(Sub-title: A Hair Elastic is a Good Thing to Have at a Lunch with a Group of People.)

(Sub-title, la deuxième: File Under “Mortifying Incidents of the Sort You Know Could ONLY Happen to You.”)

You know that special type of embarrassment you get to experience when you’re dining out with people from your work, and you’re talking to your boss (who’s sitting directly across from you), and in between bites, your response to his question is interrupted by the sudden appearance of a hair in your mouth? Your own hair, which is below-the-shoulders long? And your first two or three attempts at removing it fail, and the ensuing hair-capturing ordeal unfolds into a drama that overtakes the conversation as you repeatedly grab at the side of your half-open mouth between words, since each time you try to nonchalantly continue your sentence, you realize it’s still there? And when you finally succeed at pinching it between your forefinger and thumb, you start pulling it out to discover, to your horror and disbelief, that it’s all tangled up in the food that was still in your mouth, so the hair is actually resisting removal… forcing you to yank on it? And by the time you manage to extract the hair from your mouth – drawing it out slowly and carefully in all its long splendor (surely it was the very longest hair on your head that somehow got in the way of the food in your chopsticks) – your poor boss and the co-worker sitting next to you are awkwardly looking around everywhere but at you, including at the ceiling, probably because they’re simultaneously grossed out and painfully embarrassed on your behalf? Long after their initial thought of, Oh! OH, well, um, this will pass evolved into the conundrum of oh DEAR, what’s the proper etiquette for this situation? Should I act like I don’t see what’s going on? as your struggles seemed to never cease?

Well, I sympathize with you. It happened to me on Wednesday.

The wayward hair originated from this.

So, yeah, the expression “foot in mouth” has a new counterpart for a different kind of embarrassing conversation kerfuffle: “hair in mouth” (while eating in a restaurant with people from work).

At least I could laugh when I described the scenario to Callaghan a few hours later. He laughed, too.

“Haha! That would NEVER happen to me,” gloated my bald husband.

“You’d better hope it never happens to you. If it did, it would be someone else’s hair,” I said.

It was almost as funny as the Great Toilet Paper Incident of 1999, which happened while I was actually at work at the University Registrar’s Office. I’m not ready to share that one just yet.

In all seriousness, though, I really am going to have my hair cut an inch or two, just up to my shoulders, I think. I’d been going back and forth on this for the last few weeks, and then this incident happened, and it kind of made up my mind for me. Funny how that happens!