Mustaches and My Quarter Life Crisis

By Mink

I recently have been spending more time with middle aged men. Is that a weird thing to say? Well it is true. As I've mentioned, I travel quite a bit for work and many of the participants on these conferences are male emergency planners in their 40's and 50's. I also play in 2 softball leagues which are flooded with the senior circuit. In fact my team got shut out last week by a dude who was playing softball during the Korean war. And finally I have been spending more time just chilling at the barber shop in the Jewish part of town. (It's really a pretty similar barbershop experience to the one in the Baltimore inner city that I wrote about a few months ago. The only mild difference is that you have to replace conversations about boxing matches with kvetching about back spasms and replace Allen Iverson styled hair requests with "please make sure to part it like David Goldberg the accountant and leave some sideburns.")

Anyway all this male bonding has been life altering. I am now a regular groaner during both take offs and landings from my chair, I wear a V-neck (not tighties), and make the same unfunny puns as my father. But the most significant change in my life is that I am pretty sure that at 26 years old I have mustache envy. The stache is something that has always fascinated me but it is also something that I have mocked for years. I have never known my Dad without his under-nose fur and growing up it often provided an easy retort to his rebukes. Example:

Dad: Jon your room is disgusting, clean it
Me: You have a growth under your nose, shave it

But as time went on and I watched Tom Selleck achieve fame and sex appeal solely on the basis of his thick whiskers, I began to become more intrigued. There were, however, some things that troubled me about the whole phenomenon. First of all what prompted someone to begin the stache movement? I mean common sense says that you are either going to shave or not shave but the mustache is something that involves careful grooming, triming, and even brushing. I also found it to be extremely troubling that Hitler, the regimented German genocide artist, seemingly forgot to shave a little patch everyday. But most troubling of all is the question of why has the mustache become the lost art of our generation?

I mean you see twenty-somethings grow them once in a while but usually they are on the faces of murderers from Alaska, and are certainly not considered cool. Kip in Napolean Dynamite has a solid one (see picture above) but he doesn't exactly convey sex appeal unless middle- america- white- trash gets you going. Adam Morrison, the best college basketball player this past year, also sports one but his looks like one a 13 year old unintentionally would grow before he can shave. Bottom line is for whatever reason we don't choose to grow them and if we do they look abysmal.

With that in mind, I decided I wanted to try it out. But unfortunately my dad didn't pass along the good stache gene and mine looked even worse than Morrison's. The whiskers are light colored, very thin and each one grows in a different direction. Basically I look like some of the older Russian ladies that I have run into at the JCC who decided probably 20 years ago to stop grooming their faces. (no offense intended to Russian people.... my great grandparents were all Russian and I love the babooshkas).

Anyway I had to shave that upper lip debacle off but don't think that it made me happy. I am now fully entering a quarter life crisis where I am bitter about the onset of greying hair, receding hair lines and an inability to compensate for such things because I am incapable of growing even a semi-presentable looking mustache.