Health, Beauty and further proof that wearing a watch is a bad idea

Nothing quite so profoundly reminds me what it means to be American like getting sick. Last week i got the flu and all my cultural conditioning immediately kicked in: calling in sick is a sign of weakness and indicates lack of commitment to one's job, going to a doctor is only necessary as a last resort, the need to rest is a euphemism for the desire to be lazy. Logically, i know none of these attitudes can survive much scrutiny; however, cultural responses to unexpected situations - i was going to say 'stressful situations', but only an American would classify illness as a form of stress - are not based on logic, but rather on normative behavior.

In the US - especially for those without health insurance - the norm is to work until you drop and as soon as you can stand up again, get back to work. It's no small coincidence that Americans are so inclined to try self-help remedies, women moreso than men. The principle difference between us and Europeans is that much of the alternative/complimentary medicine in Europe is practiced by doctors, whereas in America, we have learned to avoid doctor visits as much as possible and do our best treating ourselves. Over a decade ago, i contracted lyme disease and believe me when i say that i did a lot more work than any of the doctors i went to in figuring out how to recover and then manage this disease. 'It takes a lot of work to get well' fits very nicely with the entire cultural ethos (physical therapy is obviously an exception).

At any rate, while i was being a lazy bum, staying out of the rain and (intense Caspian) wind, drinking a catatonia-inducing quantity of Theraflu or whatever its Russian equivalents are called, i did manage to save myself the expense of going back to a hair salon by covering up those gray roots in the comfort of my own home. This is not to say that i regret having experienced the pleasures of an Azeri salon - au contraire! To spend an afternoon in the midst of so many black-haired beauties carrying out their feminine mandates was precisely the sort of perspicuous adventure any armchair anthropologist would crave.

It's probably safe to say that in a place where the bars and tea houses are predominantly exclusive to males, upscale beauty salons become a sort of female clubhouse. There seemed to be a number of women there just to gossip, drink tea and compare accessories. Smokers came and went through the back door. The only way to distinguish workers from customers was in the footwear, with employees sporting every color of plastic slipper or epsadrillo knock-off imaginable. Instead of music, a muted tv screen was set to a Turkish music video channel: sexy girls in sexy clothes, being drooled over by sexy, lustful men. The whole atmosphere felt almost conspiratorial.

While i was in 'the chair', a would-be Avon lady stood in front of me and methodically went through her entire bag of cheap, glitzy hair pins and jewelry. It didn't seem to matter to her that i wasn't going to buy anything; in a country of high underemployment, not making a sale here was just as good a way to spend the day as not making a sale somewhere else. Anyway, each hair stylist has 3-4 assistants who do lots of mindless tasks, such as taking the place of hair clips, (used in western salons) by holding the sections of hair that aren't being cut or colored, so there was a little mob around me who were happy to ooh and ahh over the contents of her various satchels.

Being a non-Azeri client, i was an item of obvious interest and practically everyone who worked there had to come over and get the low down on what exactly was being done to my voluminous locks. Cups of tea came, cooled and were replaced by new, hot ones. There were several discussions about ideal cuts and styles, followed by repeated disbelief that i only wanted a trim, as if i was insulting their sense of feminine propriety. My hair was dried simultaneously by three different girls while their mentor looked on, giving tips on pulling and fluffing. Far too much fussing for me, but i had to assure them all over and over that yes, the color was good and yes, the cut was what i wanted and yes, i would come back again. When i was finally finished and waiting to pay, in came a woman with a crate of kiwis to sell, which seemed like the perfect finale for this little afternoon comedy. Surprisingly, tips are not de rigueur here, which was fine since i was already paying way more than i'd expected. But no complaints. They gave me the full treatment, as it were, and it was definitely worth the experience.

Clearly, health and beauty are complex cultural realms, especially across national divides. Nonetheless, it was beyond shocking to read that wearing a watch - which has always seemed to me such an internationally accepted form of accessorizing that it doesn't even count as noteworthy - was responsible for no small number of men being renditioned to Guantanamo. Evidently someone(s) at al-Qaeda decided Casios were the perfect gift for their recruits; hardly as classy as a Rolex, but Casios do come with all the practical features a materially deprived, mountain-based terrorist needs: shock resistance, altimeter, solar power and a multi-functional alarm (one imagines that working for Sheikh bin Laden, effective management of alarms would be high on the list of priority skills). The lesson here is that sometimes it might make sense to look a gift horse in the mouth and just depend on the sun and stars to set up your attack plan, as warriors did in the time of Xerxes. Undone by a watch? Well, for a religious fundamentalist it's probably more palatable than being undone by a beautiful woman. But let's not tell the ladies here that, we wouldn't want to spoil whatever romantic fantasies may lurk in the minds of those yearning for eternal beauty, however contrived.