Good bud Aaron Miller agreed to honor his long standing moustache challenge despite being many kilometers away in NYC. As long as it was properly documented, he would keep up his end of the bargain. For every day during the first week that I would shave my face but not my 'stache he would pay me 1 dollar American. For the second week, 2 dollars American per shave sans-'stache, and and so on, for up to one month. After that, new terms would have to be forged....cliffhanger
So here's day 1. Clean shaven, all the way around. Let the games begin.
Day 2:
Pretty horendous, I know. Right away I learned the moustache challenge doesn't start easy and get hard. It gets hard right away. Especially when you've got to sport something this feeble/ratty to your grandmother's 80th birthday party. Which I did tonight. A surprise party by the way. The whole way there I rehearsed my openings.
"Surprise, I'm gay!"
"No I'm not growing a moustache. I'm just not shaving my upper lip. Of course there's a difference."
"You told me to get a job. I'm actually getting paid to do this. I'm particpating in a socially scientific research experiment."
"Well...there's this guy in New York. He's just a friend..."
I was pretty nervous. My family is bunch of clean shaven, suit wearing Irish Catholic ass kickers (even the women); when they're not taking names or hashing out business ideas, they're usually making jokes at my expense. My Grandmother had already made it clear on many occasions that men who choose facial hair choose poorly. Already unemployed, I felt about as comfortable en route as if I had the word "faggot" scrawled on my forehead in loopy purple cursive.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
But I dug deep and self soothed with scraps of mantra: "I got to be me, where angels fear to tread, the road less travelled," etc. "This is for money, this is for pride, for glory! For menboys."
And I guess in the end, my three day old 'stache was so wimpy, pathetic and unnoticable that my family must have assumed, that, like everything else, I'm just a shitty shaver. Plus my mom's house has a lot of soft lighting. There was just one Hitler joke from my uncle, which I played along with like George McFly the night Biff wrecks his car and drinks his beer.
Day 3:
Kinda looks like I could be an inmate.
This weekend took me to NH. I consider NH to have a less open minded culture than TAX-achusetts, where I live, so there was yet more reasons to feel anxious and uncomfortable b/c of the rat-stache. What's funny about the M challenge is you forget you're in in the until you go to take a leak in a pizza place, see your reflection and then realize why the girl who took your order was looking at you funny, and why the mom with the toddler made nervous sideways looks while hustling the tyke out the door.
Tyke.
Which reminds me of something Gabe "Disco King" Cohen blogged about last year, from El Salvador. He observed that when 'stached, "whenever I sat next to a mother and her daughter on the bus, the mom subtly clutched her daughter closer and watched me out of the corner of her eye."
So true.
