Marked by up-to-dateness in dress and manners<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I just got a hair cut.<\/p>\n
The first hours after the sheering feel awkward, no less now than when I was 10. I remember a certain Peanuts<\/i> strip of early vintage: My memory of that strip starts with Snoopy as a recipient of generous, loving hugs from the girls of Peanuts<\/i>. Pig Pen sees what the girls are doing and asks if he can have a hug, too. Pig Pen is rejected, and the girls skewer him saying they would never hug someone as filthy and slovenly as him.<\/p>\n
In most of his appearances Pig Pen revels in his filth, but this time he decides that the prospect of getting a nice hug from the girls is worth the effort of cleaning up. He showers, washes his hair, and a few frames later returns to the girls, this time smiling and radiating cleanliness. His clean appearance is a sort of nakedness, as when a heavily bearded man shaves his face for the first time in many years. Pig Pen’s arms open wide in anticipation of a warm embrace but he is instead rejected again. I forget now exactly what the girls said to him to shoo him away but the strip ends with Pig Pen’s halo of cleanliness turning to a rippled, distorted cloud of rejection and confusion. Pig Pen then returns to a mud pool and feels like his good old self again.<\/p>\n
That one frame, where he returns to the girls with his open arms, is often how I feel immediately after a haircut and a shave. The drawing shows Pig Pen with a stunning halo about him, a halo made all the more striking for how we have only ever known Pig Pen to be a filthy mess. I would not say that I feel like a filthy mess before getting a haircut — nor do I expect a hug after getting a haircut — but that cut and scrubbed post-haircut feeling always reminds me of the Pig Pen halo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Marked by up-to-dateness in dress and manners<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whats-the-word","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/saumAn-natty","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12245\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}