DO I KEEP THE BEARD?
DO I KEEP THE BEARD? — Considerations and Stipulations:
1. I start work tomorrow after a three week break and an 18 day period of not shaving.
2. I teach at a High School, so my beard — despite my scant genetic ability to follicate successfully — will be better than that of any of my students. However, I should still endeavor to look professional.
3. My family generally seem to like it. I anticipate that my students will hate it and my colleagues won’t give a damn. I have no friends who are local enough to speak their minds, as the most vocal opponent is in Thailand.
4. I haven’t changed my look in a long, long time. And I’m not ready to cut off the ponytail.
5. Further reading: Martian Love Fest, including an excerpt from Cryptonomicon about beards.
6. The popular consensus of this forum will not necessarily affect my decision.
7. Trust me when I say that there is no one who takes a personal interest in the scratchiness quotient of my face.
8. I would hate it if I turned into one of those people who is forever absently or musingly stroking his facial hair as if making a ridiculous attempt to smooth it out. Euuch.
9. I fear that the fact that I can’t grow any moustache across my filtrim will become laughably apparent and evidence a great sculptural faux pas.
10. I think the photograph with the beard makes me look older. I don’t think that illusion carries over into the daily animation of life.
11. I took five pictures with the webcam before I was satisfied with the beard picture. That might mean something.
12. Tangent: I like how the bookcase in the background is completely different, even though it’s the same square footage of the same wall.
13. The first word that springs to mind for you may be “unkempt”, but the word I’ve been getting all day from students is “satanic”.
14. I went on a huge, ill-advised DVD splurge this weekend (I had a 20% off coupon at BORDERS), and I ended up picking up two DVDs that I should be slightly ashamed to own. I am slightly ashamed, but my professed love for bitter romantic comedies is well-documented, so I might as well own up. Anyway, I picked up a copy of WHEN HARRY MET SALLY… for $10.
Harry grows a beard about halfway through the film. This is done for three reasons:
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- In order to differentiate between the earlier two “ages” of Harry, age 21 and age 24. The beard is supposed to make him look older.
- In order to show that he is depressed. People who are in a funk grow beards, the film says, because they no longer care about things like person appearance. It is at this point in the film that Harry is also seen wearing jeans with frequency, and generally looking rumpled. This is to contrast Sally’s seeming even-keeled response to her breakup, producing no evident doldrums.
- So that he can shave it off later and Sally can say, “I like you without the beard.”
15. The moustache ends — my students are calling it “the anti-moustache” or “the reverse moustache” as it is all tips and no middle, as if I’m selling scraps of facial hair to Hitler — are now long enough to dip in whatever I am drinking. I hate this.
16. Culturally typical responses to someone with a new beard include the following: You/He look older/more distinguished/more mature/handsomer. None of these apply to me. I somehow manage only to look more somber and troubled. Yay.
Jacob Two-Two and the Missing Children’s Book
In fourth or fifth grade, I was in the process of reading every book in the Maple Street School library. I was a nerd and had figured out how to avoid the torture of peer socialization each morning before classes started: I got a library pass. And so while other kids were fighting over dominance of the swing set, falling headlong from the cargo net, playing four-square, or generally freezing to death on a crisp New England morning, I was sitting cozily in the library working my way through the fiction section, book by book, alphabetically.
And I read a book about a young boy who was sent to an island run by a huge monstrous man who kept children as slaves, but secretly wanted to be loved by them. I liked that bit, but what I thought was the coolest was that the young boy was rescued from the island by two superheroes who resembled his older brother and sister — siblings who wouldn’t give him the time of day if they were all at home. I thought that was a piece of brilliant high-concept, even if the phrase “high-concept” wasn’t in my vocabulary at the time. As a child surrounded by siblings, I easily recognized the truth that while you hated them because of their proximity and very relation to you, brother and sisters were still be be protected.
And I could never find the book again. I had vague memories of whereabouts it fell on the shelf — I could remember about where I gotten up to in my alphabetical trudge through the fiction section — and had certain impressions about what color the spine was. But search though I might, I could not locate that book in that library and no children’s librarian was able to recognize the title from my fairly detailed plot description.
Last month, Tim Lehnerer was boasting in the WEF Deplhi forum that he could locate any half-remembered children’s book. He is a god, for when I mailed him my recollections of the plot he was able to send me back a title and author in four days. And when the book arrived two weeks later from InterLibrary Loan, I flipped it open to a random page and saw this illustration…
…and I knew that he’d hit the nail squarely on the head. After fifteen years, I’d found a book that I had convinced myself didn’t exist, that I’d dreamt. Tim Lehnerer is indeed mighty.
Single-handed Ropeburn
Evidence of my single-handed victory in a game of tug-of-war on Friday. I felt particularly masculine and effective until I realized that the burn marks were not going to fade with anything resembling speed. I have enough scars and marks on my hands to make me self-conscious, and a large red brand was not the fashion statement I have been searching for — regardless of how in vogue scarification may be on the Left Coast and other depraved areas of the planet.
Original Speed
I have received a second package of original artwork from the comic book Finder by Carla Speed McNeil. Speed always includes a couple of sketches or roughs with every mail order, and they are about as helpful of a resource to an amateur comic book artist as any text could be. The ability to compare the roughs to the actual finished art to the reproduced art on the printed page tells volumes about technique, detail, evocation, and reproduction.
My first order of original artwork is a major source of pride, and one that I can’t help but show off to any guests or visitors. It consists of the first two pages to a short story called “Counting Coup”, the title being a theme she has explored at various points over the entire series. Finder is the comic book I give to people who don’t read comic books. It is currently the standard against which I judge all other works.
Summer Librarian
My job description is varied and sprawling, as I have one of those catch-all professions. I’m only sort-of a teacher, ’cause I don’t teach full time. I write curriculum and train student teachers, but that’s not what I spend the majority of my time doing. Yes, I also do mailings and copy jobs and answer phones, but my boss is always vaguely offended when I describe myself as “a glorified secretary”.
At the moment, I am also a librarian. The full-time librarian at my host school has complimented me on my Info Sheet, and told me that she’d probably steal it. I gleamed for about an hour. My challenge-laden informational resource scavenger hunt has not driven anyone to tears, but frustration has been epic. Still, these are not the things of which I am most proud in my current role as program librarian.
Today I put a copy of The Westing Game into a child’s hands. I introduced kids to John Bellairs and William Sleator. A girl who declared that she’d read anything I handed her walked away with The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. The Golden Compass, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, Fantastic Voyage, The Fellowship of The Ring, Redwall, A Bad Beginning, and The Book of Three have all be checked out in the last hour.
Not a bad day’s work.
Things I Didn’t Know About My Apartment
Things I didn’t know about my apartment when I rented it:
The Memorial Day parade starts right outside my front door. For the last ten minutes I’ve been listening to National Guardsmen, High School Marching Bands, the American Legion, and the Brownies walk past my window playing drums and bagpipes and trumpets in competing dissonant overlap.
How did I miss this last year?
Vanity Plates
New Hampshire reputedly has a greater percentage of personalized license plates, or “vanity” plates, than any other state in the Union. Apparently, one of the freedoms we live with or will die without is the freedom to express ourselves in six or fewer alphanumeric characters. Which, while it isn’t anything to be proud of — you should have heard me bellowing obscenities at the hapless fool who decided to choose QUIGON as his license plate — means I spend an inordinate amount of time deciphering people’s bumpers.
Sitting behind a car with the plate IMOK, I spent about thirty seconds asking the driver — rhetorically — what, precisely, he mocked. Then I got it.
And now you know who you should all mock.
Editorial-Man
My first-ever letter to a newspaper was printed on Sunday in the Concord Monitor. Instead of feeling proud, I feel somewhat ashamed. I didn’t write about the crumbling state of something-or-other, I didn’t lash out against stagnant conservatism, I didn’t call attention to the gradual suburbanization of the New Hampshire wilderness. No, I fact-corrected a smarmy, useless front page fluff story about the success of Sony’s new Spider-Man movie.
I am such a bloody nerd.
Superstition?
It is a common superstition that it is bad luck for a black cat to cross one’s path.
But how does one interpret the omen of an enormous wild turkey flying across a two-lane highway in front of one’s car?
Dynamics
An article appeared in the New York Times on Thursday, April 25 about Skidmore College’s co-ed a cappella group, the Dynamics. Selected as one of the top six college a cappella groups in the nation, the Dynamics competed for top spot in “the finals of the International Championship of Collegiate a Cappella, … Sunday afternoon at Avery Fisher Hall [in Lincoln Center, NYC]. (The other finalists are from Cornell, Boston University and the Universities of Michigan, Maryland and Oregon.)”
As an original member, I proudly attended the competition. It didn’t really matter if the Dynamics won. As Elizabeth Harrison put it, if there was a group that was better than we were, then they should win, and we would shelve our nepotistic pride.
In terms of polish and blend, the Maryland Faux Paz were clear stand-outs, and should have championed the judges criteria of “musicality and performance.” The judges, though, universally displayed terrible taste and singled out the shrill, the flagrant, and the lowest-common-denominators for recognition.
May the names of ROGER PAYNE, RENE RUIZ, and PHYLLIS CLARK be forever reviled.
And as the Dynamics stood onstage in Lincoln Center looking disheveled, casual, and real instead of like the black-clad, cookie-cutter, monkey-suited groups surrounding them, and as they walked offstage with not even a morsel of acclaim, I have never felt prouder of them. I am glad to have been part of a group of individuals and losers.
But that shouldn’t come a big surprise to anyone.
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