today i shaved off my goatee. how long ago was it since the last time i shaved? it's been a while. i'm afraid to say it, but i don't think i've shaven off my goatee at all this year. but occasionally the mood strikes me, and i get sick of facial growth, and i just want to look clean.
i want to feel my face all smooth instead of running my hands through scratchy hair. but almost without fault, immediately after i do shave off my beard, i start regretting it right away. my mental image of myself is a person with a goatee. to not have one, to look myself in the mirror, i don't even recognize me anymore. there was a period a while back when i was goateeless for a couple of months, before i went back to the goatee. i must've been in a different place mentally, but i could never do that now. they say men with beards are all hiding something. it's a physically manifestation of subconscious secrets. but don't we all have something to hide? who is without some skeletons in their closet? the beard is actually functional during the winter because it keeps my face warm. sure, it's not a fleece scarf, but the few times i've shaved during the winter, i notice the difference right away when i go outside in the cold. having a beard also makes my lips less chapped for some reason. probably something to do with surface area and evaporation, scientific hocus pocus stuff. the good thing out of all this is i'm pretty hairy for an asian person (a trait that i'm particularly proud of), and in a matter of a few days i will have a stubbly beard again. what do you say? which do you prefer? beard or no beard?
with the beard |
without the beard
(i am not picking
my nose!) |
after dinner today i went to the everett target store. this is my first time ever being in a target. with the local ann & hope and bradlees having gone out of business, now there's no place close to buy things like socks and underwear and basic household items like cleaning products. it's a real shame. so now when i need things like that, i have to go all the way to places like everett. anyway, my first time in a target, i wasn't particularly impressed. target has that recent publicity blitzkrieg, hipping up their image. now it's actually cool to shop at places like target, when probably in the past it was something you would never mention. i got some clear storage boxes for my summer clothes and some gym clothes.
one last thing, i have a new desktop image. it's that national geographic portrait of the afghanstani girl who fled to pakistan, taken back during the war with the soviets in the mid-80's. the afghanistans are a beautiful people caught up in a bad war, sort of like what happened with yugoslavia (situation's different, but the yugoslavians were very physically striking people as well).
it's been something that i wanted to do for a while since coming back from my vacation (october 8th), and that's to create a travelogue so people can read about what i did in turkey instead of having to ask me about it. god knows i have enough material to work from, with all the photos i took and my meticulously kept analog journal entries. it's also good for me to get all that stuff down, while the memories are still relatively fresh in my mind. it's totally not complete yet, i've only covered 1.5 days so far (i think my entire vacation was 16 or 17 days), but if you're curious, here's the new url: