Facial Do’s

Ages ago, I was a very consistent person.  From – I’m guessing here – about age 24 to my mid 30’s I had a mustache, goatee, and long hair.

I chopped off the long hair in my late 30’s, and ditched the facial hair.  Then I shaved my head bald.  Then I grew it back and grew a beard.  Then I tried various things with my hair, from just keeping it buzzed short (which is low maintenance), to bald, to “Bruce Willis in Die Hard 2”.  Pretty much as much of the spectrum as I could do with my slowly dwindling hair.

And, I would grow a beard for about 4 or 5 months out of the year, then, shave it off again.  Unfortunately, because of my facial surgery, I can’t quite grow facial hair correctly on the left side of my face.  It was a skin flap procedure, which means a good sized chunk of my beard now resides directly under my eye.  Both inconvenient for growing a beard, and inconvenient for shaving.

So, the compromise this year was the mustache and goatee look that I haven’t sported in years.  And, just for the heck of it, I let the goatee grow long (I usually kept it trimmed up somewhat tight previously, but, was being adventurous.) However, Kat finally got tired of it (and the sideburns – she had requested me to grow them).

Instead of shaving it off, I decided to experiment with my facial hair just a bit further.  Now I’m sporting a General Zod goatee (I have no idea what the specific name for it is, but, it’s the one Zod had in Man of Steel.  My facial hair isn’t nearly as dark as Michael Shannon’s, so it doesn’t have quite as dramatic effect, unfortunately.

I was admiring the Zod facial hair, and was laughing a bit about it.  Not that it looks funny – I like it, though, Kat doesn’t – but that I used to be so consistent about stuff like that.  Same style every day of the year.  Now, I’ll change it at a whim, unless it’s something Kat as specifically asked for.  I’ve always heard that as you get older you get more inflexible about stuff like this, but, seems for me I’ve only gotten more playful with it.  Why have facial hair if I can’t do interesting stuff with it 🙂  I really can’t say why that changed over the years, though – I can explain the changes to my hair (long hair with a balding head is silly looking), but, I guess changing that sort of broke my requirement that things must always be “just so.”

Maybe I’ll trim it down to a more standard goatee, or maybe a soul patch for a couple of days 🙂