A few weeks ago, I came to a realization about myself. Like most great epiphanies, this one occurred while on the toilet, and what I recognized was that in almost twenty-six years of living, I had never attempted to grow facial hair of any kind. This may not be the sort of things that normal people ponder while on the john, but to each their own. When I asked myself why I had never pursued such a hair-growing feat, I had to acknowledge that it was most likely because I’ve never been a fan of beards, goatees, or mustaches. It wasn’t the hair itself that I had a problem with rather the people who were attached to the facial hair that I really disliked. As I traced my memory banks I noted that with just a few exceptions, almost everyone I’ve ever hated in my life has had facial hair of some kind.

Back in high school, there were guys who were already shaving. Some had probably even been doing so since middle school and while they were at their homes removing hair from their backs and discovering their new found muscles, I was at my home singing show tunes in the shower. I was a soprano. The guys who were already shaving their whiskers were the same ones that wanted to pick on me at every opportunity and make my life difficult. A side effect of the testosterone that made them grow the mustache also granted them an uncanny ability to seek out and destroy anyone weaker than themselves, so I can see how facial hair, utter terror, and misery are all connected in my brain.

The day my epiphany I woke up and gave my razor the cold shoulder though I’m not exactly sure what sparked the idea to see what my face was capable of. Maybe it was just one of those whims, or maybe it was an early morning bout of man pride. Most likely it was to bother my girlfriend who swore that if I ever grew a beard she would stop talking to me and maybe I wanted to see if she’d put her money where her mouth is.

Above all other talents that I hold, I’m able to grow hair like it’s nobody’s business. I keep my hairstylists phone number on speed dial because if I don’t visit her every six weeks then I’m mistaken for a homeless person while out and about. One the positive side, I make a lot of money in spare change, but my dignity takes a hit. In fact, during my youth, whenever my hair would get too long, my mother would subtly hint that I needed a trim by admitting to me that, “it looks like nobody loves you.” This only caused my impressionable mind to believe that anyone with long hair was not currently being loved by anyone anywhere in the world. My hair grows so quickly that often times, after I get it cut and step onto the sidewalk outside the salon, I could turn around and walk right back in and easy have enough hair for another round. While in a hair salon, you often times see one employee dedicated solely to roaming the room with a broom and dustpan, sweeping up the sheared curls of the patrons. Normally she waits to clean up until the guest has left, but I’ve had these people visit my area four or five times during one sitting. They look genuinely concerned that the stylist and I might die in an avalanche of hair if they don’t act quickly. After paying the bill and tipping the stylist, I often wonder if I should also tip the broom gal as well.

Though the top of my head may grow quickly, the rest of my face is a different story. I have one sideburn that shares the gene that makes the hair grow as quickly as rabbits reproduce while the other side is lazy and must be coaxed into growing with sweet words of encouragement. I gave myself two weeks to grow the beard (i.e. the length of time it took until my girlfriend threatened to leave) to see what I was capable of. By the end of the first week I was the proud owner of a thin mustache though the beard itself wasn’t coming in evenly. It was as though while I’d slept, someone had casually spread beard-seed across my face; missing the majority of places you’d want it to grow. There was a little patch of fur here and a little patch there, but nothing that could be mistaken as a beard. From a distance, my face just looked slightly dirty.

Midway through the second week, I couldn’t help but notice that the hair itself had stopped growing and was beginning to curl. Because this was my first foray into the world of facial hair, I lacked the proper tools for self grooming, so my beard status had officially switched over from “scruffy” to “quite unkempt.” I was soon hit with “the itch” and the majority of my days were spent walking around scratching furiously at my neck. People will joke that when you grow a beard, you’ll start finding food crumbs in it from previous meals. While I was excited at the prospect of this happening, always welcoming a light snack, the only thing that I ever found in its depths was the gray hair from one of my felines, which I then started attracting regularly like some kind of magnet. I would wake up in the mornings and panic when I looked in the mirror, thinking that my beard had gone gray prematurely. I then had to spend precious minutes combing it out, which after I finished, provided a pile of cat hair nearly equal in size to the cat itself.

By the end of the second week, I was starting to get used to the new addition. I was no longer scratching at my face, though most likely because it was completely raw and untouchable, and the feeling of something continuously attached to my lower lip no longer distracted me from simple tasks. This sensation had proven to be quite a hurdle earlier in the process when on several occasions I had woken up in the middle of the night and made the assumption that there were bugs attacking my face. I had also acted accordingly, repeatedly slapping myself silly.

The day before I had planned to shave the hair off (i.e. the day my girlfriend demanded that I “lose it, or lose her”) something happened that made me change the way I felt about my face. I had been on the cusp of extending the experiment for another week but while eating lunch that day, I attempted to rescue a bit of mayonnaise from my upper lip, and I accidentally licked my mustache. The problem wasn’t that I had touched the tip of my tongue to the prickly hair, but rather once I had done it, I couldn’t stop. It was a whole new experience for me, as mind-blowing as the first time I kissed a girl, but much less pleasant. Now scared that I would begin developing a nasty habit of what I dubbed “’stache-licking,” I was in full agreement with my girlfriend that the beard was pure evil and needed to go. The following night we waved goodbye as the hair was systematically shaven from my face.

Some day down the line, I’ll sure that I’ll give beard growing another try, but until then, I’ve got an overactive sideburn to deal with.

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