It’s November. That brings a few things to mind…
Election Day – Not gonna talk about that. Voted. Grumpy.
Thanksgiving – Not gonna talk about that. Family. Grumpy.
Movember – Gonna talk about that. Facial Hair. Grumpy.
Mustache + November = Movember, which is an international effort to raise awareness for men’s health, raise some cash toward education/research, and give gentlemen across the globe an excuse not to shave for 30 days.
“Awareness” activities – from colored ribbons to community walks to fundraising – have begun to leave me cold. C’mon. If there are any adults subjected to these campaigns that aren’t already aware that breast cancer is a disease, i’d like to meet them…and perhaps buy them a television, a newspaper, a magazine or computer.
But Movember strikes a special note with me every autumn. As i stood in front of the magnifying mirror in my bathroom last night -mindlessly tweezing the stubble from my middle-aged, pre-menopausal lip, it hit me.
i am a contender. If i failed to dispose of my ‘stache pixels for 30 days, through my endless battle rhythm of tweezing in between waxing, i could grow one.
Fucking hormones.
Trailer Park Refugee 
you don’t have a pair of balls if you DON’T try and grow one. c’mon. you declared Movember. embrace it and let’s see what happens. pictures required.
i would put the gentlemen to shame. i couldn’t possibly embarass them so badly… they’d hang their little faces with the molester mustaches in shame as i sport handlebars by the 15th!
For eight years I lived in a culture where many women did not pluck or wax. Bearded women were the norm, not the exception. It almost appeared to be hereditary as the entire female membership of some families developed facial hair.
Yes, it was a culture shock to my effete European eyes.
so i’m guessing there was no trimming of the unibrow, either? zoicks… i guess you get used to it. i guess.
Have you been sitting in a meeting at work yet, stroking your chin, and found an inch long hair that wasn’t there the day before? Yikes! My sister and I have both done that. They apparently grow overnight.
Fucking hormones.
Not only that, but a few weeks ago, i discovered a half-inch renegade IN THE MIDDLE OF MY FUCKING FOREHEAD! thin, and wispy. not something that would leave a mark, mind you. BUT IN THE MIDDLE OF MY FUCKING FOREHEAD!
“a half inch renegade”… freakin’ hilarious daisyfae!
is it sad that this has been happening to me since my twenties? electrolysis is expensive and waxing hurts. Is it sadder that I have emergency tweezers at work, in the handbag and at least 2 places in the house? (bloody hormones and genetics).
i keep a set in my purse… in a special case. don’t leave home without them!
Fucking hormones!
this is the price we pay for growing balls in middle age.
I don’t think I *can* grow a mustache! My boyish good looks don’t come without paying a penalty. My facial hair grows in in blotches and patches. And it takes forever. I think I must have a testosterone deficiency. So count me out.
aren’t you italian? doesn’t that give you genetic license to sprout hair all over the place?
I have sprouts all over my chin….I also have very precise tweezers!
the chin whiskers. grrrr…. and i’m very fussy about my tweezers. i buy good ones…
get your lip lasered daisyfae…. you’ll never be able to join in Movember ever again though.
NM’s right but you better hurry up before they start turning gray. when that happens you’ll need electrolysis. ~Ouch!
mine are probably too light to laser already. except for the occasional black ones. grrr…
Ditto what Nursie recommended. Laser’s the way to go. I’m 30, and I’m sad that I know this already. I suspect someday I’ll be a doppelganger for Cousin It.
fuck. i really don’t want to get hit with a photon torpedo to get rid of these things…
I’ll sponsor you.
Ummm…. thank you, but i think i’ll pass…
badass.
on a good day…
I have the rogue 1/2 inch hair that grows under my chin.
It’s been growing there for the last 5 years.
Nowhere else … just the under the chin.
And only one.
??????
Fucking hormones.
just one? consider it a prophylactic. maybe it’s scaring away the other hairs! i wouldn’t touch it…
So are we going with trailer park dirt-lip, Tom Selleck porn-stache, or 1920’s handle-bar mustache?
Eh, I’m probably just jealous because of all the things I can do, growing decent facial hair is not one of them.
i could do the handlebar, no sweat…
i lucked up. it’s all stayed on my head, so far, but i have to admit, i’ve noticed it disappearing from other areas… xoxoxo
you are lucky indeed! since my hair mostly fell out about 10 years ago, it’s been very sparse and fine ever since… grrr…
You have played up your non-conformance, haven’t you? Like gnu, I’d say go for it.
North American culture has certainly adopted some weird ideas of haute couture. Like what’s with all the pubic hair shaving women are doing these days?
yeah, but i’m trying to get laid out here, bud. facial hair ain’t gonna help the cause… as for the lady-scaping? lots of reasons for that – most of them driven by societal expectations. but some folks do it for non-aesthetic reasons… and not to please a man. different feel…
trying to get laid out here
Oh.
i meant “out here”, as in “out here in the midwest”, where there aren’t a lot of gents who like a pencil-thin mustache framing the smile of a female companion… not “out here”, as in the interwebz… that’s no challenge. and a little scary, even for me!
I hadn’t heard about this moustache business. I’ve just resolved to shave more often because my daughters had started complaining that I looked scruffy. Now I’ve missed the perfect excuse.
if you can’t embarass your daughters with a fine, waxed handlebar mustache then you’re really not earning your “Dad Pay”! Go for it…
Really? Men need something to bring awareness to their health problems? Why? don’t men’s health problems get all the press and money anyway? Or isn’t it true that your insurance will pay for viagra but not birth control pills? And that there is a blood test for prostate cancer but women still have to have pap smears and breastsmashograms?
Go ahead and grow a mustache, though. Personally, I would have a very silly one as I only have one mustache hair on the right side. Plenty of chin hairs though, which I have given up tweezing and now I just shave them off maybe once a month when I think of it. Which isn’t very often as I gave up shaving my legs and underarms about 20 years ago so shaving is not high on my list of
things to do.
i am pretty sure the tsunami of ‘awareness’ issues is going to ultimately just swamp any true educational value that was originally intended. we’ll get numb, and just say ‘what the fuck! i’m going to die of something! pass the wine!’ – which may not be a bad approach to things…
the ‘dares’ in my comments section have actually gotten me thinking about why i really hate the lip hairs… i think it gets back to the whisker rubs i got from the grandma and aunt when i was a kid. i associate it with advanced age, and i’m working hard on my denial for the moment!
I wore a mustache from the ’70’s through, well, for longer than was probably proper. I think I’ve done my bit.
pleeeeeeeeeeeease tell me it was one of those “Tom Selleck” jobbies? pics or it never happened…
It was more Quigley Down Under than Magnum. There’s a pretty good example in my Profile Pictures album on FB. But only one of those is me. The black and white head shot is Joe Walsh.
holy. crap. i would TOTALLY hit the hippie in the “Showco” t-shirt…
I love it. I’ll stop plucking my errant nipple hairs in solidarity with men. And my chin hairs too.
lord. tittie floss.
deliberately blocking the thought offorgot about those…brain just imploded… i have that to look forward too also?????
hopefully your eyesight goes in conjunction with the growth of the nipple hairs. what you see can’t kill your brain…
What about fire? Can’t you just burn it off?
After posting this, I ran across this post about fire beavers.
http://lagunatic.wordpress.com/2010/11/01/the-dams-on-fire-what/
If you had a pet fire beaver, you could use it to burn your facial hair off.
on a nice sunny day, with a very finely crafted and carefully aligned magnifying glass, using a steady hand? perhaps they could be singed. but i’d rather go with the fire beaver as a pet. alternately? suppose i could light my dog’s farts…
I had a chin hair that I nicknamed “Little Vinny.” After repeated vigorous pluckings, he sleeps with the fishes now.
THEY. KEEP. COMING. BACK. the same ones. i’ve stopped short of naming them, but i’m getting to know where to look for them. what i can’t figure out? how they can grow to be a quarter inch long overnight…
I have perimenopausal nose hair growth. Seriously. I plucked a giant one that was waggling out and tickling my upper lip. Plucking it made my eyes water, for more reasons than one. Sigh.
I agree about the damn awareness crap. You have to be aware of everything. How about “Menopausal Women with Unwanted Hair in Annoying Places Month”?
i may have to treat myself to invest in one of those nosehair weedwhacker thingies at some point, too.
and this is the real reason i choose to be single. i can’ do all of this “maintenance” and no one watches but the dog. he still loves me, no matter how many sprouts appear, too!
I think you should do it!
oh, crap. i really struggle to resist such direct dares…
My roommate keeps on saying she needs to wax her mustache, and I’m like, fine, but otherwise you’re gonna look stupid driving around in that van.