20150929.0617

While I wear a beard and moustache, I do shave parts of my cheeks, as well as my neck. I do so only on days when I expect to be out among people for any length of time--and Tuesdays are not generally among those days. Typically, Tuesdays see me at home with Ms. 8, working on freelance pieces when she naps and when her mother gets home from her job, playing with my daughter or watching some kind of kid's show when she is awake and acting more or less decently. (She approaches two. The time is called terrible for good reason.)

Today, however, I shaved, for today, I will be attending a workshop meant to help me integrate critical thinking skills into the classes I teach. I already work to do such things, of course, as I teach much argumentative prose and effective argumentation requires no small amount of critical thinking. But I know that I can always improve my performance, so sitting for a brief workshop series presents no problems. Too, the series will result in my receipt of a stipend that will be quite helpful for me to have; Sherwood Cottage and its indwellers need money because they need the access to resources it represents, more or less always.

As I shaved this morning, I noticed again that the hair on my neck seems to grow faster than that on my cheeks and chin, and the flesh of my neck remains rougher than that of my cheeks after I have shaved them. Why this is, I am not certain. Perhaps I am fated to be an elder neckbeard, coming in time to be an echo or a vestige, not of the human race when all the laughter dies in sorrow, but of a pattern of nerdiness still seen but fading against the still-ongoing-although-fading pop-culture infatuation with the nerdy (against which I have railed). It might be nice, since such figures do tend to act as centers of gravity for other nerds, but the situations that permit such things are falling away, as many lament. I would be among the last in a world that no longer needs such things, were such events to take place.

I cannot allow myself to be so now, though. For now, I am ready to face my day, waiting to tend to Ms. 8 until such time as the Mrs. makes it back home--neither is yet awake--and I head off to where I will need to be for a couple of hours, after which I will return home and my wife will try to work a bit more money for us. It is the dance we continue to dance, amid the steps of which our work continues (I have to say it daily, after all), and, speeding, we try not to fall over our own feet.