A Friendly Barber Headshake?

There’s a lot that can be said about shaking hands. I can’t speak for the girls, but for the guys the handshake says a lot about you and how you want to portray yourself to another person. I recall going to a class about becoming a better communicator, it was sponsored by the Navy and conducted by a contracted lecturer. I remember us spending some time talking about what messages different types of handshakes can communicate. We can all laugh about most of them, since we’ve all been there, especially the guys. I won’t analyze them right now, but some of them are:

--What I like to call the ‘dead fish.’ I experienced this one a lot on my mission to Brazil. The person extends their hand to you, but when you grab on it’s like a limp body of flesh, lifeless, lax and flopped over.
--The opposite of the ‘dead fish’ is the ‘vice’. Get a dead fish and vice together to shake hands and most likely someone will get hurt. The vice is the handshake that feels as if it’s going to crush every bone in your hand. It’s not good and I usually try to avoid these people, if possible.
--Then there is the ‘grasp your elbow or shoulder while I shake your hand’ hand shake. “Yes, Bishop, I’ll be there, or I’ll accept that assignment.”
--And there is the ‘bobber’. That’s the handshake that bobs up and down for the duration of your conversation. It’s no use pulling your hand away, you’re stuck bobbing with the bobber until the bobber is done bobbing. Period.
--There is also the ‘four finger’ handshake. This is mostly offered by ladies, but every once in a while the other guy will close his hand too early catching only your four fingers inadvertently and then your stuck for an awkward moment giving him the four finger shake—never a good handshake for a guy to give another guy, especially if the other guy is a ‘vicer’! OUCH!
--Lastly, I’ll mention the ‘civil’ handshake. This is the more traditional thought of a handshake where two hands are clasped firmly, but not overbearingly, with a good balance of bounce and proper release timing.

In Iraq they add a little extra touch to the handshake, I kind-of like it, although it did take some getting used to. They tend toward the ‘civil’ handshake more often than not, and then once you release hands you place your hand over your heart for a brief second. It is an endearing sign of mutual friendship.

Folks from Iraq tend to be friendly, at least the ones I’ve met. So friendly, in fact, that they like to be real close to you, too close sometimes for me. They often enter my personal space; my ‘bubble’, if you will. You can kind-of see it in one of the photos below, where I’m standing in the middle of several men. I have my hands clasped in front of me for a reason. As we lined up to take the photo the guy to my right wanted to hold onto my arm. I’m not comfortable with that and simply pretended to not notice and quickly moved my hands to my front where they, and the arms attached to them, could not be cleaved to by another man. It’s not necessarily a sign of homosexualism or anything; it’s just part of their culture. I’ve seen several times a group of men walking somewhere and they will be holding onto one another’s arms or even hands, kind-of like teenage girls do in the States.

This I’ve never seen in the US, however, and I’m glad too, because I don’t really enjoy it. Some of you might like it, however. When you get your haircut they will finish it off with a head massage. Everyone does it from the beauty salon stylist to the barber. Once your hair is cut they immediately begin to squeeze and squish your head. They push and poke around your neck a little, but mostly they act as if your head is a huge pimple and they’re not giving up until it pops! I honestly think that my skull has taken a different shape since being here! They really squash and compress and clutch your head. It makes me feel like I’m shaking with a ‘vicer’, but with my head instead! The barber shop where I always go has three barbers in it. I usually go to one in particular, when he’s available, and have trained him by tipping more when he doesn’t massage my head then when he does massage. He’s caught on now, which is why I like him—the other two…not so much.