Prelude to a Beard

I suppose being nervous about the turning of the year isn't all that odd. I'm sure a lot of people worry and fret over broken resolutions, unmet goals and all other assorted kinds of failures and shortcomings. I get that. I can certainly understand having those same fears for the coming year, too. I mean, after all, if you've let yourself down this year, it's easy to get lost in thoughts that you've created a spiraling, self-perpetuating cycle of failure, the depths of which you can only plummet into as life violently spins out and away from you, becoming something you have no control over.

Uh... Hrm.

Well, anyway, that's not so much what I'm nervous about. I mean, yeah, I guess there's some of that too, sure. Mostly though, what I'm worried about is hair. And a beard. Or, well, rather, a lack thereof for both. See, when I get up (and why yes, it is past 7 AM now, at the point of this hastily written post-post writing parenthetical addendum, and I have not yet gone to bed) I'm going to go out into the world and hope I can find a barber open on December 31st. Then I'm going to ask them to shave my head down to the scalp. Then I'm going to ask them to shave my beard down to my, err, beardscalp. It is my intention, you see, to enter the new year a new man: mostly hairless, and entirely harmless. And quite likely, quite silly looking.

I'm trying to convince myself that this will be fun. I'm also trying to convince myself that this will be worth it. I'm not sure how good a job I'm doing of either of those. Honestly, I'm really kind of torn up about it.

So, why am I doing it? I've got a history, which I'd generally stick to my guns and say is usually rather helpful in some way or another, of not doing things which I find threatening, stressful or dangerous. I'm also incredibly fond of my beard and consider it to be my favorite physical feature. I feel kind of crazy deciding to shave it at all, like a comic artist deciding to stuff his hand in a food processor. Except my beard doesn't make me money, now that I think of it.

If you're the kind of person who doesn't like a lot of explanation and tends to consider such exposition an exercise in pretense and self-import, I've got a few short, unimportant, and perhaps ultimately silly reasons for doing this. I just always thought it'd be kind of neat to do. I have a strong desire to give myself an easily memorable "beard birthday," so that when people in an elevator ask me something like "Whoa. How long did it take you to grow that?" I can have a really precise answer. It'll also give me a chance to try and figure out the rate at which my hair grows and the rate at which my beard grows. Maybe then I'll give those two figures to a mathematician and they can make something amusing out of it for me. Maybe I'll just know how long it takes me to grow a beard, rather than just letting it happen out of negligence and then falling in love with it, like I did my first time. Maybe I'll just figure out how weird and lumpy my head is. After all, the first time I kept a pair of mutton chops, I did it because I thought I'd look silly and I think it's important to be able to laugh at oneself. I'm certain that after all the hyperbolic tears and heartache and angst borne of a deep and meaningful loss-of-self, I'll be quite capable of laughing over how silly I look.

Now, if you're the kind of person who isn't impressed by frivolity and whimsy, I do have some deeper, more purposeful and sententious reasons as well. I manage to get by in my day-to-day life. Things are good. I'm doing well in school, studying two fields I love. I've got a fantastic and supportive girlfriend. I've got a cat that is sweet and adorable and knows intuitively how to lift my moods, and another that's an incorrigible asshole who seems delight in actively making my life worse. All that said, I'm a man with the very bad habit of not developing very good habits. I don't have a lot of follow-through. Schedules are the bane of my existence. I put things off. I shirk. My hope is that the simplest of all things, a shave and a haircut, can become a crucible. I'm hoping that the self-alienation can be fuel for a self-transformative process, by which I can emerge a brighter and more productive human. Or maybe I'll just get back in the habit of writing more regularly if I have something I feel to write about.

I'm still not 100% on what exactly I'll be doing with this blog. I might post daily ruminations on how my regrowing mane helps define me as a purpose. I might post weekly, or even less often. At the moment, I'm hoping to take a picture of myself every day, because it'd be kind of cool to have a 365-slide animation of my hair and beard growing out. I'm not sure about that yet. We'll see how it all shakes out. After all,  I might not find a barber open later today. Or I might chicken out and quietly delete this blog without ever letting anyone know my plans.