you learn all sorts of things about yourself when you're bald

I never knew I had crinkly elf ears until I lost my hair. Nor that they flare out from my head a bit at the top. I don't think I'd ever had a really good look at my ears at all, in fact. Now that I'm looking at them, I'm not sure I like them. These are very odd-looking ears. They're not the noble elf ears of the Hobbit movies; they're definitely more like the "house elf" ears of the Harry Potter series.

Human ears are kind of weird looking anyway. I can't say I quite understand why evolution chose this particular path for them, when humans could have instead had cute pointy cat ears or delicate mouse ears. Wouldn't those have served us just as well? Instead we got these squishy bald things. They look like a mound of silly putty someone crammed up against the sides of our heads.

I'm not sure I approve of the shape of my head, either, now that it's out there in all its glory. I have a very high forehead and, as it turns out, pretty prominent eyes for my skull. When I had hair I of course styled it to minimize my defects, not even realizing at the time how very defective they were. But going bald--or rather, going suddenly mohawked, in my case--knocks out one of the most effective tools in your arsenal for convincing everyone around you that you're normal. Now, if I angle my head slightly downward and look up, I have discovered that I can make myself look very much like the aliens supposedly being hidden at Roswell.

So if you're into conspiracies, I think I can now safely claim to have discovered what happened to those aliens the government was hiding: they escaped and interbred with my ancestors.