How I Learned to Stop Shaving and Love the Burn

One of the most vexing problems of my summer so far concerns my shaving schedule. During the school year I would generally only shave twice a week, allowing a dashingly masculine amount of stubble to creep onto my cheeks, mostly as a symbol that I have better things to do than shaving, like building gun racks out of oak, or wrestling black bears.

Now, however, I am a suit. As such, I find myself in a position where I must shave much more regularly, or else look like a hungover asshole who hasn’t showered and probably only stopped drinking two hours before he showed up to work two hours late.

The problem is, however, that while I seem to sprout hair across the entirety of the hundred-acre-woods that is my face and neck, my beard just doesn’t grow fast enough to be shaved every day. If I try to shave on back-to-back days, the hairs aren’t long enough to be shorn without having me irritate the ever-loving crap out of my face. On such days, I look like I tried to commit suicide by jumping neck-first into a garden of cacti.

And, of course, the alternative of not shaving is just as unappealing. I normally have a shadow by two o’clock. If I don’t shave on a given day, by mid-afternoon or so I start looking for a guy who just got laid off and has been at the bar so long that he has begun to contemplate the idea of opening his own bar, where no one would ever get cut off, not like at this damned place – fine, I’m leaving! Leggo!

Anyway. That’s my quandary. Either I look like I took a cheese-grater to my face, or I look like I slept on a park bench.

Buy an electric razor, someone will say, and I have tried that. But that runs into the same problem. Unlike blades, electric razors – at least the ones I’ve tried – do not get anywhere near close enough to the face to be effective at all. I'd have better luck stripping paint with a weed-whacker.

The other solution, of course, is to just say screw it and grow a beard. But beards are very uncomfortable in the summer. And then I’d have to go to work for two weeks during the beard-growth period – an awkward stage where I go from forgot-to-shave to college-student-on-a-bender to young-professor-who-is-trying-to-look-older to street-musician to serial-killer-who-kills-other-serial-killers. And then, eventually, I’ll look like George Clooney in Syriana, but by that point the summer will be over and people at school will just shake their head in disappointment at just how much I’ve let myself go.

I guess my face will eventually get used to the regular assault of the blades. Maybe it's like Everclear. Yes, the first time burns like hell. But constant use and practice will bring about positive results in the shape of utter numbness.