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The shift from massive amounts of head hair to none may seem a bit drastic, but sometimes we need to be extreme. After all, my life is just moving from one thing to the next, as I plan things out for a future that may never come. As John Lennon said, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

In other words, there are a few times when overwhelming circumstances cause you to change your entire lifestyle and way of viewing the world. Growing long hair and then cutting it has no doubt changed my lifestyle. From now on, I will never have the oily, itchy mess that happened when I didn't wash the spaghetti and I will never have to brush it, tearing some out due to frustrating knots. I'll never again feel the subtle motion of knocking my hair back in the wind or be able to run my hand through it with water. I will miss these things.

Going bald, I imagine, will be like losing a limb. I can just see myself trying to grab my hair only to realize that it's not there. The shock alone makes the cut worthwhile.

Think about how many shocking things you've done lately. Things that push the limits of your emotions. Often without these shocks, life would be a solidifying glacier day after day, each day moving toward that ultimate destination.

What is art if not using media to shock an audience into reexamining their lives, their loves and even their hairdos? In this case, my hair is art, shocking all those around me, including my mother, forcing people to reconsider who I am, which ultimately allows me to reconsider who I am. It's throwing rocks into a pond and seeing where the waves will go.

In fact, art is identity. It reinforces certain ways of thinking, such that propaganda would be impossible without skilled craftspeople churning out icons. Catholicism would lose virtually all its powers without those huge cathedrals, the costumed priests, the crucifixes and, of course, perhaps the single most influential piece of literature ever written, the Bible.

Similarly, going to UCLA means getting acquainted with the 8-clap, wearing blue-and-gold shirts and caps, and listening to the band play the UCLA victory march ad nauseum. On the other hand, if you wore red (USC's color if you didn't know), you'd be violating the strict codes of etiquette. Art becomes identity.

Music is perhaps the best source of identity since, with the internet, MP3s and peer-to-peer servers, one can now experience virtually any type of music instantaneously. As one of my professors would say, it enables people to try on different identities risk-free.

So the cookie-cutter suburbanite can see what it's like to be a glam goth with a little Marilyn Manson blasting in the aural canal. A raver can become romantic opera lover with a few arias sung by Andrea Bocelli.

Each type of music tells you how to move your body. Rap is all about moving to the groove with syncopations. Trance is all about pretending that you don't even have a body, but are a free-flowing being in a sea of happiness. Classical tells its listener to not move at all, but instead to sit silently while the emotion and intellect of the music tell a story without words.

Art is intimately connected to the body and to think otherwise would be to engage in puritanical denial. Since art is also identity and your identity is also the body ... what was I writing about again?

Anyway, the point is that it's all interconnected in this beautiful way. Take advantage of what artistic potential you have to live dangerously, to shock others and more importantly, to shock and change yourself. When you've lost this ability, death cannot be too far away.