Now I Look Like This

October 26, 2005

Now I Look Like This

Well, I have been threatening to do it for about a week now and I finally did it. I shaved my face down to bare metal. I do it from time to time but it is so infrequent that even the people that have seen me in the past without facial hair are taken aback by it every time I do it. There are countless comments and questions every time. Some funny, some not. This time, my friend and coworker, El, shared with me the story of why he shaved his van dyke for good (actually, he told me the last time I went clean shaven but I didn't write it down ... so just pretend it happened this time, okay?).

El was a bit of a hipster artist in college: Long hair, facial hair (a van dyke, in fact), tattoos, piercings, and well; you get the picture. Anyway, El was still at that point in life where you believe you'll never change. You'll always have long hair, facial hair, visible piercings, etc. That all changed one day with a simple comment from El's aunt. Well, maybe not everything but definitely his thoughts on keeping hair around his mouth.

Another thing to note about El is that he was acutely aware of anything that minimized his masculinity (or so I gathered from the story). This trait of El's played a key role in his decision to go clean shaven as you will soon see.

El was home visiting from college. During this visit many relatives dropped by whom El had not seen in a sigficant amount of time. Many were stunned by his appearance as they had not seen him since he had gone off to college, wet behind the ears. Stunned they may have been but none spoke up about El's new look except, that is, for his aunt.

El's aunt walked up to him, looked him up and down as if to take in her new nephew that replaced the old El. She looked him in the eye, grabbed the goatee portion of his van dyke, gave it a little tug and said, "That is so interesting, El, I've been pissing through one of these things for forty years."

October 26, 2005

Now I Look Like This

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		Since I started hanging out with bloggers, I have had to answer the question, "So, do you have a blog?" in the negative. Now I can proudly say, "Yes, yes! I do in fact have a blog. For I am a protestant! And, if the urge struck me, I could march down to the corner store and purchase a condom." - eBill (with thanks to Monty Python)