Five o’clock shadow should not appear days too late

I dislike my beard.

More accurately, I dislike my lack of a beard or any substantial… I dislike my beard.

More accurately, I dislike my lack of a beard or any substantial facial hair at all. No matter how long I give it to grow, my face refuses to grow anything other than a straggly, patchy, woefully thin half-beard thing, which, as I mentioned before, I hate. I wouldn’t mind it if it grew in nicely, or even just left a little rugged stubble around my jaw line, a la Harrison Ford or Brad Pitt. But that’s apparently way too complicated for my hair follicles, which instead leave me adorned with something resembling David Spade in “Joe Dirt.”

This wouldn’t really be so bad if the one other thing I didn’t hate entirely was shaving. Shaving is, and I feel that many men can agree with me on this point, completely awful. It’s painful, irritating and time-consuming. My girlfriend will occasionally whine about shaving her legs (which I can understand – as a swimmer in high school, I’ve been there), but it’s nothing compared to shaving your face. For one, the skin on your face is far more sensitive, and therefore more prone to razor burn and rashes.

Second, if you screw up shaving your legs, or cut yourself, there’s a very simple solution: Wear pants. But as far as I know, they don’t make pants for your face, so any shaving mishaps you might make are visible to the whole world.

So I tend to let my facial hair grow, which invariably brings me back to what I hate about my facial hair in the first place: It looks like crap. After a week or so of refusing to shave, I look kind of like some scraggly, wino knock-off, only without the glazed eyes or drug-addled grin. At which point I’ll resign myself to fate, suffer through my self-induced torture over the bathroom sink and let the process begin again.

Another side effect of my facial-hair woes is that I’ll sometimes become slightly, almost imperceptibly jealous of my friends with beards or other respectable facial hair. Not only do their faces not look mangy and prickly, but they have the ability to grow their beards and such in just a day or two. In contrast, it takes me something around three days to even build up a meaningful amount of stubble. The day I am writing this, Wednesday, is the first day I’ve bothered shaving since Saturday. It is also the first day I felt shaving would be justified. Meanwhile there are all these other guys around me who are apparently using Miracle-Gro on their faces, actually achieving a five o’clock shadow by five o’clock instead of, say, two days later.

The act of shaving also makes me wonder about society in general. For example, who was the first person to shave? And what did other people think of him? (Or, quite possibly, her?) And more than anything, what motivated him to do it? Was it strictly for appearance, like it is today, or was it something completely different like a hygiene deal or religious requirement or whatever? And then consider the razor.

If I hate shaving so much today, imagine what it must have been like before the days of the safety razor when men shaved with what looked like small machetes. And often they wouldn’t even do it themselves but go to a barber. I can’t say for certain, but I think it would take a lot more than a bit of facial hair for me to approach a stranger wielding a long, sharp knife and let him near my exposed throat with it.

So at least we’ve progressed beyond that in terms of shaving technology, but the basic problem still remains: Shaving pretty much sucks. It’s kind of like vacuum cleaners. Vacuums used to be cumbersome and annoying, but before vacuums everyone had to clean by hand. Now vacuums are sleek and tiny, but the problem is that you still have to vacuum, just like no matter how much I dislike it, I’m still going to have to shave. And no amount of complaining about cutting my face or getting razor burn is going to change that, just like no amount of griping at the vacuum cleaner for having a full bag will make it empty itself out.

So I guess I’ll just have to deal with the razor, even though I hate it. But at least I get a nice smooth face out of the deal, which isn’t all that bad. Better than looking like Joe Dirt, anyways.

If you hate a benign aspect of Western society, e-mail Richard at rab53@pitt.edu and tell him about it.