Man. I really fell away here, didn't I? The past few days have been rife with work, worry and stress and procrastination in an attempt to avoid stress, and then more stress brought on by procrastination. Grad school is serious business and whatnot. It's unfortunate that it kept me from doing something so basic as taking a picture and posting a blog, but life is what it is and that's that. You can take that as maturity and an acceptance of life uncommon to youths today (do I still count as a youth? I think I do in some circles, at least. Many, perhaps!) or you can call it a wishy-washy, noncommittal no-stance attempt at washing my hands of any and all responsibility. I'm shooting for somewhere in the middle, I think.

Anyway, on to hair and beards.

This was taken at, like, 11:30... so it's technically what I looked like yesterday. You get the idea.

I'm surprised by how quickly the hair on my scalp is coming in, and somewhat saddenedby the relative slow growth of the beard. I've grown various facial hair styles numerous times (mostly beards and muttonchops, but there was the mustache + muttonchops period, too. That was fun) so I should have a pretty good grasp of how this works. Somehow though, I still thought that I'd have something resembling a beard by the time school started back up. Alas, school starts next week and I'm still in that "Beard? What beard? I just can't find my razor!" stage.

See, part of the problem here lies in my own pogonotrophic insecurities. At these early stages of the game, I don't actually think I have that great a beard, nor do I think it looks like I have great beard potential. While all the primary beard parts grow in okay, the bits that connect those parts together are another story. These "beard tendons" as I've been known to call them, leave the spots between muttonchops, mustache, goatee, and yes, even neckbeard, sparsely populated. Now, once this all grows in and I get some good length going, the fullness of the beard does its job and picks up the slack a good deal. Once everything gets going, I'm quite content -elated, really!- with my beard... it's just this, the awkward teenage stage of bearddom that poses a problem.

No picture for Friday, I'm afraid. We're staying with Rhiannon's mom tonight since she's about three hours closer to my GRE test site than we were in Carbondale. We remembered our camera, but managed to forget the memory card reader. I'll be back on track after tomorrow though.

Tonight was a mixed bag of me trying to look over my study manual and watching movies with Rhiannon and her mom to try and remain unwound. We watched The Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Blues Brothers, neither of which I've ever seen. I know it's a special kind of blasphemy not to have seen the latter film and I have to say, I'm really glad to have finally atoned for that particular grievance.

I should probably attempt to sleep before the big test. There'll be more tomorrow, when I enter the recovery phase.

Another slow, scary day as I await the horrors of the Graduate Record Examination. My heart is dark and weary with fear and trepidation. Or something. Anyway, here's the me for today, strange lighting and all:

 

I've gone from being stubbly to full-on fuzzy up top, but the beard is still in that prickly stage. You know the part, the one where it doesn't look intentional yet, so much as lazy. 

Urgh. So, yesterday was the first missed update. In the grand scheme of things, I suppose it won't matter, but I am a little disappointed. I mean, it's not like I had a great reason or anything. I spent part of the day in St. Louis, and then Rhiannon and I settled back in at home and watched a bunch of episodes of Pushing Daisies courtesy of Netflix streaming. It was a nice enough day, certainly, but it wasn't the kind of day that provides a convenient excuse, either. Oh well.

Here's me today, at any rate:

There I am, all sleepy and lopsided.

Updates might be a little sparse over the next few days, but I do still intend to make them. I'm just also preparing to take my GRE on Saturday. I hate standardized tests. I think everyone does, probably. I hope everyone does.

The sirens are screaming and the fires are howling way down in the valley tonight

Yeah. You can't blame me for that title. We were cleaning, and when one cleans, there must be music, and wherever there is music, there is a chance of Meatloaf. It's just the way the world works.

Ahem.

Slow day around here. I didn't really go anywhere or do anything, other than poke at the internet and fret a little over the impending GRE. Either way, there's a picture update before midnight, so the date posted actually matches up! That's exciting, right?

That question was rhetorical, folks. No need to lie to me.

So yeah. That's that, really. No new deep ponderings about the nature of hair growth. I'll have to make up for that later, I suppose.

Calendars are hard.

I'm not so great at posting on time, but at least I'm posting consistently.There's nothing new to report today. We had some company over for steaks and gaming, which while it makes for a great evening, it doesn't tend to be all that newsworthy.

Anyway, here's the picture for Sunday, January 2nd:

I still need to figure out some kind of system. Maybe setting up a chair against a specific wall, with a TV tray+tripod and some kind of remote trigger or timer? It doesn't need to be complicated, it just needs to be nice and consistent.

And this is the part where you picture me naked.

Showers are different now, too. I put some music on the little stereo in the bathroom. I turn the shower on, and turn the heat up to it's usual near-scalding starting point. I get in. I feel a moment of shock as the water hits my scalp. I briefly contemplate how to wash my scalp, settle on using shampoo anyway because, well, I don't know. I do the usual body washing. Then I stand there for a minute and get bored. It just feels... done. It used to take me a while to wash the thick head of hair I had, to say nothing of the time I'd spend washing my beard. Now that's gone and it feels like the relaxing little ritual nature of the shower has gone with it.

See, I've always spent a lot of time in the shower. It's kind of like a decompression chamber for me. I could turn on some music, crank the hot water way up and just turn my brain off, with my thoughts drifting off lazily into what's probably the closest I've ever been or will ever come to having a moment of mental stillness. An occasional thought will form here or there, but even then it's usually noted only briefly before being filed away for actual use later. I'll often emerge looking like some kind of overgrown seared jumbo prawn, steaming and pink, except quite alive, and quite refreshed.

In a way, it was one such shower that started this whole project. While I'd had the idea to shave my head in early December, I'd let that thought kind of wither on the vine. It was an exciting thought when I'd had it, but as time wore on, it just seemed somehow less vital. Something clicked while I was in my little steam chamber though, and the thought took hold and wouldn't leave. It seemed bizarre and alien, and worse yet, mad: What if I didn't shave just my head? What if I shaved the beard, too? It was a scary thought, but also an exciting one. And it made sense.

I don't usually do daring, surprising things. I don't usually do anything that takes me out of my comfort zone. This is something that's pretty well known about me, so other people don't really expect much from me in that regard either, I don't think. While I'm not one to do something just to fish for reactions, I had to admit that the shock I knew this would bring would be pretty entertaining.

I wasn't sure I'd be able to do it. Imagining myself without the beard was next to impossible. The beard did something to mitigate a jawline I had never been personally very happy with and aside from that, I'd always had an untested certainty that I'd look like an idiot with a shaved head. Then I realized that I thought I'd look like an idiot with muttonchops, and that didn't stop me. I thought I'd look like an idiot with beard, and that didn't stop me.

Even the timing made sense, really. There's always all this talk about using the new year for a time of regrowth and renewal, or self-improvement or something like that, and really, while I've always wanted to be optimistic, it's always been hard for me to buy into it. If I shaved on December 31st and made an honest effort to chronicle what comes after starting the next day, that would force me to buy into it, but with a wink and a nod. I could treat the whole idea with a sense of absurd sincerity at that point, and best of all, it provided me a sort of no-fail option. I mean, after all, it's all going to grow back whether I do anything or not. For once, it would take me more effort to screw something up than actually get it done. That had a certain appeal.

So when I emerged from the shower, it was with a rather uncharacteristic nervous and manic glee. I'm not sure what was going through Rhiannon's mind when I approached her on the couch and said "Alright, I'm going to tell you I want to do something. You're going to think I'm crazy, and you're going to think I'm lying, and you're going to think that there's no way I'm going to follow through with it, but here it is: Tomorrow, I want to go to the barber and I want to get rid of it. All of it. Even the beard." To her credit, she certainly seemed shocked, but she didn't tell me I was a crazy liar with no follow through. She grinned (perhaps with a touch of doubt, it's hard for me to say) and said... something supportive. Sorry. I was pretty wrapped up in myself at the moment.

I wasn't sure what to expect the next day. I got up a little later than I had hoped, but after a surprisingly small amount of the usual brainless dithering that comes after waking, I was dressed and we were ready to go. My initial plan was to go to the same barber shop I'd been visiting since moving here in the summer of 2007, but as I half-expected, they were closed. We briefly considered my options. We noticed that a lot of the chains would be open and settled on Great Clips.

Now, I have a confession here: a big part of the reason we chose Great Clips was because it opened up the way to making some crack like "And so we went to where all great hair goes to die," but now I feel that's a pretty disingenuous thing to say. The lady that shaved me did a fine job, which I suppose isn't all that surprising, since it's largely a matter of putting clippers to scalp, but it's still worth noting and not worth insulting. What's really important is that the lady was absolutely thrilled to shave me. We engaged in witty banter that, to my memory, Deadpool and Spider-Man, at their best, would both be proud of. Having someone do the deed who was not only positive about it, but was actively having fun with the whole event really did a lot to put me at ease and keep the actual loss from being anything traumatic. I think it did a lot to kick the whole project off on the right foot. Had it been someone who just, y'know, shaved me and asked all the usual boring stuff, I think I would have tried to back out after we shaved my scalp. I don't think I could have gone all the way. Plus, I think she only charged me half price. I dunno. I tipped well either way.

And, well, that's how this all started.

We're going to pretend like this is 01-01-11.

Well, today was my first full day fully shaven. I'd like to say it was a magical day full of self-actualizing revelations, but it wasn't. I got up, went out to an incredibly late breakfast/lunch, came home and did some gaming. It was a good day though, all told.

I took pictures again today, so day one went okay in that regard. I have to say that I'm not all that happy with them though. I always had a suspicion that the beard did some minor mystical trickster illusion wherein it hid, to some degree if not in totality, how much weight I've gained over the last couple years. Never mind how pointless it would be to have a head that appears to have missed gaining it's part of the couple dozen pounds that the body it's attached to has picked up over the last five years or so, the photograph provides enough evidence for me. Unless, I suppose, we're sticking with the idea that the camera adds ten pounds... and an extra chin. Either way, here's today's photo:

I need to work out  a process for this. I'd like to have all the pictures taken of me so that I'm in roughly the same position and taken from roughly the same distance. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

In addition, my girlfriend snapped this one of me today as well:
 

 

I like it a lot more, in no small part thanks to the fluffy bastard behind me, giving the camera his laser eyes. That's Theo, the cat I mentioned in my original post. Not the sweet one. The other one. The bad one.

When I'm either less social or a little better at writing this during the actual day, I'll make a couple longer posts about my experiences so far. For now though, I'm collecting some general impressions that I can share. Stuff like

• The world is a lot colder. The day I got shaved was unseasonably warm, like around 60 degrees or so. Today was more like winter, with the temperature being somewhere in the 30s, I think. I've always been pretty wimpy in regards to the cold to begin with, but I never recognized just how much my hair did for me. Even now, in my apartment, I can use my shorn scalp to detect the various drafts, cool breezes, eddies, and currents in the air around me. I can't help but note that this would be useful, were I an archaeologist or dungeoneer, exploring some subterranean depths in search of secret entrances and passageways. 
• The world has a lot more friction. Or at least my world does. At the very least, the part of my world that involves sliding things across my head, such as the head opening of a t-shirt, the hood of a hoodie, or even my pillow. I'm continuously surprised with how often things catch and snag on the sandpaper-like stubble I'm now sporting up above.
• Reactions so far have ranged from bewildered to amused, with very few of them dipping anywhere near the negative. People who've seen me in person have reacted with the proper amounts of shock, but people are mostly supportive and amused. This has helped me stay positive. People on the internets have so far given me a lot of "haha oh wow" which... Well, I'm going to pretend means they're being supportive. It works better that way. The only wholly negative reaction so far seems to be my mother, who appears to be angry with me. Mom, when you read this, try and remember: it's just hair, right?

 I've got a few more that I could throw into the bulleted list, but I'll save them for later. To tell the truth, I'm not sure how long I can expect this to stay interesting to me, so holding back a little doesn't seem like a bad idea. Rainy days and all that, right?