What is cute and accidental mullets

I've been around kids for a while now and I'd like to think my exposure the little Korean children has given me insight into what makes them cute or not. I know, I'm shallow and superficial. Now that that's out of the way, let's move on to the meat of this entry.

What makes a child cute.

1. Big head small body. Ok, every kid has this going for him/her. Kids are walking lollipops. But for some reason, some kids' bodies catch up and become proportional to their heads, or some kids just have small heads. Whatever, the magic formula to cuteness is BIG head, small body. I have a friend back home, Timmy, or Tim now that he's older. Anyways, his dad tells this story of watching him as a baby. Tim's head was so big he had trouble keeping it upright and it would sometimes topple over and he'd fall backwards or to the side. Tim's dad would just sit there observing Tim as he watched TV and struggled to stay upright.

2. Glasses. Kids with glasses are exactly 1,000,000,000,000,000 (that's One million, billion) times cuter than kids without. Remember Johnathan Lipnicki? He's that coke-bottle bespectacled kid in "Jerry Maguire".


But then he got rid of his glasses and got himself a faux-hawk and now his career leaves a lot to be desired. He shoulda stuck with the glasses.

3. Walking around with your hands in your pockets. This is one I discovered here in Korea. If you're an adult, walking around with your hands in your pockets means you don't know what to do with your arms when you're walking (like me) or you got something to hide. However, if you're a child, walking around with your hands in your pockets is about the cutest thing you can do. Trust me. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go and do some field research. Find yourself a child of about six years old, ask him or her to walk around with their hands in their pockets, and try not to squeal your eyes out.

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So I got my hair cut today after letting it run wild on my head for a good two months. It's the first time I've had to go to a salon by myself here so I was practicing some key vocabulary on the way: "Short" "Top" "Sides" "Back". Regular stuff. Anyways, when I get there the lady asks me how I want my hair cut. So I tell her "Short". Of course that doesn't really help her cause short for her could mean something different for me. So she brings me a book of hairstyles, and by "book of hairstyles" I mean collage of magazine clippings. I flip through a few pages and I see something I like. I point to it and tell her that's how short I want my hair.

She takes off my glasses and she starts clipping...and clipping and cutting and clipping...

10 minutes later she's done. They take me to the back to wash my hair, and back to the chair for some styling. Only after she's completely done and she puts my glasses back on that I realize that she gave me a baby mullet. Check it out.