Bad beard decisions

Topics/tags: Autobiographical, short

There are all sorts of bad decisions. There are the bad decisions that are easy to recover from. For example, if you stay up late binge-watching a TV show and are exhausted the next day, you can catch up on sleep later in the week [1]. There are the bad decisions that are difficult or impossible to recover from. For example, you might sell or give away something that has individual, personal meeting [2].

And then there are the bad decisions that fall somewhere in the middle. I made one of those the other day. I was getting sick of how my beard looked [4]. So I shaved it. I regret that decision. I’d gotten used to it. And, well, I don’t particularly like how I look unshaven. In contrast, my mother and my honorary sister would probably say Oh, it’s nice to see more of your smiley face. Middle son is glad I shaved. Eldest and Youngest haven’t seen it. Michelle is somewhere in the middle.
I think she said, It always takes a while to get used to you without a beard.

So now I have a bad decision from which I need to recover. If I were my middle son, I’d wait a week and I’d have a passable beard. But I’m not my middle son. My facial hair is more sparse, it’s white, and it grows more slowly. So I’m tempted to leave myself clean-shaven.

Now, it’s not like I’ve had a beard my entire adult life. I’m not sure when I grew a beard, but it’s less than a decade ago. When I look back at pictures around the department, more of my career has been beardless than bearded. So I’ve been bearded for less than 1/5 my life. And I’ll admit that I sometimes enjoy shaving [5].

I also realized that I don’t like having long hair without a beard. So I thought about cutting my hair, too.

Nonetheless, I’m happy with my long hair [6]. And, as I think about it, I really do prefer myself bearded. So I’m going to have a month or so of that time in between clean-shaven and a reasonable beard.

I do need to figure out what to do once I regrow the beard. Getting a regular trim by a professional is probably the right thing to do. That would be a good beard decision.

[1] That’s what I hear. I never seem to catch up.

[2] For example, a long, long time ago I traded away a signed copy of Pogo that I had gotten from my uncle [3]. I still don’t remember why.

[3] While that’s not a huge bad decision, it’s still a book that I’ll never be able to replace.

[4] It didn’t help that they had a picture of me with the beard in the campus memo.

[5] Yeah, really.

[6] Sorry, Middle!

Version 1.0 of 2018-07-14.