hilariously flippant and tell the woman to go ahead and grab any extra gray ones she ran across. i had it all planned out.

ha. i was so naive in those golden days of yore.

after a TWO HOUR WAIT at the clinic, i was escorted into a room and SCALPED.after i "lost" those 70+ hairs, i jolted from my testing chair and made a run for it. i bolted myself into my suv and convinced myself not to cry. i used the following logic to hold back my tears: if i cried then it would mean i'm emotionally unstable even when i'm not on the pill, and i really want to believe that i'm not. alas, i didn't cry, despite the fact that this is the first time i can ever remember (since 1999) having long and chemically unaltered hair, i did not cry.

i wanted to cry, though.
and the more i thought about why i was upset, the more i realized that it wasn't so much the vast bald patch that was getting me down as it was the invasion of my civil liberties.

all i could think about was going to the new hire orientation in june and comparing my bald patch to everyone else's. i imagined us all with matching tracking devices implanted in our wrists so that the company could monitor our every twist and turn. the imagery in my head was 1984 on crack, and even the post-scalp purchase of three new frocks at nordstrom rack couldn't make my racing thoughts of fascist dictatorship disappear.

and then it happened.
i went all new hampshire on my vermont ass (translation: switched from liberal to libertarian).

i laughed when my friend dominic looked at me late last year and embarrassingly confessed to having become a libertarian. in classic bliss form, i am now suffocating on that laughter. while i will continue to live a drug free existence, i think i'm finally ready to support other people's rights to live free or die.

note: although i now support people's rights to do whatever the hell they want in the privacy of their own homes (unless it involves feces or child molestation) i will continue to find stoners cataclysmically annoying. i don't mind coke heads or speed freaks though, because they're usually a lot of fun to party with.