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.