Bearding

Blogging the past few weeks has been sparse and people have started talking. Unfortunately, I was a little swept away in the Christmas spirit and forgot about the blog entirely (in other words, I became content with sitting around and watching movies all day). Then New Years happened and I was not by a computer until returning to school. Although excuses do not change the fact that you had to live without any Spicy Blog Sauce for an extremely long time, I hope you can accept my deepest apologies and we can move on with our lives.

I have come to the realization that my "friends" only like me for the Spicy Sauce these days. It was strange at first when people only talked to me about my posts and constantly asked when I would blog next. I've debated if I actually want to continue a life of "friendship through the blogosphere" and just drop all personal friendships altogether, or drop the blog and have actual friends again. Since the blog has made me exponentially cooler, I think the blog wins. In a way, it's flattering that friends are willing to set aside any sort of relationship to focus solely on the blogging aspect. I know none of you actually want to read about my personal feelings, so I am going to stop digressing.

I did a little experimenting over break. Nothing illegal, just something I never had the stones to do before. As only a handful of you actually saw firsthand, I grew a small beard during the two week respite. My face was put to the test to see how much of a man I actually am. Regrettably, I am not much of a man after all. My facial hair failed to grow in a few crucial areas, making me look like a total shmuck. My family and friends made sure to point it out by asking if I've hit puberty yet and that I will never live up to the bearded glory that is my dad (For those of you who have not seen my dad, let's just say I would have no idea what he looked like if he ever decided to shave his beard). Overall, the experiment was a failure and future testing is unnecessary and will never happen.

Bearding (yes I used it as a verb) was not all bad though. I found out I can grow more facial hair than my roommate Sam. Also, as Sam pointed out, I would fit right in with the homeless crowd on the streets of Chicago. If accounting fails to work out, I have a back up plan.

Luckily, there are no pictures of me with a beard, so I don't have to worry about the embarrassment of everyone seeing me with one. Since I am sure all of you do want to see what I would look like with one though, I created some visual representations using an expensive software package. The results of the representations are surprisingly dead on to what I actually looked like. Little imagination is necessary thankfully. Here are a few pictures of me at different stages of bearding:

This is an aerial shot of me during the first couple days of bearding. As you can see, there isn't a whole lot of beard there. At this point my face was very stubbly and itchy.

This is after New Year's Day when my facial hair was longer, yet still extremely patchy and lame.

This is me during the sleepy Mexican phase of my beard. You can tell I'm in this phase by the beard, sombrero, and sleepy eyes.

As you may have noticed, this is not actually me at all. If I were an elephant, this is what I would look like with a beard, just in case you were wondering.