I had this coming.

When Chris told me he'd written down instructions to relay to the stylist when he went in for a haircut, I laughed at him.

When he urged me to do the same when I went in myself, I laughed again, confident that I had enough of a grasp on the language to avoid walking out with racing stripes or gang insignia shaved into my scalp. "Would you like me to shave any gang insignia back there?" the stylist might ask politely. "No, just a bit of a trim," I'd reply, and everything would go smoothly.

And to be honest, I thought we were communicating perfectly well. "Not too short," I said, just three or four centimeters off the back and leave the front a little longer. When I tried to explain that she could go ahead and use trimmer around my ears, she showed me a picture in a book to clarify, which looked about right to me. "Like this?" she asked. "Like that," I confirmed, to which she muttered something that I didn't quite catch and fired up the clippers.

In retrospect, this would have been an ideal moment to clarify what she had just said, and the overall guidelines of the impending haircut in general, because when she made her first pass a moment later, I realized that French and American stylists have serious philosophical differences on the meaning of "not too short." My first thought was mild panic; my second was that it didn't matter: The hair wasn't going back on and, being a fan of symmetry in my haircuts, I wasn't going to ask her to stop.

And so I sat there and chatted with her about the United States, Lille and travel, trying not to cringe at what was unfolding in the mirror in front of me. "You certainly had a lot of hair," she marveled afterwards at the massacred clippings everywhere. Yes, I thought to myself, yes I did.

What concerned me the most was the fact that the style of cut she had given me is currently very popular among the troubled youths responsible for much of the recent rioting and violence in France. As I walked down the street, people seemed to regard me with new anxiety, as if I was poised to break a window or torch a car. My British Civilization professor had a different take: "Are you going to join the Marines?" he quipped. I didn't have a comeback at the time, but I'm working on a great one.

And when the time comes to deliver it, I intend to be prepared. I'm going to write it down.