Day 365

My beard is officially 365 days old. Unfortunately this blog thing hasn't worked out like I hoped, but the beard speaks for itself. The only question left is what the hell am I going to do tomorrow? (Word to the wise if you're doing some last minute voting: People who vote for the Close-Crop are scientifically proven to be mad boring. Just sayin'...)

Sick Beard

I swear, every semester right before I come home I get sick. What the fuck?
Scientific studies seem to suggest that voting in my poll cures the common cold; so do me a favor, will ya?

T-minus 18 days, 16 hours, 20 minutes

Close-Crop, 39.13%
Pennsylvania Dutch, 13.4%
The Pugilist, 8.7%
The DuBois, 8.7%
The Colonel, 8.7%
The Man Ray, 8.7%
The Fidel, 4.35%
Le Surrealisme, 4.35%
VOTE NOW!

Should I Shave Or Should I Grow Now?

About 3 weeks left. That means you have about 3 weeks left to vote for what I should do to my face on January 1st. It's currently looking like I'm gonna go for the boring ol' regular close-crop beard, but you don't want that to happen, do you? VOTE!

Happy December

If you're in Oberlin this weekend, come check out my band playing World AIDS Week local music night at 8:30 this Friday in Wilder Main. (I'm told there will be free wine and cheese!) Or go see some of my photos in the ELC Art Show, also Friday, 8-10, Edmonia Lewis Center. Oh, and don't forget to vote in my poll!

31 Days, 20 Hours, 24 minutes...

Black Friday

Happy Tofurkey Day

I'm thankful that I only have a month left. I love my beard and all, but I miss the feel of the breeze across my cheek, the ability to rub my chin, and not having scraggly ass hair coming out of my neck. Won't you vote in my poll?

Down to the wire

Well, it's almost 2009, and I'm almost done with my 366 days of facial hair. As you can see, it doesn't look very long, but don't let the picture deceive you--if I were to straighten my beard out it would be ridiculously long.
In preparation for my next step (i.e. shaving), I've created a poll to help get some ideas of what I should do with my post-beard face. Clean shave? No shave? You tell me:
What should my face look like on January 2nd?
There are a bunch of examples there, but feel free to add your own suggestions. I'll be updating this thing more frequently as the date gets closer. Until then...

What a joke

Man, this is a failure. Maybe if I ever decide to do this again, I'll actually be on my shit about documenting it, but as it stands the only thing I have to show for this project is the beard itself (mad long now, just to put it out there).

Day 183

Half way there! Pics to be uploaded in the morning.

Day 182: Six Months Down, Six to Go...

Well, despite the total meltdown of the visual, artistic portion of this project, today marks a milestone in my 366 Days of Facial Hair: the Six Month Mark. (Tomorrow marks another milestone--the exact midway point.)
To commemorate this fact, I present the following two items:
Item in the first: I'll try my damnedest to get back on track with the pictures.
Item in the second:

Cheers.

I am a cliche

So, yeah. Beard... Let's just leave it at I'm too busy to actually take pictures and upload them and update this thing. "Busy," right... But the beard is coming along nicely, it's mad long yo. I'd say it's about as long as it was in New York.

But anyway, in case the 3-7 of you who visit this page per week weren't able to attend the 16mm Filmmaking Exco's showing yesterday, I've uploaded my film onto YouTube. Sure, it looked a helluva lot better projected onto a big screen, but c'est la vie.

(I just noticed that I'm wearing the exact same thing as in my last video... Trademark?)
Peace in the Middle West

Guess who's back in the muthafuckin' house...

... with some fat photos for ya muthafuckin' viewing pleasure.
Here's what happened--I ran out of space on my camera, and couldn't figure out how to get the images off the flash card, so I haven't been able to take pictures. But now I can again! So here are all the shots up until I ran out of space (about a month ago). And by "here" I mean on my Flickr. The Flickr's a bit disorganized now but I'll get to it. In case you were curious, the beard is coming along just fine, thanks for asking! It's pretty long--short of before I shaved it's the longest it's ever been. The worst is the neckbeard though. It's getting kinda funky, not in terms of how it feels or anything, but in terms of the fact that I'm slowly nearing a continuation of hair running from my upper lip down my beard to my neck through my chest on down the happy trail and so forth... A "full body hair suit," if you will (as quoted from this dude I met over Winter Term). Oh well, I knew what I was getting into.

In other news, it's springtime in Oberlin--that strange period of limbo between the face-freezing winter and the flesh-melting summer. In the past week it's been 70 and humid, it's snowed, it's tornadoed, it's thunderstormed, and it's been completely cloudless and blue, often in the same day. I heard someone describe Oberlin spring as being "like puberty," which pretty much nails it.
The Giants are 6-10, which is six wins better than I would have expected at this point in the season, so that's good I guess? Or not "good" so much as "decent," or not "decent" so much as "acceptable." Or "not the worst it could be." God I hate this team...
Tomorrow marks the end of one of my favorite local bands--Teenage Harlets (...). A show of theirs I saw at Bottom of the Hill was a religious experience for me, no shit, they're that fucking good (better live). This is irrelevant given that I'm in Ohio anyway, but it kinda pisses me off that their last show ever is 21+. Sure, they're a band known for their drunkenly orgiastic live shows, but they also have a major fan base among the younger Phenomenauts-fan contingent, and if I were one of 'em I'd be pissed. (On a beard-related note, I have total mustache envy over their lead singer, Johnny Dismal...)
Peace in the Middle West.

Update, sin photos

So, as if you're reading this you probably already know, I can't get any of my photos onto here (yet), but I'm up this late finishing up school work already and I figure why the hell not tell the 7 of you per week what's up in the world of my beard.
In the last three days it has passed its typical stagnation point and is now what I like to call "long." Of course, it's nowhere near as long as it will be by the end of this, but I've got a good amount of hair hanging off of my chin unperturbed by the presence of my skin. (Great timing, too, cuz it's been cold as balls lately, and I can't find my balaclava so all the extra warmth I can get is great.)
Now, as most beard-growers will tell you, my shit comes in mad patchy, so while my chin is coming along great my cheeks and chineck area are sparcer in some places than others. I don't quite get it, but there's this one spot where the left end of my mustache just refuses to meet up with the hair on my chin. It's bizarre.
All in all, though, I'd have to say that it's looking pretty good at the moment. I'm half way between not being able to imagine myself clean shaven or stubbly, and not being able to imagine myself with a beard as long as it was before I shaved.

On an unrelated note, it has recently come to my attention that after years of my saying that Snoop Dogg had fallen off, he done went and made the perfect hip hop video. That's right, I said it. Tell me I'm wrong, I dare you:

(DISCLAIMER: It's 4:37 am and I've been sick this past week, so all claims made in regards to popular culture may not reflect the views of my normal, healthy self...)
Chuuuch.

Greetings from Oberlin

So as you may have noticed (if anyone is still checking this thing) I haven't updated in a while. I've been taking pictures, but my camera is broken and won't allow me to transfer directly from it to my computer, and thusly all the pictures I've been taking are trapped. It's probably just as well, though. My beard has reached a point of quiescence for the moment, like a caterpillar going into its chrysalis as it prepares to emerge as a beautiful butterfly, or a solid collecting latent heat to become a liquid. Essentially, for the next few weeks my beard ain't gonna look any different and posting pictures everyday wouldn't really show any new development...
Anyway, as soon as I can figure out how to fix this I'll upload more pictures to my Flickr, but until then this thing lays as dormant as my beard.
--Sam-o

Oy

I swear I'll be more on top of shit once I get back to Oberlin and don't have the distraction of... well, things to do outside of my house.
I'll load pictures ASAP, though as you may or may not know I can't actually upload pictures directly from my camera (piece of shit) so I need to borrow someone else's camera to upload which gets kind of annoying. Also, I was given some really interesting ideas for directions to go with this thing, so look for that soon as well.
Goodbye Dennis Kucinich. I'll miss you dearly.
--Sam-o

Day 20

Couldn't find my camera so I had to use Photobooth on this one...

Day 16

Just backdated the missed entries for the week. I must say, I'm quite surprised I still get traffic (19 in the last week, with only one post to show for). Maybe I'll be better about updating. Maybe not.
No picture for today, yet. It's coming along nicely, the ingrowns are gone, and no more itching/burning. If I recall last time, it was a few months before it started itching again, so maybe I'll be lucky and it'll work out that way again.

Day 15 (backdated)

Day 14 (backdated)

Not stoned, just mad exhausted. I swear!

Day 13 (backdated)

Day 12 (backdated)

Day 11 (backdated)

It's coming in, slowly but surely. This is gonna be a long year...

Day 10, or "wow I suck at updating" (backdated)

Alright, I've gotten real lazy about this. In my own defense, I was ready to update on time, but Flickr wouldn't let me upload for some reason. But anyway, this was day 10. Nothing of note.

Days 5-9

Well, less than a week into this thing and I'm falling behind...
Day 5

Nothing really to note, except mad ingrown hair annoyance.

Day 6

Same deal...

Day 7

day 7 started feeling very much beardlike, though still fairly rough to the touch

Day 8

As you can probably tell from this lovely picture, I've been hecka sick the last couple days, and not in the good way. My beard has coming in nicely though--ingrown hairs no longer bother so much, less sandpapery, which brings us up to date with...

Day 9

Today has been handsdown the biggest milestone since I shaved. Though I still have some ingrown hairs on the sides of my neck, my beard hairs now move independent of the skin around them--as my girlfriend noted "it's not rough like sandpaper anymore, just kind of prickly." Indeed.

Day 4

Well, my "beard" has moved on from just stubble to now looking like a genuine--albeit pathetic--beard; which is to say it looks like a small, blackish fuzz rather than just a gray haze on my chin. It doesn't itch anymore, and the burning has subsided for the most part.

Flickr finally set up... for now

Apparently you need to pay in order to use Flickr to any serious degree, so I'm looking into alternatives. In the meantime, enjoy my Sets on the shaving process and extra shots of my daily progress (plus one with all those pictures, plus more!).
So, anonymous comment-leaver-who-is-too-obscure-for-me-to-guess, suck on that.

[edit 1/16/08: Changed my Sets, so the shaving process one is still the same, but the one with all the pictures has been moved, and the one with extra shots has been replaced with the "official" images.]

Day 3

Slight burning sensation, probable ingrown hairs (even though I meticulously avoided shaving against the grain). Definitely less sandpapery.

Sorry about the lack of photos thus far... I'm not entirely sure how to work this whole Blogger/Flickr whathaveyou. I'll have it down soon.

Day 2

Well, I've been beardless for a day. I forgot how itchy and rough it gets right after shaving. Little things like wearing a hood or wiping my mouth feel completely foreign. I miss my beard.

It has begun...

Well, I'm clean shaven...