My office sent me to Milwaukee to look at a print ad and check its color. Yes, Milwaukee. Yes, to look at a color. It seemed like it would be an easy task, but of course the color was wrong and I needed to stay up all night to fix it. While driving through the Milwaukee back roads at 4am to go check the color again, I clenched the steering wheel, pissed that this was my life. I felt tears approaching my lids and anxiety holding my jaw taut.
The color never got to be perfect, and I left Milwaukee feeling like a failure. Well, half of me felt like a failure and half of me felt like I was stuck in a joke. Or a Mike Meyers satire where everyone in the film is creating a huge deal out of something so insignificant. Miserable and scared of how my bosses would view the color fiasco, I got to the airport only to find a problem with my flight.
Right when I felt like my body would implode from anxiety, I walked passed an Indian man. He was round and bald and cloaked in a brown bomber jacket. I could see he was bald and the throng of busy travelers could tell he was bald, but the man himself could not see he was bald. Perched atop his head was what looked like the puff of hair that usually lands in the trash after I clean out my brush. He’d poised this tumbleweed directly in the center of his shiny dome in a desperate attempt to convince the world that he was not one who could be classified as bald.
At the sight of this man, my brain could do nothing but make me laugh, and laugh I did for a good two minutes. Not at him, but at the fact that all humans have “problems” that seem so huge to us in the moment but in essence aren’t so important. While I could tell the man that his baldness was really not worth the fretting and styling and grasping at a last-ditch solution of puff-piling, he could probably tell me that the color of the print ad would not be my demise.
Thanks, bald Indian man. I know you don’t think I’m talking to you because you don’t classify yourself as bald, but thanks anyway.