Bye-bye beard: The end of No-Shave November 2016

For the third year in a row, I participated in No-Shave November. After shaving my face on Halloween, I let my facial hair grow throughout November, only shaving my neck. Since the calendar turned, I gladly buzzed my beard down and shaved off the stubble this morning.

Oh, so fresh and so clean clean!

(I always debate whether to use “No Shave” or “No-Shave.” I’ve used both, but just found that there is an actual cancer awareness organization called No-Shave November, so I’ve decided to use the hyphen from now on. Plus, I suppose “no-shave” is considered an adjective and should be hyphened.)

No-Shave November was a little different this year. In the past, I shaved on my birthday — October 22 — and let my auburn facial hair grow from there. This year, however, I waited until the very end of October. As I’ve mentioned before, beards are not my thing. At a certain point, my beard starts annoying me. This year it started happening last weekend, and on Monday I began impatiently counting the days until I could turn the calendar to December. (My beard seemed to grow with a vengeance this year.) By yesterday, I had had enough and began charging my trimmer after dinner, unsure of whether I should stay up and start buzzing at the stroke of midnight. (I ultimately kept it through the night, but buzzed it off after breakfast and shaved after cleaning the journal inboxes.) Had I shaved on my birthday, as I had in the past, my beard would have reached the annoying stage nine days earlier. Needless to say, waiting until the very end of October to shave was definitely a good idea, something I will do in the future — if I participate again.

There was one thing I planned to do but didn’t: trim every now and then. Since it did not start annoying me until recently, I had no reason to trim it. Would trimming be cheating? Does anyone care? It definitely would have made the last couple days tolerable.

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