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?

Something clever about endings and beginnings, perhaps.

I did it. I really, actually did it. However, it happens to be New Year's eve, and I happen to have company. I'll post the ultimate results tomorrow, where you can see me shaved, shorn, and quite likely undergoing a bleary-eyed recovery. In the meantime, I'll leave you with a couple pictures of the process.

 

This is me, as I appeared this mor-... afternoon. Having just woken up, I was still sleepy and unmolested by either comb or brush. For anyone who's interested, my beard measured roughly four and a half inches, when fully extended.

Here we are. This part, while weird, I was sort of ready for. I actually kind of liked how this ended up, but alas, it was not to be. 

By Jove, my good boy! I say, have you seen my bowler and monocle?

Man, what I'd give for a bowler and a monocle. It took everything I had not to stop at this point in the process.

And that's that. I'm going to try and update this regularly. The hope is to update it daily with a new photo, but we'll see how well that pans out.

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.