Monday, November 29, 2010

A Hairy Situation

I've decided to grow a beard.  Like many of the finer endeavors of my life, it was my wife's encouraging that spurred this decision.  It was not taken lightly.  For me, growing a beard is wrought with challenges.

First is the general patchiness of my facial hair.  That's why my first shot at facial hair was limited to a mustache and goatee.  I'm proud to say that over many years, this patchiness has evened out.  Mostly.

The real issue is my shaved head.  I let the hair on my head grow for a full week when I first started Project Beard (NOTE: one of these times I'm gonna misspell beard as bread.  I just know it. And spellchecker won't catch stuff like that.)  I studied the growth - and lack thereof - and remembered why I started shaving my head to begin with.  Chia-pets are not attractive, not matter how awesome they look in the commercial.

So now I have hair on my cheeks, and a sudden transition to nothingness at the top of the sideburns.  My goal is to ease the suddenness of that transition. My wife encouraged me to Google pictures of Chris Daughtry.  I think it is cool that I can get compared to him, because he's rich and famous and good-looking, and I'm just bald, too.  But I don't want to look just like him, because I'm a decade-and-a-half older than he is and I will come across as a poser (NOTE: 1987 called and it wants the word "poser" back).

For now I have a solution that I convinced myself is decent:

A hat.

Ha ha!  Just kidding.  But seriously, maintaining this look requires a skill and/or patience that I don't have.  Or at least, if I do have it, it has yet to fully manifest itself.  It's a lot easier to clear-cut a whole cheek than to gently taper the point as it rounds the top of the ear.  Trust me on that one.

But for now my wife likes my bread, so I'm keeping at it.