gum in hair

I've done a lot of travel by intercity bus. It's always more comfortable for me than trains. (I know trains are a lovely idea, but the physical reality of trains makes me sicker than the physical reality of any type of vehicle but boats. And presumably spaceships, which I am too prudent to try.) The current state of air travel, with security theater and delays and other restrictions, makes me think of bus and air travel as involving similar total amounts of discomfort, for trips of up to 500 miles. It feels like bus travel is so strongly associated with poverty and discomfort, I need to offer some explanation as to why I did this thing. Why I plan to do it again.

I'm posting because Friday's trip was unusually difficult. I started cold and anxious, waiting in line for the first bus out of Boston. I wanted to make a very tight connection in New York, and I couldn't reserve a seat on the connecting bus (because if the Boston bus turned out to be late, I wanted the option of taking a later bus on south.) It was below freezing, even inside the terminal. I wasn't wearing my new coat (The Resolute) because it's bulky enough to fill an extra bus seat, and I knew it would be ridiculous in Virginia where the weather forecast was in the 40s. I kept opening my suitcase and putting on extra shirts under my coat, but I hadn't packed all that many. It took so long for the heater to warm the bus that I was afraid the whole trip was going to be miserably cold, but I stopped shivering about 2 hours after we left Boston, and an hour after that I was warm enough to fall asleep.

Falling asleep with my hood off turned out to be a big mistake. I had not realized there was gum on the side of the seatback, the kind of gum that stays soft and sticky for days. I haven't had gum in my hair for 30 years, and I would have been more than happy to continue the trend. I know several techniques to facilitate removing gum from hair, but they are not feasible on a crowded bus. (In a bus terminal where there are signs in every restroom warning that there are laws against using the facilities to bathe or change clothes, somebody would probably have called the police. Even if I had time, and plenty of peanut butter in my bag.) The only gum-removal equipment I could reach on the bus was a comb and a little tin of Burt's Bees ResQ Remedy, and of course I dropped the tin and had it roll away shortly after I started to work with it. I also had my little penknife. I ended up cutting 100-150 strands of hair off around chin length (which I know is not nearly as bad as it might have been) because that was the only way I could keep the gum from spreading to the rest of my hair. There was a little gum high up over my ear, where hair lies flat against my hair and doesn't go swinging into other hair...so it was easier to leave it alone for the rest of the day, until I got where I was going and could work it out with oil. But it was fairly miserable.

Now that I think about it, it seems like amazing good luck that I've ridden buses and trains and airplanes for so many years without getting gum in my hair before. I've never taken precautions. Perhaps I should.

glove recommendations?

Do you know that nagging feeling of walking around with an unsolved problem for a long time, because there are just too many inconvenient specifications to deal with? And then finding a perfect way to deal with the problem, so you can just put the worry away and deal with it as a tidy Solved Problem? It's lovely. I had a problem for a long time with needing very warm gloves that are also very easy to put on without a lot of fingersquirming, waterproof, and allow me enough dexterity to deal with something like a transit pass. I finally settled on a 2-layer system, with very soft acrylic gloveliners for dexterity and loose padded mittens for the extreme warmth and waterproofing.

Do you know what it feels like when a solved problem suddenly becomes an unsolved problem? My mittens don't give me enough dexterity for driving. My gloveliners don't have a good enough grip for driving. The leather or spandex "driving gloves" made for the purpose, with grippy things on the palms, are made to fit tight (probably for a better grip), which makes it painful for me to put them on.

Any suggestions? My hands are approximately the size of a men's medium or a women's large, which should not be all that hard to find. The problem is that I can't deal with much (if any) compression around the wrist and base of the thumb. And that I want my fingers able to move fairy freely, without having a lot of excess cloth beyond my fingertips.