The day after the bar exam, I went to the local barber in Cambridge and had my head shaved down to a close crop. I suppose some other people might have done so out of ritualistic excitement, but my reasons were mostly aesthetic - enough of my hair had fallen out that I was in danger of becoming one of those people who try to pretend they aren't balding. So I took action.

I liked the results, and so I just had a barber in Wilmington shave things down again. My head has more interesting angles than I had expected - there's a particularly surprising 45 degree slope on the right side. But in the meantime, I've noticed that balding men who have shaved their heads share a few more glances and nods than men generally exchange in public. It's as if one is saying to another something like - "yeah. I too saw the light". Or maybe, as my mom said, they're comparing the shapes of their heads. In any case, I feel like a new member in a secret, not very nefarious club - made up of the men everywhere who've had enough of balding, and have decided to beat their hair to the punch.

Of course, my grip on reality isn't always that tight, as I probably could explain at length. But if I'm making things up, I don't want to know. The fraternity of the shaven heads is a nice fantasy, and I'm keeping it.

For all of my waxing praise of the Yale Library System, it does have its serious annoyances, namely the large number of people it seems to employ with the purpose of keeping me away from its books.

When I dashed into the Sterling stacks yesterday with 25 minutes until closing to round up some books I had coveted all summer, I discovered, after many wasted minutes, that many of the books were no longer in the position listed in the call number guide-- the legal books had fallen 5 floors, the tail-end of some translated literature had hopped half-a-floor, and so on. The result was that I made it out of the stacks at 4:47, 13 minutes before closing, and the circulation desk steadfastly refused to check my books out.

When I returned today to recover a few more books, the lady who guards the stacks refused to let me pass, declaring that my Yale ID was sufficiently worn that she couldn't see the expiration date, and therefore that I would have to acquire a new one before she would let me through. [Fat chance. I will simply have the book delivered to the law library, or return when she is gone.] In the law library I was similarly stymied over the weekend when I discovered that the circulation desk is closed on summer sundays, and the self-check-out machine is broken. When I run a library, circulation and the stacks will be open 24 hours.

On the other hand, there is a large white table down in the Cross Campus Library (the basement cousin to the main library) with a sign that reads "this is not a chair". Nor, I suppose, is it a pipe.