Recently I tried shaving regularly. What a miserable experience. Perhaps scraping off the top layer of facial epidermis daily toughens the skin. Perhaps I lack practice or technique. Maybe exposed skin weathers and toughens. I really haven't a clue. Today's fancy new four-bladed razors do seem to shave a bit closer but I don't remember such rash and irritation during the years I was clean-shaven. I suppose I could try my old double-edged razor again. I could experiment with various shaving tools to lessen my discomfort. But it's so much easier to just let the hair grow. I'm rather used to it. Julie likes it. Shaving is only a cultural norm razor-makers reinforce. We shave because we can. Don't get me going on what they charge for the newest disposable razors. They may not be earth friendly, but it's hard to avoid generating trash in a disposable age.
Beards go in and out of fashion. The borderline scruffiness of an infrequently shaved face seems the current style. But full beards are not the current norm. At times like this, a full beard seems just a bit like going around masked. Your naked face is covered when exposure is expected. It's not a great leap to wonder what or why you are hiding. People are programmed to recognize extremely subtle differences in the faces normal to their culture. Everybody else more or less looks the same. They're strangers, possibly dangerous.
And why should I care anyway? Well, probably I'm just pandering to my usual neuroses. You can argue we all pay way too much attention to appearance. But that really denies everything popular culture stands for. Intrinsically silly as fashion may be, fighting is hopeless and makes you look stupid too.
In my current profession, first impressions make a difference. Or so I perceive. I'd rather someone's first thought not be "wow, a beard, what's that mean?" Dangerous stranger? So I compromise with a little beard, closely trimmed, neat, just enough to cover the really angular, sensitive part of my face. A little beard, a beardlet fussy enough to pass fashionable muster. Lord, I really spend time thinking about this? Wow, guess I do.
So, new beard style, need a new Facebook photo, a new web icon, something current. Keeping a 5 or 10 year old portrait of myself up in public is cheating, I think. Who do I think I'm fooling? Much better people don't think "gosh, he's a lot older than his picture." But if it makes you feel better to look better on the web than in person, I understand. I really do. Aging is a bitch.
I don't believe I'm alone in considering most photographs of myself less than flattering. The very notion that some image might actually flatter me is absurd, really. The older and more battered we become, the more absurd the proposition. Everyone else knows what I look like from all angles, at this age too. They integrate how we look from all sides as one person. All photographs of me look like me.
It's just me that usually sees myself straight on, reflected in the mirror. That's what my internal image looks like, what I imagine I see in the mirror. Somehow the notion of a good portrait is what best matches the picture in our head. That photos abound of me at every age only complicates the situation. Perhaps my self-image is of another, younger person. I don't feel any different than I did 30 years ago, but I surely look different. Then young, now old.
So I did it, I came up with a new photo, some image almost imperceptibly different than the rest. Something I'll own up to in my own mind until I change the beard again. And, just like me, I took the photograph myself. I taped some photographer's seamless gray paper up on the bathroom wall opposite the mirror. The paper is left over from a project ten years ago. (Sometimes, just often enough, the pack-rat is rewarded.) Then I held my little digital point-and-shoot at arms length and proceeded to squeeze off shots, catching the camera's digital viewfinder in the mirror to make sure I was pointing in the right direction. 30 exposures, import to the computer, look for a winner. No luck? Back to my bathroom studio. Iterate until satisfied.
I found one shot I really liked, one out of the hundred or so I took. The one accidental personal success you can achieve with digital cameras in this Year of Our Lord 2010. No skill involved, just take enough pictures and maybe you'll like one of them. And maybe you just get tired after an hour of such foolishness. Anyway, I have a new portrait. And, yes, if you look closely, some wild eyebrow hair is sticking down over my eye.
